Eponymous Foods: Fourth Course

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, Tracy.
It's time for another eponymous foods episode, and it's so excited.
These have become a favorite of mine. I love these

(00:23):
because they get to talk about food, which I love.
But also they're often surprises, and this one is no different. Um,
this episode only has two foods in it. Those two
foods could not be more different. One is a flaming
dessert and one is a meat patty. Um. Also, we
want to make sure we say at the top one
of these foods was part of a fad diet. Neither
of us is really a fan of telling anybody what

(00:45):
to eat, but I will point out that it's a
good idea to eat a balanced diet of a lot
of different food groups unless you're instructed otherwise by your
personal physician. I don't want anyone to think we're endorsing
the strict diet that will come up in the second
story that we're telling today. UM, eat, eat which you
think is best for you. You know your body and
I don't. But this one seems very extreme to me. Yes. Uh,

(01:08):
folks may also be surprised to learn that it was
like a a weird diet food originally, because when I
first not something I associate with health foods at all,
and I don't think most people would. Yeah, but we're
going to start with the sweeter story. But the sweets
refer to the food. There are some slightly darker aspects
of this story. So here we go. Yea, So beyond

(01:32):
everything Holly just said, this first food we're talking about
is a little bit tricky because it's difficult to find
information on the person the dish is named for, even
though he's mentioned a lot. And this is relatively recent history,
so we're going to unravel as much of it as
we can. There's still a little bit of a gap,

(01:52):
and really the story veers off in some other directions. Anyway,
what we're talking about is Banana's Fosse stir. So if
you have been to New Orleans, you know that Brennan's
is a New Orleans dining icon at this point. Uh,
that restaurant went through some financial and legal issues in
the twenty teens. That family has kind of splintered apart

(02:13):
over the years, and had some disagreements. But there are
ten restaurants owned and operated by members of the Brennan
family in New Orleans today, and it all started on
Bourbon Street in nineteen six, although the main Brennan's location
relocated to Royal Street quite a while back. And while
you might think of New Orleans and associate it with
French or Cajun or Creole food traditions, all of which

(02:36):
you can absolutely sample at Brennan's, Owen Edward Brennan, who
first opened the restaurant, was actually an Irish American, although
he was born in New Orleans. Owen had enlisted his
younger sister Ella's help and some earlier restaurant ventures, and
when he bought out a restaurant called the Villa Kara
and turned it into Brennan's Via Kara, he had her

(02:58):
on staff in the French corp to restaurant as a manager,
and this was not always easy. Ella had helped her
brother out and other businesses, but management was a lot
more serious level of involvement. She really didn't have any experience.
She was only twenty one when she started there. According
to Ella Brennan's memoir quote, Owen fired me at least

(03:21):
three times that I recall, but Mom always made him
hire me back. It was like a bad comedy. And
in her memoir, Ella describes the moment her version of
how the bananas Foster dessert was invented. She wrote that
Owen came to her in the kitchen one morning and said, hey, kid,
we're having a dinner honoring our friend Richard. He's just

(03:42):
been appointed the chairman of the new Vice Commission, and
I would like to honor him with a newly created
dessert named for him, and I need it for tonight.
And though Ella told her brother that she was in
the middle of ordering liquor and revamping the breakfast menu
and she did not have time to invent a new dish,
he just up repeating the ask until she finally acquiesced

(04:03):
by saying, damn you, Owen. So then she recounts talking
to the major d Frank Bertucci, about this whole challenge.
She thought about how every other restaurant did cake for everything,
which she did not want to do, and then she
commented on how they had plenty of bananas. She thought
about how her mother made them for her for her

(04:23):
breakfast earlier on in the memoir, she recounted her favorite
childhood morning meal quote, My earliest food memory is of
her scrambled eggs and saute bananas. I just loved them.
Nellie stirred the eggs in a little bowl, poured them
into a pan sizzling with butter, stirred them again gently,

