The Historical Ponderings Society

[EverySongbirdSays]

Following on from the thread "What questions do you have about stuff from History or am I the only one?" Which is here

Ever wondered how we got from the clothes of Cave people to the clothes of today?

Who was the first person to make and eat Cheese? Or cake?

How ideas became widespread

Why the Aztecs didn't have the wheel?

Why Elizabeth I never married?

How accurate historical fiction is?

Then this your thread and we are your people.

PROCEED HISTORY LOVERS

Ideal if you had a stove though? (Farmhouse kitchens that I've known.) Or even just a hearth fire with a trivet.

Might have to get a lot crane and test it out on my wood burner ( doesn't get hot enough on top to do direct heat) over the winter. I can test it on my OH for safety...

Pot crane

Last night I knocked up some biscuits for the festive cheese remains and made it up as I went, but if you tried that with a sponge, you'd be in trouble

I tend to do cakes by eye, Victoria sadwich type. They usually work out fine.

Sandwich, that should read. Where''s the bloody autocorrect when it would actually be useful?

Ah. My Granny would likely have allowed you to take tea with her, Bear.

All hail bear , I might use the eggs as weights to work out the proportions, but I'd be too scared to do it completely by eye!

Oh, and a happy new year to you all 😀

If I were trying out a new recipe, I would follow the instructions and weigh things out then.

Happy New Year!

Hopefully there will be a ceasefire outside soon, but I'm not sure my cough will allow me to sleep anyway.

Thought you might enjoy a little bit of recent history. I mentioned to my dad the weevils and flour, and he told me the fuller story which I hadn't known as a child.
We were living in Jeddah, and the city was booming, but the port was too small, so any boat arriving in the port had to wait 6 months for a berth. Food ships were given priority, but that still meant a 4 month wait. Boats carrying cement were often pushed to the back of the queue. Because of this, the big Greek boat owning companies realised that if they sent a load of cement to Jeddah, they may then have a boat tied up sittting in the red sea for 6 months. So they used to find their oldest and most decrepit boats, or even buy old cheap boats and send them to Jeddah. The only problem was that then, once the boat was given permission to start up and come into berth, some of them started their engines and then sank!

At one point they used helicopters to offload the cement. Remember jeddah was booming and there was a massive buolding boom, and the port was the only way in. So they had ex vietnam helicopters working road the clock picking up pallets of cement and dropping them on hte quayside.

I also remember the story of the boat that arrived with a huge load of Jack Daniels by mistake. The whole lot was sytematically smashed against the harbour wall.

By "mistake"?

No - Jeddah is dry - no alcohol, it is illegal, so it has to be destroyed.

Oh sorry - delivered by mistake. yes, it was a shipment that offloaded in Jeddah, and then went on to another port, but as it had docked in Jeddah, they removed the illegal substances!
This was several years later, once the new port was up and running, so there was no longer a 6 month wait.

I was just suggesting that that was the excuse the ship owners gave. :)

Even now weevils are a problem in hot weather - visited dad in UAE and he was chuffed that a local shop had got in some Alpen, which usually was a lot more expensive at the main supermarket. The boxes didn't have Arabic writing on so must have been remainders of a load destined for elsewhere, like the random stuff labelled in Greek you find in London corner shops.

Opened the new box one morning, realised contents were green and wriggling, chucked it in horror. Opened the second, looked OK, added milk and put my spoon in, and then realised that one was wriggling...

The cereal destined for that market has much tougher plastic bags and thicker cardboard boxes! Didn't eat muesli for a while after that.

I really thought weevils had been pretty much obliterated....live and learn!

NotCitrus, not surprised you didn't eat cereal for a while.

in the past weevils were said - by the superstitious - to be signs of someone having cursed the baker or whatever I think? Not sure where I read that...

My mum grew up in rural America with no fridge, and so I grew up similarly with a pot of stew on the cooker which would be boiled "for at least 10 minutes" every night. Still would if MrNC didn't finish off the leftovers every few days.

