Lili Krakowski on mon 10 jul 06
John:
The essential difference between cooking and glaze recipes is, as that we
all are familiar with food ingredients from childhood on. Not so, except
maybe for borax and talc, for glaze ingredients. (You will notice that in
US cookbooks featuring foods unfamiliar to Americans, far more attention is
paid to the nature of the food.)
Furthermore most of us have watched and experienced food preparation. We
have seen Cook mix eggs, lard a chicken with garlic cloves, make toast. And
we know from ditto experience that toast can burn, a cake "fall", a chicken
be over-seasoned....and we take that into account when we ourselves cook.
And last-- many foods can be tasted as one goes, with little risk.
With glaze we come to the ingredients as adults. (Exception: Tony Clennell)
Most on ClayArt and, I daresay, potting today, have little if any idea of
how the ingredients behave. When, the other day, someone was looking for
what, basically, was a dolomitic, titanium opacified glaze, all sorts of
things were said, explained, hashed, rehashed when that one phrase should
have done the trick.
In cooking we generally can look in the stove (DO NOT try this with sponge
or angel food cake) taste (DO NOT do this meat till it is well done) and
like that. The "investment" is relatively small.
With glaze we commit a lot of preparatory work--such as the making of the
pots--before glazing. Alas, many have big wonderful kilns, and no test
kilns. A glaze fire includes a whole mess of pots....but one learns only a
little with each firing. And many are so hungup on result they cannot
spare emotion for the mixing etc.
As to lazy etc....well...humph. Wot's to say? Many amateurs feel that
taking glaze seriously is wrong, pretentious, unnecessary, they want glaze
to be like paint, and, as they whiningly will tell one, "I do not mix my own
paint."
I truly think that those of us who love glaze qua glaze, who love it as an
area of knowledge, who enjoy that knowledge and so on, are the ones
responsible for changing the way glazes are published. I notice that more
and more in the shelter mags. recipes have a breakdown telling how many
carbs. protein, fat is in a serving, and what the caloric total is!
It is when those who really are crazy about glaze insist the mags publish
more info that it will happen...Just as nutritionists have prevailed on the
shelter mags.
Lili Krakowski
Born July 1930, Berlin, Germany!
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