(04:44):
and slid them out while they were still very soft perfection.
Then she'd put a little brown sugar and cinnamon on bananas,
sliced lengthwise into quarters, turned them over in hot butter
until they were caramelized. Imagine what our kitchen smell like,
and serve them with the fluffy eggs. Nelly never could

(05:04):
have imagined what her handiwork and our home kitchen would
lead to. But let's just say that eggs and bananas
have been very good to our family. So Ella told
Frank Bertucci about her mom's breakfast bananas, and he also
noted that a competitor restaurant, Antoine's, had a flaming baked
Alaska that people just loved because of the flamba element

(05:27):
that was performed table side. And Ella thought they could
do the same with bananas, using rum and banana liqueur
for the fuel and then adding cinnamon to make it
sparkle in the flame in the dim dining room lights.
Then they thought about putting this warm banana flaming situation
over ice cream, and so by the time the dinner
that night had started, they were ready and that new dessert,

(05:50):
Bananas Foster, was born. So that's one version of the story.
The other is a bit simpler, and it contradicts Ella's version.
This goes that Owen, recognizing that New Orleans was basically
bursting with imported bananas, wanted to come up with a
dessert that would take advantage of all that banana availability,

(06:12):
so he asked his chef, Paul Blanche to come up
with something. There are some variations that suggests that Ella
and Paul worked together on it, and then, to add
a little more confusion to the mix, the name of
the restaurant shifting over time from View Kara to Brennan's
View Kara to just Brennan's, and some documentation that there

(06:32):
were also other name variations and a location move. That's
all led to some inconsistency in the reporting. It is
safe to say, though, that this was created at Owen
Brennan's restaurant in the early nineteen fifties. Yeah, I had
seen one account that said you'll see that it was
invented at Brennan's, but really it was invented at View

(06:55):
Kara when Owen Brennan owned it. It's like it's all
the same restaurant with his name shifts Um. Now, there
are two things that we have to revisit in this
story because they have some complexity. One is that availability
of bananas, and to that Vice Commission and Richard Foster's
place on it, because both of those created the scenario

(07:18):
that made bananas Foster happen. First, the bananas. Bananas weren't
really a common thing in the US until after the
Civil War. North America is not a place where bananas
typically grow, although today you can find banana groves in Florida.
Hawaii becoming a US state also changed the numbers quite

(07:40):
a bit, But even with Hawaii and Florida combined, the
US grows less than a single percent of the world's bananas.
We have them available all the time in the grocery store, though,
yep So. Starting in the eighteen seventies, bananas started arriving
in large quantities at US ports and New Orleans being

(08:00):
a southern port had a steady flow of bananas. Because
of New Orleans ports status, a lot of fruit companies
were headquartered in the city and the surrounding areas, and
one of those fruit companies, the Standard Fruit Company, was
loosely connected to the Brennan family through marriage. Owen and
Ella had siblings, and their brother, John, married into a

(08:22):
family that had a steak in Standard Fruit Company, and
for a while John started running a produce business in
the city. However, well before the now famous dessert was created,
Standard Fruit Company had a very aggressive competitor, and that
was Cuyammel Fruit Company, which became part of United Fruit Company.

(08:43):
Cuyammel was owned and operated by a man named Samuel
Za Murray who had immigrated first to Mobile, Alabama from
Russia and then moved to New Orleans. Sam had started
out by buying the fruit that had been on the
dock for too long as workers struggled to keep up
with this mass of influx of shipments. He would get
the fruit which was too ripe to just sit in

(09:05):
a restaurant pantry for long, for next to nothing, and
then would turn it around to sell it to the
public at a discount. Eventually, he had an entire network
of men selling fruit, and then as he saved up money,
he started buying land in Honduras for his own banana plantations.
And of course, most bananas hitting US ports were coming

(09:26):
from countries that we would call banana republic, so places
that depend economically on the export of natural resources and
are often deeply unstable from a political standpoint, largely because
US business interests were using their influence there to ensure
that their businesses thrived at the expense of the people
and workers who lived there. Honduras was the first nation

(09:49):
labeled a banana republic and was the primary banana exporter
in the world as of the nineteen thirties. Zu Murray,
who had ties to the CIA and the U. S
State Department, used his power and wealth to do things
like support military coups, install Manuel Banilla as president of Honduras,
and just generally to maximize exploitation of Latin American countries.

