September 13, 2021 • 32 mins
Lots of foods are named after people, but sometimes the stories of those names are hard to pin down. This episode looks at where Granny Smith apples, nachos, and the Cobb salads get their names.
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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, Tracy Yeah,
and listeners. I am clearly on a roller coaster cycle
(00:22):
of like super Downer episode, light and Fun episode, Super
Downer episode, Light and Fun episode. I'm sorry, I don't
know what's going on. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I think I because of where we're all at mentally,
and like evolution did not prepare us to deal with
the ongoing kind of stress of a pandemic, my brain
(00:43):
is very much gravitating towards a lot of dark things
in a not bad way. I am fine, but I
always have had that proclivity and it's kind of augmented now.
But then I always feel like, oh, I gotta bounce
back by doing something late and thankfully today we are
on a light wek um and it is about one
of our favorite subjects. That means this is a food episode.
(01:05):
I can't even describe the weird circumstance that happened, but
through this complete happenstance, I saw a reference to a
food that was named for someone recently, and then I
found myself wondering if that had been a real person.
I have a whole secondary thing with it that I'll
talk about in the behind the scenes, and if it
was a real person, who that real person was? And
(01:26):
then soon I was down this eponymous foods rabbit hole
and it was very, very fun. So, uh, if Tracy
and everyone else will come along with people will explore
three of these foods. But I feel like this could
be the start of a a recurrent theme. As anybody
knows from any episode on food that we have done before,
(01:48):
they're often a lot of fuzzy details and variations on
origin stories. That's often just how it happens when there's
sort of a culinary accident or an experiment that turns
out well. It's not always doc event and carefully so,
I have tried to capture all of the most popular
versions of any of these origin stories or note when
things have differed significantly. So grab a snack and we
(02:10):
will dive right in. We're going to start with one
of the world's most popular varieties of fruit, and to
tell that fruit story, we have to talk about Maria
Anne Sherwood. Maria Anne Sherwood was born in seventeen nine
and Peasmarsh, Sussex, England. Her father, John Sherwood, was a laborer,
Her mother was Hannah Wright Sherwood, and Marie was baptized
(02:32):
on January eighteen hundred at St Peter and St Paul
Church in the same rural community where she was born.
As she grew up, she didn't really receive much in
the way of a formal education, but she did learn
about farming through her parents and she worked as a
farm laborer just as they did. At the age of nineteen,
Maria got married to another farm laborer named Thomas Smith,
(02:54):
who was her same age. Their wedding was held in Ebony,
Kent at the parish church on August eight, eight nineteen.
Since neither Maria nor Thomas could write, they both signed
their wedding paperwork with a mark. The newlyweds settled in
Beckley and East Sussex, which is where Thomas had grown up,
and they started their family there. They had a total
of eight children over the course of the next nineteen years,
(03:17):
although three of those children died as infants. In eighteen
thirty eight, Maria and Thomas made a huge change. They
set sail for Australia and as part of what's often
called the bounty scheme. In the decades leading up to
the eighteen forties, Britain had gone through a series of
events that had led to a lot of economic distress.
(03:38):
There was the US were of Independence, the French Revolution,
and a subsequent war with France. All of that had
been extremely costly. There was also an agricultural crisis and
a food shortage as a series of harvests failed. As
the industrial age started, a workforce that was already flooded
with men who had served in the war saw shrinking
(04:01):
job numbers and the rise of workhouses, and one of
the ways that was proposed to deal with these problems
was a scheme that would take some of those tradesmen
and agricultural laborers and send them to the New South
Wales colony in Australia to both relieve the conditions in
England and create infrastructure and a food system for that
new colony. The rules of that program changed over the years,
(04:25):
but by the time the Smiths were recruited, any settler
who was already in New South Wales who wanted labor
for their enterprise could pay agents in Britain to recruit
skilled emigrants and then have them as employees when they
arrived in Australia, provided they passed inspection. All of this
is a very abbreviated version of a much bigger and
(04:46):
very complex topic. We are just introducing it here to
explain exactly how this farm family from East Sussex picked
up their lives and moved to the other side of
the world. While a lot of the scholarship on the
bounty scheme suggest us that in a lot of the
cases the people being shipped to New South Wales were
not really up to snuff in terms of work experience,
(05:07):
the program rarely accepted families. The Smiths were both knowledgeable
and farm practice and had five children. There was Thomas
age sixteen, Stephen age thirteen, Charles age eight, Sarah who
was six, and then one year old Maria Ann. They
all made the journey together and they're reported as traveling
aboard the Lady Nugent. They arrived in Sydney, Australia on
(05:30):
November eight. Yeah, the Lady Nugent has its own whole
history as like a prison ship for a while and
then um as an immigration ship later, but once Maria
and Thomas had made it to their destination, and they
all made it more or less intact. Thomas sought out
work and found it in a district which is charmingly
called Kissing Point. That's in an area called RDE that's
(05:52):
a suburb of Sydney, and the draw to Kissing Point
was its fruit production. Thomas was able to harley his
years of farming experience and knowledge to get a job
with an established fruit grower making five pounds per year,
and the Smith's family made Ride their permanent home. Maria
had one more child after they had settled in New
(06:13):
South Wales. That was a son named William, who was
born several years after they had moved in May of
eighteen forty two. Maria's husband, Thomas may also have taken
on a side job working for Major Edward Darville on
his estate. That information has been relaid through family stories though,
and it's not documented, so it's not totally clear. But
Thomas Smith did save up money over the years, and
(06:35):
in the eighteen fifties he was able to purchase two
parcels of land that were adjacent to the field of
mars Common in Ride. The field of mars Common was
land that had been set aside as a public space
in eighteen o four, so that meant that the Smith's
new orchard property, which is about twenty four acres, was
right next to undeveloped space. In eighteen seventy four. A
(06:57):
significant portion of the Field of Mars Common was cleared
and sold off as farms and homes after the passage
of the Field of Mars Resumption Act, but part of
it remains undeveloped as a wildlife refuge. The area in
which the Smith orchards were cultivated is now known as Eastwood,
and the first of the apples, which we would now
(07:18):
know as Granny Smith, were said to have been discovered
by Maria, having sprung up quite by accident. In the
Perth Sunday Times, a story appeared on November two titled
the Granny Smith Apple the Story of its Origin, and
this actually recounts a story that had already appeared in
a much smaller publication called Farmer and Settler, and they
(07:41):
ran a version of the piece in June of that year.
