Basilica di San Vitale
Late antique church in Ravenna, Italy. The 6th century church is an important surviving example of early Christian Byzantine art and architecture.
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Basilica di San Vitale
Late antique church in Ravenna, Italy. The 6th century church is an important surviving example of early Christian Byzantine art and architecture.
sunburst
“Ask yourself many times during the day: Am I doing at this moment what I ought to be doing?”
- St. Josemaria Escriva, “The Will of God” from The Way, #772
"lower sugar" should mean "not as sweet as the product normally is" and not "we took half the sugar and replaced it with artificial sweetener"
This is a water-seal stoneware crock. The design is ancient.
It is, essentially, a large ceramic vessel that you put vegetables and sometimes brine into. To prevent spoilage, you place those ceramic weights on top of whatever food is in the crock, and that keeps them weighted down, below the level of the water. Because fermentation creates gases, most crocks have a "water groove" in them. The lid sits in the groove, which allows air to escape but not come in. Because fermentation creates gas, the interior of the crock is positive-pressure, and because the gas created is almost entirely carbon dioxide, it's a low-oxygen environment that additionally helps prevent spoilage.
And all this would be pointless without lactobacillus, the bacteria that chomp down on the vegetables you put into the crock. They're anaerobic, which means totally fine without oxygen, and they produce an environment that's inhospitable to most other organisms. The main things they produce are CO2, which means no oxygen for other bacteria, and lactic acid, which makes the fermented thing sour and also decreases the pH low enough that many other bacteria cannot survive. They tolerate high levels of salt, which kill yet more competitor bacteria. It ends up being a really really good way to keep food from going off.
Our ancestors figured this out thousands of years ago without knowing what bacteria were. This general ceramic design has been in use around the world in virtually every place that had ceramics, salt, and too much cabbage or cucumbers that was going to rot if they didn't do something about it. It's thousands of years old, so old that it gets hard to interpret the evidence of the ceramics.
And I have crocks like this in my kitchen, where I make my own ferments, and I always think about how beautiful and elegant it all is, and how this was probably invented hundreds of times as people converged on something that Just Works.
(I do have pH testing strips though.)
The Virgin's first seven steps, mosaic from Chora Church, c. 12th century
(Via Wikipedia)
Detail of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Caravaggio (1598-99).
Chicken in trousers (drawn in 1783). Via @CuriosMuseum over at the Ex Bird Place.
First snow at the Palace of Versailles (nov. 2024)
Pink Mary- prints on society6
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…”
Apollo 8, speaking to Earth from lunar orbit, Christmas Eve 1968
Still life with cherries and strawberries in china bowls
with detail
Osias Beert (1580-1624)
lying down for 50 minutes to imagine in real time the experience of walking to trader joes and buying a single pea and walking back home and getting out a cutting board and a knife and skinning and chopping one pea and sprinkling it into a tank with one fish in it
When i used to work at Whole Foods i would make and freeze my sandwiches for the week but since frozen lettuce is an abomination and a whole head of lettuce is Way too much for a single broke college student who doesn't even really like salad that much, each lunch break i would go to the by-weight salad bar and carefully purchase one single small lettuce leaf. All of my coworkers mocked me relentlessly for it but it cost like $0.01 and half the time it was too light for the scale so they'd just shove it towards me like "Just take it, man." Through such cunning means i probably spent like a dollar total on lettuce in 2 years
just saying. we got a lot in common, the humble betta fish and I
So because every Howl’s Moving Castle book cover that isn’t sixty five dollars is in that sort of- gaudy, super saturated, 80s-90s style, I’m making my own. I still need to order the book (cuz I only own the audiobook), get the proper color of fabric, and find some decent gold paint, and once I have obtained all of the proper components, I’m gonna give it the hardcover it deserves. >:3
april in northern california, 2024
Dress
c. 1858
“Blue, pink, and green plaid silk taffeta dress. Bodice has scalloped neckline to waist and a hook-and-eye front closure. Collar, inner bodice, and undersleeves are made of white muslin trimmed with eyelet embroidery. Two-tiered pagoda sleeves are edged with blue and black silk fringe and two rows of scalloped taffeta at the top of the sleeve. Full gathered skirt with self-piping at waist. Bodice and sleeves lined with brown glazed cotton. This dress was worn by Matilda Bamburger Stein (1831-1919), who was born in Germany and immigrated to America in order to marry.”
Maryland Center for History and Culture