(10:12):
During his reign as the so called Banana King, Zamurray's
Cuiamel Fruit Company was bought out by United Fruit Company,
of which he became president. Eventually. His legacy is also
tied to the nineteen fifty for Guatemala cou that we
covered as a two parter in twenty nineteen. To be clear,

(10:34):
the Brennan family doesn't appear to have been directly involved
in this political maneuvering, and John didn't stay in the
produce business because he started working as a food buyer
for the restaurant. But bananas always being plentiful in the
kitchens of New Orleans restaurant during this time is something
that all ties directly back to US business interests actively

(10:56):
working in ways that were harmful in other countries that
they are doing business. And Standard Fruit Company eventually became
part of Dull Foods, and United Fruit Company was a
precursor to Chiquita. So coming up, we're going to talk
about the other part of New Orleans history that relates
to the Bananas Foster dish. But first we're gonna take
a quick sponsor break. So the next aspect of this

(11:28):
Bananas Foster story is a little bit trickier to get
details on, and that is Richard Foster, for whom the
dessert is named. New Orleans, like any big city, has crime,
and in the early nineteen fifties, a murder in the
French Quarter led to an effort to crack down on crime.
Robert Dunn, a tourist from Nashville, went out for a

(11:49):
day of partying on New Year's Eve leading into nineteen
fifty and after midnight he and his friends continued their
revelry and eventually they ended up at the Latin Quarter Club,
one of the many many bars on Bourbon Street, and
when a waiter was unable to resuscitate the intoxicated Done,
paramedics were called, but Done could not be revived and

(12:10):
he was pronounced dead at five oh five am. He
was initially believed to have had a heart attack that
was brought on from heavy drinking, but an autopsy revealed
that he had been poisoned with a sedative chloral hydrate
known as a mickey. Finn as In slipped him a mickey.
We might very well do an episode about where that
name comes from in the future, because it's a pretty

(12:31):
interesting story. Uh So, in this case, Done was sedated.
It was believed so that he could be mugged, but
the dose was too high and it killed him. This
death of a tourist catalyzed a whole movement to clean
up the French Quarter. This was a point where the area,
which was long considered to be unsavory, was seeing the
first pushes towards gentrification. Residents wanted city officials to make

(12:55):
the neighborhoods safe for them, and restaurants and clubs also
wanted to make sure that the tourism trade continued, so
they were pressuring city officials as well. Of course, this
kind of campaign usually comes with problems. Most gentrification efforts
in any city push out the very people who made
the neighborhood desirable in the first place, and there's almost

(13:17):
always a lot of bias and racism and classism involved.
This was definitely true for New Orleans in the early
nineteen fifties, when three committees were formed to investigate vice
and corruption. The first of these was the Mayor's Special
Citizens Committee for the View Carre the s c c

(13:39):
v C. In this case, View car A is another
name for the French Quarter, and it was not referencing
Owen Brennan's restaurants, although Brennan was involved in the committee
along with Richard R. Foster and several other business owners
from the quarter. Foster was a local businessman and a
civic activist who had long been troubled by the rising

(14:02):
crime in the French Quarter. He was unanimously elected chairman
of the sec VC because he had been advocating for
some sort of crime commission for several years at that point.
It's documented from at least so at least four to
five years. He was also a member of the Police
Advisory Board representing business owners in the French Quarter. Most

(14:24):
of the committee's recommendations involved removing quote shady characters from
the French Quarter. This meant investigating taxi drivers, sex workers,
anybody deemed to be deviant in their eyes, be girls,
which was short for bar girls, meaning young women who
were employed at the bars to socialize with men and

(14:46):
encourage them to purchase drinks. They were also under suspicion
The b girls were considered the most likely source of
the poison that had killed Robert Dunn. Homosexuals were not
called out specifically as one of the problems that the
committee sought to solve, but Foster and other committee members
very clearly held homophobic beliefs and wanted the Quarters gay

