Hot and Sour Soup

Original variation by David Dyer-Bennet of traditional Chineese recipe.

If particularly large quantities of pork and fungus are used relative to the amount of broth, this recipe is sometimes known as “Basian pepper stew.”

Ingredients

1 qt chicken broth

4 oz pork; remove most fat and shred

2T cornstarch; dissolve in 1/4c cold water

1 egg; beat lightly

2 scallions; chop thinly for garnish

Hot sesame oil; to taste (“until Pamela screams”)

Group A

6 dried black mushrooms. Soak in boiling water for 15 minutes, then remove stems and slice thinly across the cap. Add soaking water to chicken broth.

2/3 c dry black fungus. Measure loosely packed. Soak for 15 minutes in boiling water, then pick out hard sections and slice into thin strips. Discard soaking water.

12 golden needles. Soak 20 minutes in cold water. Tear off hard ends, break into pieces about an inch long. Discard soaking water.

1/4 c preserved pickled vegetable. Optional. Rinse and shred finely.

Group B

8 oz bean curd. Slice into 1/4″ sticks

3 T distilled white vinegar

1 T light soy sauce

1 t sugar

1 t pepper

Method

Bring chicken broth (with mushroom water added) to a boil. Add group A, bring back to a boil, and boil gently for 8 minutes.

Add pork, cook for 1 minute.

Add group B and cook for 30 seconds.

Add cornstarch dissolved in water, stir thoroughly. Immediately remove from heat and pour in beaten egg slowly while stirring the soup (this is an “egg drop”).

Add hot oil to taste (or until Pamela screams).

Serve with chopped scallions as garnish.

Tagine

Or something a little like it.

Not sure I’ve ever had tagine; if so it was decades ago, in Boulder or Denver.

For a weird coincidence of reasons, I got interest in making something of that sort. One reason was that, from reading about it (the essence being the clay cooking pot with the peaked lid, and the steam recirculating and condensing) it sounded like it would work well in an Instant-pot. Another was that the list of ingredients and seasonings sounded very hopeful. (I’m not familiar with a large range of meat-plus-sweet dishes, but I’ve invented one, and liked many of the ones I’ve had.)

For various reasons (not including what was in the freezer; I had both) I made it with pork rather than chicken. That’s either wrong or unusual for a tagine, if my sources are right, perhaps more common in Morocco? Anyway, it seemed like it would taste good.

As one does, I reviewed multiple recipes online in a cumulative half hour or something, over a couple of days, and came up with a rough idea of what I was going to do.

Made it today, and Lydy and I thought it was quite successful. I’d say it was under-seasoned, but the balance of the seasonings was about right.

So, here’s a reasonably accurate description of what I made:

Ingredients

2 Tbs. olive oil

1 lb boneless pork, thawed and cut into good-size chunks

1 small potato, cubed

1 medium onion, chopped

An inch or 2 of ginger root, minced

4 or so cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 c. dried apricots, chopped

1 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. ground coriander

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. turmeric

1 tsp. hot pepper mix (wasn’t, very)

1/2 tsp. salt

1 cup beef broth

1 can diced tomatoes (15 oz)

Dry rice

Method

Set your Instant-pot on saute.

Put the oil in the pot and heat it. Add the pork and stir to brown.

Add the onion, garlic, potato, ginger, apricots, and seasonings and get them at least a bit browned.

Add the tomatoes and beef broth, and stir to mix.

Seal the pot and cook on high pressure for 30 minutes. Then release pressure “naturally” (i.e. slowly). (Note that, with heating to pressure, and pressure release, the elapsed time from when you seal the pot is about an hour.)

Meanwhile, cook some rice (I used brown rice).

Serving

Serve over rice. I served this with boiled spinach, which went very well with it.

This ended up serving 2 people plus 3 leftovers (we always seem to eat more the first night).

Thoughts

There were supposed to be carrots, and chickpeas. I’m not sure about the chickpeas, but using them instead of the potato would be more traditional.

Other recipes had sweet potatoes. Sweet instead of regular potatoes might work well with chickpeas.

I think there should be more apricots, and more seasonings in general. For the seasonings, maybe 2x as much even (except salt and perhaps cinnamon).

