Random Thoughts

Recipes spend most of their time speaking in measurements. Two hundred grams. Twelve minutes. A quarter-inch dice. Then, near the end, they write: salt to taste.

"To taste" is treated as vague advice, the place where instructions give up. I think it is the most exact measurement in the recipe. Salt does not enter an empty system. It meets tomatoes with different amounts of water, broth salted by someone else, cheese at its own stage of age, a sauce that reduced more quickly than expected. The author cannot know the total. The cook has the only instrument that can.

This transfer of authority would feel generous if recipes did not postpone it. After twenty lines telling a beginner exactly what to do, they suddenly demand judgment without admitting that judgment is a skill. "To taste" can feel like abandonment because the recipe waited until the last possible moment to make the reader a cook.

I want the instruction earlier. Taste before it thickens. Taste after the acid. Taste again tomorrow. Not because intuition is mystical, but because flavor is a moving target and attention is one of the ingredients.

Measurements get you close. The final instruction is the first one addressed to the person actually holding the spoon.

The number your weather app calls "feels like" has never described you.

For most of a century it described a bottle. In 1940 Paul Siple and Charles Passel hung a small plastic cylinder of water from the roof of an Antarctic hut, level with the anemometer, and timed how long it took to freeze. What they published in 1945 was a cooling rate in kilocalories per square metre per hour — a four-digit number, not a temperature. Somebody else converted it into the friendly negative one a radio announcer could read.

That held until 2001, when a joint American, Canadian and British group replaced it. The current index models heat leaving a bare adult face turned into the wind, walking into it at 3.1 miles an hour. The wind comes off the standard anemometer at thirty-three feet and is scaled down to five feet, where a face is. The sky is clear and it is night, so the sun contributes nothing. Twelve volunteers, six men and six women, spent ninety minutes at a stretch on a treadmill in a chilled wind tunnel in Toronto with thermal transducers taped to their foreheads, cheeks, noses and chins.

The numbers came down hard. St. Louis reported 69 below on 20 January 1985; run that day through the current formula and it is 48 below.

None of which made the number about you. You have a hood up, you are standing still at a light, it is two in the afternoon and the sun is out. The old index at least sounded like an instrument. This one sounds like a person, and there is a particular one it means: bare-faced in the dark, walking into the wind at exactly 3.1 miles an hour.

Say "about." The first syllable isn't an A — it's the sound your mouth makes doing nothing. Jaw slack, tongue idling in the middle of the mouth, no reach in any direction. That sound is the schwa, and it's the most common vowel in English. It has no letter of its own. It's where every other vowel goes when nobody stresses it: the a in about, the e in taken, the o in harmony, the second half of sofa. Any letter in the alphabet can be pronounced as one. None of them own it.

English is stress-timed. We hit the syllables that carry weight and let the rest go slack, and what goes slack is the schwa. It isn't a sound we choose to make. It's the sound left when we stop choosing — the center of the vowel chart, the position the mouth falls back to between efforts. It's also what comes out before we've decided. The "uh" that holds the floor while you find the word is the engine idling, the line kept open.

We spend more breath on this neutral than on any vowel we actually picked. Most of a sentence rides on it.

The name is borrowed from Hebrew — shva, a mark set under a consonant to say the vowel here is reduced, or gone. The root means emptiness. So the busiest sound in the language wears, when it's written at all, a lowercase e turned upside down, and answers to a word for nothing there.