Opening music
Liz
Hello and welcome to bread and thread a podcast about food and domestic history. I’m Liz.
Hazel
I’m hazel. We’re two friends who studied archaeology together and love history.
LIZ
So what have you been making or baking?
HAZEL
Not so much baking, although OK I did bake. I baked a good one. It was a Victoria sandwich. Because we’re like being hit in the face by strawberry season over here. My mum’s got this patch of strawberries. We had some strawberry plants a few years ago and my mum just thought whatever, so now we just have a full bed.
LIZ
Cause strawberries are one of the aggressive ones.
HAZEL
So aggressive, whatever image you have of strawberries being nice and sweet they’re really vicious. So I made a strawberry sandwich and elderflower icing, fresh strawberries in the middle. It was delicious. I also finished a dress I started five years ago.
LIZ
How many moons ago is that?
HAZEL
I don’t know many moons.
LIZ
I can think of a lot of places you’ve lived in the last four years that’s a lot of places to move a dress.
HAZEL
Yeah I moved then I moved again and moved abroad and never really finished it but I broke out the sewing machine again. It took me to two months of lock down to go right, I’ll get Betty out. Betty’s our sewing machine. named after my grandma..
LIZ
As an Elizabeth I approve.
HAZEL
Yeah I got it finished in a couple days. I don’t know why but with sewing I work myself up cause I think it’s going to be difficult cause it’s so many steps but you break it down it’s not too bad but that’s great and now I have a bright blue dress with a skull and crossbones on it.
LIZ
That’s amazing please will you tweet a picture of this dress I need this.
HAZEL
I will. It’s like from a distance it looks like flowers but then you get closer and it’s pirates. It’s in a jersey knit so it’s really comfy. I’m the comfiest piratest lady you’ll ever see. What are you making?
LIZ
I finally broke out the milk cotton you got me and I made the world’s comfiest socks. And was constantly making cheesy feet jokes cause of containing milk.
HAZEL
I didn’t think there was actually milk in it I thought it was a mistranslation but there’s actually milk are you enjoying your milk feet?
LIZ
It’s been very warm so I haven’t worn them much but they feel very good and this is from a person who loathes socks but I also made some pink limeade cause limeade is superior to lemonade so logically it’s going to be good. That’s going to be the next patreon bonus recipe.
HAZEL
That sounds amazing I’ve had your lemonade which is delicious but limeade… Sounds refreshing.
LIZ
Listen to the end fro the patreon information if you want to learn how to make pink limeade.
HAZEL
Oh I will.
LIZ
I hope you will.
HAZEL
I mean I usually log off when you’ve stopped talking… So I’m ready to learn about peanuts.
LIZ
OK so peanuts are one of those things that people have been eating forever. They might have been domesticated 9 or 10 k years ago. So they’re about as old as domestication.
HAZEL
I mean that’s like neolithic levels.
LIZ
Yes. So we have been eating peanuts forever or at least South America has.
HAZEL
How do you know that?
LIZ
One of those things that was brought back from conquistadors, it replaced in parts of Africa something called a bambara which is like a peanut in a lot of ways. But peanuts aren’t nuts cause of the seed pod development it’s a legume rather than a nut cause its ovaries don’t harden.
HAZEL
I thought you were going to tell me peanuts were a fruit or something, but…
LIZ
If they’re a legume they’re a vegetable but every plant we eat is kind of a vegetable. Botany is weird and confusing.
HAZEL
Like everything else in life.
LIZ
Considering it’s a seed pod you could call it a fruit but it doesn’t have flesh it could be considered a fruit.
HAZEL
Is it a fruit? Discuss.
LIZ
I didn’t dive that deeply into taxonomy but the bambara ground nut which also develops seed pods that are very similar to peanuts in the ground which is apparently where peanuts develop they develop in the ground which is weird I didn’t know this it blew my mind a little like when you learn where cashews come from.
HAZEL
Where do they come from?
LIZ
They grow on apples. Well not actual apples but yeah
HAZEL
They grow out of a fruit right.
LIZ
They’re the external seed of the cashew fruit yeah. But they replaced the bambara ground nut in west Africa and now peanuts are a staple crop.
HAZEL
Why did they replace it was it better?
