Listener Mail: Fire Burn and Caldron Bubble

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Monday. So we're bringing you
some messages that have come into the show mailbox over
the past few weeks. Let's see, we are still getting
messages about the vegetable lamb of Tartary. People never give

(00:25):
up on that one. Lets people love the vegetable lamb.
People love it. They're constantly coming up to us saying,
why aren't we getting more vegetable lamb? Uh? Rob? Do
you want to do? This? One? From me? In or sex?
Dear Robert and Joe, I'm about six weeks behind on episode,

(00:47):
so apologies if someone already wrote in about this, but
I was listening to your episode on the Lamb of
Tartary and it was reminded of a group of plants
that does grow itself an animal. The ophrisk genus of
orchids are known as b orchids, and each one grows
flowers that are little replicas of the female be or
other pollinator. The flowers not only look and feel like

(01:10):
the female, but also release the sex hormone of fertile females.
This fac similar lures in males to try to mate
with the flower, thereby transferring pollen and fertilizing the orchid.
Each species of this orchid is adapted to lure in
males of only one particular pollinator species, though rarely individuals

(01:30):
of a closely related species will be duped as well. Amusingly,
males do eventually learn to distinguish between the flowers and
true females of their species, so it tends to be
the younger, inexperienced males that are tricked. It actually makes
me feel a little bad for it. This is obviously
a far cry from the fully functioning mammal on a
tether of the lamb of chardary, but is nonetheless a

(01:54):
fascinating example of very specific evolutionary pressures causing a plant
to grow a kind of animal. It's stem as always,
thanks for your wonderful show, and please keep up the
good work. I well, that is ah, that is a
great example. Ian and actually, um, I while we were
recording those episodes, or maybe shortly before, I went to
the Atlanta Botanical Garden and I was walking around like

(02:16):
looking particularly at ferns, thinking I might see some sort
of wooly mass that resembles a sheep, but also looking
at a lot of orchids, and yeah, there's so many
fabulous um forms in the orchids. Uh some that at
least to the human imagination may look like like little
creatures or a little little humanoids little angels at times.

(02:40):
And yeah, this is a great example of of a
a targeted uh mimicry that is employed by the flower.
Rob do you know about the orchid that looks kind
of like a sinister clown? I don't know this one.
It looks kind of like like the violator from Spawn
or something, So look up uh Ophrius ariadne or the

(03:03):
species name is A r I A d in a E. Oh. Yeah,
this is this is interesting looking. I don't know. I
don't get as much of a spawn feel from this
as more it looks like some sort of uh A
fluffy winged Pokemon type of creature. Okay, but I like it.
I mean, I guess it depends exactly how the pattern

(03:24):
works out and if you squint when you're looking at
it and stuff. But I can sometimes see like a
like a like a mean looking kind of rotund clown
that's telling me I'm going to go to hill. I
don't know. I see like a slightly burly little fella
with very fuzzy arms or wings. H it almost looks
like I can see two eyes for sure, and almost

(03:46):
kind of like a beak going on there. It's kind
of making a Muppet face like kind of you know
when when Kermit the Frog is a little perturbed like that,
kind of like scrunched in face. Oh yeah, I know
what you're talking about, the kind of when the when
the puppet bind. Yeah, oh one o. The But the
clown orchid is in the same genus, the Ophrius genus, Okay, yeah, yeah,

(04:08):
Well it's a it's a remarkable looking specimen. I don't
know that I've seen one in person, though, to be clear,
I don't think it's officially called the clown orchid. That's
just what it looked like to me. All Right, Well,
we've we've got the last of the vegetable Lamb listener
mail out of the way. What's next on the on
the schedule? Here's so so many listeners got in touch

(04:29):
about cauldrons, uh, specifically about our segment on the ceramic
cooking cauldrons of the Joeman culture and prehistoric Japan. Now
you remember these these were ceramic pots that were used
for cooking by these hunter gatherers who lived in Japan.
Uh and these pots had intriguing features. For example, they

(04:51):
had decorative textures that were made by pressing ropes into
the wet clay um, so you see kind of a
fibery texture along the the outside of the finished pots.
But also a mysterious fact that we discussed was that
the earliest pots in this pottery school appear to be

(05:11):
rounded on the bottom rather than flat. So these were
cooking vessels that would not stand up by themselves on
a flat surface. So onto the messages addressing that this
first one comes from Cat, and she says, just listen
to episode one of Cauldrons, and I have some clues

