Behind the Scenes Minis: Coffee, 'Pirats' and Sea Robbers

Holly and Tracy talk about their coffee preferences. Then Tracy traces the path that led her from a listener mail to the topic of Fort Mose.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about the invention of
coffee filters. H I'm the Melita Company this week. Yes,

(00:23):
some of which got dark in a way. I was
not anticipeading when I started this. Now, Smorry, but you
don't want to ignore that stuff because it's important. Now
it's an important part of the story, so we got
to acknowledge it. I have a number of notes, but
first I want to start with the conversational. I know
you are a coffee drinker. Huh. I'm a coffee hound,

(00:46):
as I said the first thing. And I know we
both have cut back on what we used to drink.
I used to drink so much coffee, jolly long all day.
I drank coffee all day and then after work. This
was when I was just out of college. When I
was in college, I would drink coffee all day. Yeah,

(01:08):
and then at like one o'clock in the morning, we
would go to waffle House and I would have some
waffle House coffee at one o'clock in the morning. Come
back to my dorm room and be able to go
to sleep after that. I don't understand how this worked
for me, because then after graduating from college, I would
drink coffee at work all day, and then after work,

(01:30):
I had a coffee shop that I hung out at
all the time, and I would drink more coffee at
the coffee shop. Yeah, and then I decided that I
was drinking too much coffee and that I should cut back.
And this was like something I was challenging myself to do,
thinking it was going to be a limited amount of
time that I was going to cut back to just
a couple cups of coffee in the morning, and it

(01:52):
ruined my ability to have caffeine later in the day. Yeah,
just really destroyed it. So now if I have caffeine stuff,
if it's more than just like one cup of tea,
if I have caffeinated things after about three or four
in the afternoon, I have trouble sleeping. It's very sad.
I can still chug it. Yeah. I always joke with

(02:12):
people and sometimes they believe me this is not true
where because it's happened. There was one time it happened
and it was so funny, and I felt bad because
I don't want to laugh at somebody who's being earnest.
But it was very funny. I was at lunch with
a friend of mine and I asked for a water,
a diet coke, and a coffee and the server said,

(02:32):
so much caffeine. And I said, well, I burned out
my adrenal gland when I was seven because I don't
get it constantly, I'll die, being sarcastic. And she was
so earnest. She's like, O'll make sure you always have
some on the table, and I was like, oh no, no,
I'm just being a jerk, but I do appreciate it
and would like the caffeine to keep coming. But I
was like, that's not a thing. I didn't do that. Yeah,

(02:53):
I still drink it all day long. I have cut
back from about probably ten to twelve cups a day
to like four to five. Yeah, only because my doctor
climbed on my tail about it. And some days that's hard. Okay,
here's the real question that I want to know. Okay,
what is your preparation preference? Okay, So for a long
time at home, I had a regular drip coffee maker

(03:15):
and also a very inexpensive espresso machine. Yeah, like, what
is the cheapest espresso machine that a person without a
lot of money could buy. That is what I had.
And then time went by. I think I broke the
pot on the espresso machine. It wasn't getting a lot
of use. So I got rid of the espresso machine.
And then I moved to Massachusetts and we were living

(03:40):
in an apartment that was on the third floor of
a triple decker. It had no shade, it had no
air conditioning, and it got so hot in the summertime
that I could not tolerate the idea of drinking hot coffee. Yeah,
so I got a cold brew set up. We also
had no room, so I got rid of the regular
coffee pot at that point, so we just had the

(04:02):
cold brew set up. Yeah, this is a whole coffee journey.
It's great. Eventually I was like, now I want hot
coffee again, though, and heating up cold brew is not
as satisfying. So I got a French press and so
I still have the cold brew set up in the
French press and that lasted until the day I was
making my coffee in the morning and I knocked the

