Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about eponymous fruit this week,
Uh huh, which you tickled me by saying you did
(00:22):
not realize those were eponymous.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
No, the barb hair was the only one. I mean,
it makes total sense that boison berry.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
But Clementines doesn't really flag that way to me either. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Well, and uh, you know when you set this to
me and I was like, eponamous fruits, I wonder what
they are, probably Bartlet pair. And then I got to
the first person's last name being Boys, and I was like,
what that was not what I expected at all. I
am sure I have had boys and berry preserves, it's
(00:54):
just never been like in the rotation of their show,
so good regular things that I eat.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
They're so good. Yeah, I love them. Yeah, we ate
like I said, we ate them all. I think they
were my dad's favorite for a long time, so they
often went on like waffles or were served with pancakes
or toasts. That was kind of a breakfast staple for us.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
So most of the jelly type stuff Preserve jams. All
of that that we ate as children, Yeah, was homemade, right,
homemade by my grandmother. And these it was a I
feel like either muscadines or scuppernongs, which I don't think
(01:39):
are the same thing, but are both grapes, but they
don't taste like the grapes at the grocery store that
are just like red and green table grapes. And any
other jelly type thing that we ate at home was
mostly like we got biscuits. Yeah, that came with the
(02:00):
little container like the little jelly packets.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah. We also did a lot of boisonberry syrup at
our house. Okay, Yeah, which, now that I'm saying the
phrase boisonberry syrup, I'm like, I gotta make a cocktail
with some boisonberry syrup.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I gotta get on that.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Yeah, And I it would be great for cocktails, especially
because it was not as thick as like a some
other syrups you would have like on pancakes, so its
viscosity is kind of better to mix with things without
having to thin it. Oh. I have ideas. I have
so many ideas.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I'm so excited about this.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I think that's we're gonna have boisonberry mohidos this summer.
That's what I think is going to happen at our house.
There was one very silly thing in this episode that
tickled me in a way that maybe is just a
me thing. The fact that there's a Small Fruit Division
of the USDA just tickled me because in my brain,
(02:59):
here's what happened. And I'm sure you have seen the
graphical image of Joy Division, the cover of Joy Division's
Unknown Pleasures album. It's actually a neutron stars like graph
(03:23):
is what it is. But it's very popular and it
gets it gets spoofed by a lot of other things.
And in my head, there's a T shirt out there
called Small Fruit Division and it looks like that, but
it's made of fruits, so funny, weird, black and white.
Do you know the cover I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I love it. Also love Joy Divisions.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So you know, I have now clarified in my own
mind that scuppernongs are a type of muscadine.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
There you go, yeah, there you go. Anyway, Small Fruit
Division the other thing that I wanted to mention because
we got into its origination point but not its end.
Algeria did not get out from under France's thumb until
night sixty two. It was a long time anyway, just
deserves a mention because you know, colonizing, speaking of places
(04:12):
in northern Africa colonized by France. We're going to Morocco
in November.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
We sure are seems like a good enough place to
drop in a mention of that. I just liked at
the website this morning. The single room rate is currently
sold out. Yeah, so people traveling solo currently sold out?
Are still rooms for two travelers together if you are
a couple or traveling with a friend. I would imagine
(04:41):
if you are traveling by yourself and you're like, oh no,
I wanted to go drop define destinations a note, and
if anyone else is in that same boat, they may
be able to, you know, work out a roommate situation.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah, our friends have. One of my friends has done
that on our trips before and that worked out just fine. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, I absolutely understand the impulse to want to have
a room for yourself. I have paid the solo room
for yourself premium on trips that I've taken before. But
you know, this tends to be a really fun kind
group of people who you know, tries to support and
be respectful of one another.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
On the trip.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Defined destinations dot com if you want to learn more
about that. That was my interjection about our Morocco trip. Yeah,
I love those trips. Everybody kind of feels like family
by the end of it, which is really nice. Yeah,
we were able to add some slots to our trip
to Iceland. I don't think that is possible with this
(05:46):
one because some of the places we are staying, like
the number of rooms is very fixed limited.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I would like to talk about pairs for just
do it. They're delicious. I love pairs, love them so much.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I'm going to confess that I did not come to
love pears until I was an adult because being in
the sort of family that would be buying the regular
oranges and not the clementines. In my childhood, we just
we did not really have fresh pears. Ever, the only
pears I really experienced as a child were canned pears,
(06:24):
which are not Yeah they're fine, I don't mind them,
I'll eat them, but they're not as good as a
fresh pair. And the texture weirded me out of canned pears.
When I was like, yeah, I didn't like that, and
I can't I could not tell you where was the
first time or when was the first time that I
had a pair as a grown up, but I was like, wow,
(06:44):
I have been missing out, I think because you know,
there's a lot of friendliness in my in my youth,
I ate a lot of pear tarts very early.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
On business is dolugus. It's a very popular tart in
French baking. Yeah, I'm literally thinking about it, and Drew like,
my brain just went to that, like eye roll, buttery sweet.
I love them. I love them. I wonder every time
(07:21):
we do an eponymous foods, have I exhausted them? And
I would have said I had last time, and then
I just randomly was like, oh what about fruit the
other night? Well, a lot, but not all of the
eponymous foods that we have talked about are dishes, right,
(07:42):
and not a plant? Not all of them, but yeah,
the first one was the Granny Smith apple, So yeah,
not all of them. But yeah, I always wonder are
we done? The answer is no, so we'll see. There
could be more. I don't know. There may be more
spite houses. I don't know. Maybe those are also fun. Listen,
(08:02):
I love a grudge. We need the fun.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
One of our episodes. This week was an unexpected episode
to focus on two people instead of one person, which
was not what I was expecting when I was going
into it. So Thomas J. Dorsey, William Henry Dorsey. I
was intending initially to focus just on William Henry Dorsey,
and I thought just from a quick glance that there
(08:34):
would be enough information to do that, And then I
found that that was not exactly the case, because there
just are some gaps on you know, what we know
about him as a person, his life before his adulthood,
stuff like that. And then I, you know, as I
was looking at this, I was like, oh, and his
father really part of establishing the catering industry as in Philadelphia.