The Farmer and Settler right up is the first known
account of the origin of the apple in print, and
it was the work of writer H. J. Rumsey, who
in his research, interviewed two men who had known Maria
Smith when she was alive. The two gentlemen where fruit
grower E. H. Small and Harry Johnston. According to Mr
(08:03):
Small's story, Maria had taken some gin cases home from
the Sydney markets and there had been some Tasmanian grown
apples in them. She referred to these as French crabs,
and those fruits were rotting, so she dumped them out
near the creek on the Smith property. But then sometime
later She's found a small apple seedling growing among the
(08:24):
ferns by the creek and it was producing fruit. This
was an apple that was different for many that she
was familiar with. And remember, this isn't like a person
who is not knowledgeable about fruit, so she was like,
this is something unique. Maria, who had come to be
known among locals as Granny as she aged as kind
of a sweet nickname, wanted to get the opinions of
(08:46):
other fruit experts about this seedling and its fruit, so
she called in E. H. Small's father, who was also
an expert orchardist. E H was just a boy of
twelve at the time, but he went with his father
and Mrs Smith to examine this seedlinging, and as a
boy tasted one of the seedlings apples himself, he declared
it delicious. After consulting with Small, Maria decided that she
(09:08):
would start cultivating the trees, but she only had a
couple of years to do so before she died. So
a couple of notes on apples and their propagation. Almost
all apples require cross pollination. That means they have to
be pollinated with pollen from a different apple species to
produce fruit. The Granny Smith apple as we know it
(09:28):
today is an exception. It can self pollinate, although it
normally produces a better result if it's cross pollinated. But
it's obviously different from a crab apple, which is what
Maria Smith had dumped out. Crab apples are just really
small apples, and the French crabs that she mentioned are
a type that's often used for jellies and jams, So
(09:49):
it seems most likely that the seeds from those French
crabs had grown into trees that were pollinated with pollen
from some other tree nearby. This is an area that
was known for its fruit, including many orchards. The resulting
fruit produced seeds that eventually became this new apple tree
that Maria Smith found in the ferns. None of the
(10:10):
accounts of Maria Seedling have any dates or timelines mentioned
between when she dumped out the rotted crab apples and
when she found this new tree. So there's this there's
some guesswork here. Yeah. There was even one right up
about it that I read that said there's a little
bit of a mystery because in one account she had
(10:30):
suggested that the land had been cleared in between the
time that she had dumped those rotted French crabs and
when she found this tree. So it's a little like, well, then,
how how did this happen? But it does bear enough
resemblance to to a French crab apple that people still
think that's the origin point that then got cross pollinated
(10:51):
with another species of apple. Maria Smith died on March nine,
and her husband, Thomas died six years later. Orchardist Edward Gallard,
who was a friend of the family, bought part of
the family property from their surviving children, and he continued
to cultivate Granny Smith apples until his death in the
nineteen teens. Those tart apples had the characteristics that continue
(11:14):
to make them popular today. They had an excellent resilience
in baking so they don't disintegrate, and an acidity that
accentuates sweet flavors. Although it actually was not initially recognized
for its excellence in dessert baking, it was used for
cooking things that were not so sweet At first. Gallard
and other orchardists in New South Wales continued to cultivate
(11:35):
the apple trees that Maria Smith first discovered as an
accidental seedling. In the early eighteen nineties. Fruits produced by
the Granny Smith trees were starting to win prizes in Australia,
particularly as a cooking apple, and in Granny Smith apple
trees are planted in large numbers that the Bath Frost
Experiment Farm that was part of Australia's still new Department
(11:57):
of Agriculture. The apples were all so part of the
list of fruits suitable for export that the Department of
Agriculture compiled in and the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales,
which came out in August of the Granny Smith apple
is referenced by that name in a section titled Fruits
to Export and how to Export Them. It had this
(12:19):
brief descriptor quote. Granny Smith's seedling, a New South Wales
seedling raised from seed of the French crab near Ride
on the Paramatta River. One of the things that helped
the Granny Smith apple secure its position of popularity around
the globe, it's just how sturdy it is. That firmness
of the fruit that makes it great for baking, also
(12:40):
makes it pretty easy to transport compared to some other
softer apples. And that's also thanks to a relatively thick skin,
so it stays marketable for longer and shipping. But as
it shipped around the world from New South Wales, it
also of course started to be cultivated on new continents.
In the nineteen thirties, European grow started introducing it into
(13:01):
their orchard and then in the nineties seventies it finally
became popular in North America. Today, there's a Granny Smith
Memorial Park on the eastwood Land that was once the
southern boundary of the Smith orchard. There's a playground area,
a wide open green space for playing in a monument
placed there by the New South Wales by Centennial Council.
Coming up, we are going to talk about one of
(13:23):
the simplest and most delicious dishes known to humankind. There's
gonna be some cheese, but before we do that, we
will have a quick sponsor break. Alrighty, the next person
that we are talking about is Ignacio Anaya. If you're
(13:46):
scratching your head wondering what food is named after him,
we will only need to remind you that the nickname
for Ignacio is Nacho. That is right. Nacho's have a
traceable lineage, and they were named for their creator. And
while they seem like they us have been around forever,
and we'll talk a little bit about that. Uh, Nacho's
as we know them, are not that old. Just to
(14:07):
avoid confusion, even though Ignacio did go by Naco most
of the time, We're mostly going to refer to him
by his given name rather than his nickname, just so
that we don't constantly say Nacho over and over and over.
Ignacio and I I was born in San Carlos, Chihuahua, Mexico,
on August. His parents died when he was very young,
(14:30):
and he was raised by a foster mother. One of
the memories about her that and I would recount later
in his life was that she often made him Cassidas,
which he loved. Andia had a number of jobs in
his early life, and he lived in a few different places,
but eventually he ended up working at a restaurant in
Piedro's Nigres, Mexico, called the Victory Club for reference. Piedro's
(14:53):
Negres is about one fifty miles west of San Antonio, Texas,
and it is just a short jump across the US
Mexico border from Eagle Pass, Texas. Ignacio had worked as
a waiter over the years, but he was the restaurant's
maitre d by the time he created his now famous snack.
One afternoon in ninety three, he was working in the
(15:13):
restaurant in the time in between the lunch and dinner service,
and several wives of officers from Eagle Pass came in.
The story has been told a number of different ways.
In one version and I told the press that after
several rounds of drinks, these four ladies asked for some
fried tortillas, and as he explained, quote, well, since no
(15:34):
one was in the kitchen for about an hour, I
went in slice of tortilla and four pieces, put some
cheese and a slice of hallepenia on top. And stuck
it in the oven for a few minutes. That cheese
was reported as Wisconsin cheddar, and the hallapenos are pickled.
