Latest / Stuff You Should Know / The Origins of Breakfast Foods

Transcript

The Origins of Breakfast Foods · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, before we get going today, we wanted to
0:04
Speaker 1: uh acknowledge ourselves and you right right, de Luke Chuck,
0:11
Speaker 1: what episode is this? This is episode number one thousand,
0:16
Speaker 1: five hundreds. Nuts. It's nuts. Up to this moment, I've
0:22
Speaker 1: just been thinking of episode. When you say it like that,
0:25
Speaker 1: it just seems like a mind boggling number. It is
0:28
Speaker 1: mind boggling. And many thanks or in order, first of all,
0:31
Speaker 1: to Jill Hurley, our Minister of Stats, for pointing this
0:35
Speaker 1: out because we would have never known, right, yeah, definitely.
0:39
Speaker 1: We got to thank Jerry of course, and also Dave,
0:42
Speaker 1: Max Matt know, all the producers who've helped us along
0:46
Speaker 1: the way, right yeah. Uh. And of course Ed and
0:49
Speaker 1: Livia and Dave Bruce are intrepid writers. Is that the
0:54
Speaker 1: right word. They're intrepid for sure, they have no trepidation,
0:59
Speaker 1: that's right. And we're acknowledging the stuff you should know
1:02
Speaker 1: Army as well, and all the listeners, because there's no
1:05
Speaker 1: way we would have gotten episode fire let alone five
1:09
Speaker 1: hundred had no one ever listened to begin with. And uh,
1:12
Speaker 1: you know, we're super lucky to have this job that
1:15
Speaker 1: we continue to be able to do, you know, yeah,
1:17
Speaker 1: for sure. Of course, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without
1:19
Speaker 1: you guys listening out there, and of course Chuck. Last,
1:22
Speaker 1: but not least, we've got to thank our families like you,
1:25
Speaker 1: me and Emily Momo Ruby. Yeah, of course, everyone provides
1:31
Speaker 1: us a lot of support, and uh, it's just pretty amazing.
1:34
Speaker 1: The number is a weird number to look at, and
1:38
Speaker 1: we're not going anywhere anytime soon, so don't think this
1:40
Speaker 1: is a sign off, but we just wanted to acknowledge
1:43
Speaker 1: it and and say big thanks to everybody. Yeah, so
1:46
Speaker 1: thanks everybody, and we'll just stop now and start the episode.
1:49
Speaker 1: How about that. That sounds great. Welcome to stuff you
1:54
Speaker 1: should know a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and
2:03
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast, or should I say paancast. I'm Josh,
2:07
Speaker 1: there's Chuck. It's just the two of us. But I'm
2:12
Speaker 1: excited about this one enough that I've basically birth to Jerry.
2:17
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, sure what that means, Just don't think about it, okay.
2:22
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, we're talking about breakfast, and uh, I mean
2:26
Speaker 1: I could name about I feel like about a third
2:28
Speaker 1: of the websites on the internet for this, because if
2:31
Speaker 1: you want to learn about breakfast, there are a lot
2:33
Speaker 1: of websites that want to teach you about it. It's
2:35
Speaker 1: Taylor made for the internet. You know, there's nostalgia, there's tastiness, um,
2:40
Speaker 1: there's history. It's got everything it does. But how stuff
2:45
Speaker 1: works are old colleagues. Of course, we're involved in Smithsonian
2:49
Speaker 1: mag and the Kitchen Project and the breakfast shop in
2:53
Speaker 1: Chicago Waffles great website by the way, the Daily Meal.
2:57
Speaker 1: There were a bunch of websites where were rated this wonderful.
3:01
Speaker 1: And this is just probably a part one. Like, there
3:05
Speaker 1: are so many breakfast items with rich histories that we're
3:08
Speaker 1: not going over today. So I feel like we could
3:10
Speaker 1: do another one of these later. Have we ever done
3:13
Speaker 1: one on breakfast cereals specifically, because that seems like something
3:17
Speaker 1: we could spend an hour saying, like, oh you remember
3:20
Speaker 1: do you remember Frank and Berry? We haven't, but we should.
3:25
Speaker 1: That sounds fun. Um. So yeah, we're just gonna do
3:28
Speaker 1: kind of just a select few today, maybe some that
3:31
Speaker 1: you're not going to be very surprised at, and as
3:33
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, I'll be surprised if anybody's surprised
3:36
Speaker 1: at any of these selections. But they're still good. Nonetheless,
3:40
Speaker 1: But before we get to that we should probably talk
3:42
Speaker 1: about where the idea of breakfast comes from, because it's
3:44
Speaker 1: just such an integral part or it once was such
3:46
Speaker 1: an integral part of people's lives that you just kind
3:50
Speaker 1: of took it for granted, right, Yeah, And it's really interesting.
3:53
Speaker 1: The House Stuff Works article points out that like what
3:56
Speaker 1: we consider breakfast foods, like there's so many different things
4:00
Speaker 1: that go into what made that happen, and that none
4:03
Speaker 1: of them are the same. Like sometimes it's religion, sometimes
4:06
Speaker 1: it's technology, sometimes it's just what was available. Sometimes it's
4:11
Speaker 1: cultural like regional norms, uh, immigration plays apart. It's just
4:17
Speaker 1: super interesting, I think. But breakfast as a whole, uh
4:21
Speaker 1: is you know, it's something that people have always eaten,
4:26
Speaker 1: sure that first meal of the day. Depending on where
4:30
Speaker 1: we are in the world and where we are in history, Um,
4:33
Speaker 1: the importance of breakfast is a little bit different. It's
4:37
Speaker 1: like it's not quite the same thing as it was,
4:39
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds or thousands of years ago. Though, no,
4:42
Speaker 1: not at all. And you can make a really strong
4:43
Speaker 1: case that at least in the States, it's not what
4:46
Speaker 1: it was thirty or forty years ago. You know, good point.
4:50
Speaker 1: But um, the idea of breakfast if you hadn't figured
4:53
Speaker 1: it out by now at this point in your life.
4:55
Speaker 1: It's um break and fast, like you're breaking your fast
4:58
Speaker 1: put together. And I always thought it just had to
5:02
Speaker 1: do with you know, you you woke up, you hadn't
5:04
Speaker 1: eaten since the day before. Just makes sense you've been
5:07
Speaker 1: fasting whether you wanted to or not, because you can't
5:09
Speaker 1: really eat while you sleep. I've tried, and so you're
5:13
Speaker 1: breaking that fast. But apparently it's much more religious than that,
5:16
Speaker 1: because people used to fast until church when they would
5:19
Speaker 1: get the Eucharist or the communion wafer, and after that
5:24
Speaker 1: they could you know, go whole hog on some on
5:26
Speaker 1: some meals and that was their breakfast, but it would
5:29
Speaker 1: come later in the morning, if not in in the afternoon. Yeah,
5:33
Speaker 1: And I think um, as far as seeing that word
5:35
Speaker 1: written down, they trace it to UH fifteenth century UH.
5:41
Speaker 1: And that's in the English language. But the same word
5:44
Speaker 1: apparently can mean different things, or used to mean different
5:46
Speaker 1: things in different countries, anything from a a sort of
5:50
Speaker 1: a smallish lunch if you're in France to a lighter
5:53
Speaker 1: supper in Italian and they, you know, like I said,
5:57
Speaker 1: depending on where you were and when you were there
6:00
Speaker 1: would be different and we'll see as we go on.
6:02
Speaker 1: You would eat like things that you would consider really
6:05
Speaker 1: weird now, like unless you're going to a Sunday brunch
6:08
Speaker 1: or a Saturday brunch and having like a bloody Mary
6:11
Speaker 1: or something. The idea of drinking for breakfast alcohol seems
6:15
Speaker 1: really weird. But that used to happen. They used to
6:17
Speaker 1: drink you know, hard ciders and and sort of low
6:20
Speaker 1: A BV. Beers all the way up until like the
6:24
Speaker 1: mid nineteenth century. I saw it can be anywhere between
6:28
Speaker 1: the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, but that, yes, but
6:31
Speaker 1: that went on for millennia. That's just what people did
6:34
Speaker 1: at breakfast. They love that. They drank booste every day.
6:37
Speaker 1: I think kids did as well, if I'm not mistaken.
6:39
Speaker 1: I saw somewhere. But then in addition to like drinking booze,
6:43
Speaker 1: there would also be stuff that you'd be like fish
6:45
Speaker 1: for breakfast, super breakfast, And it seems odd to those
6:50
Speaker 1: of us in the West, who are you know, customers
6:52
Speaker 1: that specific Western kind of breakfast, But that's still the
6:55
Speaker 1: case in some places today, especially Asia, like in Japan.
