The History of American Food

Listen to "042.5 Bonus - History of Distillation" on Spreaker. Episode 42.5 Bonus - How we got Distillation and the Water of Life or a Plethora of Ways to Kill Yourself Messily Through Physical Chemistry Take a walk with me around the world to see how distillation got started, and how it went 2 ways out of Mesopotamia.  It looks like the Chinese were getting blitzed on Hard Alcohol before the Europeans.  And two styles of distillation rigs grew out of the early life of distillation whether you went east or west. East - and distillation remained a pottery driven activity.  Used for both booze and Immortality Elixirs.  They most have been up to some extremely industrial strength stuff to the entire lake of Mercury they put in this guy's tomb: Shi Huang Di 1st Emperor of a Unified China 3rd Century BCE  West - where the focus was on floral essences for flavorings and perfumes along with chemistry, Immortality and the Philosophers Stone.  They didn't get around...

Listen to "041 Housekeeping - Domestic Labor Before 1660" on Spreaker.   Listen to "042 The Labor Situation 1661 - 1699" on Spreaker.  Links to the Episodes: Episode 41 - Domestic Labor Before 1660 Episode 42 - The Labor Situations 1661 - 1669 Sorry!  No pictures... The word "housekeeping" got used quite a bit during my post-high-school academic career to mean making things clear and cleaning up details.  There are quite a few words I've seen come into academic fashion, like "unpack" and others that have fallen out of favor,  like "mastery".  Each in its own way being shortcuts for larger concepts.  In academia we are often dealing with people who are swimming in the same pool of vocabulary words - or we assume they are.  And since we are all trying to get to the good stuff, there is a tendency to create these short-cut words to cover things we do all the time.  There is an attempt to save long explanations for the new. And it was...

Listen to "040 17th Century Fast Food" on Spreaker.  Link to the Episode: Episode 40 - 17th Century Fast Food Without cars, there were no drive throughs.  But there was fast food, or at least food you could pick up and eat on the go. There was actually a thriving fast food - or food vendor economy in the big cities of the world in the 17th century... going all the way back to antiquity.  Any city that started to pack people in little rooms in wooden buildings soon found it was a terrible idea to let people have fires in their rooms.  Especially in the days before a fireplace with a chimney.  And even in the early days, the chimneys could be problems in themselves. So a few of the items I mention in this episode: A Wattle & Daub Chimney - this one is likely late 19th Century. Note that the chimney is leaning away from the house - and the stick propping up the chimney.  When it inevitably caught on fire, the stick could be pulled out, causing the burnin...

Listen to "039 Varmints - Eating the Wild" on Spreaker. Link to the Episode: Episode 39 Varmints - Eating the Wild  Sure - the colonists got over themselves, and eventually realized they could eat the wildlife - even the ones they didn't have at home.  Not much more than mentions of these consumed varmints linger - especially if they weren't that tasty. But its the art and dress that lingers on - so we can see that many an animal was part of daily life for the 17th Century Native American and Colonist alike. Photo by Uyvsdi - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12647084 Loomed Quill Work collected from an Upper Missouri Tribe by the Lewis & Clark expedition pre-1804 - all natural dyes.  Currently held in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Photo by Squirrelwhisperer - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43154516 An example of contemporary Quillwork - the art continues The tall...

Listen to "038 Spice - Worth Taking Over the World" on Spreaker.  Link to the Episode: Episode 38 Spice - Worth Taking over the World I knew that Frank Hebert had clearly been reading Earth History when he came up with the Dune book.  What I didn't realize was how closely the shenanigans, chicanery and straight-up slavery that existed around the trade of Cloves, Mace and Nutmeg were mapped onto his story. Even down to The Very Best People using cloves and nutmeg as drugs for painkilling, hallucinations and purportedly longer life.  Oh yeah, and going to war over Spice profits.  That too.   Cloves: Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Nutmeg: On the tree - looks like plums.  The flesh is an opaque white.  Candied, pickled and juiced locally - nutmeg fruit flesh doesn't have much market beyond its fresh, local use.   By Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0 The nutmeg aril - while still on the seed coat....

