Eponymous Foods: All Chocolate

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Speaker 1: 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. It is time for an all chocolate edition of Eponymous Foods. Yeah, I love chocolate. I'm not really a chocolate person, but I love these stories. I mean, I won't, you know, spit chocolate out. It's just not the thing I'm gonna choose first. But today we have two foods that are eponymous foods, both, as I said, chocolate. One of these is a lot shorter than the other. Part of that is because the second eponymous food we have today sent me down like such an obsessive rabbit hole that even my husband was like, why are you so obsessed with this? But it's like, I don't know, but I gotta figure this out. Um. Both of them do feature chocolate, so our chocolate loving listeners might get a kick out of it, But they also both feature some issues with timelines and attribution and things being a little fuzzy that need to be unraveled. Also, I need to give you a heads up and I will just jump right to the spoiler. The first section of this show features the story of tutsie rolls. That sounds super fun in some ways it is, but it has some very dark elements to it, including a death by suicide with a firearm. So if that's not for you, just jump ahead to the first sponsor break that's going to be right around twelve minutes and forty seconds. Then if you jump ahead to that part, the second two thirds of the show pretty much all fun, I promise UM and a very hilarious and reiterative dance party on who invented this? Just tree, So, as Holley just said, we're starting with the tutsie Roll. The creator of the Tutsie Roll was a man named Leo Hirshfield, and there's not a whole lot of readily available information about his early years. We know was born in Austria, was the son of a candy maker, moved to New York as an adult in eighteen eighty four. By the time his story with the Tutsie Roll picks up, he was already married and had a family, and as this story is usually reported, on February Leo opened a candy store in Brooklyn, and one of the candies he sold there was his own invention that was the Tutsie roll. This is eponymous because Tutsie was his nickname for his daughter, Claris, so she is the one who has the bragging rights to this thing being named after her. And that candy, which sold for a penny, was recognized for its unique consistency and flavor almost immediately. I like I used the word unique because while I do love chocolate, the unique texture of the Tutsie role is not my favorite of chocolates. There were plenty of chocolate candies before eight, none that candy stores could really sell in the summer because they would always melt. But Tutsie rolls were shelf stable even in the heat, so they became a really popular year round treat, and that popularity is said to have gotten the attention of the Stern and Salberg company, which offered Leo a merger deal that meant that production could go from the small setup that had supplied the Heirshfeld's Brooklyn shop to a much bigger scale, and that would include distribution to other candy stores. That deal meant that production moved to Manhattan, so did Leo and his family. So that's the official story. Don't get too attached to it. There's a little bit more to this story about how Leo and his Tutsie Rolls became part of a larger company perhaps, or there may have been a different route. Tussie Rolls were not incidentally the first treat that Leo Herschfeld worked on. We'll talk about some more, but for example, in he developed a gelatin dessert mix, romance Angeline, which he created for Stern and Salberg company. Bromangelin was a precursor to Jello. It was the same kind of thing. It was a fruity gelatin that you mixed from a powder, and it was pretty successful until Jello became the dominant dessert gelatine on the market. That alleged merger with Stern and Salberg and the move to Manhattan happened in nineteen o five, But it wasn't until nineteen o seven that Harshfield applied for a patent on the way that he made this long lasting heat stable candy. He describes in the patent application what makes this process unique quote. My process relates to the treatment of the candy after it has been pulled and before it is shaped. After the candy has been pulled for the desired length of time, the mass is placed in an oven or other heated receptacle and is subjected to a constant temperature of about a hundred and forty to two hundred fahrenheit for about one half two hours, during which time the candy is not in any manner agitated. After the candy has been thus subjected to the dry heat, it is ready to be shaped. The idea of subjecting a batch of candy to dry heat after it has been pulled and before it is shaped, is to impart there to a peculiar mellow consistency, whereby the candy will retain its peculiar consistency a longer time than it would otherwise, and whereby, while also while tough in measure, it is not unpleasantly so, and well, after a reasonable length of time, thoroughly dissolve in the mouth. Now, I'm like, are these the chocolate candies that Horace Fletcher was chewing in the morning. Maybe? But here's the thing. This timeline gets so wobbly. Right. We just mentioned that that that didn't happen, that that patent until nine seven, and he had allegedly been making these in the eighteen hundreds. So Samara Kawash author of the book Candy, A Century of Panic and Pleasure, dug into hersheld story and found some things that really predict that official story. For one, according to a city directory that Caah trackdown, Leo moved from Brooklyn, where he was listed as a confectioner in