(04:24):
French press off of the counter and shattered it. Before
I had made my coffee for the day. That day,
I made coffee in a tea infuser. Yeah, listen, desperate times,
desperate measures. It worked. Okay. So now the two coffee
setups in my home are a cold brew setup and
an arrow press. And the arrow press is what the

(04:45):
hot coffee gets made in most porning. Yeah. Yeah, I
used to drip for a long, long long time. You know.
I was that person that like, oh no, the coffee
pot's almost empty, time to make another pot, Like yeah, thises.
This was constantly kind of doing the thing. In recent years,
I say recent, it's been quite a while. I switched

(05:05):
over to French press and I have a very adorable
RTD two French press that I got from Think Geek.
Remember Thinking Geek that I will cry if it ever
becomes damaged in a way I cannot use it. Another
company has started making them recently, but they are not
quite as good. But here's the thing, and I love

(05:27):
a French press. I also have a cuig that I
do the refillable cups for that I keep in my
cantina and case people order an espresso martini when they're
over or I want an espressomartini. When I'm just hanging out,
I want listeners to understand something which you would that
you just said, which is that when guests come to
your home, you have a bar menu. And I love

(05:49):
this and I feel that this is something other people
should know. I do. I have a bar menu. It
got updated recently. I mean I have a bar, like
we built a cantina onto our house because I like
making drinks and I like Star Wars. So people come
over and it's like going to a restaurant. You don't
pay at this guy now, And I literally act like

(06:12):
I'm working as shift, like I'm not usually not drinking.
I'm only bartending and making sure everybody has snacks. And
I love it. I don't I don't know. I just
love it. I love making drinks. I love inventing drinks. Anyway, Yeah,
sometimes you want man for Januine because this year I'm
trying to have people over every month that has a
thirty one in it for the owen of that month. Okay,

(06:33):
So for Januine, I did an espresso martini. We did
three specialty drinks that day, and one of them is
a pumpkin spice donut espresso martini okay, and that was
just stupidly good. That sounds really good and not as
sweet as you might be thinking. But anyway, yeah, so

(06:53):
we love and I do love an espresso martini. I
know that's a little basic lady drink, but who I
love it. And a good one is this weight in gold.
But yeah, here's the other thing about me though. As
much as I love my French press and that is
my preferred method, I would say, mm hmm. I'm a junkie.
I'm not a connoisseur. Yeah, I just want coffee. Yeah.
If somebody's like, well, this coffee was filtered through a sock.

(07:16):
The sock was clean, but it's you know, and the
grounds are really bad. There might be pencil shavings, I'm like,
that's okay, So you have creamer to put in it.
I'm good. I just need the coffee. Yeah. The reason
that we got the arrow press was number one shatter proof.
They do make glass wise, but the one that we
have is plastic. So I would never again have the

(07:37):
situation of preparing to make my coffee and I shatter
the thing used to do that. That is, I would
I think I would cry. I might actually cry cry,
but then the other thing is that we have a
friend named Dan, and Dan makes his coffee in an
arrow press, but then also has a little hand cranked
coffee bean grinder that he travels with. Oh yeah, yeah,

(07:59):
And so it's a whole like a ritual. It's way
more quality focused than ours, which for me is just
having something warm that tastes like coffee first thing in
the morning, especially right now when it's freezing cold outside.
But yeah, Dan is like way more like there's a
whole precise ritual, and I'm just like, grind the beans,

(08:20):
dump it in there, dump the boil, dump the water
in there, right, dump the thing in there, star go.
Do you remember this is some years ago when we
were still just how stuff works, I think, And we
would do sometimes like guest lectures, and we had a
Dune come in to talk about coffee. I don't know

(08:42):
if I remember that part, but I do remember doing
guest lectures. It was pretty fun because you know, he
very much waxed rhapsodic about coffee, just understandable, you know,
and was It's one of those things where there are
always people who are so attuned to a specific thing
that they can really talk about like a consumable good

(09:05):
coffee of wine, et cetera. Where they could talk about
all of the notes and everything and blah blah blah beers,
Like when I hear people talk about beers in the notes,
I'm not a beer drinker. Everything tastes like rolling rock
to me. I know that's anathema to people, But it
was just so funny because he was noticing the same
thing that, like, he had friends that would talk about
like wine the same way he would talk about coffee.

