Alphonse Bertillon

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We mentioned quite recently that an al fALS Bertion episode was coming, and in a shocking turn of events, here it is with very little delay. Yes, unlike so often when it's like four years later. If you have noticed that there is also a Bertillon episode in the archives, yes, that's true. This one is not exactly an update. It's got a much different focus than that one that talks a lot about his police work and some of the ways he innovated, which we don't talk about much in this one beyond some of the key elements of the Bertillon system. But I really wanted to look at his life story a little bit more and who he was as a person. So that's why we are revisiting alfals Bertion. Bertil is a man who definitely is a mix of really positive achievements and traits and also a whole lot of really problematic issues. He's a very complex human. Bertil developed a system of identification via body measurements that was designed to identify whether crime suspects had an existing criminal history. It's just worked sort of. But his contributions to police work have kind of been occluded by some terrible missteps he made in his career after that. I'm just going to tell you upfront, this is one of those episodes where there are a lot of parentheticals where we just have to point out that there is a threat of racism through his entire story. I don't want to detract from it by jokingly saying you're going to get a lot of this, but just brace for it. It's one of those things we're just acknowledging because in a lot of cases it doesn't do any good to really dig into it and go, here's how this was racist. One thing, the very title of it, you will know is super racist. So know that going in as we examine Alfonse Bertillon. Alphonse Bertillon was born April twenty third, eighteen fifty three in Paris, France, and he came from a family of innovators. His grandfather, Jean Baptiste Bertignon, served in the military under Napoleon Bonaparte before becoming a chemist. In that role, he made improvements to the distillation process and invented a sugar purification method. Jean Baptiste also invested in one of the first gas works in Paris, helping to usher in the age of the literal city of lights. Alphonse's father, Louisdolphe Bertillon, studied medicine at the Sorbonne, although his true passion was engineering, and he sort of combined the two when he realized he could measure humans and used that data to compile statistical tables. Some of these tables were inherently racist. Ui Adolf eventually became France's head of vital statistics, and Alphonse's brother, Jacques Bertignon followed their father in that role. Alphonse's mother was Zoe Guiller Bertillon, who had married Louis Adolf in eighteen fifty. According to a biography written in the nineteen fifties, Zoe had wanted to name their second son Alfred, but Louis Adolf had forgotten the name they had chosen when he went to register the birth and so incorrectly went with Alphonse. That is really quite a charming story in that biography, where she's just like okay, fine, like they're just really happy about their new baby, who apparently screamed a lot. When Alfonse was just a few months old, the Bertillons moved away from Paris to Molmoor and See, about ten miles or seventeen kilometers north, and this move was precipitated by a growing distrust of the science community in Paris at the time, as scientific discoveries move the populace forward to people behind them were sometimes seen as causing unrest. Uh but this move was very good for the family for other reasons because being in the country seemed to help Alfonse, who had been kind of sickly from the time he was born, gain a degree of health and level out a little bit in terms of his child development. The family stayed at Monmorency for three years, and they moved back to Paris in eighteen fifty six, settling in on the Rue de Bruze. Alphonse sounds like a scamp as a kid. He was a curious child, but not really interested in structured learning. When he struggled in school, his parents hired a tutor for him, but he was pretty merciless with this tutor would hide his glasses and play tricks on him. Because he had been sickly as a small child and still had some health issues. He was entirely willing to exploit that to just get out of work. When Alphonse was eleven, he was sent to a boarding school that special in difficult students. He was there for a semester before the Bertignon family received a letter that basically said no amount of money was worth dealing with Alphonse. As a scholar, he excelled in botany and natural history, but he just did not have any interest in other subjects. At the same time, the family was trying to decide what to do with their precocious thirteen year old Zoe Bertillon became gravely ill. Her exact illness is unknown. It's been theorized that she may have had some sort of bacterial infection that led to sepsis. Alfons, his older brother Jacques, and their younger brother George attended her deathbed, and Alfonse is said to have fainted in the moment that she died. As the family was mourning, Luis Adolf had taken the two younger boys to Orno la cousadle Bach, near