eighteen ninety one. At that point he moved into three sixty five West forty five Street in Manhattan, so that's much earlier than the nineteen o five timeline. In four and Leo got multiple patents for candy technology inventions. One was a machine that deposited candy into molds, another was a machine that dipped bond bonds into their codings. He also invented a fork for bond bond dipping. But these patents were jointly assigned to Julius Stern and Jacob Salberg, so that suggests that Leo Hirschfeld was working for the company for years before the Tutsie Roll ever existed. In nineteen o four, Herschfeld was listed in a New York City directory of Corporations as a director at Stern and Salberg, and, as we mentioned a moment ago, the patent for Tutsie Roll, which Hershfeld simply titled Process of Making Candy was not applied for until nineteen o seven, and it wasn't until nineteen o eight that Stern and Salberg applied for the trademark on the name. So it really seems much more likely when you see all these pieces that Leo actually worked for Stern and Salberg for quite a while before the Tutsie roll was conceived, and it was a big hit once it hit the market, and apparently very good for his career because by nine thirteen he had moved up from director to vice president. Stern and Salberg made tutsie rolls a high profile part of their business, delivering stock to stores first and horse drawn buggies emblazoned with the candies logo, and then doing the same with automobiles once they were a part of the company's operation. The ads that ran for Tutsie Rolls really leaned into the candies stable nature. One trade ad targeted to stores read quote, Tutsie Rolls stand any weather, stand any test, and sell at all times. All this we guarantee. In nineteen seventeen, when Julius Stern and Jacob Salber retired, Stern and Salberg Company changed names and became Sweets Company of America, and it also went through a big reorganization. Herscheld was still there, but he remained a vice president instead of rising into a higher title, and it appears that he may have been pushed out by new management or just got tired of the fact that they brought in new people to run the company instead of promoting him, because in nineteen twenty he left and he started his own company, Mells Candy Corporation. This, unfortunately, was a short lived venture. In one Leo was ill. He often had stomach issues. That same year, his wife was moved to a sanatorium to treat what's only described in accounts as a serious illness. On January Tho, Leo Hirschfeld went to work as usual. Before lunchtime, he left and told staff he would not be back that day. He went to the Monterey Hotel where he had been sleeping for several weeks. He wrote a note that simply said sorry but could not help it, and then took his own life with a revolver. Newspaper coverage indicated that Herschfeld had been depressed due to an ongoing illness and due to being separated from his wife while she was convalescing. Yeah, most accounts say that he was not in any kind of financial trouble. That would have, you know, sometimes been a thing that people pointed to as a reason for someone to do something like this. He was fine financially. Tutsie rolls, of course, continued to be sold because Sweets still owned them, and they continued to be more and more successful. Herscheld kind of vanishes into the background, and this is probably part of why the company has this alternate version of his story. I will mention another thing in the behind the scenes about how they've tweaked this story a little bit, um or how the popular story has tweaked a little bit that that maybe helps um brush this unpleasant part of it under the rug. The Tutsi Pop was released in the early nineteen thirties. That was a success that then enabled Sweets Company of America to stay afloat through the depression, and when the US became involved in World War Two, Tutsi rolls were sent to the front lines as quick energy rations for soldiers, and the supply of them is sometimes described as a sort of proto government contract before those were really a thing. And then, of course in nineteen seventy the first advertisement featuring Mr Owl and the age old question of how many licks does it take to get to the Tutsie roll center of a Tutsie pop aired. Uh, there's another another story that goes with the Korean War that we're going to talk about in the behind the scenes today. The entire company is called Tutsie Roll Industries. Tutsie Roll has pretty much driven the bus for a while, and in addition to its namesake, that company manufactures Andy's Mints, Dots, Razzles, Charleston Chew, and a variety of other candies. Okay, gonna go on an adventure of tracking down the origin of the next treat, but before we do, we will have a quick sponsor break. Okay, just in case you have never had German chocolate cake, here is what it is. It is a chocolate layer cake with a distinctive custard like icing in between the layers and on the top. It typically does not get iced down the sides. That rich icing is usually made with egg, yolks, evaporated milk, coconut and pecans. That icing is going to be really important as this piece of history unfolds, and the name suggests to a lot of people that it came from Germany, or it's related to a baking tradition from that country, or is someone trying to make something like a German thing, or is even a type of chocolate from Germany. No, this isn't upon him as food. It's named after a person. What. We'll talk about him in a minute. I read this already, so I already knew that, and I'm still like, what what uh? This story, though, is about much more than the man