(09:26):
And I literally like asked him something about, like, is
it anathema to you when people put stuff in their coffee?
And he looked kind of dejected and sad and was like,
I mean no, And I'm just like because I'm dumping
in my sweetener and my yeah, my creamer. Now I
usually use protein shake in my coffee, so I feel

(09:47):
like I'm at least getting something worthwhile. Yeah, I'm like, Oh,
I just want all the coffee. I just want the coffee.
I love it. There were a few interesting things that

(10:08):
came up in the research for this. They're on the
lighter side of things. This isn't really the lighter side,
but it is interesting to me because that whole World
War One situation where Britain was really kind of controlling
who did and did not have access to coffee trade.

(10:29):
Oh yeah, or had limited access to coffee trade. What
ended up kind of happening in the midst of all
of that is that the US got a lot of
coffee trade because like it just came north instead of
turning across the Atlantic to it. And I'm like, oh,
this is where like the whole seed of It's not
like as though people weren't drinking coffee before that, but

(10:49):
I really think that's probably the beginning of this concept
that we all live now of like coffee lifes, right,
like coffee achievers, the coffee generation, all of that stuff
that we got marketed when we were kids. And it
just made me chuckle to think about the ways that
history is impacting us that we don't always see. Our
coffee love is very seriously jeopardized by climate change. Require

(11:16):
coffee requires very specific conditions to grow in, and those
conditions are imperil very much. So I am gonna confess
to you that I had a lot of confusion looking
at pictures regarding how the Melita coffee filter, the metal

(11:37):
coffee filter worked. Initially oh yeah, uh huh, because we
described that it has that little set in basket at
the top, and I was like, is that where the
coffee goes and the filter because it is indented like
a little basin. But then I watched a video of

(11:59):
I think her great grandson, who is now one of
the executives in the company, pull one out, pull that
off and put the paper inside, and I was like, oh,
it's different than I thought. Huh, Like I don't I
don't know, I don't know what I was thinking. I
just was like, Okay, I felt very foolish. But it's
similar to the way that we couldn't be confident about

(12:21):
the way the device that maybe prevented boil over yeah,
or maybe prevented over cooking, depending on right, because translations
offer alternate concepts, we know when you look at a thing.
And then it really though, was very in line with
some of the stuff we talked about in the episode,
because they did have to teach people how these things work. Yeah,

(12:43):
you know, like when they if they had just handed
them to a consumer, they wouldn't have been able to
be like, Okay, the coffee goes here, I guess because
the paper could have sat inside that little shallow basin
as well. Right, right, we don't know. I do kind
of now want to get one of these pour over
cups just for or the entertainment of it, to say, yeah,
I used to one. Yeah, they're little, they're not gonna

(13:03):
take much space. There's got to be a cocktail I
could make that makes use of it. Oh, I just
had such an idea. Look out, people come into my house. Yes,
there's gonna be a hot coffee drink coming. Oh my goodness,
I just had such a good idea. Okay, there is
another thing that Listen, this happens all the time, okay,

(13:25):
where the way a history even of a company or
an entity is reported by that company or entity that
doesn't line up with other facts that we know or
that you can't corroborate. And I don't even think that's
like necessarily nefarious. What I'm about to say is a
very benign thing. But I just was like, huh, I
don't know what's going on here, Like I'm not even

(13:46):
talking about any of the World War two Nazi stuff. Literally,
the Melita Company's website that has their history that I
got to sort of through a back door mentions that
they won gold and silver medals at the nineteen eleven

(14:07):
International Hygiene Expo in Dresden and the nineteen ten one.
But when I looked up the International Hygiene Expo, there
is no evidence that there was one in Dresden in
nineteen ten, so I'm like, what is going on here?
There was one in nineteen ten, but it was in
Buenos Aires, and I don't think they sent anybody to it,
So I'm not sure what the scoop is there. But

(14:30):
on the certificate that you can find if you really
root around on their site, the certificate for the nineteen
eleven awards has pictures of the nineteen ten award coins
like the medallions that are labeled nineteen ten. So I
don't know if that is the source of some confusion
or if there was an event that is just not documented.

