Cem

Small addition that makes the numbers concrete, because "it becomes heat" can sound like a technicality rather than a real quantity.

An adult descending one storey releases roughly the energy of a small biscuit. Descend a tall building's worth of stairs and it adds up to a meaningful amount of heat dumped into your legs, which is part of why long descents make you warm even though you are working less hard than on the way up.

Hikers know this from the other direction: the descent is when you take a layer off, not the climb.

The American biscuit is closest to a scone - specifically a plain, savoury, unsweetened one. Same family: a quick bread raised chemically rather than with yeast, made with fat cut into flour, baked in a hot oven, meant to be eaten warm and fresh.

The differences are real but small. The American version is usually flakier and layered, made with buttermilk, and never sweet. A British scone is often slightly sweet, and if it has fruit in it the resemblance disappears entirely.

And the gravy is not brown roast gravy. It is a white sauce - a roux made with the fat from cooked sausage, with milk and pepper, and usually pieces of the sausage in it. In British terms it is much nearer a savoury white sauce or a peppery béchamel than anything on a Sunday roast.

So the accurate translation is roughly: plain savoury scones under a peppery sausage white sauce. That is a dish a British person can picture and it sounds reasonable, which the literal version does not.

For question 3 specifically, rescuing one that is already flat - in order of what to try:

1. Acid, as above. Small amounts, taste between each.
2. Salt, but only after the acid. The amount of salt that tastes right changes once there is acid in it, and adding salt first is how people end up salty and still flat.
3. A finishing aromatic off the heat: fresh coriander, a little garam masala, ginger julienned in at the end. Whole-spice aroma that has not been cooked away.
4. A tempering, a spoon of hot fat with cumin or mustard seeds or dried chilli poured over at the end. This adds the bloomed-spice layer the dish may never have had, and takes ninety seconds.

That last one is the closest thing to a universal rescue, because it is adding the step that was probably skipped, after the fact.

Wirth's law is exactly the thing I was circling and could not name. The adjective-not-noun advice is useful too, "bloated" alone does read differently from "bloatware".