France's border with Andorra. It was a place that he and Zoe had spent time when they were first married, and there Alphonse got some tutoring from his father, who realized that his mental child mostly just needed to be challenged by education to engage with it. This is something, of course, that is recognized as part of a person's learning profile now, but in the mid nineteenth century it was often mischaracterized as laziness or a lack of focus. I think folks still struggle with being branded lazy when that's not really what's going on today. But to be clear, Alphonse was stubborn about the whole idea of studying things he did not have a natural interest in, and this recognition of Alphonse's need for stimulus did not result in him becoming a good student or having courses tailored to him. Perhaps more than anything else, though, this period brought Alphonse and his father much closer. Before her death, Zoe had been the parent that Alphonse had been close to. But Alfos did have to go back to school, and he was eventually enrolled at the Imperial Lise at Versailles. This initially seemed like it might be a good fit, but all of the same problems arose once the newness of that situation had worn off. He not only didn't work on his studies, he actively worked with some of his friends to disrupt class. Eventually, the Imperial Lise sent Louis d'lfberthion a letter very similar to the one that he had received from the previous school. They had been able to deal with his behavior until an incident in which Alfonse, who this sounds wild to me, had been secretly making hot chocolate in his desk with the spirit lamp for himself and his friends started a fire. But then, when he was confronted about it with literal smoke coming out of his desk, instead of opening the desk and revealing what had gone on, he hit his teacher over the head with a book that ended his formal education. But this happened just as the Frank Oppression War began, so it's also possible his education would have been put on hold then. Anyway, he managed, how it is unclear, to take and pass the baccalaureate examination in science and Literature on his own a couple of years later, at the age of twenty. Alphonse wanted to sort of bask in that accomplishment, but his father wanted him to get a job, so much so that Luis Adolf found one for him as a junior bank clerk. This went about as well as you might think young person being pushed into a job by their parent. It's unclear exactly how this posting ended for Alphonse. It was a short lived situation, though. Next Alfonse was sent to England with the hope that some time abroad would mature him, and he found London to be a bit alienating. He noticed immediately that people stared at him just when he was walking around, and one of his friends, who was also French but living in London, explained that it was because he dressed like a Parisian and that set him apart from the rest of London. He wanted to revamp his wardrobe to try to blend in better, but Louis Adolph refused to send him money for that, so the normally pretty aimless Adolf Bertillon suddenly was hunting for jobs, and he landed a position teaching French for very low pay at a collegiate school. This was really challenging because he didn't really speak English much at all at this point, but he did manage. He next moved to a position as a private tutor, and he started to suggest to his family that maybe after he was done in London. He would go to university in England or in Scotland, but his father did not want to spend the money to enroll him in a university given his education history. Al Fose moved on to another job, teaching French and London until he was recalled to his home country for military service in the ongoing Francoprussian War. In eighteen seventy five. He became part of one hundred and thirty ninth Regiment stationed in Rome, which is right in between Vichy and Lyon. He was moved at some point from an infantry to a clerical role, and also decided that when he was done he would go to medical school, so he started to use this downtime in the service to study medical texts. He became fascinated specifically with the skeleton. In a biography in the nineteen fifty six, author Henry T. F. Rhodes states that even at this early point, Bertillon was quote devoted to and almost obsessed with a specialized problem. This was the dimensions of the human skeleton. That fascination with the human skeleton would feed into the way that Bertion eventually made a name for himself. But before we get to that we'll pause for a sponsor break. After his military service, Berthion returned to Paris, and while deciding what his next move would be. Because it turned out he didn't end up wanting to go to medical school, he got typhoid fever and that delayed any plans that he may have had in mind. But he may have also been starting to panic a little at how far behind his brothers and friends he was in terms of a career, so he asked his father to help him again. Al Foals was able to get a job working for the police department of Paris as a records clerk with the help of his father. He started in that job on March fifteenth of eighteen seventy nine, and the twenty five year old Bertien found that