(08:59):
That's a whole additional story. And without his father's leaving
him a trust, William would not really have been able
to just spend his time largely focused on developing these collections, right,
doing what he wanted, doing what he wanted to do, yeah,
(09:20):
and really doing a you know, important work preserving the
history of the black community of Philadelphia and elsewhere. I
did not have any idea before I got into this
that Philadelphia is seen as the birthplace of the catering
industry in the United States.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, me either. That's fascinating to me. I guess I
had not ever thought of it in terms of there
being a moment that it became an industry per se,
do you know what I mean? Yeah, in my head,
it's I hadn't really put a lot of thought into it.
But I think I just presumed it kind of grew
(10:01):
out of restaurants slowly just doing large scale delivery, yeah,
instead of specifically being like, no, no, we're a caterer,
not a restaurant. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
A lot of the people that developed this industry in
Philadelphia did start with having a restaurant, and their restaurant
was a place that was sort of the focal point
of where all the food came from.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, but it makes.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
A lot of sense that, you know, if we go
farther back into history, you might have and I guess
we still have royalty who have a whole staff of
kitchen workers who are preparing all the food for big
banquets and things, and having people, whether they are paid
(10:46):
kitchen help or paid kitchen help directed by a member
of the family or an enslaved staff, like a lot
of people doing this kind of work, and in this
transition period after the abolition of slavery and or the
abolition of slavery specifically in Philadelphia, and before the development
(11:10):
of like enormous luxury hotels with paid staff in a
slightly different context, right, there was this kind of window
of catering as its own, newly developing industry. Of course,
there are obviously still great caterers.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
This is yet another time when my brain automatically thinks
of a Bob's Burgers thing and starts giggling. Oh, yes,
we talked about restaurateurs. I think of Linda Belcher saying
restaurosaur and I love it so much. Oh funny, I'm
as funny. Culture is the best thing maybe on TV.
Ever that isn't and or so you know, Yeah, I
(11:54):
love this idea of scrap booking being actually important because
because we think about it as a thing that people
do as a cute hobby that isn't given a lot
of weight in terms of what it can be. And
I really really liked this idea of the way Dorsey
(12:15):
very carefully assembled these so that you would have the
white perspective of an event next to the black perspective
of an event, like I don't think there's a better
way to teach right, right, how bias works right in media, Like,
that's a really cool way to do it at a time,
(12:36):
well before our digital age where people do those kinds
of things now all the time, But there wasn't a
lot of that going on at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, he also preserved a lot of clippings of things
that we might not have any actual copies of the
publication at this point, right, because Yeah, these three hundred
and eighty eight scrap books took up a whole lot
of room, but they took up a whole lot less
room than every cop of every paper and every magazine
that he was clipping out of. So it was simultaneously
(13:08):
a lot of space and a way to preserve things
that did not take as much space as if he
had tried to, you know, have shelves and shelves and
shelves of every single copy of every black newspaper in
Pennsylvania or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, listen, I watch a lot of Bravo. I want
to know what happened between him and his wife.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
I don't do, and I didn't find any information about that.
There's a lot of stuff that have in episodes that
I've worked on lately where it seems like information about
something might exist, but I just don't have it, and
I don't I have no idea what happens between him
(13:49):
and his wife. I'm really curious about what the story
is regarding William's marriage to Virginia cash In. It seems
most likely, based on just numbers, that Virginia's family had
been enslaved in Georgia and that they escaped from slavery
and went north. It is possible that that's not the case.
(14:13):
It just is more likely that they had been enslaved
in Georgia, and we know for sure that some of
Virginia's family had had gone to Philadelphia. It's not specifically
documented that Virginia had gone with them, but it does
seem like the most likely scenario to me.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Right. It does not.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Seem as likely that he went all the way to
Georgia and got married there and brought his wife back
with him. Again, that's possible, But as soon as I
read that, I was like, that seems what's the story there?
Like that because the book that made that reference, it's like,
(15:00):
doesn't even really say how the two of them would
have even known each other. She just sort of comes
out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, yeah, that whole two completely different stories of where
they got married. My initial thought was like, oh, were
they doing it the way people often do it today,
where you have, like us, the legal ceremony in one place,
maybe a reception somewhere else to accommodate all of the
(15:28):
people that But this scenario where they would have been
in the Deep South when it was a slave state,
doesn't seem like it would have really been an option
to work that way. Yeah, it's I don't who knows.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I have a lot of questions about that. And also,
I mean people did escape from enslavement in the Deep South.
That did happened, for sure, but it was a lot
of the people who were liberating themselves were more in
border states and were able to get to free territory
more easily. So anyway, I just I have a bunch
of questions. Yeah, yes, that I did not know the
(16:07):
answer to. And had I had the answers to all
of these questions, probably we would have wound up with
one episode on Thomas and one episode on Williams, rather
than one episode combining the both of them. But anyway,
I do find them both very interesting. I find the
whole catering industry part very interesting, and also all of
(16:27):
the scrap booking part, which is really what had caught
my eye when I said that I was going to
do an episode on him.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Marvelous.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, so whatever's coming up on your weekend, if you're
going to have a delicious catered meal, or if you're
gonna go do a little scrap booking or something else entirely,
I hope it's great. We will be back with a
Saturday Classic tomorrow. We'll have something brand new on Monday.
(16:56):
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