6:58
Speaker 1: Um they eat like fish and soup and ramen and
7:01
Speaker 1: stuff like that. For breakfast, like their breakfast looks just
7:04
Speaker 1: like their lunch or their dinner. Yeah. So the idea
7:07
Speaker 1: of breakfast as we understand it isn't like global um
7:10
Speaker 1: by stretch of the imagination. Yeah, so we're taking this
7:13
Speaker 1: from sort of a North American eurocentric point of view. Yeah,
7:17
Speaker 1: you could almost title this like how the Western breakfast evolved.
7:21
Speaker 1: You know, maybe I will Okay, I dare you game on?
7:27
Speaker 1: Uh so this is a little bit of a rehash.
7:29
Speaker 1: But um, I just noticed we're saying breakfast words all
7:32
Speaker 1: over the place, like hash. See that's when we could
7:36
Speaker 1: put on the next one, corned beef hash, just breakfast hash.
7:40
Speaker 1: We're not going to cover omelets. We're not gonna cover
7:42
Speaker 1: muffins like I think there's a whole part two in
7:45
Speaker 1: them in the making. Okay, I love it. But bacon
7:48
Speaker 1: and eggs. It seems like eggs have been eaten sort
7:52
Speaker 1: of since time in Memorium for breakfast. I didn't see
7:55
Speaker 1: anywhere exactly why. My hunch is that, uh, you get
8:02
Speaker 1: that egg out of the chicken in the morning, and
8:05
Speaker 1: maybe it just goes right onto the plate. You pick
8:07
Speaker 1: it up by its neck and shake it until the
8:09
Speaker 1: egg falls out. I think I think they like eggs
8:12
Speaker 1: in the morning, right, I don't know. I don't remember
8:16
Speaker 1: doubting myself because I'm kind of going off the dome here.
8:19
Speaker 1: I don't remember if there's like a specific time or not.
8:21
Speaker 1: But but maybe if they laid it overnight or something
8:24
Speaker 1: like that, when you got up in the morning there
8:25
Speaker 1: was an egg. Who knows that's true? That makes good sense.
8:29
Speaker 1: But the whole bacon thing we talked about in our
8:32
Speaker 1: h if I do say so myself are great? Uh
8:35
Speaker 1: maybe our greatest live episode of all time on Edward
8:37
Speaker 1: Burnet's The Nephew of Sigmund Freud and pr Mastermind, a
8:42
Speaker 1: really good episode if he hadn't listened to that one.
8:44
Speaker 1: But um, the bacon and like a big, huge hearty
8:48
Speaker 1: breakfast wasn't really the thing in America at the time.
8:51
Speaker 1: And this was in you know, the like whaties and
8:56
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Yeah, and and even before then, and from
9:01
Speaker 1: what I can tell, um, breakfast more resembled breakfast today.
9:05
Speaker 1: Like if you ate anything, it was really quick, convenient.
9:08
Speaker 1: You had to be out the door. Um, And that
9:10
Speaker 1: was a big result of industrialization and urbanization, Like you
9:14
Speaker 1: didn't go work in the fields and then come in
9:16
Speaker 1: and have a big spread for breakfast a couple hours
9:19
Speaker 1: after you woke up and started working, like you were
9:22
Speaker 1: away from your house and you had to be out
9:24
Speaker 1: of your house fairly quickly. So breakfast I think just
9:27
Speaker 1: kind of went the way of disco before disco, right,
9:32
Speaker 1: But the beech Nut Packaging Company in the nineteen twenties,
9:36
Speaker 1: they sold a lot of stuff, but one of the
9:37
Speaker 1: things they sold was bacon, and bacon just wasn't something
9:41
Speaker 1: that UH was selling as much. It wasn't sort of
9:44
Speaker 1: the staple item you would think of today. People certainly
9:46
Speaker 1: ate it, but it wasn't a breakfast item. So they
9:48
Speaker 1: got Burnet's on board and they mounted a whole campaign,
9:52
Speaker 1: a big pr campaign to basically say, hey, it's first
9:55
Speaker 1: thing in the morning, you need to really just load
9:58
Speaker 1: up on tons of food and bacon should be a
10:01
Speaker 1: part of your stable diet and it goes great with eggs,
10:03
Speaker 1: and they're correct. Yeah, they advertise that you lose energy overnight,
10:07
Speaker 1: so you need to fill up on a big breakfast.
10:10
Speaker 1: And the idea of like breakfast being the most important
10:12
Speaker 1: meal of the day comes from that advertising. And we'll
10:16
Speaker 1: see that a lot of the breakfast as we recognize
10:18
Speaker 1: it came from advertising in a company who said, we
10:21
Speaker 1: got a bunch of stuff we want to dump. Its
10:23
Speaker 1: just completely changed the way Americans live and think, what's
10:27
Speaker 1: your deal with breakfast? Do you like breakfast? Um? I
10:31
Speaker 1: have changed my eating habits in the last few months,
10:34
Speaker 1: and so I've started eating breakfast again. But there was
10:37
Speaker 1: a very long stretch where I didn't need anything until
10:40
Speaker 1: eleven or noon. Yeah, um, And I I'm not quite sure.
10:45
Speaker 1: I've been told like that's not good at all for
10:48
Speaker 1: your body. Not that like breakfast is the most important
10:50
Speaker 1: meal of the day, but just going hours when you're
10:53
Speaker 1: hungry and not giving your body food might not be
10:55
Speaker 1: the best thing for it. Um. So I've started to
10:58
Speaker 1: kind of eat earlier and earlier. Interesting because that reminds
11:01
Speaker 1: me I want to do one on Oh, what's the
11:05
Speaker 1: fasting trend called now these days? The intermit intermittent fasting,
11:09
Speaker 1: which um, is all about not eating breakfast. Well, we
11:13
Speaker 1: did a whole one on fasting, and there's no way
11:15
Speaker 1: we didn't talk about internet emitten fasting is there? I
11:18
Speaker 1: don't know, it seems I don't. I think there's there's
11:21
Speaker 1: something there for a full one. But my deal with
11:23
Speaker 1: breakfast is I love breakfast, I just don't ever eat breakfast.
11:27
Speaker 1: Like breakfast is a sort of a treat meal. And
11:31
Speaker 1: when I think of like a big breakfast, it's like
11:33
Speaker 1: an out to eat thing on vacation kind of thing.
11:36
Speaker 1: And but I love everything about breakfast, Like maybe my
11:41
Speaker 1: favorite meal as far as like a plate of hash
11:44
Speaker 1: browns and eggs and bacon and sausage and waffles and
11:48
Speaker 1: pancakes and muffins and bagels and all that delicious is
11:51
Speaker 1: I love all of that stuff. But you can't. You
11:53
Speaker 1: can't eat like that. No, That's why it does seem
11:56
Speaker 1: to be a vacation thing, you know. And that's why
11:58
Speaker 1: they have breakfast puffase and you go on vacation for
12:01
Speaker 1: that very reason. But we are about to talk about
12:04
Speaker 1: one of my favorite breakfast items, especially obviously when I
12:07
Speaker 1: go to New York City and I get my uh,
12:10
Speaker 1: I bring my extra large ziplocks, and I come home
12:13
Speaker 1: with a dozen bagels from s A bagel my favorite one.
12:16
Speaker 1: They're huge. There's no way you can need a full one.
12:19
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, you split it in half like a
12:22
Speaker 1: half a bagel. I mean, they're like they're enormous. That
12:24
Speaker 1: sounds like a wager to me. I mean you could,
12:26
Speaker 1: but it's just that's a lot of a lot of bread.
12:29
Speaker 1: You'd just be suffering towards the end. But a bagel,
12:32
Speaker 1: if you don't know, is a um. They describe it
12:35
Speaker 1: as a kind of role um. But it's a it's
12:38
Speaker 1: a bakery item. It's yeast risen. It's dough that shape
12:41
Speaker 1: my hand and in the form of a ring. Uh.
12:45
Speaker 1: The very key part about being a real bagel as
12:47
Speaker 1: you boil it before you bake it, and it's very
12:51
Speaker 1: chewy in the middle. But if you do it right,
12:54
Speaker 1: it's uh, you shouldn't even need to toast it. I
12:56
Speaker 1: do like my toasted like the inside, trustee, but uh,
13:00
Speaker 1: very crispy and browned on the outside after you boil
13:03
Speaker 1: and bacon. How do you eat your bagels? Well, I
13:07
Speaker 1: used to just eat butter before I knew anything about life.