(05:32):
to throw your way regarding questions you posited in the episode. First,
why were the earliest cauldrons rounded rather than flat bottomed?
Speaking as a crafter, I answer for strength. Angles in
pottery are weak points and frequent points of failure. Speaking
as a cook, I answer for evenness of heating throughout
the same reason why Chinese and Japanese cooking still makes

(05:55):
use of the walk, you can get a lot more
control of temperature in a rounded vest. All speaking as
someone who has to wash her own dishes for ease
of maintenance, food scraps don't have corners to cling in
after the cooking is done, and so the pot can
last longer before the accumulated residue of previous meals begins
to be evident in the background flavor. And speaking as

(06:18):
someone who backpacks portability and travel security, you can stick
a rounded pot upside down on a backpacks protrusion and
be reliably sure it will stay there without needing to
be tied down or risking the weak point of some
kind of handle. That last point is really interesting, Cat,
because as we talked about it, you might have expected

(06:39):
that pottery was invented by people who had already settled
down into a stable like uh fixed existence in geography
and started practicing agriculture. But no, the evidence is that
the Joman culture was making pottery for cooking in while
they were still hunter gatherers. Cat continues, Also, I would
like to know if the upper rims of these really

(07:01):
ancient pots have been found or not, because it could
well be that they were hung or suspended over fires,
as later metal cauldrons came to be, in which case
the rounded bottom definitely allows for even heating throughout the contents,
as opposed to the scorching that a flat bottom pan
gives when hung over fire. This is me speaking as
a camp cook, by the way. Next, I want to

(07:24):
deposit a scenario. A tribe of gatherers makes their seasonal
camp on a river bed in a fertile valley. In
the months since they were last there, the river has
flooded somewhat, and they discover that the hollow pit where
they had made the communal fire they kept going for
months to ago last year was sort of washed out
by the current. But here's the thing. The clay bottom

(07:46):
of the pit where the coals had sat that earth
is still solid, hollowed out on one side, but like
a rounded rock when someone knocks on it with their knuckles.
Now imagine that this happens every year when they come back,
a new fire pit in the bottom land clay, a
new hollowed out rock where no such rock existed before.
Maybe eventually a flood that's a little tamer than the

(08:09):
others and only washes out half of the hard baked clay,
and suddenly some woman for it's reliably the women spending
all of their days that these fires after all, works
out what happened and maybe how to do it on
purpose too. In short, my theory is that the first
pottery came about, as most all human innovations did, just
to see if a natural effect could be done deliberately

(08:32):
the uses to which they would put it. I figured
that happened later once the new hardened hollow rock that
the first lady crafted came out of the fire intact. Anyway,
thanks for your time, for your fascinating research, and for
your podcast. Cat, very good points. Cat, Yeah, yeah, I
love all the personal experience with with camp cooking and
stuff as well. I can't remember did we talk about

(08:54):
the idea that these pots may have been suspended over
fires by by ropes or fibers or leather straps or
I don't. I don't know if we got into that
as much, but certainly when you when you look back
at the early history of this style of cooking, yeah,
you're you're dealing with like even even if even in
the period before h pottery, Yeah, you're talking about either

(09:16):
cooking in the ground or cooking suspended above the fire, etcetera.
So very much something to take into account. Yeah, that
that does seem like a possibility to me, and that
that would explain why it could be rounded on the bottom,
or it could be that it sat in some kind
of holder. All right, This next to when it comes

(09:38):
to us from Sean. Sean writes, Hi, Joe and Rob
just finished The Cauldron Part one episode and had three thoughts.
Number One, you mused about the transition from open flame
cooking to wet cooking. Perhaps there was a noticeable decrease
in sickness and death among those whose liquid was solely
or mostly from soup or broth, since boiling would kill

(09:59):
microbes in the water, So perhaps it was adopted partially
because it seemed to be safer. That's an interesting idea,
and so my brain immediately went to, like, well, wait
a minute, if you're eating soup, does that necessarily mean
you need to drink less water? But then I guess
I'm probably thinking about like a soup that is salty
to a modern canned soup extent. If if you're eating

(10:22):
like suit you know, largely liquid based food, soups and
broths that are not heavily salted. Yeah, that's probably replacing
a huge amount of the need for water you would
need to drink otherwise. So yeah, you could be essentially
turning your water needs into into mostly or entirely cooked water,
which would lower the risk of water boarn illness. Yeah. Plus,

(10:44):
I think we touched on like you go into the
history of tea, for example, and you know, you go
back far enough and the line, the dividing line between
drink and soup and broth becomes a little less clear. Alright,
Seawan's point number two. Have you heard of the iron
and fish? You can read about it on Wikipedia, But
essentially impoverished Cambodian women are anemic. Studies were conducted that