(14:53):
I mean, that's the other thing that I in that
paper that's originally in Jeri that I was doing translation
comparisons on. At the beginning of that paper, that researcher
mentions that there were some issues getting a hold of
documents because of a couple of different events that happened.

(15:14):
One was that there have been fires I believe that
have destroyed things. Two is that there have been robberies
at the company, at the corporate headquarters where something's vanished.
So it's like there are just facts we can't always
validate anymore. Now, if you're a conspiracy theorist, you would say,

(15:36):
did those things really happen? Or is that what this
researcher got told. I don't. I don't know. I'm not
really a conspiracy theorist, so yeah, don't. I don't know.
But I did learn as I was researching and looking
at other companies who also did Nazi collaboration, I learned
a factoid that I didn't know that maybe some of

(15:56):
our listeners knew, but I was not aware of. Okay,
did you know that Coca Cola invented Fanta for Nazi Germany?
I don't think I knew that. Now, I wish I
had had the presence of mind to bring up to
have the website here handy. But it was like one
of those things where many products were blockaded or forbidden

(16:20):
to be shipped in various ways, but there was still
a desire for a yummy, delicious carbonated beverage, and Coca
Cola was like, we could get around these rules. And restriction.
If we invent a new thing, okay that's different from
the things we've been making, all right, then so just
remember like there, I don't want anybody's takeaway to be

(16:42):
like that company's bad, because like, yeah, we would have
to literally live in a cave and make our own
food and cook it on rocks if we wanted to
avoid every possible corporate entity that has dirty things. Yeah,
yeah the past well, and really virtually any company that

(17:02):
was operating in Germany during that era had to do something.
And so it's a scale of yes, sort of tacitly
allowing things to actively collaborating like those are sort of
the extreme. And there's especially if it's a lot about
a company. Yes, if we're talking about a company big

(17:25):
enough to be doing international business, incredibly unlikely for them
to have somehow had no Nazi involvement at all. I'm
not saying that excuses there was the reality of what
we're talking about. Yes, every car company, yeah, including US

(17:46):
car companies, Yeah, have problematic links to Nazi Germany. It
just is what it is. But what I do like
is coffee. Coffee, and for that I do like it.
I am grateful. Yeah, thank you Melita because I don't
like grounds in my coffee either. No, although I realize
now I'm not using any of her filter. No, I'm

(18:07):
really thinking about this drink though. Now this is just
got exciting for me. I really did. It's going to
for now. It's like, now our show is going to
be a cocktail show from now. It's fine by me.
Let's do it, let's rock and roll. I'm not making
Criminalia anymore. So I don't have a good place to
don't have a cartil outlet. I don't have. I mean,
the outlet is my cantina. But even so, I need,

(18:29):
I need to prompt each week more anyone. And now
I have a new idea more more at all times,
which is now reminding me of bartending school. But that's
a story for another day. We talked about Fort Mosey

(18:51):
sure did week on the show. This came about because
of like a slightly winding listener suggestion, which was that
we had gotten a listener mail asking for an episode
on a particular place, and when I started looking into it,
I was like, this place the story becomes a bummer,

(19:17):
and I I didn't want to get into the bummer
right now, and I'm not saying the name of the
place because I don't want this person to feel bad
for their suggestion in any way, and it may become
an episode at some point in the future later. But
I was like, Okay, what are some other places that
we might talk about, though, Like, what are some other