he had walked into a mess of disorganized records. One of the biggest problems is hard to imagine happening today. Police in France and a lot of other parts in the world had a hard time knowing if somebody who was brought in on an arrest or even sentenced to jail time, had a prior criminal record. There were forms that were filled out every time, but a combination of corruption sloppy practices and lying on the part of detainee meant that those forms were largely meaningless. A lot of this just wound up coming down to whether a police officer remembered a suspect from a previous offense. Adding to that, everybody seemed to include their own set of information on any intake documents, and there wasn't a set list of criteria that was supposed to be used. Before the eighteen thirties, that had been standard practice in France to brand criminals, so it was easy to see if somebody had been arrested before that was finally recognized as inhumane and stopped, and nothing had really been developed to identify repeat offenders in place of this branding, and so this is, you know, forty some years later, that they're still having all of these problems. After the branding was outlawed, thank goodness and al false, Bercielle decided that he would just restructure the whole system, and on October first, eighteen seventy nine, exactly two hundred days from the day he began the job, Bertion submitted a report to his boss, Monsieur Antrieu, the Prefect of Police. This was a preliminary version of the system that he would eventually develop, but he had devised a way to uniquely identify people in a large group through a systematic series of measurements of their bodies. Bertillon had figured out a way to plug those measurements into formulas that could sort people into various groupings of similarities and then make that data accessible and searchable in a way that a person could process a newly arrested suspect and then check pretty easily to see if that person had a prior record. For a very simplified example, Bertillon had made an initial sorting of all the records by head measurements, so you would need to measure the person in question and then see if you needed to look in the cards that were small, medium, or large, and so that already eliminated two thirds of the possible options. The remaining one third would then be separated in a similar way by the next measurement, and so on and then so on again, so you might arrive at kind of a subdivision of people who had the same forearm length from elbowcrease to wrist, all grouped together. There would be a card for each of those people in a set that match those measurements, and a police officer would use that measurement to find the card set and then sift through just a couple a dozen cards, not all the cards, to see if the same suspect had been previously booked or incarcerated. I feel like this is sort of a dichotomous key for humans. If anybody remembers that from like biology class, additional measurements could be searched the same way to cross reference and verify the identity of the person at hand. The entire system was predicated on Bertillon's realization that no two people would have all identical measurements. Uh. I will say this sounds maybe fiddley, but it sounded completely cocka mamy to Prefect Andreelle. Also that no two people having all identical measurements did come back to bite him. We'll get to that. Bercion was really disappointed that his superior did not see the functionality of this system, so he decided he would further refine it over the next six weeks, and then he submitted an updated version of the report, hoping that this time it would convince Andreau of its value. This time, he was told very clearly the police had an established record keeping method and it was fine. And in response, Alfonse Bertillon told his superior that the system was actually a mess and of little practical use. It probably went over really well, but because he was a new clerk who had no prior experience in the field, he was told to simply drop it. And because his father had been the one to get him that job, Louis Adolph Bertillon got another letter about his son, this one suggesting not that he was unfocused or high spirited like the ones he had received when Alfonse was in school. This one suggested pretty bluntly and kind of grossly that there might be something actually wrong with Alphonse, mentally like maybe your kids should get treatment. But once Alfalse showed his father what he had been working on, the Elder Bertion totally understood it, and he had some insights into why other people might not. Initially, this combination of statistics with physiological analysis had never been used in quite this way. It was complex, but it did really make it possible to find existing information about a person if they were in the records, and to build up his database of cards, which got pretty large. Bertion had visited prisons and took measurements of inmates as well as taking the measure of family, friends and associates, so he had a pretty big data set that he could show, hey, look this works. This use of anthropometry not just the measuring of the human but the study of those measurements was not a new