(11:08):
found adding an iron ingot to the soup increased iron,
but it wasn't until the fish shape, supposed to be
lucky was widely adopted. Not exactly rock cooking, but that's
where my thoughts went. So I guess the the idea
here is a piece of iron shaped like a fish
that goes into your pot. Yeah, I looked this up.
So this would be a situation where when you're making

(11:29):
a soup, you put the iron fish into the pot
and it leaches iron into the food, increasing your iron intake.
And I haven't looked into this deeply, but just at
a glance, it looked like this was useful in helping
people whose anemia was related to dietary iron deficiency, but
it was not useful in helping people who's anemia had

(11:49):
other causes. It would be interesting to see if there
any studies out there about making like non food items
or sort of marginally food items animal shaped and effect
that has on our psychology. Like I think about the
Swedish fish, for example, the red candy that has shaped
like a fish does not contain fish. Uh if memory service,

(12:10):
it's actually vegan um, But there's something about it being
shaped like the fish makes it more okay. If it
were just shaped like a coin, I would be less
inclined to eat it somehow, and I can't explain why.
That is. You are right, I thought, surely the Swedish
fish contains gelatin, which would not be vegan, but I
looked it up. That is, you are right, it is vegan. Yes,

(12:32):
I've known vegans to swear by it. I'll still eat
the occasional Swedish fish, all right. And then point number
three from Sean. Lastly, Disney's The Black Cauldron does not
do justice to the books, but the art is wonderful
and the backstory is amazing. You can find lots on YouTube.
I went down the rabbit hole over a week or so. Anyway,

(12:53):
thanks for the fascinating topics and wide ranging discussions. Yeah,
I've never actually watched The Black Cauldron all the way through,
and I can't get the boy interested in it, and
I haven't pressed him hard on it because I've always
heard this that it's kind of a lackluster Disney film,
even though it does have some cauldron imagery in it,
and you have that with the Horned King that plays

(13:14):
an important role in it, that is a very cool
looking villain. Yeah, I've never seen it either. Okay, Ethan says, hello,
Robin Joe. I'm Ethan from Indiana. Longtime fan of the
show and listen to it almost every day. I was
listening to this this week's episode on the Cauldron and

(13:37):
the topic of stone boiling, and it immediately brought to
mind a video I had seen of about traditional nomadic
Mongolian food. In this dish called bodog, they cut the
head off of a goat gut the organs they don't want,
and then fill the inside of the goat with broth, vegetables,

(13:58):
and various other soup ingreedy. It's through the severed neck
of the goat. The final edition is a handful of
searing hot stones from a fire that are dropped into
the neck, which is then tied off to create a seal.
Once tied, they will shave slash skin the body, opening
up the neck every now and again to release pressure

(14:18):
or to stir the inside. In the episode discussion, stone
boiling seemed like such an ancient and bygone day method
of cooking, so I found it fascinating that it's still
being practiced in some regions and that this archaic method
has stood the test of time. Uh. And then Ethan
provides a link to the video says, thanks for the
fun discussions you've shared and I look forward to many more. Cheers, Ethan.

(14:40):
So Ethan, I checked out this video and this is
really interesting. Yeah. So it appears to be a traditional
practice where you would take an animal like a goat,
and I think you would remove some of the some
or a lot of the meat and sort of trim
it up, and then you would place the meat back
inside the hide to stew, along with the vegetables and

(15:02):
the broth and the seasonings and stuff, and you'd seal
it up and then yeah, you you sort of singe
off the outside of the skin and then you serve
it up as a communal meal. You sort of cut
it open at a big table if everybody's standing around.
And I don't know how universal this practices, but in
the video that Ethan shared, there was an interesting thing
where the when the stew sack is cut open before eating,

(15:24):
all the people fish out the hot stones and they
distribute them to the guests and everybody holds them in
their hands, and they must still be pretty hot, because
they sort of keep tossing the hot stones, uh, tossing
them or passing them back and forth from palm to palm.
And it can't be certain, but it looks like this
is this is implied to be a regular part of
the experience of eating bodug, like it's part of the meal.