Some recipes suggested adding honey as a quick way to adjust the sweetness balance, and that might have been good.

This would probably work fine with frozen meat. It’d need to cook longer, though, and you’d probably end up shredding it instead of cubing it (after cooking). I think I like it better in cubes.

Many aspects of this may be extremely variant from actual tagine! And I was not, this time, trying to figure out and enact “authentic”, I was trying for something of roughly this style that we liked. From that viewpoint this was a success.

Unexpected Complexity of Using Film for Wedding Photos

Well, not unexpected if you ever did it, or know anybody who did it. But quick searches don’t find any discussion of it online, including in modern blogs by people who say they shoot weddings on film all the time.

I’m sure the exact details varied by photographer; in fact they would have had to, to take full advantage of their equipment. My knowledge comes from the late 60s and early 70s, mostly (I knew people doing weddings professionally then). Anybody serious used medium format, Hasselblad if they could possibly afford it (one friend started with a pair of Mamiya 124Gs, and upgraded to Hasselblads while I knew him; I bought one of his Mamiyas).

There are a few photos you just absolutely had to get. Specific portraits and group shots, the ring exchange, kissing the bride, feeding each other cake, the first dance; things like that. Of course you wanted good shots of all of those, and you wanted lots of other good shots as well, but if you didn’t manage to get those basic shots, it was going down on your permanent karmic record. No five star ratings for you!

There are two big areas where film was more uncertain while shooting the wedding, and the complex scheme I’m going to describe was carefully designed to protect you so far as possible from both of them.

First of all, you didn’t know if your camera was actually working. You could tell if the flash went off, and you could tell if it made the right noises, but that level of observation wouldn’t detect most problems below “camera is locked up”. You couldn’t, of course, just check the images on the LCD on the back!

Second, when you sent your film to the lab, you didn’t know whether they were going to screw it up. All the film sent in at once was very likely to go into the machine all at once, and if the chemistry was borked that afternoon, too bad!

What to do?

Well, what you do is exactly what you do for pretty much every problem of unpredictable failure. You employ redundancy!

Specifically, you make sure that you take each absolutely necessary shot multiple times, using different cameras and on different rolls of film. And you then carefully manage the rolls of film to be sure they don’t all go to the lab in the same batch.

In fact, you need four copies to be really sure, you might have one bad camera and the lab ruins a batch, so you need two copies on different rolls from each camera to be really safe. This is much easier if your cameras have interchangeable film backs (one more reason Hasselblad dominated wedding photography for so long).

I suspect people used their own made-up terminology, but I learned this as “A rolls” and “B rolls”, and the rule was that A rolls went to the lab in a different batch, on a different day, from B rolls, so they couldn’t both be ruined in the same accident. Similarly with an “A camera” and a “B camera” (no doubt some high-end wedding photographers, especially those using a second shooter, had more than two cameras, but 2 Hasselblads with some duplicate lenses and flashes was a stretch for most photographers).

So you had to keep track, in your head or on paper, of which of the required shots you had in AA, AB, BA, and BB forms. And the rest of the time, you needed to use both cameras a lot, not just using one and having a backup.

While at the same time doing your actual job as a photographer superbly; this added complexity saves you from some lab and camera failures, but doesn’t protect you from your own errors.

Most of the time, that’ll give you 4 versions of the key pictures to pick the best from, which is nice. But what’s vital is to protect yourself from having no versions of one of the key pictures.

I do hope the people shooting weddings on film today remember this. I can’t believe that labs are so much more reliable today that lab failure is now off the table, and the film cameras are decades older which isn’t likely to make them more reliable either.

Useless Film Developing Trivia

I would occasionally, back in the day, require extremely fast film. I encountered a recommendation for processing TRI-X exposed at EI 4000, tried it, and found that it produced very useful results. (Contrast was high, shadow-detail was low, but grain was startling small, and if properly exposed it lead to a very satisfying rendition of the scene for late-night convention parties and music sessions. The film had a strong curl, and a high level of base fog.)

I just ran across a pointer to the details of the process, which I hadn’t quite remembered, and a citation to where it originally from. I don’t expect to ever use it again (though the materials are still available!), but I’ve been unhappy not remembering the details, so I’m documenting them here, as well as where a re-discovered them.

