Behind the Scenes Minis: Food and Thesaurus

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. A'm Holly Fry and I'm trace Phoebe Wilson. We talked about more upon Himous Foods this week. We sure did. I love these episodes. They're so fun to research because there's so much they said. They said that goes on, but mostly it's pretty good natured because it's all people who just love food, So I love it. Um. There was an interesting detail that was like a gossipy thing. George Rector, who included the recipe for vetacchini Alfredo in his cookbook, later reported this thing that is not true, um, but caused some confusion, which is that you know, we talked about those gold utensils that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had made for Alfredo de la Leo, and George Rector at one point reported that delay Leo had donated those two Mussolini's war effort to be melted down for financing. Apparently, but that's not Those utensils still exist, they're photographs of them that are recent. This reminds me of multiple things I've seen on Twitter recently where somebody is really confidently, like this Golden Girls scene is even more amazing when you realize it was improvised and then the people that wrote and blocked that scene or like it wasn't actually and it's like did you just just make that while like why why? Yeah? Yeah, Um, I mean listen. Betty White genius. I hope everyone could afford to do so. Donated in her name on her birthday. Um, we did, and I was delighted to discover one of the animal shelters we donated to had Betty White as a dropped down for the reason you might be donating, and I was like, yes, um, but set a chini alfredo is a thing I could eat by the gallum. Yeah, me too, like a guppy. I will eat it until I feel sick and then be like, but a few more will be fine. It's so delicious. It has the same roots for me as my love of Caesar salad, which is being vegetarian in the early nineties, um, and also in college, because we we could have a microwave, we could not have like things that had an exposed heating element, so things that could be made in the microwave were really important and frozen fetacchini alfredo was often vegetarian. Obviously not vegan, but was often vegetarian, and the thing that it came in also fit in the little, tiny, tiny freezer compartment of a dorm fridge. Um, and that was really really one of my staples for food that I could make and eat in my dorm. Perfection. Perfection. I've just always loved it really good. Man. Um, we discussed that you do not enjoy holiday sauce, no, and I think, like something about the texture of it bothers me. I'm a lot better about this than I was when I was a child, but there are a few food textures that I just do you do not enjoy And then combining it with the poached eggs like that's just a little too like way too far over the like sort of shiny gloppy edge for me, and I'm like, I can't. Oh, oh, I bet you do not like Loco Moco either. I've never tried to eat it, so I could not tell you. I have like a rabid addiction to Loco Moco, which, for anybody that doesn't know it, I have had it in many places, but it's usually attributed to Hawaii as point of origin. But it um is rice either steamed or some places make it with fried rice, and then it has usually a hamburger patty or a big chunk of spam on it, depending on where you get it. And then uh, two poached eggs or sometimes like a fried egg that's still got some movement to it, and then brown gravy on top. So similarly, it might be too gloopy for you, yeah, own and like some kinds of gloopy or fine, but other kinds of glopy not so much. And then also when I was a small child, my brother got salmonella, and that consequently made our whole household very cautious around uh, undercooked or uncooked egg. I know, undercooked goes in quotation marks, there's there's you know, everybody has a different threshold, different tolerances, and that was that probably wasn't how my brother got salmonella in the first place, but his experience with that illness was so bad he did not have to be hospitalized, fortunately, but it lingered forever and it was not fun. And so all of the potential salmonella vectors just became just the whole huge problem at our house. So I am guessing you do not drink a lot of flip cocktails either not a lot now since they have a whole raw egg and that I occasionally, uh, we'll we'll do something that has like egg white in it. Um. I love a kniac flip. I love it like with a it's a problem. But my solve in all of this was that I bet if you made something more like an Alfredo sauce and put it on the eggs Benedict, we could call it eggs Wilson and you might find it more palatable. Yeau. Just imagine sopping up Alfredo saucy would have to be the stuff with cream in it. I think, um, with your English muffin lefto. Oh, come on, that would be delicious. And you said you had not had crabby evil. I don't think I have, but that I mean all the all the component parts of it and them like that all sounds good to me. Yes, I Um. I lived in the Pacific Northwest when I was a kid, so I