Behind the Scenes Minis: Categories, Museums and Cherries

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.

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Speaker 2: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We had our Unearthed all week this week.

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Speaker 1: We sure did.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, stuff that was mostly found in April, May and June. I think there was one thing that was reported on literally the last day of March.

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Speaker 1: That came up.

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Speaker 2: The way that this works is throughout the quarter, I bookmark all of this stuff to come back to later, and when I go back to it, usually I am confident that there will be some specific categories, Like we are probably gonna have some books and letters and some animals. There's definitely gonna be some shipwrecks. I can't imagine there not being enough shipwrecks to have a shipwreck section in Unearthed. But beyond that, the pattern kind of reveals itself as I am working on the episodes. Yeah, so that is why sometimes we have some categories, sometimes not sometimes entirely new categories. We have heard from folks that some people find the format a little tricky to follow if we're jumping around from topic to topic too fast. So like that's that's why there tends to be like a basic category structure to try to make it as listenable as possible. We also know these are a number of folks very favorite episodes, or even the only ones they listen to. I feel kind of guilty for putting science writers on blast in their headlines about ravenui. Some of them, though, Like there were articles that had these headlines that were like total shocker. Turns out there maybe wasn't an ECO side on rapanui. Sometimes the first two or three paragraphs of the article then had that tone before acknowledging that this was adding to an existing body of work, And I was just like, what is why?

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Speaker 1: My only thought is.

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Speaker 2: Like, are they trying to contextualize it to new readers? But even so, there's no reason you have to do it that way. Yeah, I don't remember what the exact headline was of like the university's press release about this research, but like if you took the wording of that headline an extra step farther, like it could be interpreted to mean that this was a brand new discovery, not something that was adding to a body of work, but not to nearly the extent of like a bunch of stuff, right. I know that there have been times that we have talked about things on the show that have a greater historical background that we didn't fully grasp when we talked about it. I sure hope not in the kind of celebratory tone of some of these Rapanui articles. Yeah, that's really when we get into publications where like this is their whole thing, this is what they focus on. They focus on this kind of research that I'm like, why did you also make it sound that way? The one other thing I had noted to talk about and behind the scenes, we had a thing we talked about that was research about the Black Death including that was focused on body lice. Right.

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Speaker 1: One of the.

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Speaker 2: One of the articles that I read about this had a lead image that looked like, you know, some kind of close up microscope image of a body louse. And I don't know what color body lice typically are, but for whatever reason, in this image.

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Speaker 1: It was green.

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Speaker 2: And my first thought was, why is there a video game villain to illustrating this body lice article?

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Speaker 1: H's really funny.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just, you know, some imaging technology used to image this body louse. I chuckle every time we talk about the Mona Lisa. Yeah, because you know, nobody cared about the Mona Lisa until nineteen eleven. Yeah, because it got stolen, right, But if you look at even news coverage of the time, a lot of them it was so not known that a lot of those articles show pictures of the wrong piece of art.

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Speaker 1: Oh no. So it's very funny to me that now you know, everybody knows what the Mona Lisa looks like. You can buy it on a pair of socks, you can buy it on like any kind of item you can imagine, and it's one of the most famous things in the world. But it's only because it got stolen suddenly everybody was looking for it. Before then, it was kind of one of his lesser cared about works. Yeah, fascinating. Did you see it.

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Speaker 2: When we were at the Louver? Oh yeah, we did too. I don't think we really planned for it. So the Mona Lisa, if you're not aware, it's a pretty small work of art.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not not big at all.

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Speaker 2: And so a lot of people talk about seeing it and being kind of underwhelmed because even if you know it's a small work of art, like you see it in person and you're like, it's even smaller than I really had thought, right, but also knowing that the crowd to see it was going to be so huge, and that like that whole area of the Loof is like really crowded. I think we had sort of plans like to skip it, but we wound up in that part of the loove kind of by accident because we did not Patrick and I did not plan ahead what parts of it we were going to go see. Uh, and we were like, well, we're here now, might as well see it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I still laugh. Nobody even noticed that thing was gone for more than a day when it got stolen. Like that's how unconcerned people were about the Bona Lisa. Yeah, I just love that. Now. It's like people speak of it so reverently as one of the most important pieces of art and we must find out who this woman was and where she was physically in a geographical sense, and I'm like, nobody cared for so long. Yeah, it's such an iconic thing right now.

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Speaker 2: This is not really about unearthed, but just you know, if you are planning to go to Paris and you're going to go to the Louver, and especially if it might be your only time and your life to go there.

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Speaker 1: Yes, if there's stuff you.