So that story has appeared in print in a lot
of different ways, with various changes to the details. In
(15:55):
two thousand two, Anaya's son, Ignacio and Iya Jr. Said
that one of his father's regular customers, a woman named
Mami Finance, came in with a larger group of friends
tend to twelve women who were officers wives from Fort
Duncan Air Base. You may also run across versions that
tell this story as being about soldiers from the base,
but the ones that are closer to the source all
(16:17):
mentioned women, even though the numbers change a little bit.
According to Ignacio Anaya Jr. It was Mamie fine And
who started touting this dish to her friends, And one
version she had asked Ignacio what he called this snack,
which she and her friends just loved, because who doesn't.
He told her they were Nacho's special or nachos special,
(16:39):
And another version of this story, it was fine And
who started calling them nachos special. Either way, though she
started talking them up to other people. Soon Nacho's Especial
appeared on the menu at the Victory Club. In some
versions of the story, Ignacio worked at the Victory Club
for almost twenty more years until it closed in nine,
but he has also often said to have worked at
(17:01):
another restaurant called the Maderno for a period of time
after the Victory Club and shared his nachos special recipe there.
Some quotes even placed the moment of invention at the
Maderno and not at the Victory Club, sometimes when they
have interviewed the same person just years apart. In nineteen
fifty four, a cookbook published by the Eagle Past Church
(17:23):
of the Redeemer called Saint Ann's Cookbook contained the first
printed recipe for Nacho's especials that included the story of
their invention. Not long after the Victory Club closed in
nineteen sixty one, Ignacio went into business for himself and
opened up Nacho's Restaurant on hwifty seven, just a couple
of miles from the bridge that connected Eagle Pass and
(17:46):
Piedras Nigress. In nineteen sixty nine, the San Antonio Express
and News interviewed a n i Am and printed a
story about how even though he had invented what had
become an incredibly popular dish over the twenty six years
since he threw it together. That afternoon, he had not
actually made any money off of it. Ignacio gave a
quote to reporter Bill Salter saying, quote, the only man
(18:08):
who's making money on nachos is the man who's selling
cheese and hallapenos. Ania also told Salter that a friend
who was a lawyer had offered to help him patent
his dish, but that Anya had turned him down, saying quote,
I didn't go with him or want to do it.
I thought it would be too much trouble. But of
course then I didn't know how popular they were going
to become. This is a little different from what his
(18:31):
son reported years later and Ignacio Junior's version he had
reached out to a lawyer to try to help his
dad secure some kind of legal claim to Nacho's telling
a reporter in two thousand to quote, I talked to
a lawyer in San Antonio. He said, there's not much
you can do after seventeen years, it's in the public domain.
Although he recognized that another path might have given him
(18:53):
more income, Ignaia Sr. Said that he would be just
as happy with lots of customers at his restaurant. Unfort
sly Later that same year, Operation Intercept caused some very
real problems for Anaia and other businesses in Piedro Negras.
Operation Intercept was a Nixon initiative that was intended to
stop the movement of marijuana from Mexico into the US
(19:14):
through spot checks at border crossing points. Even though the
bridge from Eagle Pass to Piedro's Negres experienced only minimal slowdowns,
as part of this whole initiative, there were a lot
of news stories about hours long waits at other points
along the border, and that caused a lot of people
who would kind of do day tourism trips to Piedro's
Negros uh to stop making that trip to Nacho's restaurant.
(19:38):
Ignacio reported that there were days of the restaurant had
no patrons whatsoever, but due to lack of results from
that program, it did not last long. Operation Intercept ended
after just a few weeks. Ignacio died in nineteen seventy five.
His wife had died nine years before he did, That
was in nineteen sixty six. They had raised nine children together,
(19:59):
and it wasn't until twenty years later in that Piedras
Negras Mexico declared October twenty one as International Day of
the Nacho. They also honored Ignacio and i A with
a bronze plaque. This declaration and honor were to some
degree an effort to stake a claim to the invention
of nachos on the part of the Tourism Board of
(20:22):
the State of Kawahila. Naturally, a dish as popular as
nacho's has some other claims to the origin, and even
people who say that melted cheese on tortillas has just
been a part of Mexican cuisine for way longer than
sixty years. Yeah, there are even some quotes that you
can find from Ignacio Anaia saying essentially the same thing,
like I didn't patent it because it's just cheese on tortillas.
(20:45):
Everybody does that um. Ignacio's son, Ignacio Jr. Often served
as a judge at the annual nacho competition that was
part of a three day festival Piedro's Nigras started holding
every year around International Day of the Nacho. Although he
sampled nachos topped with all kinds of different ingredients over
the years, including caviare uh, he always loved the simple
(21:07):
version that his dad created the best, although he did
at one point mentioned to a reporter that nachos would
beef for chicken and guacamole made for a pretty tasty meal.
Of course, nacho's have evolved since this origin. Point. You
might be thinking of the version with a cheese sauce
rather than melted cheese, wondering where that comes from. That's
thanks to a man named Frank Liberto. He was CEO
(21:30):
of Rico's Products Company, which specializes still in concession foods.
Liberto introduced nachos with a pompable cheese sauce in Arlington's
Stadium in n and then, after a slow start, this
version caught on with food distributors, in part because they
found that nachos drove drink sales up. People balance the
(21:51):
spice of the jalapenos, and I would argue also the
saltiness of the chips. I was thinking too that the
salt was probably a factor there. Um, Okay, we have
got one more eponymous food story to cover, but before
we do, we're gonna pause for a word from stuff
you missed in history classes. Sponsors. So this last one
(22:19):
that we're going to talk about is a story that
has two very different dates attached to it, but both
of those dates relate back to the man for whom
the dish was named and the same location. So we're
going to talk about both of the ways the Cops
Salad is said to have come into existence, and then
the many variations on the second version of the story.
So the Cops Salad is also associated with the famous
(22:42):
Los Angeles restaurant chain, The Brown Derby, which operated from
the original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard across from the
Ambassador Hotel. Was built in the shape of a Derby
hat with a sign on top of it that read
eat in the Hat, and from the very beginning it
was a popular spot with screen stars. Everybody from Mary
(23:05):
Pickford to Charlie Chaplin was known to eat there. The
Derby moved down the street in nineteen thirty seven, and
not just in name, the actual building was picked up
and moved down the block and then renovated in the
process so that it had more seating space because the
original one was quite small. In the meantime, another Brown
Derby had opened on the corner of Hollywood and Vine
(23:25):
in ninety nine, and that Hollywood location was even more
popular with actors because of how close it was to
the studios. In one a location was added to the
corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, and then another
was open in Las Felis, and each of these locations
has its own story in its own connection to Hollywood
and Los Angeles history. Robert Cobb was born in eighteen
(23:49):
ninety nine, and there's not exactly a wealth of information
about his early years, but by the time he was
in his mid twenties, he was working alongside director Herbert K.