(15:09):
population to be pushed out as well. In the meeting
minutes for the committee from a March thirty one, nineteen
fifty discussion, Foster noted that gay men were quote congregating
in greater numbers in the quarter because New Orleans had
tolerated them while most other cities had not. There was
also a lot of targeting of women in general in

(15:30):
the committee's suggestions. At one point in their discussions, one
of the members pointed out that women bartenders were likely
to poison customers because they didn't make as much as men,
so they would be likely to resort to robbery of patrons.
There was a lot of bias to go around here. Yeah,
kind of anybody that wasn't a white male businessman was

(15:54):
like suspicious, Like they fell under that complete umbrella term
of being shady person. Two other committees were formed as
the determinations of Foster's group were reported. Those were the
Special Citizens Investigative Committee and the Committee on the Problem
of Sex Deviants, and the results of all of these
committees and their recommendations were pretty mixed. Some of the

(16:17):
ordinances drafted by these three committees were used by police
commissioners to advance their own careers, and they were often
used to justify raids on poor or marginalized areas. While
crimes attributed to various business owners not really pursued. If
you're wondering why these committees were drafting ordinances, because most
of the men that sat on them had businesses in

(16:38):
the quarter but also had law degrees, so they were
like ready to write law. Uh. We should also note
that one of the three committees formed in all of this,
the Special Citizens Investigating Committee, did uncover and expose a
lot of police corruption that ended up in a whole
other legal battle that's kind of secondary to this this story.

(16:59):
But even in cases where allegedly suspicious people, per their definitions,
were pushed out of the quarter, it was always temporary.
They there was always like a brief crackdown and then
things would kind of go back to the way they
were before. So all of this to say, bananas Foster
is delicious, but the atmosphere that was invented in had

(17:21):
plenty of problems, and some of those problems were related
to and even caused by the person the dish is
named for. It's more of a fun side note, so
we don't end on that down. Or if you're a
Disney person and you've ever eaten at Ralph Brennan's Jazz
Kitchen in Downtown Disney, Anaheim, you're eating at a restaurant
that's part of the whole Brennan legacy. Ralph Brennan is

(17:44):
John Brennan's son and is the current head of the
Ralph Brennan Restaurant group. Yeah, we can talk a little
bit about that and and the family uh in our
behind the scenes on Friday. But now it is time
for the next eponymous food and this one hasked to
start with a confession. I don't know, Tracy, if you
had this same issue, but I one dent thought that

(18:08):
Salisbury steak was named for some Duke of Salisbury. I
asked my husband. That's exactly the answer he gave as well.
And if you had asked me who was named for
in a trivia situation, that would have been the answer
you got. I don't know where, Brian, I got that notion. Well,
I think I might have thought it was named for
a place, maybe not a person, but like Salisbury Plain

(18:29):
where they eat kind of personal meat loaf. I was
definitely wrong. I was not correct about about the source
of the name at all. And I think a lot
of folks have some mental picture of where the name
comes from. That's like not the real one, not at all.
What it is. Uh. You probably don't think of Salisbury
steak is a health food, but that is exactly how

(18:49):
it was conceived. So let's talk about its namesake. Dr
James Henry Salisbury. James Salisbury was born on October twenty
three in Scott, New York. His parents were Nathan and
Lucretia Babcock Salisbury. The family was Welsh. Information about his
early life is pretty sparse, but we know he attended

(19:11):
the Homer Academy and then the Rensseler Polytechnic Institute. He
got his undergraduate degree in natural science in eighteen forty four.
Two years after he got his bachelor's degree, Salisbury was
hired as an assistant chemist at the New York Geological Society,
and he also, in addition to having a full time job,
pursued additional higher education degrees. He went on to Albany

(19:35):
Medical College for his m d. And he started studying
germs while he was in medical school, and he was
very fascinated by them. He later wrote quote, in eighteen
forty nine, I began the study of germ diseases. Those
of plants first occupied my attention, afterwards those in animals
and in man. And he also got promoted while he