concept. It's still used for a variety of applications today. It is a study that has a lot of problematic issues in its history because often the data collected had been used to try to make connections about race and behavior. The pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy are based on it, and there have been many, many, many anthropologists over the years who have announced incorrect, generalized conclusions about groups of people using anthropometry as their evidence. Today this is mostly used for things like designing seats for cars and airplanes, for things like clothing size for manufacture. But in the eighteen eighties, Bertanil was not trying to use interpretive analysis to suggest that people with measurement X were more likely to commit a certain type of crime, although the system did get used that way by some police departments. We have talked about that on the show recently. He was just trying to show that no, two people would have the exact same data set, and that if you set up a system correctly, you could use their unique profile to search for them in a big system. This also has some problems to talk about in a bit. They're different problems though than trying to say that you can tell whether somebody is a criminal by what their head is, Like yeah, and he even said as much in an interview with prior podcast subject Ida Tarbell at one point like no, no, no, that's not what this is for. You cannot make the connection that like a man with blue eyes will do X, Y or z, Like this is literally just to find people, although he was also aware that people were going to make those jumps, and although Alphos's organizational system was not getting any recognition at work, with his father's encouragement, he continued to refine it on his own time. He had a growing collection of measuring tools, and he made continuously updated records of himself and other volunteers. The list of measurements eventually included the length and width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the left foot, and the length of the forearm from elbow to the end of the middle finger. There were also notes recorded of body shape, any scars, tattoos, or other unique identifiers, eye color, hair color, and it's listed as like hair quality. It sort of comes down to like hair texture and like is it thick, is it thin? Is it curly? Is it not. He also included a fairly new technology, which was photography. We've talked about the history of photography many times on the show before, so this is not really new information. The de geratype was introduced in eighteen thirty nine, four decades before this work by Bertillon, and in those four decades it had progressed considerably. It still was pretty new though. The first mass market camera was still about ten years away, and there was already photography in use in police precincts, but it wasn't really commonplace. Bertil felt that his measurement system would be even more useful if he could attach standardized photos to the records. He established measured distances from the chair that the subject was seated into the camera, and the full front and full side angles they would be photographed from. This system, known as portrait parlai, is considered the invention of the mug shot. If you've ever seen old mugshots, from Europe in particular, in which there were what looked like rulers and calipers and things like that to position the subject's head. That's because they're using the bertail age system, or a variation of it. He had, in the meantime, not for this work, gotten a promotion from being a junior clerk, but he was still kind of used as a pain in the neck and an outsider within his department. He did his job and was apparently pretty good in terms of work ethic, but he did not really make any friends at the police department. But he was befriended by a young woman by chance. When crossing the street one day, she asked him if he would help her cross because she was nearsighted and she was afraid of traffic, and he obliged, and once they had crossed, they introduced themselves to one another. Her name was Amelie Otar and she had recently moved to Paris from Austria. When she mentioned she earned a living giving German lessons, al Fall said he had always wanted to learn German. That was a complete lie. He hated that subject in school. As he was feeling stagnant in his job. Bertillon wrote a book to occupy himself during his time, and this book was titled Le Ras sauvage or The Savage Races. Holly didn't find a lot of information on this book's specific contents, but it's usually dismissed as a messy, poorly researched title that was more of Bertillon's musing on things he didn't have a lot of exposure to than on any kind of actual scientific exam of anything. Also, based on its title, seems like it must have been incredibly racist. This book did not do well, but he had dictated it to Amalie and the two of them had become very close, and soon she was taking notes for him regularly. I did find, i should say, French language versions of it, and my French is okay, but not really good enough to plow through a book of pseudo information of me, like fake scientific search. So just if anybody's like I found this