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Speaker 2: Really want to see, make a list and plan what you're doing ahead of time. Yeah, because it's enormous, Like, it's so much bigger than I really canived of. We went on one of our trips that we have gone on for the show, and but like the Louve was a side trip that people got tickets for individually, not something that we went together as a group. So we like went during our free time, and uh, Patrick and I had no plan. We did not think of anything ahead of time. We just sort of showed up and got the digital tour thing that you could get and we walked around in random meandering with it, which is fine, But had I actually put forethought into it, there is stuff I definitely would have made a point of seeing while we were there that we did Nazi. It's so big that it's very easy to get lost, And so I think if unless it does not matter and you are just excited to see whatever's there, I think it's a really good idea to have a plan. Yes with an amendment, okay, because yes, like if you're like I want to see this Delaquix and only this Delaquix. Yeah, Yeah, although those are easy because they're huge and they're on the main hallway most of the Dilaqua or like I wanted to see the Vigion Lebron stuff that they oh yeah, yeah, But I would say keep that list to a reasonable number and allow yourself to accidentally just walk around and see stuff. I love this too, because there are so many pieces that you might not realize are in the Louver, or you may not even know of that artist, but they're incredibly striking and beautiful that it's worth just giving yourself a balance of like, here are the mussy checklist items, and also I'm allocating this ninety minutes to just dink around and find weird things. Yeah, because you will and it's all beautiful. I kind of feel the same way about the Vatican Museums. Yeah, make sure sure.

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Speaker 1: Nobody told me that there's an entire room of Mark Schaghl's at the Vatican Museums. And when we walk through it, I swear the breath left my body. I was like, what you guys, go ahead. So they're they're often fun discoveries.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and that's often how I approach a lot of museums that I'll go to, like I'll be going for a specific exhibition, but then I will also just wander around and see what I see. And if I am going to a museum that is nearish to where I live, you know, it's a place I can probably get back to sometime. If later I'm like, oh man, I could have seen that thing, right, And if you if you're gonna be happy with whatever you see, regardless of what it is, feel free to not have a plan at the leave. I I wish Patrick and I had had like a little plan.

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Speaker 1: I also feel like a little bit of a plan is good because, as you said, it's huge, and just like, aside from I want to see X pieces of art, it can just be overwhelming when you walk in if you don't have some sort of idea of what you might like to see, like if you are you know, especially if you're with a group of people too, where it's like everybody they kind of might have their own taste, or like everybody's trying to be cool and like, I don't know, what do you want to see? That wastes time at the loop? Yeah, just pick a direction and go. But it can be overwhelmingly large, so but also fabulous and.

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Speaker 2: Cool Yeah, most of that has nothing to do with what was unearthed over the last few months.

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Speaker 1: No, but you know what does what alcohol? Oh yeah, okay, So did any of your research regarding the cherries on you know, George Washington's property, have any theories about their uses? There was some about that that I did not spend a bunch of time reading. There was one particular little thing called cherry bounce. Yeah, and there was some speculation about whether this could have been cherry bounce. There was some of that was based on like the quantities that cherry bounce was prepared in. Do you have insight on this or is just curiosity? No? I have just questions and theories. So yeah, you know cherry bounce, as you mentioned, which was kind of a Christmas thing, but they would prep it in the summer and put it up. That's one thing that is like an alcoholic thing.

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Speaker 2: I know.

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Speaker 1: George Washington also like love to drink, Like he drank a lot of madeira, allegedly not allegedly. I think there's pretty good evidence for it. But what I started to wonder because you know, he also had a whiskey distillery that was for okay distribution and sale. Yeah, and today you can actually like that property has that distillery in its modernized form back up and running, and you can buy George Washington's spirits. But it made me wonder, like was he drinking old fashions before they were really called that? Oh, what a good question, because that's a very natural, you know, a version of an old fashion. Listen, if you get into the old fashioned discourse, like tread carefully because some people will use cherries or cherry juice as the sweetener, other people don't want that, et cetera. Right, everybody has serin taste. But it makes me wonder if he wasn't using them kind of as some sort of accompaniment to whiskey. Yeah, which is an interesting idea.

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Speaker 2: It sounded to me like some of the fruit that was preserved was like some kind of spirituous alcohol fruit preparation.

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Speaker 1: Others possibly not.

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Speaker 2: And I think we said in the episode that they thought that removing the liquid from the bottles was gonna allow them to stabilize the glass better than leaving it right filled with whatever was in there. So yeah, especially round two of all of these additional bottles were announced in June, I imagine there is like work still to be done with that, conclusions still to be announced.