(19:55):
was getting his medical degree to the position of principal Chemist.
We've covered germ theory on various episodes of the podcast before,
so you may have correctly thought that the late eighteen
forties was a pretty early time to be studying germs.
Salisbury was kind of a loner among his peers. His
fascination with the idea that germs were the cause of

(20:18):
disease is said to have gained him a fair amount
of criticism from other people. Yeah, it's kind of like,
why aren't you just treating your patients? Why do you
want to look through a microscope. In eighteen fifty two,
Salisbury left his job at the Geological Society so that
he could move to Sconnected in New York and attend
Union College for a master's degree. He supported himself during

(20:40):
this time by teaching chemistry at the New York Normal
School that was located about twenty miles away in Albany.
Once he had finished his master's program, he started a
private practice and he worked on his own research projects.
Dr Salisbury was ahead of his time in a number
of ways, and was studying diphtheria well before were most

(21:00):
others in his field. Diph THEORYA had only been named
by French physician Pierre Bret No. About twenty five years before.
It would be several more decades before the bacterium that
causes diph theoria would be identified and named, so Salisbury
was doing research with his microscope into it in the
very early stages of understanding this infection. He also studied

(21:24):
other medical subjects through the microscope and including measles, and
he researched alimentation, meaning how people gained nourishment, and Salisbury
started to really focus on the relation between nutrition and
disease or health. He had been from the beginning of
his private practice frustrated at the state of medicine and

(21:45):
its lack of understanding regarding the cause and effective disease.
He wrote quote, I was immediately and forcibly struck by
the almost entire want of medical knowledge in regard to
the true causes of disease, and by the consequent uns
certainty that must and did exist as to the means
of combating and curing pathological states. This uncertainty hampered me

(22:08):
at each step of my practice. The art of therapeutics
was a chaos whose sole order consisted in dealing with
established pathological conditions as though they were the disease itself
rather than what they actually were viz. Consequences based upon
antecedent and obscure states arriving from an unknown cause. The
grim list of so called incurable diseases and their steadily

(22:31):
increasing death rates riveted my attention and fascinated my thought.
I attained an entire conviction that they must be curable,
that since abnormal conditions could be established in previously healthy organisms,
their causation must be discoverable, and that the mind of
man must be endowed with sufficient power to trace the

(22:51):
interlinked sequence of diseases back to their primary source. I
determined to accomplish this discovery if possible, before my exit
from this world. We'll dive into the ways that James
Salisbury experimented with his ideas regarding food and health after
we hear from some of the sponsors that keep Stuffy

(23:12):
miss in history class. Going according to his own account,
starting in eighteen fifty four, Salisbury started experimenting with his diets,
starting with quote, living exclusively upon one food at a time.

(23:35):
I'm going to confess this brings out like my inner
seven year old of giggles because he started with baked beans,
and this one exactly as well as you might expect.
Within three days, he wrote that he experienced flatulence, constipation, dizziness,
ringing years, prickly limbs, and mental fog. He examined a

(23:55):
sample of his stool under the microscope and discovered that
quote the Ean food did not digest. He then noted
that the beans fermented and filled the digestive tract with yeast,
carbon dioxide, alcohol, and acetic acid. He continued these experiments
with his own diet until September eighteen fifty six. Then

(24:16):
he expanded his research and got six men to come
to live with him while they two eight only baked beans,
and he recorded the results. Does not sound like it
would have been a pleasant place to be during this experiment,
seven men all eating nothing but baked me. Then he

(24:39):
had another test group of four. After that he ate
nothing but porridge for thirty days, and then he tested
various limited diets using two thousand hogs. Unlike humans, though,
he took the hog experiments to extremes, seeing what level
of malnourishment and subsequent diseases would result in their deaths. Somehow,

(25:02):
even though he was eating experimental diets that often gave
him terrible gas. Salsbury managed to get married to a
woman named Clara Brazzie in eighteen sixty. She was twenty
five at the time, and the couple had three children, Alice, Mary,
and Trafford. Although Alice did not live to adulthood, she
died at the age of five. When the US Civil