(19:39):
potential locations, because I feel like I haven't done one
of those in a while. And I then from this
wandering from this listener suggestion, wound up on Fort Morse,
which I had not ever heard of before, and so
much of the things that happen in the history of
Florida during you know, parallel with the history of Fort Mooise. Yeah,

(20:02):
I also didn't know about I obviously did know about
Saint Augustine being a city and being the oldest European
established city in what's now the United States, Like I
knew those kinds of things. Patriot War, never heard of
it until doing the research on this, Yeah, I don't
think that I did. I had kind of a vague

(20:24):
understanding about Oglethorpe that I knew a little more about, Yeah,
like I knew that sort of that that had happened,
but not a lot of details, and that I just
did not fully think through all of the worst mostly

(20:44):
between European powers, sometimes with indigenous allies, sometimes also with
and against indigenous people. But like all of those things
that really started in the eighteenth century, and how many
of them that there were that all just affected Florida,
and how many times Florida got passed back and forth
between different European powers. Yeah, I definitely got lots of

(21:07):
Saint Augustine. I lived in Florida from when I was
nine to when I was eighteen, so yeah, kind of
those key history time years. But also during an era
of our country's history where it was totally cool to
really give only the most complimentary version of a history

(21:28):
regarding the place or maybe talking about you know, there
was not a lot of Oh, and they treated people
really bad. It was like they were the first ones
and everything was amazing, right, you know. Yeah, Having grown
up in North Carolina, I had a sense of Carolina
being established as one colony, not North and South. That

(21:50):
North and South came later. I did not really have
a sense of how far the southern border was under
the Royal Charter expected to go like but not only
did it go way into Florida, but like it included
Saint Augustine. I did not really have, yeah, a big
sense of that part of it. Yeah, I had thought
of something else that I was going to say, and

(22:10):
now I have Do you want to talk about food
while you try to think of it? Let's do talk
about food, because I was very very glad that you
included mention of the Gullageechee Corridor at the end. Oh yeah,
because I don't know if you've noticed it might be
something that's happening more in the South, but I have
noticed more and more one restaurants just popping up, like

(22:32):
as this is a Gulla restaurant, like we're using old
Golla recipes and like the restaurant that I go to
all the time that's like my favorite neighborhood joint. They
have started including notes on their menu about this is
an old Gola recipe, like that's where we and like
calling it out, which is kind of cool because there
are some really incredible food traditions right, Like it's often

(22:56):
a very grain base, Like listen, if you love shrimp
and grits the way I love grits, Uh huh, that's Gulligichi.
I mean that's yeah, that's the origin point. So it's
just cool because it's an interesting time in terms of
like the gastronome zone of people recognizing the cultural contributions

(23:17):
of the gulligichi, and like how much we have. I mean,
we've seen shrimp and grits on you know, menus everywhere
for a long time, and nobody ever calls it out
and goes, hey, do you actually know where this came from?
So I'm excited to see that more and more restaurants
are now doing that. Yeah. Yeah, and also now I
want shrimp and grits. I do too. You said it,

(23:38):
and now it's in my head. I mean, it's hard
for me to find a day when I don't want
shrimp and grits because it is one of my yeah
things on the planet. I like to order it any
restaurant I walk into, if it has it on the menu,
I will almost always order it just to see how
they make it, because there are lots of different variations
in terms of the sauces and whatnot and what they
whether they put things in the grits. Yeah. Living in

(24:00):
New England now, I when I order shrimp and grits
at a restaurant, there's an aspect of like morbid curiosity
there at this point because it's so far removed from
like where I grew up and where I learned to
eat grits, that I'm always like, Okay, what are what
is this that you are going to serve to me? Yeah. Anyway,

(24:23):
one of the things that I read while I was
researching this was the correspondence between James Coleton and Dunlop
when Dunlop was on this mission to Saint Augustine. And
this was part of the instructions that the governor gave Dunlop,
Before the part about like and you need to get