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Speaker 1: I hope someone designs a George Washington cherry beverage that is a more modern cocktail making use of these things. Yeah, yeah, I think there might there.

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Speaker 2: So there were definitely references to the possibility of seeing if any of those pits will germinate. Yes, there was also some discussion of collecting DNA to compare these cherries to other cherries currently growing in the area. Yeah, there's a whole archaeology lab there, and like a whole lot of other work that's going.

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Speaker 1: On there is also if anybody wants it and you're curious about what cherry bounce is, which is a freeedy cordial mount Vernon dot org has a recipe for it, so you can make it, just if you're curious there and wondering cherry bounce and do you love cherries? I also loved Slash was a little ooged out by the Roman cremaines in wine.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but then there was part of me that was like, is this my final destination plan? Do I want like my cremaines put in a bottle of gray Goose? Yeah, since I'm a vodka gallant, Gray goose is my fee That would just be funny to me.

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Speaker 2: But really, I don't know what was up with someone apparently tasting it a little bit, and I intentionally quit looking into it because I had this moment of like, are you serious? Also why also gross? Let's move on, right, I was working on these episodes, like I don't know, we can just acknowledge end of June, beginning of July nine million things happening in the new use, all of them bad. Yeah, So it's like I was just trying to keep my head down focusing on these things and like not go down unproductive research holes about is this a joke about the tasting the thing? What is happening with that? Let's move on to the next thing for Unearthed.

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Speaker 1: Well, and just in case this may help you, but also any listeners, I imagine this wasn't like he poured himself a shot. I imagine it is like the most minuscule amount possible for a variety of reasons other than uginess, just not wanting to accidentally poison yourself or do anything funky that you maybe didn't realize there are lots of reasons not to do it. Uh yeah, Dickie, you.

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Speaker 2: Know, there was interesting stuff that we didn't get into about that particular find that had to do with how they identified it that it was wine and white wine specifically.

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Speaker 1: Yeh.

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Speaker 2: That had to do with like isolating specific components within it, which, like I thought that was interesting but also a lot to try to explain in a short amount of time. Yeah, if you find a bottle of something somewhere, please don't drink it.

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Speaker 1: S right up there with don't eat bog butter.

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Speaker 2: Just you know, we've talked before about during the summer months, especially how I watch a bunch of through hikers documenting their through hikes of various things on social media.

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Speaker 1: And there was one of these.

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Speaker 2: Pairs of hikers that I was watching recently had gotten to where they were supposed to be able to get water, and the water source had dried up and they had backtracked to like have to go back to try to get other water, and they found a half empty discarded bottle that someone else had left that they picked up and said, we're gonna have this as part of our emergency stash. And I was like, I no, no, no, I advise against this a lot.

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Speaker 1: Oh no, thank you, No, no, no, no, no, no, I that is part of why things like through hiking would never have any appeal to me. Like nature's cool, but like I don't want to put myself in a position where I might not be able to get life necessities. Sure, that's I know some people find that to be part of the challenge. But I'm just like, but why though, when you could go to the Marriott or some other lovely hotel and have people just bring you a glass of water? Why why?

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Speaker 2: Oh?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but I have a spoiled cookie who likes to have things brought to me. Anyways, I understand this. Bring me some cherry bouncer. Yeah, yeah, like have a recipe for that.

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Speaker 2: I'll get to use my cherry pitter, which I find deeply satisfying.

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Speaker 1: It involves a lot of cherries. Just FYI, okay. The recipe that they have on Mount Vernon is ten to eleven pounds of cherries woo to four cups of brandy. So like it's a high cherry component. Do we need to pit the cherries? Yes? Yes, actually yes, pit the cherries, cut them in half, put them in a large bowl using a potato masher, carefully mash the fruit to extract as much juice as possible, and then you strain the juice.

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Speaker 2: All right, that might be a weekend project.

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Speaker 1: I have an easier thing you could do, which is that I would pit the cherries, cut them in half. I would boil them with a cup of sugar and a cup of water and let them get kind of simmery and glurpy, and then strain that off. And you have beautiful cherry syrup to use in cocktails. And the cherries you have strained off are great spread on like toast or bread.

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Speaker 2: That sounds yummy. You made two things and it's way faster. Yeah, you can still make delicious cocktails. Also get to use the cherry pitter, which is, as we said, I find very satisfying. Yes, whatever's happening on your weekends, I hope it's great. If you have to pit some cherries for something, I hope you enjoy doing that and that it goes well and does not spray too much cherry juice around your kitchen. We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday Classic, which I think is going to be about beekeeping if I looked at the calendar right, And we'll be back Monday with a brand new episode. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.