13:12
Speaker 1: But still good though, that's still good. It's like that
13:15
Speaker 1: kind of plain simple. Yeah, taste can be really good. No,
13:18
Speaker 1: I like it. I like nothing but everything bagels. It's
13:20
Speaker 1: my only bagel for me. But um, now I do
13:23
Speaker 1: sour cream. Um, I prefer not whipped. I prefer just
13:27
Speaker 1: the regular sour cream, but I will have it whipped.
13:30
Speaker 1: And then I really love the smoked salmon on top.
13:33
Speaker 1: Now yeah, okay, you finally got to the important part
13:36
Speaker 1: and everything bagel shake, I add that on top as well. Wow.
13:41
Speaker 1: So let me ask you this, do you ever treat
13:42
Speaker 1: yourself and get a red onion, carve up a few
13:45
Speaker 1: like ultra thin slices and put some capers on top.
13:48
Speaker 1: I'm not into capers an onion. Oh well, then definitely
13:51
Speaker 1: avoid that. But if you were into capers an onion,
13:53
Speaker 1: I was strongly recommend doing that. Yeah. I mean, that's
13:56
Speaker 1: that's a very classic bagel about say recipe, but it
14:00
Speaker 1: you know, what would you call that an assembledge? I
14:04
Speaker 1: think it's perfect for it. But then one last thing
14:07
Speaker 1: about that, chuck. So I'm glad you said smoked salmon
14:10
Speaker 1: because that's my preference too. And for a very long
14:13
Speaker 1: time that's all I ate. Um. And I wasn't aware
14:16
Speaker 1: that there was a difference between locks and smoked salmon
14:19
Speaker 1: until I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and locks
14:22
Speaker 1: out and ate it, and I was like, poo, poo,
14:25
Speaker 1: what is wrong with this salmon? And it turns out
14:28
Speaker 1: locks is different locks is entirely salt cured, so it's
14:31
Speaker 1: one of the saltiest things you'll ever eat in your life,
14:34
Speaker 1: whereas smoked salmon is also salt cured, but they go
14:37
Speaker 1: lighter on the salt and it's heavier on the smoke flavor.
14:40
Speaker 1: It's way better in my opinion. Yeah, and the everything
14:43
Speaker 1: bagel is already pretty salty, so um that yeah, that
14:46
Speaker 1: would be what Emily would call a salt lick. Right.
14:49
Speaker 1: So we don't even know actually where the word bagel
14:52
Speaker 1: came from. It's kind of a weird word if you
14:53
Speaker 1: think about it, but there's some pretty good contenders. Um.
14:56
Speaker 1: Yiddish has one called bacon, which means to bend. Makes sense. Um,
15:02
Speaker 1: The German Germans are friends. In Germany, they have a
15:05
Speaker 1: word for bracelet that sounds familiar braceletter ring google not bad.
15:11
Speaker 1: That's awfully close if you asked me. The one that
15:13
Speaker 1: I always thought it was because I learned it from
15:15
Speaker 1: Uncle John's bathroom reader, is that it's an Austrian term
15:19
Speaker 1: for stirrup bugle, because the stirrup is supposedly what the
15:24
Speaker 1: bagel was originally shaped after, at least according to Gordon Jovna.
15:28
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with that one too. That one spoke
15:30
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah, so that's what when we're gonna go with.
15:32
Speaker 1: That's the official s y s K choice for where
15:36
Speaker 1: the where the word bagel came from? Uh, that's right.
15:39
Speaker 1: And if you want to know where the printed word
15:42
Speaker 1: be a g e l came from first, they've tracked
15:45
Speaker 1: it down to the year sixteen ten. Very impressive in
15:49
Speaker 1: the community relations I guess handbook for crack Owl Poland
15:55
Speaker 1: and this is pretty great. A bagel is on the
15:58
Speaker 1: list of official items that you can give a woman
16:02
Speaker 1: on the occasion of her son's circumcision. Bam that So
16:08
Speaker 1: that's the first instance of bagel, you say, right as
16:10
Speaker 1: we understand it, b A G e l. So um,
16:14
Speaker 1: the that's fine and good. Like the people of krak
16:17
Speaker 1: how had been eating bagels for centuries by the time
16:20
Speaker 1: we got on board. But we can thank our friends
16:23
Speaker 1: who were part of the nineteenth century Jewish exodus to
16:26
Speaker 1: the United States for bringing bagels to US. Uh. And
16:30
Speaker 1: at first it was like strictly considered an ethnic food
16:33
Speaker 1: and it was really pretty much relegated to um the
16:37
Speaker 1: Jewish community of New York in particular, and they set
16:41
Speaker 1: up bagel bakeries out the Yin Yang. There was at
16:43
Speaker 1: least seventy in the Lower East Side alone in the
16:47
Speaker 1: early twentieth century. And there's a bagel bagel Baker's Union
16:51
Speaker 1: that was formed there and they did their whole meetings
16:53
Speaker 1: in Yiddish. So you can kind of understand if you
16:55
Speaker 1: put all that together that, yeah, it didn't really creep
16:57
Speaker 1: outside of that neighborhood for a little while. Yeah, but
17:00
Speaker 1: it Uh, this is one of the instances where I
17:03
Speaker 1: guess modern technology sort of came into play to take
17:06
Speaker 1: something wide, as is the case a lot of times.
17:09
Speaker 1: But uh, they you know, they got bagel factories. Basically,
17:13
Speaker 1: they got these machines that could mass produce bagels. In
17:15
Speaker 1: the mid to late nineteen fifties in the United States,
17:19
Speaker 1: that was a big deal. And a man named Harry
17:22
Speaker 1: Lender of New Haven, Connecticut got ahold of these things
17:25
Speaker 1: and we're like, these are great, we can make tons
17:27
Speaker 1: of bagels now. And his son Murray Murray Lender obviously
17:31
Speaker 1: of Lender's bagels, uh, and then at a slicing machine,
17:35
Speaker 1: so they're pre sliced, which is always appreciated. But usually
17:40
Speaker 1: if you get a pre slice bagel, it's probably not
17:42
Speaker 1: the best bagel, but you can imagine that's when they
17:45
Speaker 1: really took off like a rocket. I don't have to
17:48
Speaker 1: slice them, they're already mostly sliced for me. Sold. Yeah,
17:52
Speaker 1: and you can get those, but I don't have one.
17:54
Speaker 1: But the the little bagel slicer as you see in
17:56
Speaker 1: the shop that like the the guillotine. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
17:59
Speaker 1: I know, and think those work that well. They tend
18:02
Speaker 1: to smash the bagel down, um, and then they if
18:05
Speaker 1: they don't fit in there, right, It's just I get
18:07
Speaker 1: why they use them. But the coffee shop up the
18:09
Speaker 1: street from me uses those, and I'm always like, please
18:11
Speaker 1: don't cut it. I'll cut it when I get home. Yeah,
18:13
Speaker 1: I mean, the best thing is just a serrated knife
18:15
Speaker 1: for a bread knife, which also was serrated. That's what
18:18
Speaker 1: you want exactly. And by the way, let me thank
18:20
Speaker 1: you publicly for the avocado really gig that you got me.
18:24
Speaker 1: You're very welcome. Have you used it yet? I did,
18:27
Speaker 1: And what I found out on the first use is
18:29
Speaker 1: that it's not great if it's a little softer, but
18:32
Speaker 1: I bet if it's a good firm avocado, it works. Wonders,
18:35
Speaker 1: it really does, and I had no illusions whatsoever that
18:38
Speaker 1: you are going to just change your whole game. But
18:40
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I'd give you the chance to
18:42
Speaker 1: if you wanted to know. I have to know because
18:44
Speaker 1: my daughter likes it, so oh okay wow, and she
18:47
Speaker 1: loves avocados nice, so that's perfect. So it was really
18:51
Speaker 1: for her. Then, I guess, yes, that's right. So she says,
18:54
Speaker 1: thank you, uncle Josh, you're very well share a birthday,
18:57
Speaker 1: and happy birthday to mar to you by the way. Yeah,
18:59
Speaker 1: happy birthday to her tomorrow too. Yeah. I'm not sure
19:01
Speaker 1: people know that, but that's one of the very funny
19:04
Speaker 1: things about life, is that my daughter was born and
19:08
Speaker 1: I was looking up celebrity birthdays to see who shared
19:11
Speaker 1: her birthday with her. Your face spots up. That's awesome.