who lends this cake his name, but we are going to start with his story, what little we know about it. Samuel German not from Germany, born in eighteen o two. We do not know if he was born in Biddleford, Devonshire, England, but that's the last place that he lived before moving to Dorchester, Massachusetts as an adult, according to a history of the Baker Chocolate Company. Anyway, he lived in Dorchester Lower Mills with his wife, Charlotte Pder German, who he married after moving to the United States. His boss when he first got to the US was Thomas Tremlett, who had an estate on the corner of Washington and Tremlett Streets, and Thomas Tremlett was also from England. German worked for them as a sort of handyman, kind of a jack of all trades, doing whatever he needed on the estate, assisting him however it was requested. And through this work on the grounds there, Samuel who went by Sammy to his friends, became friendly with the neighbor basically the person who owned the estate that abutted their's, and that was Walter Baker of Baker Chocolates. Baker eventually hired Sammy away from Tremlett to work for him as a coachman, but then he gave him a job at his chocolate mill. I think we should just also take a moment to talk about how while Baker's chocolate is used in baking and a lot of recipes, that there is also a brand named after a person thing I didn't really realize until just now. It was at Baker's chocolate company that Sammy German created a new chocolate called German Sweet Chocolate that was in eighteen fifty two. This was a sweeter blend of chocolate than Baker's other offerings, and the extra sugar make it really popular with kids. The product was billed as quote palatable, nutritious, and healthful in addition to being a hit with younger consumers. Baker purchased the recipe and it's rights for a thousand dollars and marketed this as Baker's German Sweet Chocolate. Now. According to that same history of Baker's company, a recipe for German chocolate cake appeared in the Dallas Morning Star on June three, seven, and that recipe of the day, as it was build, specifically called for the use of Germans chocolate, so this is quite a while after the chocolate was developed. It called for an eight ounce bar of it. That was apparently an error. The paper ran a correction two days later for a four ounce bar to be used. That same recipe popped up again in August, with far less required. This one said a quarter ounce bar. I can only assume that this was kind of an editorial mistake and that it was maybe supposed to be a quarder of a full size bar, and someone just didn't understand and got the copy wrong, because a quarter rounds bar is like less than a tutsie roll for so whatever it was supposed to say. The recipe had been sent into the paper by a woman named Mrs George Clay. Unfortunately, we do not know her actual first name, only her husband's. But the following year, when General Foods, which had acquired Baker's Chocolate, published a booklet of recipes, including the German chocolate cake recipe. It also credited a Dallas County food conservationist named Mrs Jackie Huffins, who, according to the company, had since a very similar recipe to a television show around the same time. So they both got recognition. Oh but there's so many more than two. Uh So. Research turned up several versions of the story that stated that the original recipe was Germans Apostres chocolate cake, referencing the bar specifically, and that eventually the apostrophe s fell off, and that that has led to the confusion over the years that this was a German treat and not something made with German's chocolate. That doesn't appear though to be entirely accurate, because Baker's Chocolate Company changed the label from German's Chocolate to Baker's German Chocolate way before that. It's entirely possible that this is one of those instances where the public refers to a thing that is not an accurate representation or version of the name. So a modern example would be like the company Starbucks has no apostrophe in its name, but people often write it that way, as though Starbuck owns the company. Um, these things happen all the time. Here's the thing, though, If you do a certain old newspapers, you'll find recipes for German chocolate cake that pre date this late nineteen fifties story. As early as the eighteen seventies, we found advertisements for German and chocolate or German sweet chocolate for cakes. That's not a recipe, obviously, but it does indicate that Samuel German's Sweeter chocolate was being marketed for people to use when baking cakes. The earliest recipe that I was able to find that was called specifically German chocolate cake was from nineteen o one, but that particular recipe is not much like the cake that that name is associated with today. It did call for one cake of sweet chocolate, and Baker's German was often listed as a cake of chocolate rather than a bar, but the recipe doesn't mention the German chocolate ingredients specifically by that name. Also, this is a recipe for something that actually sounds more like a sweet from Germany. It's a very thin style of cake that's then cut into small strips or bars and assembled into kind of like small servings or even finger foods by layering multiple slices of the cake with jelly in between. About six years before the Mrs George Clay recipe appeared, newspaper advertisements for Pat Steakhouse of Welsh Louisiana touted quote, try our homemade German chocolate cake was apparently a popular dessert at Pat's, but we don't really know what style or recipe it was. And a nineteen fifty two article in the Denton Record Chronicle of Denton, Texas, under