Tag: Food & Cooking

King Edward VII

Post author By Betz
Post date January 24, 2022

Have a drink with: King Edward VII, aka “Bertie”
Sportsman, monarch, don’t mention the lobster

Ask him about: Holiday weight gain

It’s movie awards season, which means I have been trying to catch up on all the “for your consideration” titles I didn’t get to over the course of 2021. Last week I caught Spencer, in which Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana during a tense holiday weekend with the royal family at their Sandringham estate. In the movie, as Diana arrives for the festivities she is informed by the house manager that all guests must, per the queen’s request, weigh themselves before and after the holiday on a set of antique scales. The tradition is said to have begun with King Edward VII, as a way of figuring out whether his guests had sufficiently enjoyed themselves under his hospitality – three pounds being enough gain to show that guests had properly indulged.

Do we know if this whole scale story is true? A leading royal columnist says so, and there is indeed a 19th-century jockey’s scale on display to guests at Sandringham. But the story is hard to back up to satisfaction, not least because the royals are not exactly known for publicizing their in-jokes.

But would King Edward VII (nicknamed “Bertie” within the royal family) have gone for such a practice? I’d certainly buy that he believed a minor food-baby was an appropriate measure of a good time. This is a man who was so fond of epicurean pleasures that his nickname was “Tum Tum,” and who postponed his coronation over the fallout from an epic lobster dinner.

Tags Doctor in the House?, Food & Cooking, Hollywood, Royals

18th Century

Judge Breckenridge’s Eggnog Bender

Post author By Betz
Post date December 23, 2021

Have a drink with: Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Attorney, nog enthusiast, clothing optional

Ask him about: Pork as medicine

It’s the holiday season, and that means it’s time for nog.

Where did eggnog come from? If you look into it, you get a linguistic soup of suggestions (“nog” being an old word for strong ale, or “noggin” as a drinking vessel); and there are all sorts of historical links dragged out as to its origin, from medieval “posset” concoctions, to frothy egg-flips, to aristocratic milk punches (not clarified punches, which are an entirely different thing and which Ben Franklin loved). Consensus is that there is a centuries-long human history of making eggy milk drinks and pouring booze into them, which at some point syncretized into the modern concept of eggnog.

It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that eggnog existed early on in American history, thanks to British culinary tradition and the good availability of eggs and dairy in the young nation, and it frequently involved a fair quantity of whatever liquor suited the local taste and economy.

I say a “fair quantity.” We now turn to Judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court at the turn of the 19th century, for demonstration of the fact that there is indeed such a concept as too much of a good thing.

Tags Colonial America, Food & Cooking, Holidays, Jackassery, Megalomania

19th Century

Really Old Wedding Cake

Post author By Betz
Post date August 20, 2021

Have: a piece of cake.
It’s….pleasantly aged?

Ask: is it past its sell-by date?

Royal Collection Trust RCIN 750872 — Detail of Queen Victoria’s wedding cake, Royal Collection Trust

According to the BBC, last week a slice of cake from the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana sold for £1,850 at auction (about $2,500 USD). A piece of one of the couple’s twenty-three cakes, the slice had been in the care of one of the queen mum’s household, who had apparently cocooned it in cling wrap and stored it in a floral tin with a “handle with care” label before selling it to a collector in the early oughts. This person decided the wedding’s 40th anniversary was the perfect occasion to give this slice of cake something cakes don’t usually get: a third owner.

Forty-year-old cake may seem like a very strange souvenir, even if it does happen to be royal cake. But this is hardly the first time the preserved desserts of the rich and famous have been hot commodities.

Tags Food & Cooking, Victorians

19th Century

The Stomach Rebellion

Post author By Betz
Post date August 12, 2019

Have a drink at: Your College Dining Hall
Cabbage: now with extra protein!

Discuss: FOOD FIGHT

Today, a college’s dining hall is part of its overall outreach in the competition to attract students, and to keep them happy and achieving while they’re on campus. So much is put into the food and the architecture that travel magazines and college prep companies actually rank colleges by the quality and appeal of their food. This is a far cry from the college dining experience of the nineteenth century: in the summer of 1828, students at Yale College got so upset with their dining experience that they undertook a group protest that came to be known as the “Bread and Butter Rebellion” or the “Stomach Rebellion,” and it got so heated that the university president had to expel everybody to get them to cool the eff down.

You can see why a pasta station may be a better solution.

