Alchemy
al·che·my
[al-kuh-mee]
1. A form of chemistry and speculative philosophy practiced in the Middle Ages and the renaissance and concerned principally with discovering methods for transmuting baser metals into gold and with finding a universal solvent and an elixir of life.
2. Any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.
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The Alchemist
By Paulo Coelho, Alan R. Clarke - HarperSanFrancisco (2006) - Paperback - 197 pages
My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.
The Alchemy of Dry-Cured Flavor
by Harold McGee.On Food & Cooking.
Some of the muscles' biochemical machinery survives intact, in particular the enzymes that break flavorless proteins down into savory peptides and amino acids, which over the course of months may convert a third or more of the meat protein to flavor molecules. The concentration of mouth-filling, meaty glutamic acid rises ten to twenty fold, and as in cheese, so much of the amino acid tyrosine is freed that it may form small white crystals. In addition, the unsaturated fats in pig muscle break apart and react to form hundreds of volatile compounds, some of them characteristic of the aroma of melon ( a traditional and chemically fitting accompaniment to ham!), apple, citrus, flowers, fresh cut grass, and butter. Other compounds react with the products of protein breakdown to give nutty, caramel flavors normally found only in cooked meats (concentration compensates for the subcooking temperature). In sum, the flavor of dry-cured ham is astonishingly complex and evocative.