the headline Miss Florence Davis charms family with German Chocolate Cake recipe talks about a cake that has been handed down in Miss Davis's family for generations that uses German sweet chocolate. This article is a little weird to read to modernize. It's super fixated on the fact that Florence never married, and it calls her an honored spinster. But it does eventually get to her recipe. And here's the thing. This base cake for this recipe is pretty close to pretty much all of the cakes that are called German chocolate cake, right, So it has sugar, German sweet chocolate, baking, soda, flour, shortening, buttermilk, four eggs, a pinch of salt, and vanilla. Just about all of the cakes that we're talking about here under this banner of German chocolate cake are very similar to this, with just subtle variations on measures or the fat element, for example, like instead of shortening one will say butter, one will say o, leo, etcetera. The big difference in Florence Davis's German chocolate cake to the standard version that we call German chocolate cake today was the icing. So HER's is a pretty standard icing. It's butter, egg, yolk, coco, a box of confection or sugar, and then cold coffee or cream to thin it to the consistency that you like. So this doesn't really qualify as the first of the kind of German chocolate cake we're talking about, but that cake base really is pretty much what everything else looks like. Article called County Cook's Corner, which appeared in the Tailor Daily Press of Taylor, Texas, described a German chocolate cake recipe provide by a woman named Sarah lou It's very similar to the Florence Davis recipe, and the main difference is that her icing called for more than double the amount of cocoas this is a more chocolate version. Okay, so when did the coconut and pecan icing enter into the picture? Unclear, but we can't say for sure that it predates the most repeated version that states that that recipe was first published in June seven and then kind of became an overnight sensation, because there is an identical recipe in the Chickashaw Daily Express of Oklahoma from April of ninety seven. That version is attributed to a Mrs E. F. McDonald of ten seventeen Grand Terrorists. One interesting note on the German chocolate cakes origins came from an article in the Eugene Registered Guard of Eugene, Oregon in August. The article is really about how buttermilk can be used to enhance baking, but it mentions the juror and chocolate cake in particular and delves into its mysterious history. According to the articles writer Ka lundin quote, exactly who developed the cake remains a mystery, but grocers in Dallas suddenly became aware of a heavy demand for Germans Sweet chocolate, so stores who regularly handled a few cases were sending for fifty cases at a time. As the popularity of the recipe spread across the country, bakeries also developed the recipe for their use. A woman in St. Louis wrote that thirty years ago, as a bride, she was given a very similar recipe by her mother in law. She discontinued baking the cake during the depression because it was too expensive. So that cost of the cake is something that came up in a number of articles and write ups. Eggs, sugar, and flour have certainly fluctuated in price at times, and especially during wartime when ration ng was in place. Right during World War Two, flower was particularly ration. But they're also of staples that tend to come right back into regular use. So if the expensive ingredients were causing people to shy away from baking it during the depression, it suggests that the coconut and perhaps even the pecan may have been the problem, and that this version is in fact much older than the nineteen fifties when it became popular. We're gonna talk a little bit more about the pecan aspect of it in just a moment, we'll take a quick break first to hear from the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. When we get back, will track down some additional cases where various people were credited for inventing the German chocolate cake. Bump Bump, bump Bump, and even earlier instance of the German chocolate cake recipe than those that we mentioned before the break appeared in February nineteen fifty seven in a paper in Guthrie, Oklahoma, that was attributed to Mrs Floyd yen Zer. But wait, in January of that year, it was published as Mrs A. R. Brown's recipe in the Waureka News Democrat, and that instance mentions that a similar recipe appeared in the same paper about a year earlier. Mrs Virginia Berbers German Chocolate Cake was published in the Oklahoma City Advertiser on January eleven, and that won her a five dollar prize from the paper as the best recipe submission of the week. Predating any of this, and Burne, who's one of our favorite podcast guests, traced the cake back to an even earlier mentioned in a newspaper. In Texas Fan's entry on German chocolate cake in her book American Cake mentioned a nineteen fifty six right up by journalist Daisy Pierce in an Irving, Texas paper. So we went looking and found that it's called Summer German Chocolate Cake. The recipe that was basically the same in a column called Cooking with Daisy. The story of Daisy's first encounter at the cake is detailed. Quote impressed when her daughter, Mrs Milton Tomlinson of Frederick, Oklahoma served this during a recent visit, Daisy filched the recipe for her irving friends. As usual, the editor sampled a generous serving with a stein of cold lemonade, and we heartily endorse its texture and flavor. So this murky origin to the version of German chocolate cake that included the coconut and pecan icing was actually something