19:15
Speaker 1: It was very very funny day. Was that sad celebrity
19:18
Speaker 1: dot Com? Uh? No, it was. It was a legit
19:22
Speaker 1: celebrity birthday side. I wasn't on it. I was like,
19:24
Speaker 1: how did you get on there? They reached out to
19:26
Speaker 1: me sometime and I was like, sure, I'll definitely lift
19:29
Speaker 1: a finger to be on this website. And it paid
19:31
Speaker 1: off an aces apparently. Yeah, it was a very very
19:34
Speaker 1: funny moment. I was like, you gotta be kidding me.
19:37
Speaker 1: So just one last thing. Let's put a punctuation mark
19:39
Speaker 1: on bagels and then take a break. How about that.
19:41
Speaker 1: Let's do it so um. Apparently, as far as how
19:45
Speaker 1: Stuff Works reports, the idea of spreading cream cheese and
19:49
Speaker 1: adding locks to bagels was, if not invented, at the
19:53
Speaker 1: very least widely popularized in America by Family Circle magazine.
19:58
Speaker 1: I love it, I mean too good stuff. That's a
20:01
Speaker 1: punctuation mark if I've ever heard one, right through that
20:03
Speaker 1: hole in the middle of the bagel. All right, let's
20:07
Speaker 1: take a break. You know something we should have mentioned
20:29
Speaker 1: in the bagel segment be Ali's what? Bali is a
20:36
Speaker 1: sort of a cousin of a bagel b I a
20:38
Speaker 1: l y never heard of a bli? No, I think
20:41
Speaker 1: of the deal with a bali is there's no hole.
20:44
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what the other difference is. I didn't
20:45
Speaker 1: look this up, but I just thought we should shut
20:47
Speaker 1: out the bali because then I will get listener mail.
20:50
Speaker 1: It sounds suspiciously like an English muffin. I think it's
20:54
Speaker 1: just I gotta look it up because I don't want
20:56
Speaker 1: to misspeak. But I think it's a bagel without a whole. Okay,
21:00
Speaker 1: I've I've genuinely never heard of that by name or
21:03
Speaker 1: by concept either. Interesting. All right, so let's let's talk
21:07
Speaker 1: oats then. Yeah, oats is one of those things that
21:12
Speaker 1: is maybe in the running for the oldest breakfast food
21:17
Speaker 1: because for centuries, in thousands of years, people have been
21:23
Speaker 1: eating growing oats and eating oats and some kind of
21:26
Speaker 1: slobby porridge type thing. Yeah. What's crazy is the oat
21:30
Speaker 1: was actually domesticated relatively late compared to like wheat and barley,
21:34
Speaker 1: because the yields of the oat are much smaller. But
21:37
Speaker 1: eventually they were like, oh, we'll give this a try
21:39
Speaker 1: to so um as far as um, what about years
21:44
Speaker 1: ago we were we were domesticating them and eating them.
21:47
Speaker 1: But the way that they were eating oats before was
21:50
Speaker 1: they would take the husk off and then eat the
21:52
Speaker 1: whole oat. And that that method, or that what you
21:55
Speaker 1: have after you just d husk and leave the hole
21:58
Speaker 1: is called a groat. Doesn't sound very good? No, well,
22:02
Speaker 1: prepare for this, um. Apparently there are fats in oats,
22:05
Speaker 1: specifically in groats um that can go rancid, So you
22:10
Speaker 1: could be eating rancid groats for breakfast, had it not
22:14
Speaker 1: been for a couple of geniuses named Henry Seymour and
22:18
Speaker 1: William Heston who developed a different process called rolled oats,
22:22
Speaker 1: which actually gets rid of those fats that can go ranted.
22:25
Speaker 1: That's right, and then you have, I mean kind of
22:28
Speaker 1: exactly what we have today. I mean, there are obviously
22:31
Speaker 1: different kinds of oats, like steel cut in different varieties,
22:34
Speaker 1: but uh, rolled oats is what we're eating today. They
22:37
Speaker 1: founded Hested and Seymour founded Quaker Oats, and apparently one
22:42
Speaker 1: of the they're not Quakers. Apparently one of the reasons is,
22:45
Speaker 1: at least as legend goes, that they named themselves Quaker
22:48
Speaker 1: Oats is because they wanted to seem like an upstanding, uh,
22:53
Speaker 1: non fraudulent company, because food fraud and the eight hundreds
22:57
Speaker 1: was a thing where they would water mill down and
23:00
Speaker 1: they would basically try and trick the customer into thinking
23:04
Speaker 1: they were eating a more pure product that was cut
23:07
Speaker 1: with something else, like like bad cocaine. Yeah, it makes
23:11
Speaker 1: sense though, Yeah, if you're gonna sell cocaine, you should
23:14
Speaker 1: be like, this is Quaker brand cocaine, and people would
23:16
Speaker 1: be like, I can trust you, I don't need to
23:19
Speaker 1: test that first. That's funny. So the Quaker Man. I
23:23
Speaker 1: was looking to see who it was based on, because
23:25
Speaker 1: all those things were modeled on somebody. And I came
23:28
Speaker 1: across the very famous version of it that you and
23:31
Speaker 1: I grew up with. It was painted by um Head
23:34
Speaker 1: and Son Blom, who painted the Coke Santa Okay, and
23:38
Speaker 1: once you know that, you can kind of see the
23:40
Speaker 1: different the the similarity. But anyway, um some people say
23:44
Speaker 1: it was based on William Penn of the famous comedy
23:48
Speaker 1: duo Penn and Teller, but apparently Quaker Oats says, now,
23:52
Speaker 1: I wasn't based on anybody. But if you go look
23:54
Speaker 1: at the old Quaker Oats, like the original ads, it
23:57
Speaker 1: looks a lot like William Penn. Yeah, I agree, And
24:01
Speaker 1: I love that you sent me the uh that little
24:04
Speaker 1: nostalgic page on the old nineteen seventies and eighties, the
24:08
Speaker 1: little I mean he still make them, the those delicious
24:11
Speaker 1: sugary flavored packets of Quaker oatmeal. Yeah, you can see
24:15
Speaker 1: the progression of them from like unlike zero taste too,
24:19
Speaker 1: you know, adding raisins and then all this stuff. And
24:21
Speaker 1: then by the nineties there was like a blue raspberry
24:24
Speaker 1: when did you see that? No, grody, I think that
24:28
Speaker 1: was on That was on click americana dot com, which
24:31
Speaker 1: is a great site for nostalgia like that. I do
24:34
Speaker 1: like the overnight oats thing. That's something I didn't know
24:37
Speaker 1: was the thing until a couple of years ago. Yeah,
24:39
Speaker 1: it seems to be very popular now. But those are
24:41
Speaker 1: those are tasty. All the kids these days are eating
24:44
Speaker 1: overnight Well, that's right, it's the It's the hipster version
24:47
Speaker 1: of hot oatmeal. So um, we got we have to
24:51
Speaker 1: talk about coffee for a couple of reasons. I mean,
24:54
Speaker 1: we did an entire episode on coffee. We did an
24:57
Speaker 1: entire episode on caffeine. So we'll keep it short. Agreed, Yeah,
25:01
Speaker 1: because we covered most of this. Um. But the very origin,
25:05
Speaker 1: the very origin, the origin of how supposedly, and it's
25:10
Speaker 1: a pretty good story even if it's not true, but
25:12
Speaker 1: the legend of the Ethiopian goat herder that saw goats
25:16
Speaker 1: eating what ended up being coffee beans or coffee berries,
25:20
Speaker 1: and those goats started jumping around and dancing and getting
25:24
Speaker 1: down and boogeing, and the goat herder was like, huh,
25:28
Speaker 1: let me see if I want to eat one of those,
25:30
Speaker 1: and they realized the stimulating effects right off the bat,
25:35
Speaker 1: and caffeine and coffee beans became a thing. Yea that
25:38
Speaker 1: was coldly by the way the Ethiopian herder. So in
25:42
Speaker 1: the colonies. In America, everybody mostly drank tea, even though
25:46
Speaker 1: coffee had made its way to Europe by them, but
25:48
Speaker 1: everybody like tea, and then England began heavily text hea
25:52
Speaker 1: and so they adopted coffee widely. In America, it became
25:56
Speaker 1: kind of a patriotic thing to drink coffee. But then
25:59
Speaker 1: round about this time, or maybe a century or so before,
26:02
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, coffee started to replace beer
26:06
Speaker 1: and wine as like the breakfast drink because people noticed
26:10
Speaker 1: that you didn't like fall over on your scythe at
26:13
Speaker 1: eleven a m if you drank coffee for breakfast in
26:17
Speaker 1: you would if you drank a bunch of like hard
26:18
Speaker 1: cider insteady Drinking booze for breakfast is unless you're at
26:23
Speaker 1: sunny brunch. It's not a great way to start your
26:24
Speaker 1: work today. No, not at all. So get this, chuck.
