Rick Stein

German politics

Let’s start with a photo I got from Henrik. You can see the pencils Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is using: Faber-Castell Grip 2001s. ^[1]Did you know that the official way of addressing her is “Your excellency”?

British politics

Meanwhile, in the UK the House of Lords decided that they would stop using vellum (goat or calf skin) for printing laws. It looks as if the Cabinet Office minister will now offer to pay the cost (around £80,000 a year) to keep this tradition alive. You can read more about it at the Guardian. Just to avoid any confusion, vellum is parchment made from animal skin, but vellum paper or paper vellum is not. You might have come across vellum paper on Rhodia notepads (High Grade Vellum Paper), but it’s synthetic and not made from animal skin. Rhodia Drive wrote about this a few months ago.

British cooking

Staying in the UK: In Rick Stein’s Taste of Shanghai you can see him making notes using a pencil. At first glance I thought it is a Caran d’Ache 844, but after rewinding and looking again I think it’s a Pentel P209 (0.9mm) mechanical pencil.

---

I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post, falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.