Somborne and screenwriter Wilson Meisner and their new restaurant venture,
and he was a co owner. And the story of
the salad falls from a couple of different places on
(24:11):
the timeline, sometimes starting all the way back to the
very early days. Perhaps the least favored version of the
Cobb Salads origins is that it was created at the
opening of the Hollywood Brown Derby by executive chef Robert
Crease in honor of the owner. That makes a lot
of logistical sense. That's probably why it's the least favored version.
(24:33):
It's not very full of you know, um puff or story.
The more popular version is a lot more colorful, so
that version of the stories that's the scene in N seven,
and even this one story has some branching variations. The
least showy version of this one is that around midnight,
(24:54):
after a full day of work and without stopping to eat,
Bob Cobb was ravenous, so the head chef at the time,
Paul J. Posti, created a salad with basically what they
still had on hand after the end of the whole
dinner shift, and then he offered that to his boss.
This is also pretty believable, and once again that makes
(25:15):
it less beloved than some of the other versions. Yeah,
the next iteration includes those key catalysts from the previous
one that Bob Cobb was very hungry, that it was
very late, that he had not eaten all day because
the restaurant was so busy, But in this take on it,
he went to the kitchen himself and rooted around for
whatever he could find and then just started adding various
(25:38):
leftover items to a bed of lettuce. The final version
sort of is that Cobb was in a restaurant at
or after midnight once again, but in this version, said Grauman,
owner of Grauman's Chinese theater was with him, and it
was Sid who was hungry, and so Cob put together
a salad for his friend of snack on. This one
(25:59):
has an added detail that Graunman either had a sore
tooth or had a recent dental procedure that led Cob
to chop all the ingredients into easily swallowed pieces that
would not require a bunch of chewing before he tossed
the salad with dressing. So we said that was sort
of the last version, because sometimes that Cobb and Graunman
together story gets some facts switched around, but it stays
(26:22):
essentially the same at its core. You might see a
version of it where it was Cobb who was a
hungry one, but Sid Grauman was there and was intrigued
by the restaurant tours midnight snack, and so he asked
for one himself. But the detail for even the blended
up aspects of the story that usually lands at the
end of all of them is that Graunman loved this
(26:44):
dish so much that he came in the very next
day and asked for the same thing, and he ordered
it as a Cobb salad, and soon that dish became
a menu staple and to see why the classic ingredients
for a Cobb salad are allegedly the same as it
was possibly scavenged from the kitchen, and whatever version of
this story that you believe, iceberg and romaine, lettuces, avocado, tomatoes,
(27:09):
chicken breast, hard boiled eggs, bacon and rook frot cheese.
The dressings components are a matter of debate. It might
have contained olive oil, lemon juice, red wine, vinegar, Worcester sauce, garlic,
and dijon mustard with just a little sugar, may or
may not have included egg yolks. Any of these ingredients
could have been in there. Kind of a mystery. Yeah,
(27:31):
and today, if you have a Cob salad, even at
places that claim they're doing the original, the dressing would
probably very a little bit place to place, depending on
how they like to do it. All are delicious. But
in this case, while the story has a lot of variations,
the central theme always remains the same and that it
was invented at the Brown Derby, and that it is
(27:52):
named for Robert Cobb. And because Holly is sure there'll
be folks wondering in the listening audience, the Rion of
the Brown Derby that's in Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida,
is based on the Hollywood location of that restaurant. It
is not shaped like a hat, but you can get
a cop salad there. Yeah. Um. I did find one
(28:16):
picture that seems to be mislabeled online that claims that
it is the Hollywood Brown Derby in Disney's Hollywood Studios,
and it is shaped like a hat, but that I
think is an older one before it got torn down.
And it does have some souvenirs out front, which I
think is confusing to people, but none of them are
Disney souvenirs if you look closely, so that one is
(28:38):
not the one. Um Cobs salad, Uh Yeah, delicious, marvelous,
Thank you Robert Cobb. However that came to be. I
have listener mail that is also about food, and partially
(29:00):
about yucky food, so I'm sorry, but it ends with
funniness about cheese, which we've mentioned in two of these dishes,
so I'm happy to include it. This is from our
listener Shelley, who writes High Holly and Tracy. I just
listened to this swill Milk scandal of episode and I
was utterly fascinated and totally disgusted in equal measure. Like
(29:20):
you mentioned, maybe in the behind the scenes many I'd
never really thought about how odd it is that milk
was a staple food item way before refrigeration was possible
At home. I grew up pretty much just putting milk
and tea and cereal. But my husband grew up drinking
a glass of milk multiple times a day. Even now
in his thirties. Anytime we have pasta with tomato sauce,
he always drinks a big glass of milk with dinner. Because,
(29:42):
of course, I guess. I was reminded of maybe my
favorite scene in the latest installment of Becky Chambers Wayfarer series,
The Galaxy and the Ground Within. If you haven't read it,
I highly recommend it. It's fun, funny, heartwarming and poignant
sci fi with incredible world building that both makes you
think and want to be best friends with all the characters.
But I digress from dairy. There is a scene where
(30:05):
several individuals of different sentient alien species are chatting, and
one character asked the only other who knows the human, well,
if cheese is actually a real thing. The ensuing description
of the unfortunate reality of cheese made me laugh harder
than I've laughed while reading in a very long time.
The cheese making process is described as leaving the milk
(30:26):
mixture quote out until bacteria colonize it to the point
of solidifying, and I felt hilariously called out as one
of the humans so quote bonkers for cheese that they'll
ingest a dose of the enzymes needed to properly digest
it before they can eat it. Devastatingly accurate for me anyway.
Thanks for all the wonderful work you do on the podcast.
(30:47):
I always look forward to new episodes. Um, thank you
for sharing that. It is one of those things. There
are a lot of foods that when I think about them,
I'm like, wow, who was like, um, that thing that
came out of a chicken's cloaco, We should eat that
for sure. I mean, there are many many foods of
that nature. I understand how some people land at an
(31:08):
entirely plant based diet based where a lot of food
comes from. I had parents who had a farm when
I was quite young, so I never had any illusions
about the origin of animal based foods um and yet
still continue to eat them. Um, if you would like
to write to us and share your revelations about how
(31:30):
cheese is actually kind of gross even though it is
magically delicious, or anything else you can do so, you
can write us at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History. And if you'd like to subscribe to the
show and you haven't gotten around to that yet, finish
your snack and then you can do so. That's on
the I heart Radio app or anywhere else you listen
(31:51):
to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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, Tracy Yeah,
and listeners. I am clearly on a roller coaster cycle
(00:22):
of like super Downer episode, light and Fun episode, Super
Downer episode, Light and Fun episode. I'm sorry, I don't
know what's going on. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I think I because of where we're all at mentally,
and like evolution did not prepare us to deal with
the ongoing kind of stress of a pandemic, my brain
(00:43):
is very much gravitating towards a lot of dark things
in a not bad way. I am fine, but I
always have had that proclivity and it's kind of augmented now.