26:28
Speaker 1: Sixty of Americans drink coffee every day. Seems like a lot, right.
26:34
Speaker 1: Australia has just totally beat of people in Australia drink
26:39
Speaker 1: coffee every single day. That doesn't surprise me. They do.
26:42
Speaker 1: They do everything to the max. Okay, so so you
26:45
Speaker 1: you think that's pretty impressive, though, listen to this in
26:49
Speaker 1: the UK. Of people who live in the UK drink
26:53
Speaker 1: tea every day. Okay, I'll thought you about to say coffee.
26:56
Speaker 1: I would have been blown away. Yeah, they don't do that.
26:58
Speaker 1: But of people drink you over there, and only six
27:01
Speaker 1: of Americans drink coffee. My I feel like I'm standing
27:04
Speaker 1: on my head right now. Uh should we do o
27:08
Speaker 1: J Yeah? Alright? What orange juice? It's such a staple
27:13
Speaker 1: item for breakfast, even though apparently it's over the past
27:16
Speaker 1: couple of decades, consumption of orange juice has been going
27:20
Speaker 1: down in the United States, but it's still a staple
27:23
Speaker 1: breakfast item. And this is because again, people were drinking
27:29
Speaker 1: low alcohol booze at breakfast for you know, many hundreds
27:32
Speaker 1: of years, and then finally, uh, orange juice came along.
27:37
Speaker 1: But it was really expensive. Oranges were expensive. They you
27:40
Speaker 1: can't grow them everywhere obviously, so getting them, you know,
27:43
Speaker 1: across America was an issue. But trains came along and
27:48
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you could get oranges around the
27:50
Speaker 1: country pretty speedily, and vitamin C became a thing in
27:54
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties where scientists isolated and said, hey, this
27:58
Speaker 1: stuff is really good for you, and there's a lot
28:00
Speaker 1: of it in oranges and this this is also another
28:02
Speaker 1: breakfast food that came about because the company was like,
28:05
Speaker 1: we need to unload a bunch of these things, and
28:08
Speaker 1: there's a bumper crop of oranges in nineteen sixteen and
28:11
Speaker 1: so orange producers kind of got together and started a
28:14
Speaker 1: campaign called Drinking Orange, uh, and it was like, you know,
28:18
Speaker 1: buy a bunch of oranges and make orange juice and
28:20
Speaker 1: drink that for breakfast. So that's another idea where it
28:22
Speaker 1: came from. But they ran into a problem until the
28:25
Speaker 1: nineteen forties Chuck and that was that, yeah, you could
28:28
Speaker 1: get oranges across the country, and you could get orange
28:31
Speaker 1: juice kind of far, but there was a chance that
28:34
Speaker 1: was going to show up turned it was going to
28:37
Speaker 1: spoil along the way, and so the US government was like,
28:40
Speaker 1: our soldiers want orange juice, but we can't give it
28:43
Speaker 1: to them. We're going to give a bunch of money
28:45
Speaker 1: to anybody who can come up with a way to
28:47
Speaker 1: get orange juice across the United States without it turning bad.
28:52
Speaker 1: That's right, And that's when frozen concentrate orange juice came
28:57
Speaker 1: into play thanks to the Minute Made Company. And I
29:01
Speaker 1: have haven't had that stuff since I was a kid,
29:03
Speaker 1: but I have a great nostalgia for it because that's
29:06
Speaker 1: how we drank orange juice in my house growing up. Yeah,
29:09
Speaker 1: I just realized that that's what's wrong with my freezer
29:11
Speaker 1: as an adult. It's missing like that Minute Made can
29:15
Speaker 1: that was just kind of like a little blast of
29:16
Speaker 1: sunshine every time you open the freezer, you know. Yeah,
29:19
Speaker 1: And I will say this, even though there are many
29:21
Speaker 1: more ways to make a sophisticated cocktail, if you're hanging
29:25
Speaker 1: out in the summertime by the pool and you happen
29:27
Speaker 1: to have like a blender nearby, there are a lot
29:31
Speaker 1: worse things you can do than get some lime made
29:35
Speaker 1: or some of that strawberry frozen junk and make a
29:39
Speaker 1: big thing of frozen dacories. Just cheap eat little frozen dachories.
29:43
Speaker 1: I remember that Baccardi Breezer's add from the eighties where
29:46
Speaker 1: the parson went inside. When they came out, her friends
29:49
Speaker 1: were like eighty years old, and they're like, what took
29:51
Speaker 1: you so long the weird thing, oh man, so Minute Made,
29:56
Speaker 1: by the way was founded by a guy named Richard
29:58
Speaker 1: Morse who invented that proce us of creating concentrate from
30:01
Speaker 1: orange juice and shipping across the country. And for the
30:04
Speaker 1: first season they packaged for a company called snow Crop.
30:08
Speaker 1: It took off like a rocket, and Minim said, yeah,
30:11
Speaker 1: we're going to stop doing that inform our own company,
30:13
Speaker 1: and they did. Why did they spell it like that? Though?
30:15
Speaker 1: That's the one thing I've never understood minute made? Yeah,
30:19
Speaker 1: why is it? I mean, why is it spelled M
30:21
Speaker 1: A D E Like it's made in a minute? That's
30:23
Speaker 1: what it implies. Why is it spelled like a housemaid?
30:27
Speaker 1: I'm going to make something up completely, But you can
30:30
Speaker 1: also call it hazardating a guess. Okay, sure, let's hear it.
30:34
Speaker 1: So it's it's made in a minute. So you get
30:36
Speaker 1: that just from the minute made together. But the fact
30:39
Speaker 1: that they spell it like that makes it seem like
30:41
Speaker 1: it's so easy to make you might as well have
30:44
Speaker 1: a domestic servant helping you. Yeah, you think that's my guess.
30:48
Speaker 1: That's my guess. Now I'm wondering what the actual definition
30:52
Speaker 1: of made is there may be something in there that
30:55
Speaker 1: I don't know about. I don't think so, I think
30:57
Speaker 1: I'm right here. And of course A very quickly just
31:00
Speaker 1: googled made and the first thing that pops up is
31:02
Speaker 1: a bunch of sexy halloween Halloween goss. I'm sure of it.
31:07
Speaker 1: How bat Man, Uh, should we take another break and
31:11
Speaker 1: then finish up with a triplet of delicious pancakey waffle
31:16
Speaker 1: e French tosty things? Indeed, I do, Chuck, I think
31:19
Speaker 1: that's a great plan. Okay, so we're back and we're
31:41
Speaker 1: talking first about pan clocks. Have you ever seen fifty
31:46
Speaker 1: First States? I've seen parts of it. I don't know
31:49
Speaker 1: if I ever saw at all. Adam Sandlers trying to
31:52
Speaker 1: um attract Drew barrymore so. He pretends like he's trying
31:55
Speaker 1: to order off the menu, but he can't read, so
31:57
Speaker 1: he's sounding it out. He says pan clocks and then
32:02
Speaker 1: he gets all frustrated. It's pretty cute, little seam. But anyway,
32:05
Speaker 1: it's funny that was a reference to that. Instead, we're
32:07
Speaker 1: talking about pancakes, and you said that um oats are
32:11
Speaker 1: one of the oldest UH breakfasts, And actually it seems
32:15
Speaker 1: that pancakes are probably the oldest breakfast of all time
32:20
Speaker 1: because they found that, um ootsy, remember our friend outs
32:23
Speaker 1: the ice man, he had a breakfast of iron corn
32:27
Speaker 1: wheat in his stomach, and they think that he probably
32:29
Speaker 1: ate it in the form of a cooked pancake. Oh interesting, Yeah,
32:33
Speaker 1: because you can make a batter out of some sort
32:35
Speaker 1: of grain and pour it on a hot rock and
32:38
Speaker 1: there's your grittle right there. Yeah, that's a good point. Um.