(15:48):
You'd feel the stone as a type of culinary experience. Yeah,
very interesting. Well, thanks for writing in, Nathan. All right,
here's another called rim message. This one comes to us
from Tyler Hi Robert and Joe. After listening to your
most recent episode on Caldrons, I was wondering if in
any of the research you have done on Chinese mythology,

(16:10):
you have run across the sculpture garden at Hopper Villa
in Singapore. Along with many scriptural dioramas depicting events in
Chinese mythology, there is an exhibit depicting many different circles
of hell Um. I had the opportunity to visit happar
when I was living in Singapore, and the whole place
is very strange and a lot of fun. Here is

(16:30):
a link to the site, but you may have better
luck getting a feel for the place through an image search. Uh.
And they do, in fact include this link, which is
h A W P A r v I l l
A dot s G and um. It is a very
nice website that yeah, it doesn't it kind of seems
to sort of gloss over the grizzlier details of the

(16:52):
of the of the of the hell exhibit, or at
least some of the photos you'll find it an image search. Uh.
Tyler writes, I have included a couple of photos I
took while there. I love the podcast and you guys
always do a great job, all the best, Tyler. One
of these photos captures an awesome turtle man. It's like
a turtle shell, like surfing on a wave, but instead

(17:14):
of a turtle's head coming out of the neck hole
is the upper body of a man. Nice. It looks
like there's some giant crabs in here as well. And
then there is looks looks like there is a large
demon with a man on a meat hook or skewer
of some sort, possibly dunking him into some sort of
a foul river or v This turtle man, though, does
not look like hell imagery. This looks like a blast. Yeah.

(17:36):
I mean, obviously I've never been to this. Uh, this
this exhibit, so I don't know what part of the
exhibit this is a photo from. This may be from
part of it that is not connected to the various
hells and is tied with some other mythology. But it
looks like there's some other sort of aquatic hybrid people
in the background as well. Yeah, this looks great. So
thanks to Tyler for writing in and sharing these images

(17:58):
with us. Yeah, this is a fascinating place. I think
I'd maybe heard of it in the past. Uh, But
like I said, I certainly haven't been there, but it
looks looks amazing. All right, let's see, maybe we do
one more about cauldrons, This one from Lee. Lee says, Hello,

(18:19):
Rob and Joe just finished listening to the Cauldron episode.
The episode reminded me of a trick we learned when
in The Scouts boiling water in a paper cup a
regular paper cup. It can be waxed, but not plastic
or styrofoam, filled with water and placed in a fire
and will maintain its integrity while the water boils. We

(18:41):
took it one step further and placed an egg in
the cup of water before placing it in the fire.
The result was one hard boiled egg. The coup will burn,
but only down to the water level. This memory got
me thinking about early cooking vessels as you were talking
about them. I have no real support for this, but
please allow along. If early buckets for hauling water were

(19:03):
made from animal hide, they likely were bowl shaped, since
stitching a flat bottom would result in leaks. Handles to
facilitate carrying would likely result in draw string closure of
sorts to the top. Think a marble bag. If these
wet water bags were suspended over a fire, the water
could be boiled since the wet bag wouldn't burn. The

(19:25):
longish carry handles could hold the bag from the tripod
or other device and be long enough to keep the
handles from the fire. If this design carried over to
a vessel made of river bank clay, it could explain
the round bottom of early clay cooking vessels. Again, no proof,
just food for thought. Love the show, look forward to
every episode. Lee. Uh, that's interestingly, I had no idea

(19:48):
that you could boil water in a wet cup. I've
never tried it, and I don't know if the same
would apply to a piece of hide, but that it
seems to make sense that it might, at least because
I mean, obviously, one you introduce water into a heating equation, um,
you know that's going to water just absorbs so much heat.
I can see how it would potentially prevent the burning

(20:10):
through of a material that might otherwise be burned through
pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Now I have to say,
as a as a former Scout and uh, the parent
of a current Scout, I don't think I have ever
conducted this, uh this this wax paper cup egg experiment,
but I trust the listener's experience here. I'll have to

(20:33):
try it myself. I just looked it up. Can you
boil water in a paper cup? But the the Internet
seems to be pretty unanimous. Yes, you can, basically because
the ignition temperature of the of the paper is going
to be higher than the boiling point of the water,
so that the heat that's going into the the wet
bottom of the paper cup is just continually heating up

(20:55):
the water. I think it would have to evaporate the
water before the cup would be able to get hot
enough to catch on fire. All right, Well, we appreciate
everyone everyone who wrote in about our Cauldron episodes, and
I'm assuming we'll get some more listener mail related to
those episodes plus the subsequent Cauldron episodes. Uh so, right in,

(21:16):
let us know what you think, what you've experienced, what
you've heard. We'd love to hear from you. As a reminder,
listener Mail episodes run most Mondays, and then on most
Wednesdays we do a short form um episode that is
an artifact or a monster fact. On Tuesdays and Thursdays
we do our core episodes of stuff to Blow your mind,
and on Friday's we do weird how cinema. That's our

(21:37):
time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk
about a weird film. You'll find it all in the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your

(21:58):
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