Kimchi and Keyhole Lapels

Posted on 2012/07/29 09:34:10 (July 2012).

[Monday 23rd July 2012]
I'd made another batch of kimchi over the weekend (as rather sadly the recipe of the main brand available in shops in London seems to have changed - again - to include anchovies). I also thought making it myself was a good opportunity to reduce the amount of salt in it, so this time I used about half the amount of salt cited in the recipe I had been roughly following. So I used 50g of salt to make the brine in which I soaked just over 400g of Chinese leaf (a whole one, but the ones in supermarkets here tend to be relatively small). The experiment wasn't quite as scientific as it should have been though, as I left the cabbage in brine over night by accident rather than the usual four or five hours, so maybe it ended up absorbing more salt. Anyway, the eventual taste was pretty good, and certainly less salty than the shop bought stuff usually is.

After dinner I spent some time reading about keyhole lapels, having stumbled across an article which bemoaned their use, and singled them out as a sign of cheap production quality. Naturally I wanted to then check the various suits and jackets I had in the wardrobe to see if any where guilty of this. I found two examples - one on the cheap suit from Next I'd probably bought almost ten years ago (long before I was interested in sartorial matters), and surprisingly one on the most recently acquired jacket from Hackett. On further inspection though I realised this was actually not on the lapel, but on the "throat latch", which I discovered actually works, and at least in theory allows the jacket to be done up around the neck. One rule of thumb I'd read was that keyhole buttonholes are acceptable where they actually have a button to fasten up with - and this jacket has one on the underside of the opposite collar. I say "in theory" because I figured out I'd need something like a 12 inch neck in order to actually fasten this up whilst wearing it.

Anyway it was an interesting little diversion and I find these quirky little tailoring flourishes - and the perceived values associated with them - very interesting.

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