32:42
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of different pancakes throughout antiquity, uh
32:45
Speaker 1: that were made from all kinds of ingredients, depending on
32:48
Speaker 1: kind of what was readily available. Uh. You know, even
32:51
Speaker 1: consider like a potato pancake a pancake because the name
32:55
Speaker 1: is right there. Um, if you're talking official recipes, Uh,
32:59
Speaker 1: it was a Dutch cook in the sixteenth century that
33:02
Speaker 1: I think has the first official pancake recipe. But that,
33:05
Speaker 1: like you said, that was way way later. You know,
33:07
Speaker 1: people had been eating some kind of pancakey thing for
33:10
Speaker 1: a long long time, right, and since it was around
33:13
Speaker 1: so long, different cultures kind of tinkered with it here
33:16
Speaker 1: or there and came up with like their favored version
33:19
Speaker 1: of it. So that's why you have so many different pancakes. Today,
33:22
Speaker 1: you've got um the American pancake or flapjack, which I
33:26
Speaker 1: looked it up, same exact thing. It's apparently just just
33:29
Speaker 1: a regional difference in the name. If you're in Australia,
33:33
Speaker 1: you'll eat pancakes for dessert. Apparently Germans eat them as
33:37
Speaker 1: strips alongside soup. You have never heard of that? No,
33:41
Speaker 1: I haven't either, But the Swedish know what they're doing
33:43
Speaker 1: because they just they topped there. They basically go the
33:46
Speaker 1: eye hoop route and they put whip cream on their
33:48
Speaker 1: pancakes and and like sweetened fruit too. I think that's
33:51
Speaker 1: the deal. It's the International House of Pancakes, right, Oh,
33:55
Speaker 1: I guess so, because they also have crapes, the French version. Yeah.
33:58
Speaker 1: I never really thought about it before or which is
34:00
Speaker 1: kind of dumb. I never really considered a crape like
34:03
Speaker 1: a French pancake, I guess. I mean, I know it's similar,
34:06
Speaker 1: but I don't know. The taste is too different to me.
34:09
Speaker 1: It's more of a pan clock You like pancake. What's
34:13
Speaker 1: your favorite of pancake, waffle or French toast man? Why
34:17
Speaker 1: would you do this to me? I can actually tell
34:20
Speaker 1: you that French toast is my favorite. But I will
34:24
Speaker 1: eat pancakes any day of the week, any time of day,
34:27
Speaker 1: any day of the week. I love pancakes, but the
34:30
Speaker 1: actual like delicacy, like the taste, or the delicate nous
34:35
Speaker 1: and just general like like mouth feel, if I can
34:38
Speaker 1: get weird and gross of French toast is like it's
34:41
Speaker 1: tough to beat that. Yeah, I see, I love all
34:44
Speaker 1: those two. But boy, a crispy waffle those the way
34:48
Speaker 1: those squares fill up with syrup as the little individual
34:52
Speaker 1: cubicles just waiting for me to dive in. That's right,
34:56
Speaker 1: Oh god, that's why there's always a line at the
34:58
Speaker 1: holiday and Express the next morning around the always far
35:03
Speaker 1: too few waffle makers. I remember when we toured Australia,
35:07
Speaker 1: the Virgin Air lounge in the airport had waffle makers.
35:14
Speaker 1: And I've seen them in the uh you know hotel
35:18
Speaker 1: like you like the Hampton Inn do it yourself thing,
35:20
Speaker 1: but I've never seen him in a in an airport lounge.
35:23
Speaker 1: It was quite a little treat. Did it have the
35:25
Speaker 1: Virgin logo emblazon Donna? No? But I mean, since we're there,
35:31
Speaker 1: I guess we should talk about that, because apparently waffles. Uh,
35:35
Speaker 1: in the early days of um, not early days of religion,
35:40
Speaker 1: but in medieval Europe at least, the Catholic Church actually
35:44
Speaker 1: had and I'm not sure how they did this, that's
35:46
Speaker 1: the one thing I couldn't figure out. But they had
35:48
Speaker 1: biblical scenes and things on the waffle. So they they
35:53
Speaker 1: they made them using etched plates. Okay, so it was
35:57
Speaker 1: in the mold exactly, so it's exactly like what we
36:01
Speaker 1: do today, except they had theirs on like long handles
36:04
Speaker 1: and they held it over a fire and then turned
36:06
Speaker 1: them over. Oh that makes sense. And so the original
36:11
Speaker 1: waffle apparently goes back or the predecessor of it's called
36:15
Speaker 1: the obelios, goes back to ancient Greece, and it was basically,
36:20
Speaker 1: you know, an extension of pancakes, but rather than cooking
36:23
Speaker 1: it on one flat surface and turning it over, they
36:25
Speaker 1: would cook it between two metal plates and then turn
36:28
Speaker 1: the whole thing over. Um. And that was the predecessor
36:31
Speaker 1: of the waffle. And you know, give or take a
36:35
Speaker 1: thousand or so, maybe two thousand years yeah, yeah, about
36:38
Speaker 1: two thousand years the Catholic Church said waffles are so awesome,
36:42
Speaker 1: we're gonna basically make them. Plan b of the Communion wafer,
36:47
Speaker 1: that's right, and the little printed waffles that I was
36:50
Speaker 1: talking about. I think was they started out with like,
36:55
Speaker 1: oh hey, it's across or something a little you know,
36:58
Speaker 1: less fancy. But as time went on they got really uh,
37:03
Speaker 1: they kind of went crazy with the stuff and they
37:04
Speaker 1: would have like landscapes and family crests, and they got
37:08
Speaker 1: way more elaborate. I'd like to see. I couldn't find
37:12
Speaker 1: a picture of any of those. Did you see any? No?
37:15
Speaker 1: I didn't, But I can imagine them. Okay, I can
37:18
Speaker 1: guess what they look like. I just I tie the
37:20
Speaker 1: waffle so closely to that grid spared grid pat pattern,
37:23
Speaker 1: it would just look strange. So I've got one on that.
37:25
Speaker 1: They think that the word waffle came from a derivation
37:28
Speaker 1: of wafer, right, like the Communion wafer. But I saw
37:32
Speaker 1: another explanation too, that it might have come from waffle
37:35
Speaker 1: w f a l um or golf r g a
37:39
Speaker 1: U f r e, which is old French, and the
37:42
Speaker 1: old French golfer or waffle means a piece of a
37:45
Speaker 1: honey beehive. Oh well, so we got the honeycomb. Yes,
37:50
Speaker 1: I love it. Those old French knew what they were
37:53
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, and they were cooked back then, like
37:55
Speaker 1: you said, between these iron plates on like long handled
37:58
Speaker 1: over a fire. I have these things at the camp now.
38:02
Speaker 1: They're not in the shape of a waffle. They're called
38:03
Speaker 1: pie irons. It's the same kind of thing. You just
38:06
Speaker 1: put bread in there, and you can make little pizzas
38:09
Speaker 1: or you can make a little apple pies or whatever,
38:12
Speaker 1: and you just like spray that the iron, put the
38:15
Speaker 1: bread in there, and I guess it was the same
38:16
Speaker 1: for the waffle, and then squeeze them together and then
38:19
Speaker 1: hold it over a fire and brown it up really nicely.
38:21
Speaker 1: I've got something for you to try then that you
38:23
Speaker 1: might that might work with that. It's called a chaw fell.
38:27
Speaker 1: And instead of like a grain based or cereal based batter,
38:31
Speaker 1: you use um, eggs and cheese mixed together. Is the batter.
38:35
Speaker 1: But you do everything else the exact same. So what
38:38
Speaker 1: is it? Is? It just like a little old square
38:41
Speaker 1: gritted omelet, basically okay, and easily cooked, like you could
38:45
Speaker 1: very easily cook it in that pie iron. All right,
38:49
Speaker 1: give it a shot and report back. Okay. So there's
38:53
Speaker 1: there's a guy named Cornelia swartout to love and he's
38:58
Speaker 1: actually the guy who's first ended a patent for a
39:00
Speaker 1: waffle iron back in eighteen sixty nine, like a real
39:04
Speaker 1: deal waffle iron. Yeah, And apparently on that day, August
39:08
Speaker 1: twenty four, the date that he was granted the patent,
39:10
Speaker 1: that is considered National waffle Day here in the United States.