had it then. Um. And then I love San Francisco and visit as often as I can, And anytime I see it on a restaurant menu, that's one of the things that I'll be like, yes, please, because I love it so much. Some places um have started adding like you'll get crab Louis with a little shrimp added in as well, which presumably is like a cost saving measure because sometimes crab is very expensive. Um, but man, it's always delicious. I love it. I love it. I don't know if I've exhausted our eponymous food options. Probably not. One never knows. It's a good one to have as a go to when we've been talking about people being murdered violently. Yeah, yeah, it's it's the murder antidote. Yeah. Um, but I always want to talk about food anyway. So ah, this was a very hard one, as they always are when you discuss delicious things, Because how badly did I want to go out and get all of the makings of fed acchini alfredo and make it from scratch? Yeah? I mean I want some now and we don't have any in the house, and we don't. It really is a whole different story if you get freshly made fed a chenie. Yeah, well, and we have we have all the things to make our own pasta here, you know, thanks wedding gift of a kitchen ade mixer in various successories. Do you have the cutter, like the roll cutter. We have a thing that attaches to the kitchen aide that that does it nice. Yeah, um, And they're a little fiddly to clean, but we have. It's always the trick. It's always the trick. I remember growing up my mom had one of those roll cutters that you had a hand crank that you passed it through, and I loved doing that part of the work. It was what my mom had. It was it was a very similar design but for a different purpose, which was a greater that operated very similarly to that, but have little cones that you put on you hand cranked it. And uh, I bet if I literal hard I could I could find one now, But it seems like anytime I try to do that same task now it is on a box greater, which in my opinion, takes longer. Yes, I have only recently discovered the garlic zoom. Do you know what that is? It's like a little I'm mad at everybody that knew what it was and never told me because I'm not the world's fastest mentor of garlic. And I don't even know if that's a brand name or what, but like, that's what it's called as a general utensil. It's like a little plastic almost donut shaped wheel that has blades in it, and you shove your clothes of garlic in and you close it and then it rolls along the countertop like a toy, and then it's all minced beautifully and perfectly. And if you go for a really long time, you get pretty close to garlic paste. Yeah, so different. We have a garlic press that can press garlic that has the skin still on. Uh. And then we also have a little like silicone tube that you can put your garlic clothes in there and roll it to get the skin off of them. Oh. I just smush it with a knife and it falls off. That's normally how I have done it. But at some point we got this thing. You got technologies. Um. The garlic press is a really nice garlic press though, and it um you can just stick the clove in there without peeling at first, and it's fine. I do also laugh. This came up also on our our discussion of um caesar salad, all of this anti garlic hate that was going on in the mid twentieth century. Yeah, I love garlic. It's like the best thing on Earth. I don't know what that's about out but now I feel like I have many delicious things to consider and consider making, and I have to figure out a way to make a sauce Wilson that is palatable to you on your I would love that. Thank you, Jar is going to show up on your doorstep and you're gonna be like, oh, but hopefully it will be delicious. We talked about Peter Roger this week. Yeah, with many surprises in that story. I love his little escaping Geneva. Sure. I mean I I associate his name most with the Parists, and we did not even get to that but until the very very end of the episode. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of fascinating. Every almost every biography or you know, article about him that I read notes that like most of the time, the breadth of of the things he worked on cannot possibly all get mentioned, and often like you'll just get one that's about him as a doctor, or just get one about the Cesareus, which again ignores the first sixty plus years of his life in many ways. It's fascinating. Um. There was an interesting note that I read in one particular biography, and it was a chapter of a larger book where they mentioned that, UM, like a hundred years after he did that spoke illusion. There was a publicist named Will Hayes who worked in Hollywood, and he suggested that in some ways Roger had had discovered the nature of how movies and film worked, like with that whole this is how your eye is perceiving movement. This is essentially how film is tricking your eye at the same time, UM, which is an interesting idea, but that has also led to UM cinema historians being like, please, please don't do that, confusing all of this issue, which is kind of interesting. Oh, the