Michael G. Slack (in Darkroom Photography, July/August 1979, p. 13) reports pushing Kodak Tri-X Pan to EI 4000 (with extreme contrast increase) by developing for 5 minutes at 75 F in HC-110 replenisher diluted 1:15 (like Dilution A, but starting with replenisher rather than syrup).
Michael Covington, https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/hc110/

A Few Confusing Photo Terms

Photography has been around for quite a while at this point, since perhaps 1835 (images had been recorded photo-chemically before that). Recently, we’ve undergone major upheavals as the commonly-used photographic technology changed from chemical to digital.

The accumulated terminology from this time, and from related fields, ends up being something of a mess.

Edit

When newspapers and magazines started using photos, the people who chose the photos were fairly quickly labeled as “editors”, in parallel with the people who chose the stories to be published.

When photography went digital, the computer term “editor,” for a program used to change text documents (including computer programs) was borrowed for programs that manipulated digital images, like Adobe Photoshop.

So now, “editing” photos can refer either to choosing photos from a set to use for some purpose, or to adjusting the appearance of photos while getting them ready for use.

Print

With daguerrotypes, the original material from the camera was exhibited (after processing), but most other chemical photographic methods produced a negative image, and an additional processing step was needed to produce a positive image for display. This also made it possible to produce multiple display images from the same photograph. Later, methods of enlarging from the negative to produce larger positive prints were invented (and better negative materials, so that the images could tolerate being enlarged).

So, a “print” was a positive copy of the original negative photo, or as a verb, the act of producing such copies.

Photographs were also widely used in publications, where “printing” meant using printing presses to produce many copies of the publication.

Today, many more photographs are looked at electronically than as physical prints, but sometimes, for lack of other terminology, photographers, especially old-school ones like me that still remember using a darkroom, might use “printing” to describe the process of manipulating a digital image file to get it to the form I want to present. (The other obvious terms are “edit”, see above, and “manipulate”, which suggests rather too strongly changing the photo to show things other than as they actually appeared.)

“Digital printing” is sometimes used (in contrast to “darkroom printing”) to emphasize that computer tools are being used.

Ansel Adams is frequently quoted saying something like “The negative is the score; the print is the performance” (Adams initially trained as a pianist). In an interview by David Sheff published in Playboy magazine (1-May-1983), on page 226, Adams actually said “Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance.” Less pithy, but about the same meaning.

Particularly when talking about making prints for exhibition, there is a large range of things that a first-rate printer will consider doing. These fall in the general categories of color adjustments, density and contrast adjustments, and local adjustments (of those types, but applied to only parts of the photo).

We are sadly lacking any commonly-understood term for preparing the best version of an image.

Manipulate

In the darkroom days, “photo manipulation” meant changing a photo to show things other than as they actually were. As with movie special effects, the purpose was to entertain, usually (of course on some occasions people also altered photos as part of frauds; the Soviet Union was famous for editing people out of historical photos as they gradually became unpopular).

Greater changes were possible in the darkroom than many people today understand, especially if you used advanced techniques like dye-transfer printing. Commercial portrait studios routinely did major retouching to the faces in the photos of their clients even in black-and-white, and of course Hollywood publicity photos took that to whole new levels.

However, today, using digital tools like Photoshop, any 10-year-old with a little experience can accomplish those same effects, in less time.

The distinction between “printing” a photo and “manipulating” it was clear to most people (especially to people who never did actually manipulate photos; the line is fuzzier than one might think, and of course simply choosing camera position, direction you’re looking, and exact moment of exposure already hugely abstracts the complexity of reality into the clarity of your photograph). But taking a mole off a person’s face in a portrait, or smoothing down creases and lines, were common, nobody thought of them as unusual in commercial portraiture (most amateurs didn’t take the time to learn how to do such things).

Anyway, many of us aren’t comfortable using the term “manipulation” for ordinary preparation of a photo for display that doesn’t alter the scene shown.

“Retouching” is often used for small adjustments that aren’t thought of as changing the photo significantly, especially cleaning up people’s faces.