Behind the Scenes Minis: Salty Popcorn

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Polly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and we talked about popcorn. We did. I love it. I do too. Do you do dinner popcorn? No, but tell me, Okay, So here's what I do. I love to do popcorn with a lot of parmesan cheese and olive oil, and I put rosemary in there. Or I'll infuse the olive oil with rosemary first and then I'll do bacon bits. And it's dinner popcorn. That's what I eat for dinner. Sometimes that sounds really good. I mean, there have been a number of times that I've eaten popcorn for dinner, but like not in a way that I have. I need the proteins, so I got to add others. That's good. Yeah, yeah, oh man, I love it. I really am getting a little obsessed with the idea of making my own candied popcorn mixes. I don't know what that's about. I don't need that. I mean that sounds fun, but it does sound fun. Yeah, I always can kind of justify it in my head. As we have built out our lower level of the house to be kind of entertainment village that I'm like. But if people come over and they want fresh glazed popcorn, and then I right right, you need that, You need to have it. You need it. How are you preparing your popcorn? I do many different ways, Okay, so I sometimes do it on the stove. Alton Brown had a how to on how to always get perfect popcorn in like a you know, a steel bowl on the stove, and I use that sometimes. Sometimes I do it just in a saucepan. I have an R two D two air popper that is a danger to myself and others because it shoots one. It's huge, it's enormous two. It's the shoot design isn't awesome. Okay, it's cute as pie, and it works really well on a popshop popcorn, but it shoots white hot chunks of both unpopped kernels and freshly pop popcorn all over the kitchen. It's r tood to Doing this makes it so funny. It's pretty good. So if I ever use it, which I do sometimes because I do like air pop, I have to like build a little foil funnel for it so that it won't harm me or my cat's or husband, yeah, or like hit a piece of glass and break it or whatever. And sometimes I do microwave. There's a microwave brand that I really like because it has no salt, no oil, and sometimes I just like to start fresh. The other thing that I have started doing is experimenting with mushroom popcorn, which is not made of mushrooms. It's just called that. It's a popcorn more like the kind you would get in the theme park often that are. It's made for candy coating because it makes more of a sphere and it is a little bit stuff because sometimes when you put candy coating gun right now, popcorn collapses and melts. But this has better structural integrity, so it's better for that. So there's a lot of Again, my beloved hates popcorn. Oh no. He worked in a movie theater when he was in high school and then I think a little bit in college and it was just like he ate too much popcorn, and he doesn't I understand. He has he has met his quota of lifelong popcorn concession, done with it, and he wants no more. Yeah, so it's on me if I make popcorn. Yeah, we are mostly an air popper household currently. We used to have a thing that went on the stovetop that had a little thing in it that you could turn a crank and it would move the kernels inside so that like nothing burned or stuck. I found it really challenging to clean it adequately. When I was a kid, we had a like a particularly heavy pot saucepan that we would use on the stove that was like really good for doing popcorn. And and we also had a thing it had sort of a bowl and a lid, and you would put your oil down in the bottom of the bowl. You would put your kernels down in there, and it put the lid on it. It plug it into the wall. It would heat up and pop all your stuff, and then you just flipped it upside down and that lid became the bowl to eat it out of. Yeah, so that's pretty cool. I remember those. I'm sure that's the thing that still exists. But yeah, we also used to grow popcorn. We grew popcorn in the garden for a fish season, which was a fun experiment, but the popcorn that we could buy at the store was better. Yeah, because you're not doing like the industrial drying process and stuff that makes it, which is actually you've lived a good example of probably why a lot of indigenous cultures were like, let's just grind this down and we'll use it as a meal kind of thing. Yeah, because it naturally is not automatically great. So a couple of weeks ago, I was on a little sort of vacation. Vacation is it was not that long. It was a couple of days that I took off work and I took the train to Western Massachusetts. I went to Pittsfield. Two popcorn related things happened. One is that there was a movie theater right down from where the hotel that I was staying at, and I had already looked at the schedule to see if there was anything I wanted to see that was gonna line because I was only there for one night and nothing really worked. But I walked past and the door was open, and the smell of the movie theater popcorn hit me, and I was like, I wanted to walk in and be like, I don't I'm not buying a ticket, Can I just get some popcorn? Which I did not wind up doing. I kind of regret that still, though that would have been fun. The