(25:22):
War began, Salisbury cared for Union soldiers and he continued
his testing. In most cases, he was dealing with soldiers
who weren't able to fight because of chronic intestinal issues
and diarrhea, so he started to develop a program that
seemed to work fairly well for them. He was actually
feeding them a very low fiber and high protein diet,

(25:42):
which does help slow people's digestion. He just didn't quite
realize that was the mechanism that was at play. We
will talk about his thoughts on an ideal diet in
just a moment. So after the Civil War ended, Salisbury
moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and there he founded the Charity
Hospital Metical College and was a lecturer there on numerous topics,

(26:03):
and he continued his research into diet, digestion, and health,
and he was doing this work because he really felt
that if he could identify a dietary cause for the
various diseases he was studying, that he could work out
a dietary cure as well. And it took him a
long time to feel that he had enough data to
publish almost three decades and the resulting book of the

(26:26):
Relation of Alimentation and Disease, released in has essentially the
same diet for treating most ailments. That is, red meat,
as in, we should be eating a lot of it,
and in a specific preparation which Salisbury called muscle pulp
of beef. Salisbury had come to the conclusion that toxins

(26:47):
that the human body produced while trying to digest vegetables
were the cause of many many diseases, ranging from heart
disease to mental illness. His basic description of meat as
a health food is lengthy but also very detailed, So
we're going to read the whole thing. It goes like
this quote, eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made

(27:09):
into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free
as possible from connective glue or tissue fat and cartilage.
The American chopper answers very well for separating the connective tissue,
this being driven down in front of the knife to
the bottom of the board. In chopping, the beef should
not be stirred up in the chopper, but the muscle

(27:31):
pulp should be scraped off with a spoon at intervals
during the chopping. At the end of the chopping, the
fibrous tissue of the meat, the portion which makes up
fibrous gross all lies on the bottom board of the chopper.
This may be utilized as soup meat for well people.
Previous to chopping, the fat, bones, tendons, and fascis should

(27:55):
all be cut away, and the lean muscle cut up
in pieces and enter two square steaks cut through the
center of the round or the richest and best For
this purpose, beef should be procured from well fatted animals
that are from four to six years old. The pulp
should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling or

(28:15):
it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold
it together. Make the cakes from half an inch two
an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire,
free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on
a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper,
and salt. Use either worcestershire or halford sauce, mustard, horseradish,

(28:39):
or lemon juice on the meat. If desired, celery may
be moderately used as a relish. No other meat should
be allowed until the stomach becomes clean, the urine uniformly
clear and free standing at a density of from one
point zero one five to one point zero to zero.

(29:01):
Very detailed, so a quick note there. The American chopper
that he refers to is a device that was essentially
a hand cranked meat grinder for home use. There were
a few different versions of these, but most could be
affixed to a countertop with a clamp that was part
of it. It was kind of like a built in
sea clamp. And then you dropped meat into the cup
shaped top of the grinder and turned the crank and

(29:23):
the meat went through this grinder and then came out
the side where you would have a receptacle like a
bowl waiting to catch it. If you want a visual
of what this is. One of the most popular models
came out actually a few years after Salisbury's book. It
was called the Universal Food Chopper. An image search with
that phrase will pop plenty of pictures right up for you.
There were variations on the diet depending on the illness

(29:46):
being treated, and Salisbury didn't expect people to only live
on beef with a celery garnished forever. For a consumption,
he allowed for bread, but meals should be one part
bread to every four to six parts beef. No fruits
or vegetables, no beans, no sweets, no vinegar. For diabetes,
Salisbury recommended meat only for five to six weeks, then

(30:08):
the patient was allowed one mouthful of bread at each meal,
slowly increasing over time, if and only if they're urine
state out of specific density. For patients with uterine fibroids
or ovarian tumors, all meat until the tumors shrank away,
and then some bread and other meats, then slowly other foods.