Bridgewater treatises. Now, in one thing, I wanted to mention um specifically about Roget that work which became so much the focus of his efforts for a while, and so important to him at a time in his life where things were really difficult. UM. Some historians have suggested that that was very much for him a way to reconcile his scientific work with religion, because he had always been, you know, theoretically religious, but not really that fervent about it. But after Mary died he became much more devoutly religious, and he was constantly focused on what would happen when he met her in the afterlife, and so for a lot of people. When you look at this, you know, six undred pages he wrote using science to prove all of the things he wanted to believe about about God in the afterlife and and whatnot. Um, you can make a pretty clear assumption about like cause and effect going on there, which is kind of interesting. There is a really really funny to me, I'm sure it was not funny at the time. Thing that happened with the first edition of Roger's Thesaurus in the United States, which is one of those things where you're like the qua um. It was edited by a man named Dr Barness Sears, and he was I don't even want to say he was very conservative, because it goes beyond that. You know how some people who believe that they are very pious and that everyone else is kind of like a snarley mess of sin see sinful things where they're not sinful things. He edited so many words out of the Bizarres because he thought they were dirty that it became almost unusable in some ways. And I mean, like two of the words that come up when people are talking about this edit are aria, like the musical term and fugue. It was just like dirty words they gotta get out. What I did not ever manage to find an available digital copy of that first American Rog's Bizarres, but I'm just picturing it is this really unusable, clunky thing, which made Roget very irritated, of course, because he had carefully written it so that there were literally people that wanted to read it cover to cover because they found it just so interesting. So I can imagine the other thing that I didn't put in this show, but I thought was very funny UM is about Sylvia Plath. Really, she loved Roget's Bizarres and talked about it all the time, and she even called herself Roger's strumpet, And when she met Ted Hughes, she was making jokes about how her heart already belonged to this other man being Peter Roche. Was amazing because she loved his work so much so, even though she too has a very sad end. I thought that was a very very funny UM take on Peter Rochet all that he had done. I mean, there's so many writers that have invoked his work as like being just a completely vital and incredibly important tool for their own work. So yeah, yeah, well, and it's like I remember as a child flipping through Roget's The Stars of the Library. But the Rogers the Stars that is on my bookshelf is one in dictionary form, which is like more practically useful if you're writing, while the other is more like broadly useful as a resource to to look at the whole pattern rather than I just need a different word for this word. I need to not say, you know, happy twelve times in this sentence. You can, but it might be edited out in the American Aria filthy word. That made me laugh so hard again. I'm sure it was not funny at all for any of the people involved, going what have you done? Um, but it sure makes me laugh. Yeah. Like I said, I love that story of him getting back to England with his two underage students. That's a pretty um ingenious approach to be like, I know my dad was, my dad was from here, I can get citizenship. Um. Yeah. Apparently that bribe happened because he found that government official he needed to certify his blood relation to his father, like playing cards somewhere. It was like, dude, I'm just trying to get to these two kids to get home. Can I will give you money? Please just do this anyway? That is Peter Roget kind of love them. Uh. And this was one of those episodes that he bumped up against so many other interesting people that I ended up with a list of like six more people I want to talk about and their various contributions. But let me tell you, Bridgewater is happening and he is funny. All I'm saying is he dressed his dogs. Um sounds great. Uh. If this is your weekend coming up in terms of actually having time off, I hope it is so restorative and RESTful and that if you read anything, you enjoy it and it is not edited in a way that makes it clunky. And I hope if you don't have time off and you work on an alternate schedule where you actually have to do things or even just have responsibilities, this weekend outs out of your work. I hope all of it goes smooth as silk and it is as easy as possible, and that you still find a few minutes for yourself now and again, we will be right back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday with a brand new episode. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I 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.