(24:44):
these people back, he said, quote, you are to let
the Governor of Flora and know that since I came
to the government, there have been no pirates nor other
sea robbers admitted, nor had any reception in this province
without being brought to condign punishment. And I have several

(25:07):
at this time in prison who are speedily to be
brought to their trials. And that I will add times
vigorously endeavor in my station and government to extra pate, abolish,
in destroy that sort of people who are so much
enemies and destructive to all mankind. So first, the phrase
Pirrats and other Sea robbers. Just delighted me having pirates

(25:32):
without an E where we would put it, and also
sea robbers pirates and sea robbers, and then all of
this has some extra letters that we would not have
in these words in standard English today, which is very fun.
Several has two l's on it. I love anything prior
to standardized spelling. It's just a fun puzzle. It's delightful.

(25:55):
If I'm having to read a ton of it for
an episode and I'm on a deadline, I can get
a little frustrated because I'm like, Okay, this is harder
and taking longer. But call Itton's spelling trials t R
Y A L L S also very excited about that,
and then trials throughout I. So the thing that I

(26:18):
am most familiar with in terms of typography and old
documents is the long s's that look like f's. Yeah right,
We've talked about those a number of times. But the
way that the word Florida looks in this document looks
like it is spelled lowercase F lowercase F L O

(26:40):
R I DA. So two f's, both of them lowercase Florida,
and I had to just stop myself from going to
figure out why Florida was set with what appears to
be two f's. Maybe a listener who knows about fonts
and typeograph and sixteenth and seventeenth century printing will send

(27:05):
us the answer. But I loved every single time the
word Florida was in this series of letters, always apparently
with two f's Florida, Yeah, or is I like to
say Florida? Yeah. I never remembered the thing that I
was trying to think of that I thought I was
going to say earlier. The article in Bitter Southerner detailing

(27:31):
sort of the progress of this park and the discovery
of the forts and the archaeological work and all of
that stuff. It did not have a date on it
in terms of when it was published, so I'm not
sure when it came out, but it it seems like
it was some years ago, long enough in the past
that things like the fort that has been rebuilt at

(27:54):
the or the replica fort that has been built at
the park, like that's not there. If you go read
that article, which if you want to know the whole
story of the fort's rediscovery in the park and all
of that, like that, it lays it out and it
is kind of messy, but it also makes the park
sound kind of mediocre. I was gonna say point, I

(28:20):
think quait would be more generous than the tone of
the gotcha article, And but then when I was looking
at pictures of these reenactments and stuff, I was like,
I think, I think they must have done some work
to make this park more visitor friendly with more amenities
in the time since this article was written. Gotcha. So

(28:41):
if you're reading this article and you're like, I don't know,
this park is a place that I would want to visit, like,
I think there is more at the park and more
facilities at the park than when it was written. At
least that's my impression. Gotcha. Yeah, I don't know. I
know nothing about it now. I'm literally like, what else
do I want to talk about in Florida? And I'm like,

(29:01):
Golden Girls, but that's not really Jermaine to anything. Just
any excuse to talk about the Arthur is great. I
love that. I love that. I have many fond thoughts
about the Golden Girls, so many, so many. We can
just leave on that note. I think whatever is coming

(29:21):
up on your weekend, if you're getting to take a
little time to watch some Golden Girls streaming somewhere. Maybe
you have Golden Girls on DVD or Blu ray, I
don't know. I hope you get to do that. I
hope it's fun and great. You're gonna go outside if
you're living somewhere where the outside is tolerable right now

(29:44):
and you can do some stuff outside, I hope that's great.
My latest outside thing was a protest. It was in
a snowstorm. The windchill was eleven. Yeah, So I hope
you we have more favorable weather happening right now. And
I know there's so much going on in the world.

(30:06):
I hope everybody's doing as well as possible. Try to
take care of each other and be kind to each other.
And we will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow.
We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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(30:30):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.