(30:30):
He estimated the process to quote remove fibrous diseases thoroughly
would take one to three years of this diet. Treating
other ailments involved a very similar degree of limited diet,
and when Salisbury's book came out, it was very popular.
So many people started trying his meat pulp diet that
it is often called the first diet craze. So if

(30:52):
you think diets like ultra low carb be eating or
new not even close. Even before the Relation of Alimentation
and diseases was published, the doctor's quote meat pulp was
known among other physicians, and it was already being called
Salisbury steak. An article that was syndicated across the US
in March of eighteen eighty five. Read quote Salisbury steak

(31:14):
appears to be giving remarkably good results as a diet
for people troubled with weak or disordered digestion but who
require the supporting power of animal food. The write up
goes on to describe the preparation method, but it doesn't
mention James Salisbury. Instead, it references Dr Hepburn of Philadelphia,

(31:34):
who described to a reporter how to prepare it. An
article in the New York Medical Times the following year,
which was still two years before Salisbury's book, states quote,
A little salt and pepper and a small amount of
butter added make a knot at all unpalatable dish, and
one which contains all the strength of the beef, with

(31:55):
the tough indigestible portion entirely separated. This diet is used
exclusively in chronic cases by physicians professing to treat according
to the Salisbury method. They used but few drugs and
what they use are mainly tonics. So Salisbury had fans
in the medical community before the public at large had

(32:15):
access to this complete method that he described in the book.
The Salisbury diet gained even wider recognition when a woman
named Elma Stewart wrote of its many virtues in her
book What Must I Do to Get Well? And How
Can I Keep So? She wrote that ten years after
the relation of alimentation and disease, and she claimed that

(32:36):
Salisbury's diet of minced beef patties and hot water had
cured her of disease, and her endorsement had made the
diet even more popular for a while, until it kind
of fizzled out as a fad as people realize that
it was not enjoyable or often feasible to eat one
thing forever. Throughout his professional life, Salisbury was actively engaged

(32:57):
with his colleagues in the medical community and it into teaching.
He was president of the Institute of Microbiology and was
a member of many scientific societies. After the publication of
his book, he lived for another seventeen years and died
on September twenty three, nineteen o five, at the age
of eighty two. His wife, Clara died six weeks later

(33:18):
on November two. Eponymous foods Now, we know it's not
a duke of Salsburry. So UM. Sometimes we get we
get emails from folks who say, I am trying to
find your episode on X, and I cannot find it
anywhere and we have no episode on X. The person

(33:39):
has confused us with another podcast they also listened to.
So when I was reading this outline, I was like,
maintenance Phase just talked about this guy. In fact, the
podcast saw Bones, a totally different show with a totally
different pair of posts and approach talked about this not recently,

(33:59):
but in something like UM, I had no idea, yeah,
and that that was when I learned, um that there
there was not a dish unique to a place called Salisbury. Um.
Do you have some listener mail before we close out today?

(34:21):
I do. This is from our listener Christine, who wrote
us about Wigia boards and dowsing. Uh. Christine writes, I've
listened to y'all for years and sent you a couple
of animal photos during quarantine since I finally had some
extra time to do all the things I'd been meaning
to do. After listening to your Wigia boards episode, I
actually have some possibly intelligent related comments and questions in

(34:43):
your research on wigia history and dividing boards in general.
Did you happen to find many mentions or crossover with
the practice of dowsing finding underground water with sticks traditionally.
I moved from l A to rural Vermont right before
the pandemic started and somehow ended up working at the
Americans Idea of Dowser's Headquarters, which has been in Danville,
Vermont since nineteen sixty one. Although I had heard of

(35:06):
dowsing mentioned in historical homesteading context, I had no idea
it was something that was still practiced enough to warrant
an entire society. In the two years I've been working here,
I have learned a lot about the practice and cultural
of dowsing, although I still have a lot of skepticism.
I am a very fact based person. So how I
ended up here listening to a woman tell me about
how her ex husband is projecting his mind into the

