[Sca-cooks] tallow for lighting

[Jeff.Gedney at Dictaphone.com]

>    I can't remember whether tallow is just the rendered fat, or if there
is
>    more processing that is needed.

As I understand it, and lord knows that I have been wrong, the Tallow is
fat
that has been boiled several times, the water changed and the scum skimmed
off
each time, to remove all the soluble impurities and proteins. This extends
the
life of the fat, as well as removing a lot of the smokiness and smell. I do
not
know if it helps stabilize the fat so that it does not drip off the rush (a
tallow "dip" is a rush or reed that is coated with tallow to make a kind of
basic candle) when the room warms up.

Brandu



"All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical
observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet
manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety -- and simply
breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300
syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx -- or
supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it-- and, by variously
pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the
manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff into a series
of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutterals, and other minor
atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of
sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words,
sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand
what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and
the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of
mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the
listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high
pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally
associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse.
Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed."
- Bill Bryson, "the Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way"