other thing is I walked past I want to call it a popcorn wagon. It looked a lot like a wagon, but sort of a cross between a wagon and a food truck, like big enough for somebody to get in there, just sitting out on the sidewalk in Pittsfield. And apparently that thing has more than one hundred year history. Now it is part of a summer job training program that Goodwill does where you can just walk up to it and you know, order popcorn through the little window of this wagon out on the streets, red wagon with like golden wheels. And I was like, I did not know all that whole story until just now, But I was like, boy, do I love the fact that I just walked past this popcorn wagon whatever it is? Yes, oh I love it. What is? Are you like a classic buttered? Are you like a kettle corn girly? What is your popcorn zone? I like to do a lot of different things with popcorn. When I was a teen and I did not have the problems that I have with hypertension today, I would put soy sauce on there. Oh yeah, which you had to be careful with because too much soy sauce. It would just like melts, it will also collapse it. But I like I like like sort of the classic movie theater butter and salt situation again with the hypertension mindfulness, and I like to put a variety of different flavors on there. I discovered putting tahene on popcorn oh so good. So putting like there are various powdered seasonings onto the popcorn. Super good. I don't currently have kettle corn seasoning, but I like kettle corn seasoning a lot, White Shuddar seasoning and Linda Belcher kettle corn. There have been I didn't get into it in the episode. Some interesting recipes involving popcorn in many cookbooks over the years, but one thing that was interesting to me was like in nineteen oh five, the Fanny Farmer cookbook had a recipe for clam and corn soup and it involved using popcorn as your garnish instead of crackers. Okay, and apparently that was something that Teddy Roosevelt loved. He always preferred popcorn to crackers in his soup. I'm really curious about this, and I'm gonna try it sometime. But yeah, I'm also curious about like what the texture of the popcorn they were using was like, because I feel like most of the popcorns that I have used here in the twenty first century and lap the twentieth century. Also like if you put that in a liquid or a broth, even a like a creamy broth, like a like a clam chowder, it's gonna just go get a melt. Yeah, so what what what would that be like? I don't know. There were some mentions that I saw of it being used almost as a thickener in some recipes, like counting on it to melts. But like I still have that thing of like yeah, but you still have little bits of husk then that are in the like do you straight those out? Do you pick them out? Like how do you manage or do you just pick it off of the husk before you put it in for the And I didn't. I didn't go down that rabbit. Yeah, a number of the ways of preparing it that we talked about in the episode. I'm like, that feels like you would have popcorn full of sand, Like you're never gonna get that sand out? How did this work? Yeah? I don't. I was with you. I the first time I read about the no you just throw it in the hot ash and stir it, and I was like, no, thank you. Yeah. I So when I was a kid, there were a couple of times that we made popcorn over a fire, either a campfire or the fire in the fireplace, And even though we had a thing that was meant to do that with, always wound up with some like straight up burned portion of it. Like it's just it's uh, you know, if we had more experience with it, you might have done and better, but like, we always wound up with some inedible popcorn. Yeah, I think that's pretty common. I like a lightly burnt popcorn because then it's like it just crumbles to dust in your mouth. I love that. But I like almost all popcorn. Yeah. Lately I'm craving can't like butterscotch popcorn, which I think I'm gonna have to do. See, I'm like everything bagel seasoning. Yes, it is so good on popcorn. Yeah, so good on popcorn. I love it. Yeah, I will. I will use all the things anyway. Popcorn popcorn, Yeah, popcorn popcorn. I love you popcorn. Yeah, it's absolutely delicious. I like it a lot. Thank you, Universe. For popcorn. Nice. Thank you all of the indigenous peoples that cultivated maize, right, because otherwise we wouldn't have pop wouldn't have it. Yeah, it's it's so interesting all of those the long list of places that that whole myth of how they were giving popcorn to the colonists. It's so weird. Literally using popcorn to like whitewash those stories and make them palatable is so weird to me. Yeah, but there it is popcorn. We talked about iodized salts on the show this week. We did thanks for personal curiosity. In addition to the Washington Post article that's that inspired the whole thing, which we mentioned at the top of the show, there was also a couple of years ago an article in the The London Review of Books. I think that all of this in the show notes, but that focused more on Switzerland, and both of them were just so interesting to me and made me want to learn more and do a whole episode. So various articles that sort of relate to this in some way kind of made it sound like we added iodine to the salt