that was being discussed as the recipe rocketed to popularity. Remember that General Foods Recipe booklet we mentioned a little while ago. Well, when the company reached out to various newspapers with the cake recipe to spread the word about that booklet, the Austin American Statesman noticed that it was not a new cake, but one that they had seen before. In an article titled anything Just so long as it is with Chocolate, which was published on September four, writer Mary Jane Bowed stated quote, last January, we received a letter from General Foods Kitchen saying they had a new recipe called German Chocolate Cake, and they thought it was so good they'd send us the recipe. We replied by sending General Foods a copy of the October twenty seven Austin American Statesman, in which we ran a story about the Austin Woman's Club catering service. The story featured a wc's bestseller German Chocolate Cake. The recipe that the paper printed in that article is the one from General Foods. With a couple of notes. They specifically mentioned that the Austin Women's Club used butter, not shortening, and then instead of the two and a half cups of sifted cake flour called for in the General Foods version, the women of Austin found three cups. Created a quote moist but not soggy cake. It reids a little like. It has a subtext of that's cute, General Foods, that's a right up, mentions that General Foods ultimately credited the origin of the cake to quote somewhere in Texas that was after they had published that book, that they kind of did a revision. It also comments on the fuzzy nature of where recipes often start, saying quote, the sudden popularity of a dessert recipe is somewhat of a mystery, like a joke or a fad. Nobody knows who started it or how it spread. But it does seem as though the variation on the cake to include the now familiar coconut and pecan icing did start in Texas or Oklahoma, but with so many people claiming it, there is no telling at this point who was actually first. Regardless of who was first, in nineteen fifty seven and nineteen fifty eight, the interest in the cake skyrocketed when the Austin American Statesman mentioned it's sudden popularity that was an understatement. In October eight, the Charlotte Observer ran an article titled here's that Chocolate cake Again, and the opening paragraph, written by Eudora Garrison, kind of says at all, but also hints at the cake having been around for quite a while. Quote. This recipe is old, and so is a story. But over the past year so many of you have requested the recipe for German chocolate cake, not once, but time after time. Here we go again. Will you please clip this and tuck it carefully in your recipe box. I love that it was so like people get tracked together. So we already mentioned the many questions of attributions and write ups commenting on how no one knew where this cake came from, and even in the popularity boom of the late nineteen fifties for it, various versions were being printed as possibilities in the Atlantic Constitution. In September, food editor Virginia Disard writes, quote, there are many stories about this recipe's origin. One is that a serviceman stationed in Germany brought it home to his wife. More likely, the name originated it's unique ingredient, German sweet chocolate, which has nothing to do with Germany. There's one element to this that may explain, at least to some degree, the way the cake seems to just show up everywhere at once, claimed by many bakers in the mid nineteen fifties, That has to do with agriculture. Wild pecans are native to Texas and Oklahoma. Even today, a significant fraction of commercially produced pecans in these states are from natural orchards rather than from bread or cultivated varieties. Texas remains one of the top three producers of pecans in the country, but in the years nineteen nineteen fifty, so the decade prior to this explosive popularity of German chocolate cake quote, aphids and mites appeared in epidemic numbers according to Texas A and M University Forest Service, so they were basically really harming these trees. There were treatments for the contrees, but it wasn't until the nineteen fifties that air blasts speeds prayers were introduced that offered a much more effective and comprehensive way of treating pecan orchards for pests. So this is a little bit of conjecture, but healthier nut trees would have been producing more pecans, lowering the price, and also just offering enough of them that people could use them more frequently. So it seems like if this recipe had existed for a while before the nineteen fifties, which is seems like it did, that decade may have been a moment when suddenly a lot of people could pull their copy out of the recipe box and bake the cake. Since it seems like people hadn't been making it frequently for a while, it's entirely possible that any given person might think that their's was unique, like that was their family recipe, because they hadn't heard other bakers talking about it, because pecans were not doing so well in the decade prior. So, in case you're wondering, how can so many people be claiming they wrote the recipe and it's there's Recipes fall in an interesting space when it comes to copyright. Here is how they're handled in the US. Per the U S Copyright Office quote, a recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients in a process for preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity might be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration also will not cover the activities described in the work that our procedures, processes, or methods of operation which are not subject to copyright