(35:29):
body of a fly to spy on her at night.
I have no idea, but what I have learned about.
It seems to me to be very closely related to
the concept behind the act of using a weigia board.
In the traditional sense. Dowsing for water is based on
the concept that humans can sense water with their subconscious mind,
and micro movements in the hand caused the sticks to

(35:49):
move when you're over that water source. It seems an
awful lot like the unconscious micro movements that cause a
divining board plan chet to move. Yet dowser seemed to
really be disdainful to wear such a comparison. And while
tarot reraicky pendulum and board divining and even scrying are
also coming back into fashion, dowsing is almost never included
as a divining method. Maybe it's because dowsing is more

(36:12):
closely associated with old farmers and suspenders than sexy witches. Anyway,
all of that is to ask, have you found references
to dowsers in your research travels? While this big old
farmhouse is a treasure trove of the history of colonizer
dowsing in the region, the history beyond that seems to
be obscure. The president of the society actually asked me
the other day why it's called dowsing and the best

(36:34):
I can find is that it's also a nautical term
for towing something on a line, but it's more likely
to be a corruption of a foreign word. However, I
still can't find anything about it. We do have some
reprints here of translated books printed in the seventeen hundreds
in Europe about the practice, but it's not well recorded
and is mostly apocryphal. Any who just thought i'd ask,
because I'm not really finding answers, and currently I am

(36:57):
the only employee in this big, spooky farmhouse and all
the members of the board of trustees are out of
state for a pet tax. Here are photos of some
of my current herd of seven cats, one dog, five
guinea pigs, three tar Angela's, and one grass fighter I
brought inside, who was apparently expecting because she made an
egg sack, and now I have twenty to thirty baby
grass fighters running around. Cats are Cowboy and Little Charlie.

(37:18):
Onions dog is Rico, pigs are Lenny and carl and
the tarantula is Professor Puppy Breath. Thank you for taking
the time to read my dissertation, and I hope you
and yours have a wonderful holiday season. Please let me
know if you would like some dowsing round recommendations. Um, okay,
these pet pictures. The dog is amazing, the guinea pigs amazing,
the cats are adorable. And I think I might be

(37:39):
the only person, but I love tarantulas and I think
they're very cute. So I really appreciated that as a
pet picture because no one sends those. Um, thank you
for taking in your spider and giving a home to
her babies. UM. Here's the thing with dowsing. I didn't
run up against it a lot, in part because I
was not looking for it right. Like when we're doing

(38:01):
research on anything that is related to many other things,
sometimes you come up next to a thing and you
kind of have to be like, that is not my
lane and put on a blinder to it. Um. So
if dowsing came up, I probably wasn't cognizantly engaging with it.
I do think you're onto something that people it's not
even that um, people associate it with farmers instead of witches.

(38:25):
But I do think you're onto something that people associate
it more with, like one of those skills that like
a person who works in agriculture needs it could develop
that is less about paranormalism and more about knowing the
environment really well, that's my guess, but I don't know.
All I hear is Tom Waits in my head going,

(38:47):
and that's all I get. Just think about Tom Waits. Um.
I mean, who doesn't want to do that? But yeah,
it's very interesting. I haven't really researched it. I don't
know if it would ever pop up it. I think
you might be the person to do that research because
you have probably access to things we would never even
be able to find, which is pretty cool. And I

(39:09):
love that there is a place that is devoted to it. Still, Um, yeah,
I will say in my head, I think if it
as something it has been characterized as kind of paranormal,
but I really do think of it as like a
little more scientific, which is maybe incorrect. But you know
the way that like a farmer's almanac can predict the
weather very very well. I think of it in that

(39:31):
same kind of thing, right, Like it's just it's it's
experiential knowledge that gets passed down and some people naturally
into it it better than others. But again just guessing,
just guessing. Um, he would like to write to us,
you can do so We're at History podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social

(39:52):
media at missed in History and if you would like
to subscribe to the podcast and haven't gotten around to
it yet, now is the time. You can do that
on the i heart Dio app, or anywhere you listen
to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts

(40:12):
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app,
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