book, well yeah, but not an English language version for good reason, I imagine. Not long though after the publication of this book, his boss Andreau retired and the new prefect, whose name was Cemcas, had heard of Bertion's project, and unlike his predecessor, he was really interested in it, and he gave Bertillon a chance to prove that this system would work. He had three months to do it, with the help of two assigned clerks, and he had to find at least one repeat offender in the system through his method. It took some time, but eventually he did manage to match a newly arrested man with a previous visit to the Paris police department. The timing of that first match in February eighteen eighty three, was unfortunately overshadowed by the death of Alfonse's father, Luis Adolph. Despite that loss, eighteen eighty three was pivotal for Bertillon in more positive ways. He built on that first success by identifying more and more recidivists in the police records, and he proposed to and married Amili, who had been an important part of his efforts. She's said to have compiled more than seven thousand of the cards used for this system. She had, by all accounts, beautiful, easily legible writing, so she really made the whole system easier for users. By the end of eighteen eighty three, Bertillon had identified forty nine duplicate offenders in the Parisian police bureau records. By the end of eighteen eighty Fourertion's process had identified two hundred and forty one repeat offenders. This was all proof enough for his prefect to start instituting the system officially. Bertion was tasked with getting a department up and running, and police staff from other countries soon were visiting Paris to learn this system and bring it back to their own offices, and Bertion had some very high profile successes. His system was used to identify an anarchist who was plotting a bombing, as well as a man who had faked his own death and then continued to commit crimes. An eighteen eighty six article ran in papers around the US titled identifying Prisoners, and it announced the new system as a triumph. It read, in part quote, the latest method of identifying prisoners which has been introduced into France by Monsieur Alfonse Bertian, and which is now successfully practiced not only in the chief French prisons, but in Russia and Japan. As well as the exact measurement of the prisoner on his arrival at the jail, a photograph is also immediately taken, and by these means the many mistakes which have been made by a trusting photographer only are avoided. In eighteen eighty eight, France had established its Bureau of Identification, with Alphonse Bertillon as its director. Bertion's career was clearly taking off, but his arrogance was about to trip him up. We'll talk about his involvement in the Dreyfus affair after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. As use of bertillonage began to spread, there were naturally detractors. One of the biggest early criticisms was simply disbelief that there couldn't be duplicate people within the system. In a statement in eighteen ninety three, Bertillon said, quote the ideal card of the average man more exactly than Frances banand that is to say, individual in whom all the measurements correspond exactly to the average dimension, quite simply does not exist. It is never found even in the most central section of my cabinets. There are, of course, cards which approach this ideal configuration, but the related measures never approached each other so closely that they can be confused. That assertion would be proven wrong. There were other issues with the system, and we're going to get to them in a moment. But here's the thing. Bertillon was stubborn when it came to criticism. He was terrible at hearing anybody criticize his work, and he always insisted that the critic was the one in the wrong. Bertion's arrogance caused a great deal of harm when he was asked to consult on the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, which we've covered on the show as a two parter the short version. Dreyfus was tried for selling military secrets to Germany in eighteen ninety four. A key piece of evidence in this trial was a handwritten document which contained information about state secrets and their sale, and Bertil was asked to analyze the handwriting. Now, he was not a handwriting expert, but his reputation had become so well known for his police work that people thought he was the obvious choice. In the six years since the Bureau of Identification had been formed, he had developed other means of using his mathematical formulas to measure both people in evidence, and he thought he could similarly use it to analyze handwriting. And this was disastrous. Bertillon undoubtedly biased by anti Semitism, which was an enormous problem in France at the time, determined that Dreyfus, who was Jewish, had forged his own handwriting in an effort to conceal his involvement in this traitorous sale of state secrets. He explained to the court at the trial that Dreyfus had formed the letters using a square grid as the first disguise passed, and then worked from that version to make a bad copy of his own writing. Bertil may have believed that he had