LIZ
They’re easier to cultivate. And we know peanuts are huger in east Asia, we’ve all had stuff like satay which is a peanut sauce or things cooked in peanut oil. Which is why people with peanut allergies tend to avoid east Asian food.
HAZEL
Makes sense.
LIZ
I mostly want to talk about peanuts because of George Washington Carver, cause obviously there’s a lot happening in the world at the moment and wanted to highlight a black person who is relevant to what we talk about. You may know him as the man who invented peanut butter.
HAZEL
I didn’t know that.
LIZ
He didn’t but he did something cooler.
HAZEL
There’s something cooler than making peanut butter?
LIZ
Yes. So peanuts were grown basically as cheap animal feed for a long time in the US cause it’s fairly easy to cultivate you dig it up and chuck it in the animal pen afterwards but because they’re legumes they have a specific kind of bacteria which renews the nitrogen in the soil so in traditional agriculture you leave one field empty a year so it can regain the nutrients but you can plant pea plants and things like that that will add nutrients into the soil cause of its bacteria so he basically figured out that if we can popularise peanuts as a food crop he also talked about sweet potatoes and other legumes but peanuts is the main one we don’t have to have fallow fields, we can grow food every year, human food. He also worked very hard promoting the consumption of peanuts as well as the planting of them which is probably where the idea that he invented peanut butter is from. But GWC was such a badass. Former slave got into multiple prestigious places that wouldn’t let him study cause he was black, got into the dept of agriculture, was praised by Teddy Roosevelt for this peanut revelation and is one of the few Americans to become a member of the royal society in England
HAZEL
I like the phrase peanut revelation. It sounds very cool to be the person who got the peanut revelation.
LIZ
The thing is inventing peanut butter not really big deal, pre-Colombian civs were eating peanut butter, but he popularised….
HAZEL
You can make a butter out of any nut right?
LIZ
Yeah you crush it get the oil, let it emulsify, that’s it so we don’t have definite evidence but it’s pretty likely we’ve been eating peanut butter for as long as we’ve been eating peanuts. But the fact he revolutionised agriculture, with all this by necessity self taught knowledge is incredible and because of that we now have stuff like plumpy nut.
HAZEL
I’m sorry?
LIZ
Peanut butter in individual serving packets given to malnourished people because it has a lot of calories a lot of fat and protein. So who knows how many lives he saved by reinvigorating this awareness of peanut butter. Thank him for your reeces pieces and thank him for saving so many lives.
HAZEL
Mainly the second one but also the first one.
LIZ
But also he was ahead of his time in that he tried to make peanut milk a thing. He tried to make a few patent medicines that used peanut milk and they didn’t work obviously cause that’s not medicine but he was very into the idea of nut milk.
HAZEL
Well doesn’t sound like it would be bad for you.
LIZ
I don’t have the exact ingredients of his patent medicines but they probably won’t do everything they claim to do.
HAZEL
Probably not going to cure your consumption but nut milk probably isn’t going to- unless you have peanut allergies.
LIZ
There is that issue but in general…
HAZEL
Did people understand allergies at the time?
LIZ
So this would be the 20s when he patented various things so it’s possible. Um…. I do love medical history I’m not hugely up on when allergies were discovered. For a long time if you were allergic to something you basically just died.
HAZEL
Either that or worked it out.
LIZ
I feel like the approach is like people with lactose intolerance you avoid it or power through.
HAZEL
Is GWC well known today or…
LIZ
When you get things of here’s some cool black Americans people can think of he’s generally quite high up as the inventor of peanut butter which is a raw deal – got credit for crushing nuts which he sure did do – what he actually did was revolutionise agriculture.
HAZEL
Crushed land reform instead.
LIZ
He was a very cool man, and peanuts are very cool.
HAZEL
Can you tell me more about the royal society thing?
LIZ
Cause of the developments he made and also he made a peanut based stain? Like he invented a paint. So it was actually the royal society of art rather than the royal academy which confused me but I mean I guess they decided farming was more art than science.
HAZEL
I guess the old definition of art is a lot of stuff.
LIZ
And this was 1916 it was a lot more fluid.
HAZEL
Probably. That’s cool is there anything a man cannot invent from peanuts?
LIZ
He cannot invent a Tb cure you joked I looked it up there was something medicine for TB medicine in giant quote marks.
HAZEL
There’s one thing. That’s pretty rad though.
