Useful things – how to tell when meat is done

Over from Clotilde’s comes another gem on testing the doneness of red meat as described in The Butcher and the Vegetarian :

“Put the tips of your first finger and thumb together lightly, then use your opposite hand to squeeze the fleshy bit of the palm just below the base of the thumb. That is the consistency of rare meat. If you switch to thumb and second finger, the pad of your hand actually feels more solid, and that’s the texture of medium-rare. Thumb and third finger is medium; thumb and pinky is well done. Clearly this is what they are talking about when they say opposable thumbs are a sign of our evolution.”