When my parents bought their first flat in Surrey in 1973, the neighbours thought they were incredibly decadent, buying a fridge! My mum insisted. To be fair, they didn't own any chairs, tables, or a bed or any other furniture for another few months, just some trunks, a mattress, and lots of kitchen stuff and towels etc.

oh my mum grew up with no fridge in a hot country...maybe I should ask her about the nasties in the kitchen....but maybe not, I don't want to bring back bad memories

You know, those little bugs can carry a small tapeworm, called Hymenolepis nana. It's not very dangerous, but their larvae can develop in the human intestines and grow to large numbers.
www.cdc.gov/parasites/hymenolepis/faqs.html

Or its relative H. diminuta.

I hope those cereals were well cooked. :)

here was me thinking the biggest historical problem with flour was padding out with plaster dust and what not!

notcitrus I audited some warehousing in Dubai, everything was kept under temperature and atmospheric control, including things like mattresses or it would just go mouldy. When the loading bays were opened in the frozen warehouses, the air froze as the humidity was so high!

Weeds wow, didn't realise Dubai was that humid as felt pretty dry down the road in AD - but suppose it's on the coast. And did rain heavily when we were there (MrNC is a rain god!)

You don't really think of mould as a problem in the desert!

In Kuwait alcohol is illegal as in Saudi (leading to lots of homebrewing and flights on BA via AD costing twice as much as direct Kuwait Air ones, despite the BA flights getting pretty unpleasant after all the expats cheered the arrival of the drinks trolley at AD...), but also pork products aren't available, allegedly because no-one will offload them from the ships or planes. Hardly a problem given the fantastic food culture, but I did have a club sandwich with remarkably plausible 'turkey bacon', and wondered who was fooling who!

Being able to have fresh strawberry juice, melon juice, any other juice with any meal was wonderful - it's embarrassing how many Brits found the lack of alcohol a dealbreaker. (besides, some people's home made wine was excellent!)

I have just started an amazing book. Sapiens - a complete history of humankind.
It is so interesting. Loads of stuff I didn't know. For example, the Agricultural revolution, far from being a great step forward for us, was actually a step backwards in terms of health and sustainability. How whenever homosapiens arrived in a region, th eland land mamals became extinct and so on. Just so interesting , and written in a very approachable style.

When you say Agricultural revolution, are you talking about a general move away from hunter-gathering towards farming (so 1000's of years ago), or about the more recent move towards mechanising farming (about the time of the industrial revolution so a few 100 years ago)?

The move from hunter gatherer to farming, about 9,000 years ago.
Humans were successful hunter gatherers for 2.5 million years. It is a way of life that is very sustainable, if one food source fails, eg in a dry year, then there are others around. It required relatively little work, gathering food took 3-4 hours per day (compared with farming which was a dawn to dusk thing) Women tended to continue to bf babies until quite old eg 3-4 years, which meant healthier babies with stronger immune systems, and relatively low infant mortality, and also meant women had fewer children, probably one every 3-4 years.
Once we made the switch to farming, being concentrated in more dense population meant disease spread faster, we were dependant on one source of food, so if the crop failed then many died of famine, women bf less as they weaned onto porridge, which led to higher birth rate (every 1-2 years) and poorer infant health, and combined with dense population led to high infant mortality.
Hunter gatherers have very complex and varied diet, farmers have diets very heavily dependant on one food stuff, so we were healthier.

In terms of evolution, the 'aim' of DNA is to reproduce itself as many times as possible. So a peice of land that could support a tribe of 100-150 as h/g could support a village of 1,000 as farmers. So from a DNA perspective, it is more successful, 1,00 individuals to spread the DNA rather than 100. But from a human happiness and good lifestyle it was a serious backward step.

The same is true for the domesticated animals we took with us. More individuals, but less happy. Free ranging wild bull over grasslands versus bull kept to pull a plough and work the land.

Fascinating stuff.

I've only read about 1/4 of the book. Industrial revolution etc to come later!

Who's the book by steppemum ? It sounds really interesting.