But then I always feel like, oh, I gotta bounce
back by doing something late and thankfully today we are
on a light wek um and it is about one
of our favorite subjects. That means this is a food episode.
(01:05):
I can't even describe the weird circumstance that happened, but
through this complete happenstance, I saw a reference to a
food that was named for someone recently, and then I
found myself wondering if that had been a real person.
I have a whole secondary thing with it that I'll
talk about in the behind the scenes, and if it
was a real person, who that real person was? And
(01:26):
then soon I was down this eponymous foods rabbit hole
and it was very, very fun. So, uh, if Tracy
and everyone else will come along with people will explore
three of these foods. But I feel like this could
be the start of a a recurrent theme. As anybody
knows from any episode on food that we have done before,
(01:48):
they're often a lot of fuzzy details and variations on
origin stories. That's often just how it happens when there's
sort of a culinary accident or an experiment that turns
out well. It's not always doc event and carefully so,
I have tried to capture all of the most popular
versions of any of these origin stories or note when
things have differed significantly. So grab a snack and we
(02:10):
will dive right in. We're going to start with one
of the world's most popular varieties of fruit, and to
tell that fruit story, we have to talk about Maria
Anne Sherwood. Maria Anne Sherwood was born in seventeen nine
and Peasmarsh, Sussex, England. Her father, John Sherwood, was a laborer,
Her mother was Hannah Wright Sherwood, and Marie was baptized
(02:32):
on January eighteen hundred at St Peter and St Paul
Church in the same rural community where she was born.
As she grew up, she didn't really receive much in
the way of a formal education, but she did learn
about farming through her parents and she worked as a
farm laborer just as they did. At the age of nineteen,
Maria got married to another farm laborer named Thomas Smith,
(02:54):
who was her same age. Their wedding was held in Ebony,
Kent at the parish church on August eight, eight nineteen.
Since neither Maria nor Thomas could write, they both signed
their wedding paperwork with a mark. The newlyweds settled in
Beckley and East Sussex, which is where Thomas had grown up,
and they started their family there. They had a total
of eight children over the course of the next nineteen years,
(03:17):
although three of those children died as infants. In eighteen
thirty eight, Maria and Thomas made a huge change. They
set sail for Australia and as part of what's often
called the bounty scheme. In the decades leading up to
the eighteen forties, Britain had gone through a series of
events that had led to a lot of economic distress.
(03:38):
There was the US were of Independence, the French Revolution,
and a subsequent war with France. All of that had
been extremely costly. There was also an agricultural crisis and
a food shortage as a series of harvests failed. As
the industrial age started, a workforce that was already flooded
with men who had served in the war saw shrinking
(04:01):
job numbers and the rise of workhouses, and one of
the ways that was proposed to deal with these problems
was a scheme that would take some of those tradesmen
and agricultural laborers and send them to the New South
Wales colony in Australia to both relieve the conditions in
England and create infrastructure and a food system for that
new colony. The rules of that program changed over the years,
(04:25):
but by the time the Smiths were recruited, any settler
who was already in New South Wales who wanted labor
for their enterprise could pay agents in Britain to recruit
skilled emigrants and then have them as employees when they
arrived in Australia, provided they passed inspection. All of this
is a very abbreviated version of a much bigger and
(04:46):
very complex topic. We are just introducing it here to
explain exactly how this farm family from East Sussex picked
up their lives and moved to the other side of
the world. While a lot of the scholarship on the
bounty scheme suggest us that in a lot of the
cases the people being shipped to New South Wales were
not really up to snuff in terms of work experience,
(05:07):
the program rarely accepted families. The Smiths were both knowledgeable
and farm practice and had five children. There was Thomas
age sixteen, Stephen age thirteen, Charles age eight, Sarah who
was six, and then one year old Maria Ann. They
all made the journey together and they're reported as traveling
aboard the Lady Nugent. They arrived in Sydney, Australia on
(05:30):
November eight. Yeah, the Lady Nugent has its own whole
history as like a prison ship for a while and
then um as an immigration ship later, but once Maria
and Thomas had made it to their destination, and they
all made it more or less intact. Thomas sought out
work and found it in a district which is charmingly
called Kissing Point. That's in an area called RDE that's
(05:52):
a suburb of Sydney, and the draw to Kissing Point
was its fruit production. Thomas was able to harley his
years of farming experience and knowledge to get a job
with an established fruit grower making five pounds per year,
and the Smith's family made Ride their permanent home. Maria
had one more child after they had settled in New
(06:13):
South Wales. That was a son named William, who was
born several years after they had moved in May of
eighteen forty two. Maria's husband, Thomas may also have taken
on a side job working for Major Edward Darville on
his estate. That information has been relaid through family stories though,
and it's not documented, so it's not totally clear. But
Thomas Smith did save up money over the years, and
(06:35):
in the eighteen fifties he was able to purchase two
parcels of land that were adjacent to the field of
mars Common in Ride. The field of mars Common was
land that had been set aside as a public space
in eighteen o four, so that meant that the Smith's
new orchard property, which is about twenty four acres, was
right next to undeveloped space. In eighteen seventy four. A
(06:57):
significant portion of the Field of Mars Common was cleared
and sold off as farms and homes after the passage
of the Field of Mars Resumption Act, but part of
it remains undeveloped as a wildlife refuge. The area in
which the Smith orchards were cultivated is now known as Eastwood,
and the first of the apples, which we would now
(07:18):
know as Granny Smith, were said to have been discovered
by Maria, having sprung up quite by accident. In the
Perth Sunday Times, a story appeared on November two titled
the Granny Smith Apple the Story of its Origin, and
this actually recounts a story that had already appeared in
a much smaller publication called Farmer and Settler, and they
(07:41):
ran a version of the piece in June of that year.