39:14
Speaker 1: I love it. And as legend goes, who knows it
39:16
Speaker 1: is true? But they credit Thomas Jefferson with bringing over
39:20
Speaker 1: those longhanded pie iron style waffle irons to America in
39:24
Speaker 1: the late seventeen hundreds. I guess he saw those things,
39:27
Speaker 1: were like these are fantastic. Yeah. And walking it back
39:31
Speaker 1: to pancakes for another second. Um, one of the reasons
39:34
Speaker 1: why they seemed to be so old is that so
39:35
Speaker 1: many different cultures came up with them on their own independently. Like, um,
39:40
Speaker 1: you can't really say that they were imported to America
39:42
Speaker 1: because the Native Americans were already making their own. They
39:45
Speaker 1: just used corn meal. So like all of the different
39:48
Speaker 1: techniques kind of came together and in America we said
39:51
Speaker 1: we like this, this and this, and you've got the
39:52
Speaker 1: American pancake. But the reason I wanted to kind of
39:55
Speaker 1: walk it back is because we just talked about National
39:57
Speaker 1: Waffle Day. There's National pancake Day to you, of course,
40:01
Speaker 1: but in certain countries, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday is
40:05
Speaker 1: also a national pancake Day, and that apparently dates back
40:08
Speaker 1: to medieval times, not the Dark Ages um where people
40:13
Speaker 1: would use up all of their fats, their eggs, their
40:15
Speaker 1: sugar stuff that they had to give up for Lent
40:18
Speaker 1: on the last day before Lent, which was Fat Tuesday
40:21
Speaker 1: or Shrove Tuesday. Makes a lot of sense, It really does, chuck.
40:25
Speaker 1: That brings us to French toast. I do love French
40:28
Speaker 1: toast because you can I love just the little cheap
40:32
Speaker 1: old slice bread version you can do at home. I
40:35
Speaker 1: like going to a fancy brunch restaurant and having the big,
40:39
Speaker 1: really delicious kind of like hola bread French toast and
40:43
Speaker 1: they're all kinds of different breads they can use, and
40:45
Speaker 1: like the vanilla, and it's this is all just making
40:48
Speaker 1: me so hungry. But uh, there's that's twice. Uh there's
40:55
Speaker 1: a legend that you know, I saw all over the internet.
40:58
Speaker 1: Apparently everyone has seen this who looks into French toast history.
41:01
Speaker 1: But I just don't know if it's true because it's
41:04
Speaker 1: not documented and it may be one of those sort
41:07
Speaker 1: of Internet stories that there was a man named Joseph
41:09
Speaker 1: French who was an innkeeper in the seventeen hundreds that
41:13
Speaker 1: made this meal in the name. Uh, he didn't want
41:17
Speaker 1: to call it French's toast because supposedly he did not
41:20
Speaker 1: have to make it an apostrophe, and so it became
41:23
Speaker 1: French toast. But that just seems dubious to me. It
41:26
Speaker 1: does because it's and it's contradicted by the historical record
41:29
Speaker 1: because the first use of the term French toast for
41:32
Speaker 1: a type of toast that is dipped in like an
41:34
Speaker 1: eggy batter um, and then fried um shows up in
41:39
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty, So what are they in the century before that?
41:43
Speaker 1: That guy in a book called The Accomplished. Um, I
41:48
Speaker 1: have to spell it a C C O M P
41:50
Speaker 1: L I S H T cook, Right, I love it?
41:54
Speaker 1: Like that should be backwards in there. Yeah, it totally
41:57
Speaker 1: should be. So that's where the first use of French
42:00
Speaker 1: toast came from. And so people would say like, well, okay,
42:03
Speaker 1: so the French came up with this, there shouldn't be
42:05
Speaker 1: any really big mystery to it. That apparently is not
42:08
Speaker 1: the case, because the French call it pam perdue, which
42:11
Speaker 1: means lost bread, which means bread that's gone stale. And
42:14
Speaker 1: you didn't want to just throw out bread. You would
42:16
Speaker 1: use it. And one way you could use it was
42:18
Speaker 1: for French toast. But it seemed like they were calling
42:21
Speaker 1: it lost bread after older English tradition, which they just
42:25
Speaker 1: called lost bread. So the French didn't call it French
42:28
Speaker 1: toast and they didn't lay any kind of claim to Um,
42:32
Speaker 1: French toast is like their national invention. There's some other
42:35
Speaker 1: really interesting ideas of where it possibly came from the
42:38
Speaker 1: name French toast. Right, Yeah, I mean the the whole
42:41
Speaker 1: idea of French like a French fry is not from
42:44
Speaker 1: France either. That comes from the slicing technique. Old Irish
42:50
Speaker 1: word for to slice is French like French that potato, uh,
42:55
Speaker 1: And so that sort of falls in line with the
42:57
Speaker 1: same thing with French toast. It would be a sliced bread. Um.
43:00
Speaker 1: I do love the whole lost bread thing, and that
43:02
Speaker 1: all makes perfect sense that you would, you know, bread
43:06
Speaker 1: was a little stale if you dip it in something
43:07
Speaker 1: and fright in a band, you're still going to be
43:09
Speaker 1: able to enjoy that bread. It won't taste super stale.
43:13
Speaker 1: And with French toasts in particular, that name, that's there's
43:16
Speaker 1: some food historians who say maybe that could be it,
43:19
Speaker 1: but they suspect that it's actually marketing among some people,
43:23
Speaker 1: especially in America, to call it French toast because it
43:26
Speaker 1: makes it sound fancier. Yeah, I totally buy that. And
43:30
Speaker 1: then get this dude. In Great Britain, specifically in Windsor, Um,
43:36
Speaker 1: that's called poor Knights of Windsor. That's what you You
43:38
Speaker 1: would order poor Knights of Windsor, and they would bring
43:40
Speaker 1: you French toast. You have never heard of that? Um?
43:43
Speaker 1: Now are these competing explanations for that? That's what they
43:50
Speaker 1: call French toast and it has its own story, No, no, no,
43:53
Speaker 1: I mean competing stories for where that came from. Because
43:56
Speaker 1: one I saw said that the attle of what is
44:01
Speaker 1: it c c R E c y in France in
44:05
Speaker 1: thirty six, Uh, there were knights who were captured by
44:08
Speaker 1: the French and they basically had to sell off their
44:11
Speaker 1: lands in order to pay their way out of that
44:14
Speaker 1: pay for their release, and Edward the third, as legend goes,
44:18
Speaker 1: gave them a place to stay in Windsor Castle in
44:21
Speaker 1: trade for their labor, so they were they would be
44:24
Speaker 1: the poor knights because nights, you know, it's not like
44:26
Speaker 1: all the knights were rich or anything like that. And
44:29
Speaker 1: they stayed Windsor Castle, so they were the poor knights
44:31
Speaker 1: of Windsor. But I guess that they were fed that there.
44:35
Speaker 1: Maybe that's right. I don't know the connection. Well, I
44:38
Speaker 1: like the other explanation of the French connection. Right, So
44:43
Speaker 1: the reason why you might call it poor knights. There's
44:45
Speaker 1: another explanation is that, so if you were a gentry
44:48
Speaker 1: landed gentry during the medieval era, you were expected to
44:51
Speaker 1: serve dessert at dinner, and knights were gentry, but not
44:54
Speaker 1: all knights were rich, as you said, and so to
44:57
Speaker 1: kind of like still serve dessert, they would serve this
45:01
Speaker 1: French toast with jam as a dessert because it was
45:04
Speaker 1: very cheap and easy to make, and so it would
45:07
Speaker 1: be called poor night. Oh that's interesting because the what's
45:11
Speaker 1: that sandwich that we talked about before, the no, the
45:15
Speaker 1: one that's made like French toast but it has jam
45:18
Speaker 1: in it, the the mons. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if
45:22
Speaker 1: that's came from that too. I don't know, man, Maybe
45:26
Speaker 1: can we talk about can we finish with brunch? Oh man,
45:29
Speaker 1: there's no way we can't finish with brunch. We need
45:31
Speaker 1: to do brunch in this one and part two. Yeah,
45:34
Speaker 1: I think so because brunch um, brunch is something that
45:38
Speaker 1: we had growing up occasionally, like very rarely, when we
45:43
Speaker 1: were allowed to skip church growing up, I think my
45:46
Speaker 1: mom would say, you know, we can have brunch at
45:48
Speaker 1: the house. Uh, And that was just the first time
45:51
Speaker 1: I've ever heard that word it. It didn't become like
45:54
Speaker 1: a um like out to eat at a restaurant kind
45:58
Speaker 1: of thing in my life until much much later. And
46:00
Speaker 1: of course now brunch is a very trendy like big
46:04
Speaker 1: time Saturday and Sunday weekend meal. Uh. It's if you
46:09
Speaker 1: ever read the height of the New York brunch Heyday
46:13
Speaker 1: from the mid two thousand's, where uh, just things got
46:17
Speaker 1: so out of hand with like the all you can
46:19
Speaker 1: drink mimosas and bloody Mary's and people getting in fist
46:23
Speaker 1: fights and people waiting in line for hours and then
46:26
Speaker 1: angry and they're drunk. It's just like it gave brunch
46:29
Speaker 1: a bad name. But brunch is really one of the
46:30
Speaker 1: great meals if you can indulge a bit. Man, one
46:34
Speaker 1: of the best brunch drinks I've ever had, or one
46:36
Speaker 1: of the best drinks I've ever had, was called a
46:38
Speaker 1: breakfast Negroni, and it was made with apple all so
46:41
Speaker 1: it was much sweeter and I can't remember what else
46:43
Speaker 1: they put it in, but oh man, it was so good.