protection. So even if you write a cookbook and you have that cookbook copyrighted, the actual ingredients and how to put them together to make a thing will not be protected, just the additional information and images that you were to provide in the book. So it kind of makes sense that no one was really getting too worked up over who actually invented this dish in when. And it's also why a lot of recipes today remained secret. Like if a company developed something, they don't copyright it because they can't and if they try to, then it would be publicly available because it would be filed with the patent office, so they just keep that to themselves. That's the mystery of of recipes. The popularity of the German chocolate cake was so rapid and so far reaching that it didn't stay strictly in baked dessert form. In ninety nine, an entire children's line of clothing by the manufacturer young Land was fired by it. One ad red quote, German chocolate cake is the color for fall. His clothes were mostly brown with white trim. Yeah, there was a lot of white rick rack going on. It was. It's very cute little pinafores and whatnot. I couldn't help thinking if you dressed your kids like that, they might look like gingerbread. Uh. Incidentally, to close the loop on Samuel German, he died in He's buried at Cedar Gross Cemetery in Dorchester, so he never knew about the wide reaching fame of the cake that carried his name, or that most people assumed it was from Germany and didn't know it was an eponymous food. I love this little revelation. Yeah, I yeah. It never made sense to me that it was called German chocolate cake, which I thought meant that it was from Germany, because it's like coconuts aren't from Germany. I did ask, uh too, friends of mine who bake a lot, uh, and have you know done so professionally, and both of them when I was like, did you know German chocolate cake was in German? They were like, yeah, it's named for the chocolate. But I was like, but did you know that's a dude's name, and they were like, what you know? Right? Right? Yeah? So many many mysteries for listener mail. I have a listener mail that sits in an intersection of a listener mail I want to do and a shout out I want to give. This is a listener mail about eponymous foods. This is written by our listener, Margaret, who writes Hi, Holly and Tracy. I have been catching up on podcasts from the end of the year, and I've just finished the latest eponymous Foods episode. I love the eponymous foods episodes, by the way, They're probably my favorite category. Every time you do one, I start thinking about the reverse. I am a small animal veterinarian, and you would not believe the number of pets we see that are named after foods. Chocolate colored creatures named Hershey, orange cats named Cheddar, or Cheeto, marshmallow, sugar pepper, there are a ton of them. When I was little, my mom used to make a dish for supper called Rumbled the Thumps and fink Adela, who was certain that it was mom shorthand for I've got a fridge full of leftovers that I want to be sure the kids will eat, so I will call it something weird. Imagine my surprise when Google came around and I learned that this was a real thing, and there's a link to the recipes. I ever knew about this. I missed this female. I gotta go look at the recipe. Uh, it's pretty recent, so you may have just not seen it yet. Margaret continues. When we got our two current cats, my husband and I waited, as we have always done, a few days after bringing them home to let their personalities tell us what their actual names are. Thus, I'd like to introduce Rumbled the Thumps. We call him Urt, who is when he runs the loudest creature without hoofs that I have ever run across, criminally cute kitting pictures. Our ties brother is not named fink Adela because I just couldn't see calling a cat fink his whole life. But even though he's not named after food, I'll have to include Scooch here because otherwise he'll be jealous. Also painfully cute, like if I could have baby kitties at all times, that would be great. The two of them have grown from being the most adorable kittens on the face of the planet, not that I'm biased or anything, into handsome, troublemaking house panthers. They are both um tuxedos, and they are gorgeous, gorgeous cats, and we're two of the very cutest. Margaret also gives a couple of interesting suggestions for future episodes. UM so I won't include those, but I will say this, um. One, thank you for being a vet too seriously criminally cute cats. Three. This dovetails nicely into my next thing, which is just UM. I met one of our listeners at my specialty vet this week, wow um, and she I wanted to give a shout out to Tabitha and tell her I hope her bibbit is doing good, uh, and that I know she said. She sent us an email. I could not find it, so Tabitha, if you're hearing this, re send it because I want to read it. UM. I want to read about your other cat information and then UM maybe we will share that one as well. But it was great to meet you and like I said, I hope everything's going great. She got referred to especially met that I have also used and think very highly of. So that was a great moment where I could be reassuring. Uh, if you would like to write to us about your katies upon himous foods, what you name your cats, foods, you name cats after, et cetera, I encourage you to do that. You could do that a history podcast at iHeart radio dot com. We are also on pretty much all of the social media as Missed in History and you can also subscribe to the show if you haven't yet. That is easy to do on the iHeart Radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H