The Farmer and Settler right up is the first known
account of the origin of the apple in print, and
it was the work of writer H. J. Rumsey, who
in his research, interviewed two men who had known Maria
Smith when she was alive. The two gentlemen where fruit
grower E. H. Small and Harry Johnston. According to Mr
(08:03):
Small's story, Maria had taken some gin cases home from
the Sydney markets and there had been some Tasmanian grown
apples in them. She referred to these as French crabs,
and those fruits were rotting, so she dumped them out
near the creek on the Smith property. But then sometime
later She's found a small apple seedling growing among the
(08:24):
ferns by the creek and it was producing fruit. This
was an apple that was different for many that she
was familiar with. And remember, this isn't like a person
who is not knowledgeable about fruit, so she was like,
this is something unique. Maria, who had come to be
known among locals as Granny as she aged as kind
of a sweet nickname, wanted to get the opinions of
(08:46):
other fruit experts about this seedling and its fruit, so
she called in E. H. Small's father, who was also
an expert orchardist. E H was just a boy of
twelve at the time, but he went with his father
and Mrs Smith to examine this seedlinging, and as a
boy tasted one of the seedlings apples himself, he declared
it delicious. After consulting with Small, Maria decided that she
(09:08):
would start cultivating the trees, but she only had a
couple of years to do so before she died. So
a couple of notes on apples and their propagation. Almost
all apples require cross pollination. That means they have to
be pollinated with pollen from a different apple species to
produce fruit. The Granny Smith apple as we know it
(09:28):
today is an exception. It can self pollinate, although it
normally produces a better result if it's cross pollinated. But
it's obviously different from a crab apple, which is what
Maria Smith had dumped out. Crab apples are just really
small apples, and the French crabs that she mentioned are
a type that's often used for jellies and jams, So
(09:49):
it seems most likely that the seeds from those French
crabs had grown into trees that were pollinated with pollen
from some other tree nearby. This is an area that
was known for its fruit, including many orchards. The resulting
fruit produced seeds that eventually became this new apple tree
that Maria Smith found in the ferns. None of the
(10:10):
accounts of Maria Seedling have any dates or timelines mentioned
between when she dumped out the rotted crab apples and
when she found this new tree. So there's this there's
some guesswork here. Yeah. There was even one right up
about it that I read that said there's a little
bit of a mystery because in one account she had
(10:30):
suggested that the land had been cleared in between the
time that she had dumped those rotted French crabs and
when she found this tree. So it's a little like, well, then,
how how did this happen? But it does bear enough
resemblance to to a French crab apple that people still
think that's the origin point that then got cross pollinated
(10:51):
with another species of apple. Maria Smith died on March nine,
and her husband, Thomas died six years later. Orchardist Edward Gallard,
who was a friend of the family, bought part of
the family property from their surviving children, and he continued
to cultivate Granny Smith apples until his death in the
nineteen teens. Those tart apples had the characteristics that continue
(11:14):
to make them popular today. They had an excellent resilience
in baking so they don't disintegrate, and an acidity that
accentuates sweet flavors. Although it actually was not initially recognized
for its excellence in dessert baking, it was used for
cooking things that were not so sweet At first. Gallard
and other orchardists in New South Wales continued to cultivate
(11:35):
the apple trees that Maria Smith first discovered as an
accidental seedling. In the early eighteen nineties. Fruits produced by
the Granny Smith trees were starting to win prizes in Australia,
particularly as a cooking apple, and in Granny Smith apple
trees are planted in large numbers that the Bath Frost
Experiment Farm that was part of Australia's still new Department
(11:57):
of Agriculture. The apples were all so part of the
list of fruits suitable for export that the Department of
Agriculture compiled in and the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales,
which came out in August of the Granny Smith apple
is referenced by that name in a section titled Fruits
to Export and how to Export Them. It had this
(12:19):
brief descriptor quote. Granny Smith's seedling, a New South Wales
seedling raised from seed of the French crab near Ride
on the Paramatta River. One of the things that helped
the Granny Smith apple secure its position of popularity around
the globe, it's just how sturdy it is. That firmness
of the fruit that makes it great for baking, also
(12:40):
makes it pretty easy to transport compared to some other
softer apples. And that's also thanks to a relatively thick skin,
so it stays marketable for longer and shipping. But as
it shipped around the world from New South Wales, it
also of course started to be cultivated on new continents.
In the nineteen thirties, European grow started introducing it into
(13:01):
their orchard and then in the nineties seventies it finally
became popular in North America. Today, there's a Granny Smith
Memorial Park on the eastwood Land that was once the
southern boundary of the Smith orchard. There's a playground area,
a wide open green space for playing in a monument
placed there by the New South Wales by Centennial Council.
Coming up, we are going to talk about one of
(13:23):
the simplest and most delicious dishes known to humankind. There's
gonna be some cheese, but before we do that, we
will have a quick sponsor break. Alrighty, the next person
that we are talking about is Ignacio Anaya. If you're
(13:46):
scratching your head wondering what food is named after him,
we will only need to remind you that the nickname
for Ignacio is Nacho. That is right. Nacho's have a
traceable lineage, and they were named for their creator. And
while they seem like they us have been around forever,
and we'll talk a little bit about that. Uh, Nacho's
as we know them, are not that old. Just to
(14:07):
avoid confusion, even though Ignacio did go by Naco most
of the time, We're mostly going to refer to him
by his given name rather than his nickname, just so
that we don't constantly say Nacho over and over and over.
Ignacio and I I was born in San Carlos, Chihuahua, Mexico,
on August. His parents died when he was very young,
(14:30):
and he was raised by a foster mother. One of
the memories about her that and I would recount later
in his life was that she often made him Cassidas,
which he loved. Andia had a number of jobs in
his early life, and he lived in a few different places,
but eventually he ended up working at a restaurant in
Piedro's Nigres, Mexico, called the Victory Club for reference. Piedro's
(14:53):
Negres is about one fifty miles west of San Antonio, Texas,
and it is just a short jump across the US
Mexico border from Eagle Pass, Texas. Ignacio had worked as
a waiter over the years, but he was the restaurant's
maitre d by the time he created his now famous snack.
One afternoon in ninety three, he was working in the
(15:13):
restaurant in the time in between the lunch and dinner service,
and several wives of officers from Eagle Pass came in.
The story has been told a number of different ways.
In one version and I told the press that after
several rounds of drinks, these four ladies asked for some
fried tortillas, and as he explained, quote, well, since no
(15:34):
one was in the kitchen for about an hour, I
went in slice of tortilla and four pieces, put some
cheese and a slice of hallepenia on top. And stuck
it in the oven for a few minutes. That cheese
was reported as Wisconsin cheddar, and the hallapenos are pickled.