46:45
Speaker 1: And that was in a New York brunch place, for sure.
46:48
Speaker 1: Where does brunch come from though, they don't know, but
46:52
Speaker 1: the earliest we've ever found, and obviously it's breakfast in lunch,
46:56
Speaker 1: so probably a million people came up with it. But
47:00
Speaker 1: first guy to write it down in print was a
47:01
Speaker 1: guy named Guy Barringer who was a British author, and
47:04
Speaker 1: he published an essay in in the the magazine I
47:09
Speaker 1: Guess Hunter's Weekly, and it was called Brunch colon a Plea.
47:18
Speaker 1: And in this he basically says, Hey, we all, like
47:22
Speaker 1: um have Sunday brunch and it's like a huge meat
47:25
Speaker 1: filled affair that people eat after church. And it's too much.
47:30
Speaker 1: It's too much because not all of us go to church,
47:32
Speaker 1: and some of us really drink too much the night before.
47:35
Speaker 1: So we need something else that is going to replace
47:38
Speaker 1: that midday meal. Let's call it brunch, and it's meant
47:41
Speaker 1: to basically get over a hangover. Yeah, and that makes sense.
47:45
Speaker 1: They also trace its roots as a meal. I don't
47:47
Speaker 1: know if they called it brunch. In fact, they didn't.
47:49
Speaker 1: They called it a hunt breakfast in England, I guess
47:52
Speaker 1: before they went out on the fox Hunt, they would
47:55
Speaker 1: have these really big multi course meals and it sounds
47:58
Speaker 1: a lot like brunch. They would have sweet pastries and
48:00
Speaker 1: fruit and meat and eggs and sort of like a
48:03
Speaker 1: big smorgus board. Uh. And for the same reasons, because
48:06
Speaker 1: they had to have something large to eat. And this
48:09
Speaker 1: was before they ate big breakfast, I guess. And in
48:12
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties is when it seems to have caught
48:14
Speaker 1: on in the US, right. Yeah. Apparently it was Hollywood
48:17
Speaker 1: movie stars who started to brunch and everybody said, oh,
48:21
Speaker 1: I've got to start doing that because that sounds pretty
48:23
Speaker 1: awesome and it is awesome. Um. And apparently one of
48:27
Speaker 1: the reasons why it took off was because, um, people
48:31
Speaker 1: stopped going to church as much after World War Two,
48:34
Speaker 1: but they still wanted to do something, you know, socially
48:37
Speaker 1: on Sunday mornings to replace it. So brunch kind of
48:39
Speaker 1: filled that vacuum. I'm trying to picture the The news
48:44
Speaker 1: Wire reports on that attendance down. Yeah, Rock Hudson sits
48:50
Speaker 1: down at ten thirty am for a meal. What right? Uh,
48:55
Speaker 1: it is a great meal, though, you know, church attendance
48:57
Speaker 1: is down. Another thing that happens, supposedly post World War
49:00
Speaker 1: two is when women started joining the workforce more, they
49:04
Speaker 1: were like, hey, I like to do a little something
49:08
Speaker 1: fun on the weekend too, right, So can I go
49:10
Speaker 1: out and eat Sunday brunch as well? And I wondered,
49:13
Speaker 1: because you know, that same working mom was still like
49:17
Speaker 1: expected to cook at home. I'm sure, so going to
49:20
Speaker 1: Sunday brunch was a way to give her a break exactly.
49:23
Speaker 1: And it may be wonder if that's where the origin
49:25
Speaker 1: of Mother's Day brunch came from. Oh maybe so, because
49:28
Speaker 1: I think people who don't normally do brunch still do
49:31
Speaker 1: brunch on Mother's Day. You know. Yeah. My brunch thing
49:34
Speaker 1: is I still always get almost exclusively breakfast things along
49:38
Speaker 1: with like a bloody Mary. But I would never have
49:41
Speaker 1: understood the lunch side of brunch. It's more of a
49:44
Speaker 1: the time that you eat it. But you know, people
49:46
Speaker 1: do go in there and get like a shrimp cocktail
49:49
Speaker 1: or a or a sandwich like a lunch sandwich. And
49:52
Speaker 1: I think some people see that as the beauty of
49:54
Speaker 1: brunch is that it's sort of that one time of
49:56
Speaker 1: the day you can order from both sides of the menu.
49:59
Speaker 1: But I'm I still just do my breakfast stuff. So
50:02
Speaker 1: I saw the year after Guy Barringer um said, you know,
50:07
Speaker 1: he introduced brunch, that somebody said, well, if you eat
50:11
Speaker 1: it closer to lunch, you have to call it blunch.
50:14
Speaker 1: And it didn't catch on for a very obvious reasons. Hey,
50:17
Speaker 1: you want to go get some blunch, right, Yeah, if
50:21
Speaker 1: you were hungover, it just make you vomit on the spot. Yeah, good,
50:25
Speaker 1: you got anything else? For now? I have nothing else.
50:28
Speaker 1: I think we should do a breakfast part too at
50:29
Speaker 1: some point, I agree, um. And since I agreed to
50:33
Speaker 1: what Chuck just said, that means listener mail is unlocked. Yeah,
50:41
Speaker 1: and maybe people can send in their unusual breakfast traditions
50:46
Speaker 1: and maybe we can kind of incorporate that in. Yeah.
50:48
Speaker 1: It's a great idea, all right. So I thought this
50:51
Speaker 1: email was really cool. This ties into our Mangroves episode. Uh,
50:55
Speaker 1: this is from Caleb Vicari. I can't help wonder if
50:58
Speaker 1: you guys knew just how relevant you're episode on mangrove
51:00
Speaker 1: trees is to the gaming community right now. The game
51:04
Speaker 1: Minecraft just recently got a large update that added mangrove
51:08
Speaker 1: swamps to the game, specifically featuring red mangroves. They're very
51:13
Speaker 1: unique compared to all the other trees in the game,
51:15
Speaker 1: and you guys have just clarified exactly why. Because of
51:18
Speaker 1: the addition of mangrove trees, we now have also have
51:22
Speaker 1: root blocks upon which the new trees are elevated off
51:25
Speaker 1: the ground, just like in real life. Replanting them is
51:28
Speaker 1: also very different from the other trees in the game. Typically,
51:31
Speaker 1: you would need to break the leaf blocks on other trees,
51:34
Speaker 1: each of which has a chance to drop a sapling,
51:37
Speaker 1: which you can then plant and wait for it to
51:39
Speaker 1: grow into a tree. The mangrove trees, however, instead have propagules.
51:45
Speaker 1: Am I saying that right? It sounds like propagules growing
51:49
Speaker 1: on them, which I believe are the living birth trees
51:52
Speaker 1: you were talking about. You can take these and plant
51:54
Speaker 1: them either on the ground or in water, which is
51:57
Speaker 1: also unique to mangroves in the game. Point is, the
52:00
Speaker 1: game brought a lot of interest in mangros into me
52:03
Speaker 1: and now you guys have amplified that. So thank you
52:05
Speaker 1: keep being awesome. And again that is from Caleb Vicari.
52:09
Speaker 1: Great name. Thanks Caleb. Yeah totally, And that was in
52:12
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft. You said, no, are you making a joke? Yeah,
52:19
Speaker 1: it's in the Game of Thrones. Thanks a lot, Caleb.
52:22
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool because I don't know that we would
52:24
Speaker 1: have ever known that, you know, or heard about that.
52:27
Speaker 1: So thank you for lettingraft. You told us something we
52:31
Speaker 1: should know some stuff. Uh, if you want to be
52:34
Speaker 1: like Caleb and tell us some stuff we should know,
52:36
Speaker 1: we are wide open for that. It would be pretty
52:39
Speaker 1: hypocritical if we weren't. You can send it in an
52:43
Speaker 1: email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
52:49
Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
52:52
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
52:55
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.