for this whole thyroid thing, but now everybody has high blood pressure, and it made it sort of sound like the iodine addition had somehow led people to consume more salt, which led people to have high blood pressure, and that is not the process. Like people's salt intake didn't really change with the adding of iodine to salt. People just started buying iodized salt instead of the other salt that they were already using. And then, as we said in the episode, like way bigger source of sodium in the typical American diet is like canned and processed foods that are made, you know, in mass quantities to purchase at the grocery store and boxes and cans and whatever, and typically the salt used to make those foods is not iodized salt. So it's like, yes, people are eating more salt, Yes, that's correlated with more people having high blood pressure, but most of that additional salt that has become part of the diet since then is like not idized salt related to iine. I think this is one of those things where it's easy to blame something other than like, yeah, your dietary choices, because listen, none of us, myself included, want to have to make dietary changes for no better health. But sometimes you gotta yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that can feel easier if you're trying to reduce your sodium intake is to switch to a salt substitute for your like table salt seasoning purposes, right, And like, I'm not making a medical advice here, that just sort of means that, like you might be weeding a source of iodine out of your diet that you need without necessarily tackling the larger source of sodium in the diet. It just it amused me that so many articles that I read seemed to present this as like a process that went from iodized salt to hypertension, and I was like, that's not right, really how that worked. Another thing I found very frustrating is that a lot of the articles that I read really were focused on the economic impact of so many people having like hyper thyroid symptoms of like lethargy and brain fog and stuff like that, so sort of focusing on how much it was costing employers in the country to have so much hyperthyroidism, rather than having any inkling about like the quality of life for the people who were dealing with this, Right, and we saw the same thing or I saw the same thing in some of the research about the migraine episode that we did a while back, and I kept finding statistics that were about like labor hours lost to migraine, and I was like, I don't want to include disinformation in the show at all, because I don't think we need to be reducing human beings and you know, debilitating medical conditions down to whether you are making money for your employer or not. Right, listen, we understand you don't feel great, but how hard are you able to work is really the bigger issue. So frustrating. There was also a dispute that I did not get into it all. I only found one brief reference to it that apparently the commissioner of the State Board of Health in Michigan, whose name was R. M Ullen, published this letter in the Medical Society Journal in nineteen twenty four where he sort of seemed to try to take credit for the whole idea of adding iodine to the salt, when the other people involved with it were like, no, it was more like we invited him to be part of this, found him really hard to work with, kind of quietly managed him out of being involved, and like now he's trying to take credit for it, and that simultaneously seems like maybe a very interesting personal dispute to explore and also something I didn't find much about aside from this like one reference, and it became a thing of if I try to research this personal drama, it is going to sidetrack me from finishing the episode. Yeah. Also, bickering is not always documented terribly well yeah, uh, that's totally true. So yeah, we definitely have a number of different salts at our house. We have like there is there is an iodized sea salt that gets used in various cooking, but like we also have a fancy like finishing sea salt for sprinkling on top of things when you're oh yeah about to you know, serve them. And we have you know, a salt grinder and a pepper mill and a lot of the like rock salt that would go into a grinder a lot of times that's not iodized. So there have been times where I'm like, am I kidding enough iodine? And then I think about how much, like how much sushi I eat that involves right seaweed, and I like probably, all right, Yeah, I'm a fan of salt. Yeah, I love it. My thing lately has been black lava salt, which I like to sprinkle onto creemy drinks m because it brings out neat things and it also makes cool patterns at the top, which is also not iodized. But it is delicious. Yeah. Anna's cut like a nice little smoky flavor. I mean to do it. Yeah. So yeah. You know, if you're cooking something amazing this weekend, whatever salt you're putting in it, I hope it's your favorite salt. Do people have favorite salts? I think we do at our house. Uh. And you know, if you've got to go out and work, I hope your day goes well and everybody is great to you. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and with something brand new on Monday. 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.