LIZ
Didn’t really take off. There was also carverline an antiseptic hair oil made of peanut oil, and lanolin. None of his inventions really took off, just stick to farming you’re doing a great job there
HAZEL
The agriculture reforms amazing – the lanolin hair oil? Well…
LIZ
The lanolin oil was probably helpful, as someone with eczema lanolin is a miracle, don’t know what the peanut oil added though.
HAZEL
Imagine if you were allergic to both peanuts and lanolin though.
LIZ
That wouldn’t be ideal. That’s my hot take.
HAZEL
I’m inclined to agree with you.
Here there be plugs. ProbablyBadPodcast and Pod9FromOUterSpace. Both good. Both different. Listen now. Listen well.
HAZEL
OK today’s local larder is strawberry shortcake. I was a bit inspired by the strawberry abundance at the moment and so strawberry shortcake is a pretty well known dessert it’s called a cake, but it’s not really sometimes it’s like a scone sometimes a biscuit with cream and strawberries fresh strawberries and it’s delicious so shortcake itself is kind of debatable I think a lot of the time it’s more like shortbread bread like in that it’s halfway between cake and biscuit, crumbly less crunchy than shortbread. It’s called short cause of the shortening very traditionally you add a lot of fat to bread cakes or biscuit it makes them crumbly.
LIZ
Am I right in thinking that short is like lard?
HAZEL
Yeah it’s like lard or I guess suet maybe but yeah basically as you’re adding lard to it you get this crumbly biscuit so just to be clear as it’s confusing when I talk about a scone in America it’s a biscuit but in the UK a biscuit is a cookie. Specifically a chocolate chip… Anyway…
LIZ
A hard sweet thing.
HAZEL
When I talk about scones I mean the dense cake like things. So strawberries have been cultivated a long time they were cultivated by the Romans as far back as 200 BC they would have been derived from the wild strawberry they are amazing. They are tiny tiny but so sweet but obviously you need a lot of them to get a significant amount of strawberry which is what we have today but it’s not a berry which I just found out.
LIZ
They’re a droop sack.
HAZEL
A what?
LIZ
A droop!
HAZEL
I did not know that was a thing.
LIZ
They’re a droop. That’s fun to say.
HAZEL
Because the seeds are on the outside so it’s not a real berry. So strawberries like a lot of things are considered an aphrodisiac in the olden days and were served to newly-weds I’m pretty sure they are actually not. They are delicious. So we get references to the term shortcake occurring from the mid 16th centuries in cookbooks and the original shortcake is a much more biscuity thing a much more thin and hard crumbly type cake but it’s grown into more of a scone so shortcake and then shortbread which we have in the UK is most famously associated with Scotland which is hard and crunchy.
LIZ
Correction blackberries and things are droops, I don’t know how you want to edit that but please make me sound less stupid.
HAZEL
You’re already smarter than me for knowing things that aren’t berries.
LIZ
Please fix it nickblake.
HAZEL
So the cake evolved into this more cakey type thing but still a dense cake and strawberry shortcake as we know it became a thing in America I think around the 1840s it started to pop up as a dessert with layers of shortcake and cream and strawberries probably because a lot of strawberries were grown in the south and strawberries and cream are delicious and scones and biscuits are a southern thing think it kind of amalgamated into a delicious strawberry shortcake dessert.
LIZ
With the lard as well it’s quite a working class dessert. We’ve got this lard and a plant that’s everywhere.
HAZEL
There’s a version that was quite popular not now but in the American south, a thin biscuity cake could be used, closer to the original, basically like OK we normally make this cake or biscuit anyway and we have strawberries so we’ll make thing.
LIZ
That’s wonderful.
HAZEL
So tit turned out delicious.
LIZ
I’ve only ever heard of strawberry shortcake but you could do any kind of shortcake just put different fruit in it.
HAZEL
I think you could, but it just goes really well together the crumbliness of the biscuit and the sweetness of the strawberry. And strawberries and cream you get the crunch and the softness but technically you could do that.
LIZ
Excellent.
HAZEL
Creative.
LIZ
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode if you have an episode suggestion or just want to say hi you can email breadandthreadpodcast@gmail.com or tweet @breadandthread. Sorry you always do that bit, want tot do the patreon?
HAZEL
We’re also on patreon breadandthread were you can get recipes and videos and discord chat.
LIZ
Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Closing music.