figured out a criminal mastermind's method, but what he really did was get a totally innocent man exiled to Devil's Island and spark an enormous cultural rift and giant anti Semitic backlash in France. But even when new evidence came to light indicating that the real trader was Ferdinand Walsen Esterhousi, including a confession, and not Dreyfus, Bertillon continued to vehemently assert that Dreyfus had to be the guilty party. His testimony during Dreyfus's second trial was described this way by a member of the press. Quote now and again, Monsieur Bertillon's voice rose in hateful shrieks. There were interludes when he clenched his fist, struck the bar, swearing that Dreyfus was the trader. The voice rang out with passion and excitement. You beheld in him, the man vain unto madness, with confidence in his atrocious fantasies. He was at last taking his revenge for all the insults of those who had called him a fit subject for an asylum of the insane. Bertillon never conceded that he had been wrong in this matter, even after real handwriting experts had proven his conclusions and his methods false, and he proclaimed this correctness even to his deathbed. While this scandal caused them damage to his reputation as a handwriting expert, and his work had contributed made in a major way to a very real crisis, the family cost was greater. Alphonse's brother, Jacques, also a well respected statistician, was married to Polish physician Caroline Schultz. Caroline was Jewish, and Jacques was so upset by Alpha Vonse Bertillon's insistence that Alfred Dreyfuss must be guilty that these two brothers had a massive falling out and they did not speak for years. Over time, the bersionage method was recognized as having problems. From the very beginning of it being put to practical use in police departments around the world, its flaws became more and more apparent. For one thing, there were a lot of devices that needed to be acquired and then maintained and constantly calibrated for measuring. For another, there was significant training needed for implementation. Any clerk or officer who was going to use those many devices and tools needed fairly advanced instructions on how to use them, and different users would often return different measurements of the same subject. Sometimes the same user would return different measurements on the same subject if they took a second set. Bertillon, as he always did, denied all of this, stating that quote, anyone who is not an imbecile could learn to measure in five minutes and never forget the process. This system also did not really account for things like the way a person's body changes as it ages, so as a subject aged, it was less and less likely that they would match up with a Bertillon card from their younger years. Additionally, incidents started to pop up where two different people were identified as the same person, something that Bertillon had insisted was not possible. By the end of the nineteenth century, as finger printing started to be adopted by many law enforcement offices, the Bertillon system, which had briefly been hailed as a revolutionary tool, started to fall out of favor. Did not take long after its introduction. Bertillon had initially rallied against the use of fingerprints, although over time they started to be included with Bertillon cards in police files. The mug shot, however, with its standard front and profile images that's endured despite the scandal of the Dreyfus affair. Bertillon continued to be given awards for his work criminology, and he continued in his work until in nineteen thirteen, he began to experience the sensation of being extremely cold at all times. He could not seem to get warm no matter what amount of heat he was exposed to, and he shivered constantly. He was also starting to have trouble with his eyesight. After he was diagnosed with pernicious anemia. His younger brother George, donated blood for a transfusion, and initially this helped a great deal, but the effects wore off and he needed a second and then a third transfusion, and George was the donator on all of it, so it was taking a toll on him as well. He kept working for months as this was going on, and there's no denying that he was getting weaker and weaker. In early nineteen fourteen, he was nominated for the Legendarner Officers Rosette, but people were reluctant to give him this award unless he met one condition. An emissary was sent to Bertillon's home, where at this point he was having to stay in bed, and told him that he would receive this award only if he retracted his assertion that Dreyfus had written the document known as the Bordereaux, which had been a key component of that case. Bertil reportedly yelled no at the visitor repeatedly. That was the end of that. On February thirteenth, nineteen fourteen, alse Bertigon fell into a coma. He died at eleven PM and was buried at Perlischez Cemetery. In the September nineteen fifteen edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, lawyer and author Raymond B. Fosdick wrote quote in the death of Alphonse Bertillon in February nineteen fourteen, the anthropometric method of identification probably suffered its final blow. For a decade, his prestigian personality