So that story has appeared in print in a lot
of different ways, with various changes to the details. In
(15:55):
two thousand two, Anaya's son, Ignacio and Iya Jr. Said
that one of his father's regular customers, a woman named
Mami Finance, came in with a larger group of friends
tend to twelve women who were officers wives from Fort
Duncan Air Base. You may also run across versions that
tell this story as being about soldiers from the base,
but the ones that are closer to the source all
(16:17):
mentioned women, even though the numbers change a little bit.
According to Ignacio Anaya Jr. It was Mamie fine And
who started touting this dish to her friends, And one
version she had asked Ignacio what he called this snack,
which she and her friends just loved, because who doesn't.
He told her they were Nacho's special or nachos special,
(16:39):
And another version of this story, it was fine And
who started calling them nachos special. Either way, though she
started talking them up to other people. Soon Nacho's Especial
appeared on the menu at the Victory Club. In some
versions of the story, Ignacio worked at the Victory Club
for almost twenty more years until it closed in nine,
but he has also often said to have worked at
(17:01):
another restaurant called the Maderno for a period of time
after the Victory Club and shared his nachos special recipe there.
Some quotes even placed the moment of invention at the
Maderno and not at the Victory Club, sometimes when they
have interviewed the same person just years apart. In nineteen
fifty four, a cookbook published by the Eagle Past Church
(17:23):
of the Redeemer called Saint Ann's Cookbook contained the first
printed recipe for Nacho's especials that included the story of
their invention. Not long after the Victory Club closed in
nineteen sixty one, Ignacio went into business for himself and
opened up Nacho's Restaurant on hwifty seven, just a couple
of miles from the bridge that connected Eagle Pass and
(17:46):
Piedras Nigress. In nineteen sixty nine, the San Antonio Express
and News interviewed a n i Am and printed a
story about how even though he had invented what had
become an incredibly popular dish over the twenty six years
since he threw it together. That afternoon, he had not
actually made any money off of it. Ignacio gave a
quote to reporter Bill Salter saying, quote, the only man
(18:08):
who's making money on nachos is the man who's selling
cheese and hallapenos. Ania also told Salter that a friend
who was a lawyer had offered to help him patent
his dish, but that Anya had turned him down, saying quote,
I didn't go with him or want to do it.
I thought it would be too much trouble. But of
course then I didn't know how popular they were going
to become. This is a little different from what his
(18:31):
son reported years later and Ignacio Junior's version he had
reached out to a lawyer to try to help his
dad secure some kind of legal claim to Nacho's telling
a reporter in two thousand to quote, I talked to
a lawyer in San Antonio. He said, there's not much
you can do after seventeen years, it's in the public domain.
Although he recognized that another path might have given him
(18:53):
more income, Ignaia Sr. Said that he would be just
as happy with lots of customers at his restaurant. Unfort
sly Later that same year, Operation Intercept caused some very
real problems for Anaia and other businesses in Piedro Negras.
Operation Intercept was a Nixon initiative that was intended to
stop the movement of marijuana from Mexico into the US
(19:14):
through spot checks at border crossing points. Even though the
bridge from Eagle Pass to Piedro's Negres experienced only minimal slowdowns,
as part of this whole initiative, there were a lot
of news stories about hours long waits at other points
along the border, and that caused a lot of people
who would kind of do day tourism trips to Piedro's
Negros uh to stop making that trip to Nacho's restaurant.
(19:38):
Ignacio reported that there were days of the restaurant had
no patrons whatsoever, but due to lack of results from
that program, it did not last long. Operation Intercept ended
after just a few weeks. Ignacio died in nineteen seventy five.
His wife had died nine years before he did, That
was in nineteen sixty six. They had raised nine children together,
(19:59):
and it wasn't until twenty years later in that Piedras
Negras Mexico declared October twenty one as International Day of
the Nacho. They also honored Ignacio and i A with
a bronze plaque. This declaration and honor were to some
degree an effort to stake a claim to the invention
of nachos on the part of the Tourism Board of
(20:22):
the State of Kawahila. Naturally, a dish as popular as
nacho's has some other claims to the origin, and even
people who say that melted cheese on tortillas has just
been a part of Mexican cuisine for way longer than
sixty years. Yeah, there are even some quotes that you
can find from Ignacio Anaia saying essentially the same thing,
like I didn't patent it because it's just cheese on tortillas.
(20:45):
Everybody does that um. Ignacio's son, Ignacio Jr. Often served
as a judge at the annual nacho competition that was
part of a three day festival Piedro's Nigras started holding
every year around International Day of the Nacho. Although he
sampled nachos topped with all kinds of different ingredients over
the years, including caviare uh, he always loved the simple
(21:07):
version that his dad created the best, although he did
at one point mentioned to a reporter that nachos would
beef for chicken and guacamole made for a pretty tasty meal.
Of course, nacho's have evolved since this origin. Point. You
might be thinking of the version with a cheese sauce
rather than melted cheese, wondering where that comes from. That's
thanks to a man named Frank Liberto. He was CEO
(21:30):
of Rico's Products Company, which specializes still in concession foods.
Liberto introduced nachos with a pompable cheese sauce in Arlington's
Stadium in n and then, after a slow start, this
version caught on with food distributors, in part because they
found that nachos drove drink sales up. People balance the
(21:51):
spice of the jalapenos, and I would argue also the
saltiness of the chips. I was thinking too that the
salt was probably a factor there. Um, Okay, we have
got one more eponymous food story to cover, but before
we do, we're gonna pause for a word from stuff
you missed in history classes. Sponsors. So this last one
(22:19):
that we're going to talk about is a story that
has two very different dates attached to it, but both
of those dates relate back to the man for whom
the dish was named and the same location. So we're
going to talk about both of the ways the Cops
Salad is said to have come into existence, and then
the many variations on the second version of the story.
So the Cops Salad is also associated with the famous
(22:42):
Los Angeles restaurant chain, The Brown Derby, which operated from
the original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard across from the
Ambassador Hotel. Was built in the shape of a Derby
hat with a sign on top of it that read
eat in the Hat, and from the very beginning it
was a popular spot with screen stars. Everybody from Mary
(23:05):
Pickford to Charlie Chaplin was known to eat there. The
Derby moved down the street in nineteen thirty seven, and
not just in name, the actual building was picked up
and moved down the block and then renovated in the
process so that it had more seating space because the
original one was quite small. In the meantime, another Brown
Derby had opened on the corner of Hollywood and Vine
(23:25):
in ninety nine, and that Hollywood location was even more
popular with actors because of how close it was to
the studios. In one a location was added to the
corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, and then another
was open in Las Felis, and each of these locations
has its own story in its own connection to Hollywood
and Los Angeles history. Robert Cobb was born in eighteen
(23:49):
ninety nine, and there's not exactly a wealth of information
about his early years, but by the time he was
in his mid twenties, he was working alongside director Herbert K.