Tags Angry Mob, Comic Relief, Connecticut, Crime & Punishment, Food & Cooking, Jackassery, New Haven, Yale

18th Century

Joseph Priestley

Post author By Betz
Post date July 19, 2019

Have a drink with: Joseph Priestley
Chemist, radical theologian, likes bubbles.

Ask him about: favorite La Croix flavor?

Part of social life for well-to-do Europeans in the eighteenth century was to visit a spa town – someplace like Bath in England, or the town of Spa in Belgium – and “take the waters.” Not unlike a modern wellness retreat, at which you can sneak in some pool time or an Instagrammable view in addition to your yoga class or cleanse, these getaways generally rationalized a desire to rest up and relax with a regimen of health-focused activities centered on the various mineral springs. Not only did visitors bathe in springs and baths at popular wellness destinations, they also drank the water, which on account of its geothermal properties and mineral content was often sharply flavored and sometimes effervescent.

Put another way: seltzer may be super in right now, but don’t forget that it was the on-trend drink of summer 1767, too.

Tags Beer, England, Food & Cooking, Science!, Summer

19th Century

William Banting

Post author By Betz
Post date April 25, 2019

Have a drink with: William Banting
Keto, paleo, intermittent fasting? Nope: BANTING.

Ask him about: before and after pics

When the Paleo diet became popular in the early oughts and the ketogenic diet more recently supplanted it as a nutritional craze, keen-eyed historians noticed something familiar about these diets’ recommendations to hork down all the meat you can get your mitts on, guilt-free: specifically, that it wasn’t especially new. Was this all that different, they wondered, from the low-carb, high-fat diet Dr. Robert Atkins had first published in 1972? Was this just a forty-some-odd-year-old diet fad in a new dress?

To which I say: of course not. It’s a HUNDRED-and-forty-some-odd-year-old diet fad in a new dress. I’m over at Narratively today with more about William Banting, the Victorian royal undertaker who, yes, popularized low-carb dieting.

Click over to Narratively for the full story.

Tags Doctor in the House?, England, Food & Cooking, Victorians

19th Century

The Early Birds

Post author By Betz
Post date June 8, 2018

Have a drink with: The Early Birds
There’s only one 10 o’clock in the day, and this ain’t it.

Yell along with them: Go the @%(# to sleep.

In the past week alone, major publications have promised that a good night’s sleep may be the key to successful business, effortless parenting, a better sex life and more enjoyable travel.

That’s all well and good until you consider that some 40% or more of Americans don’t sleep well, despite the assurances that if we deploy the right combination of baths, essential oils, soundproofing, early bedtime and smartphone avoidance, dreamy bliss will follow. So you can take your successful business, Mister-or-Ms. Fancy Journalist, and your perfectly-behaved child, and your one-night stand in Fiji, and get back to me when you have an article on the philosophical ramifications of Netflix asking you if you still exist when you wake up at 1:30 a.m. with no memory of having fallen asleep on the dog.

Despite the tossed-off surety that history cannot possibly understand us on this particular anxiety, let’s check in with one brave journalist from 1870 who was worn out enough to suggest: please, folks, please? Can we just start parties at 6 p.m. for a change, and hit the hay early?

Tags Food & Cooking, New York Ledger, Sawing Logs, Self Care, Time, Victorians

19th Century

Walt Whitman’s Coffee Cake

Post author By Betz
Post date March 5, 2018

Have a drink with: Walt Whitman
Contains multitudes; also coffee cake

Ask him about: Baking with pork fat

Walt Whitman is today remembered for a lot of things. He is the expansive, energetic chronicler of vibrant American life and spirit. He liked nude sunbathing. He grew one of history’s great beards. There was nothing he could not solve with a nice walk outside, musing: “Few know what virtue there is in the open air.”

He isn’t, though, remembered for his baking. And that’s a shame. The man made a mean coffee cake.

Tags Author!, Brunch, Food & Cooking, Healthy Living, Poetry

20th Century

The Republican Congressional Cook Book

Post author By Betz
Post date September 1, 2016

Have a drink with: Your Friendly Postwar Congressional Republicans
Reducing sauces AND the national debt…

Ask them about: Recipes for your Labor Day cookout

In 1962, then-Congressman Gerald Ford lent his name to The Republican Congressional Cook Book, a collection of recipes and peppy political axe-grinding given to constituents.

“It is our hope that as you read this Cookbook and use its recipes,” the book begins, “you will enjoy cooking, which is one of the few things not yet regulated by the Federal government.” Ha!

Tags Food & Cooking, Ike, Politics