Listen to "037 Rum - The Most Profitable Industrial Waste of the 17th Century" on Spreaker.   Link to the Episode: Episode 37 Rum - The Most Profitable Industrial Waste of the 17th Century Yup!  We are definitely drunk now. The problems with poisoning from “bad water” in the Military were endemic.  The old solution of making small beer was generally effective since the boiling part killed most problem of the day.  But this was expensive and time consuming.    Distributing distilled alcohols and diluting it brought back dysentery and introduced a new level of drunkenness.  Whoops! Most European distilled liquors like Brandies and the Medicinal Concoctions were passed through stages of alchemy and monasteries.  But rum, like Dutch gin and Chinese Rice based spirits (and later Russian Vodka) were more of a drink of the Every Man.  These were produced at factory scale pretty early on – and made available to even the lowliest worker at affordabl...

Listen to "036 Fat - All that Moral Weight" on Spreaker.   Link to the Episode: Episode 36 Fat - All that Moral Weight The Competing Bibles in use in the 17th Century 1) The Great Bible of King Henry VIII (16th Century) - this is the I'm right, and richer than everyone version. If you are going to tell the Pope that he's not in charge here (in England - Scotland is still Pope-land at this point), your are going to need a new Bible. The title Page as Printed The Great Bible in Use - chained up b/c  16th & 17th Century People liked their stuff COLORED IN! Embellished title pages like this was how the Great Bible was experienced  (in Barbie Full Color) Not the plain printed page above (Moody & Grim) 2) The Geneva Bible (16th Century) - this is the technical annotated version for people who enjoy the argument The Geneva Bible - Title Page Geneva Bible Pages Though Contemporaneous with the Great Bible The Swiss printing quality is noticeably superior to the Engli...

Listen to "035.5 Bonus - Soap is Made of Fat" on Spreaker. Link to the Episode: Episode 35.5 Bonus - Soap is Made of Fat   Don't Eat in the Lab - You might turn into a Dinosaur. Dinosaur Neil vs. The Tick (1994) DO NOT: 1) Eat in Lab 2) Set Lab on Fire 3) Innovate Unnecessarily Soap on the Molecular Chemical Level: Instead of getting tedious - I am simply going to direct you to this great explainer - molecule diagrams, micelle pictures and everything by a Chem PhD - Dr. Michelle Wong - at LabMuffin.com: Make Your Own Soap - The Chemistry Behind Soap Making If this episode has you jazzed about making soap - there are lots of ways to go about it.  A great starter is a soap making kit - just to try it out.  There are plenty of just fine soap making books out there that let you work with preprepared chemicals and formulas. But if you want to know more, and go deep, this book is The Book of Soap Making: Scientific Soap Making by Kevin M. Dunn Have Fun!  And watch out f...

Listen to "035 Fat - Liquid Gold" on Spreaker.   Link to the Episode: Episode 35 Fat - Liquid Gold Pictures I got myself from the Boucherie I get to go to! Lard! A ham from a modern boutique raised lard hog: Lard cut for rendering: A giant pile of delicious, salty cracklins from rendering the lard - and a piggy tail... because. Suet & Tallow - no longer my photos The suet - particularly hard fat that cushions kidneys - this is from a calf Grated and Rendered Tallow - not hard to find even in these modern times: Tallow Candle - notoriously drippy when burning and squishy in the summer Though off by an entire century - The Queen Victoria messup with the Tallow Candles is from Season 1 - Episode 1 of the Lush Costume Drama.  Irreverent Recap here: Bow Down IMDb Info Cod Livers - available in Northern Europe - even today! Fun experiments in Viking Lamps with cod liver oil  at University of Victoria - Canada Guess What? (it rhymes) Here is a plucked chicken so you can se...

Listen to "034 Horses - Americans Don't Eat Them Except When We Do" on Spreaker.  Link to the Episode: Episode 34 Horses - Americans Don't Eat Them Except When We Do Some Horse Relatives: The Dawn Horse - Eohippus Charles R. Knight - 1908 early recreation painting Tapir... and a baby tapir Un-fairly Adorable! The Rhinoceros  (but a Hippopotamus is NOT a horse relative - it is sort of in between Pigs and Dolphins) Very Old Depictions of Horses -  Chauvet Caves ~37,000 to 28,000 years ago Ivory Horse Carving ~ 30,000 years ago Vogelherd Cave Could these be from a paleolithic or neolithic age pocket of horses that evolved on their own lonely corner of the Iberian Peninsula horse?  The mustachioed Basque Garrano horse. (Hybrids with modern "regular" horses tend to be non-viable so *shrug*) From Farewell to the Horse African Horses Relatives (that look more like horses than Rhinoceroses)  Zebra - 1 of three species Quagga - this 1870 photo of a London Zoo Anim...