Somborne and screenwriter Wilson Meisner and their new restaurant venture,
and he was a co owner. And the story of
the salad falls from a couple of different places on
(24:11):
the timeline, sometimes starting all the way back to the
very early days. Perhaps the least favored version of the
Cobb Salads origins is that it was created at the
opening of the Hollywood Brown Derby by executive chef Robert
Crease in honor of the owner. That makes a lot
of logistical sense. That's probably why it's the least favored version.
(24:33):
It's not very full of you know, um puff or story.
The more popular version is a lot more colorful, so
that version of the stories that's the scene in N seven,
and even this one story has some branching variations. The
least showy version of this one is that around midnight,
(24:54):
after a full day of work and without stopping to eat,
Bob Cobb was ravenous, so the head chef at the time,
Paul J. Posti, created a salad with basically what they
still had on hand after the end of the whole
dinner shift, and then he offered that to his boss.
This is also pretty believable, and once again that makes
(25:15):
it less beloved than some of the other versions. Yeah,
the next iteration includes those key catalysts from the previous
one that Bob Cobb was very hungry, that it was
very late, that he had not eaten all day because
the restaurant was so busy, But in this take on it,
he went to the kitchen himself and rooted around for
whatever he could find and then just started adding various
(25:38):
leftover items to a bed of lettuce. The final version
sort of is that Cobb was in a restaurant at
or after midnight once again, but in this version, said Grauman,
owner of Grauman's Chinese theater was with him, and it
was Sid who was hungry, and so Cob put together
a salad for his friend of snack on. This one
(25:59):
has an added detail that Graunman either had a sore
tooth or had a recent dental procedure that led Cob
to chop all the ingredients into easily swallowed pieces that
would not require a bunch of chewing before he tossed
the salad with dressing. So we said that was sort
of the last version, because sometimes that Cobb and Graunman
together story gets some facts switched around, but it stays
(26:22):
essentially the same at its core. You might see a
version of it where it was Cobb who was a
hungry one, but Sid Grauman was there and was intrigued
by the restaurant tours midnight snack, and so he asked
for one himself. But the detail for even the blended
up aspects of the story that usually lands at the
end of all of them is that Graunman loved this
(26:44):
dish so much that he came in the very next
day and asked for the same thing, and he ordered
it as a Cobb salad, and soon that dish became
a menu staple and to see why the classic ingredients
for a Cobb salad are allegedly the same as it
was possibly scavenged from the kitchen, and whatever version of
this story that you believe, iceberg and romaine, lettuces, avocado, tomatoes,
(27:09):
chicken breast, hard boiled eggs, bacon and rook frot cheese.
The dressings components are a matter of debate. It might
have contained olive oil, lemon juice, red wine, vinegar, Worcester sauce, garlic,
and dijon mustard with just a little sugar, may or
may not have included egg yolks. Any of these ingredients
could have been in there. Kind of a mystery. Yeah,
(27:31):
and today, if you have a Cob salad, even at
places that claim they're doing the original, the dressing would
probably very a little bit place to place, depending on
how they like to do it. All are delicious. But
in this case, while the story has a lot of variations,
the central theme always remains the same and that it
was invented at the Brown Derby, and that it is
(27:52):
named for Robert Cobb. And because Holly is sure there'll
be folks wondering in the listening audience, the Rion of
the Brown Derby that's in Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida,
is based on the Hollywood location of that restaurant. It
is not shaped like a hat, but you can get
a cop salad there. Yeah. Um. I did find one
(28:16):
picture that seems to be mislabeled online that claims that
it is the Hollywood Brown Derby in Disney's Hollywood Studios,
and it is shaped like a hat, but that I
think is an older one before it got torn down.
And it does have some souvenirs out front, which I
think is confusing to people, but none of them are
Disney souvenirs if you look closely, so that one is
(28:38):
not the one. Um Cobs salad, Uh Yeah, delicious, marvelous,
Thank you Robert Cobb. However that came to be. I
have listener mail that is also about food, and partially
(29:00):
about yucky food, so I'm sorry, but it ends with
funniness about cheese, which we've mentioned in two of these dishes,
so I'm happy to include it. This is from our
listener Shelley, who writes High Holly and Tracy. I just
listened to this swill Milk scandal of episode and I
was utterly fascinated and totally disgusted in equal measure. Like
(29:20):
you mentioned, maybe in the behind the scenes many I'd
never really thought about how odd it is that milk
was a staple food item way before refrigeration was possible
At home. I grew up pretty much just putting milk
and tea and cereal. But my husband grew up drinking
a glass of milk multiple times a day. Even now
in his thirties. Anytime we have pasta with tomato sauce,
he always drinks a big glass of milk with dinner. Because,
(29:42):
of course, I guess. I was reminded of maybe my
favorite scene in the latest installment of Becky Chambers Wayfarer series,
The Galaxy and the Ground Within. If you haven't read it,
I highly recommend it. It's fun, funny, heartwarming and poignant
sci fi with incredible world building that both makes you
think and want to be best friends with all the characters.
But I digress from dairy. There is a scene where
(30:05):
several individuals of different sentient alien species are chatting, and
one character asked the only other who knows the human, well,
if cheese is actually a real thing. The ensuing description
of the unfortunate reality of cheese made me laugh harder
than I've laughed while reading in a very long time.
The cheese making process is described as leaving the milk
(30:26):
mixture quote out until bacteria colonize it to the point
of solidifying, and I felt hilariously called out as one
of the humans so quote bonkers for cheese that they'll
ingest a dose of the enzymes needed to properly digest
it before they can eat it. Devastatingly accurate for me anyway.
Thanks for all the wonderful work you do on the podcast.
(30:47):
I always look forward to new episodes. Um, thank you
for sharing that. It is one of those things. There
are a lot of foods that when I think about them,
I'm like, wow, who was like, um, that thing that
came out of a chicken's cloaco, We should eat that
for sure. I mean, there are many many foods of
that nature. I understand how some people land at an
(31:08):
entirely plant based diet based where a lot of food
comes from. I had parents who had a farm when
I was quite young, so I never had any illusions
about the origin of animal based foods um and yet
still continue to eat them. Um, if you would like
to write to us and share your revelations about how
(31:30):
cheese is actually kind of gross even though it is
magically delicious, or anything else you can do so, you
can write us at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History. And if you'd like to subscribe to the
show and you haven't gotten around to that yet, finish
your snack and then you can do so. That's on
the I heart Radio app or anywhere else you listen
(31:51):
to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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