were the only supports of a system that in Europe at least, had been fast losing ground. Persistently, even stubbornly, he endeavored to save the method would was the product of his genius and which bore his name, But he lived to see it discarded in nearly every country in Europe except his own, and even in France. Now that the weight of his influence and his really compelling personality are gone, it is doubtful whether his system of identification will be continued. One of the issues that arises when looking at Bertillon's life is that there are some big gaps in the information. One cause was that his wife Emily and her grief destroyed a lot of his papers after he died. As a consequence, we really don't know a whole lot about his personal thoughts on a lot of the events that took place during his life. His actions and behaviors once he started on the system that would be the basis of his life's work show a man that was driven by our pursuit of the truth, but also distracted from that truth by Hubris. Perhaps the best summation of the complicated Bertillon was written by Richard Fairbrother and Julian Champkin in twenty fourteen for the periodical Significance, in which they said he was quote passionate about measuring everything that could be measured and some things that could not really be measured. Besides ah false, Bertillon, you are a quandary. I will talk so much about the various ways he has discussed in our Behind the Scenes on Friday, but in the meantime I want to talk to you about Stroganoff. This is from our listener Chelsea, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I want to begin by thanking you both for such a wonderful podcast. I've been a listener since the beginning, and I have loved listening to the podcast mature and grow over time with the two of you making it your own. You've done such a phenomenal job of tackling difficult and interesting topics, and I always can't wait to hear what's next. This is a little late because I listen exclusively when driving, so I'm always a bit behind sidebar. You never have to apologize. We suffer the same problems when we're going about our lives. We fall behind on the things you love all the time. Chelsea continues, I just listened to your Oops All Noodles episode, and I was excited that you were covering beef stroganoff. My husband and I have had a long standing disagreement about how to make stroganoff, going back to the beginning of our marriage. He does the majority of the cooking since he's better at it, but stroganoff is something that I feel confident about. The First time I made it, he couldn't believe I was adding tomato paste and leaving out the mushrooms because I don't like them. He thought that was absolutely ridiculous because his recipe uses paprika instead. He claimed that adding tomato paste and emitting mushrooms change the intent of the dish. I said this was how I learned to make it, and that I would stick with what I know. This has become such an inside joke between us that now years later, when we're meal planning for the week, if stroganov is suggested, it becomes an entire family discussion about are we making moms stroganof or Dad's strogan Off, complete with a lot of knowing glances and the kids taking sides. Imagine my delight when you said that tomato panes was added as an ingredient in the early nineteen hundreds. It was so great that I shouted ha while driving. I was in the middle of dropping one kid at preschool and driving to volunteer at the other kid's school, but I had just enough time to swing by home and interrupt my husband working in his home office with a triumphant I was right. I love this so much. Once he understood what I was talking about, he asked me to cite my sources. He knew he couldn't argue with me when I told him I heard it from you, because he was the one who originally insisted I listened to the podcast. He did want to make it known that he was also right about the mushrooms. Thank you for always adding knowledge and delight to my drive. I've attached pictures of our dog, Carlton. He is twelve and has always been a crabby old man dog who just wants to lie in the sun or be under a pile of blankets. Cheers, Chelsea. Okay, first, of all, Carlton is hilarious and adorable. I love a grumpy dog there. He's so cute. I want to scoop him up and kiss him, and he'd be like, please do not. Yeah, I mean that's the saying that I discovered too when doing the Stroganoff research, is that there are a lot of different versions because it propagated throughout the world and at different regions that different people created their own kind. So in my opinion, there's no wrong kind of stroken off. Ever. I'm not a tomato paste person, but if you are and you love that, awesome. I'm like heavy on the sour cream and mushrooms person on that one. But I'm just glad that everybody is cooking delicious things and that it is something that they are good naturedly poking fun at each other about, not an actual argument. If you would like to write to us about the way you make stroganoff, or any other dish or anything else we've talked about on the show, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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