Book review of J.W. Jones, The Salmon by F. T. K. Pentelow in Science Progress, 47, no. 188 (1959): 814–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43417321.
Paleography
See, for example Harvard University, Geoffrey Chaucer Website, “How to Read Medieval Handwriting (Paleography)” at https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/how-read-medieval-handwriting-paleography, accessed 25 Jun., 2024.
Sylvia Tunstall, “Public Perceptions of the Environmental Changes to the Thames Estuary in London, U.K,” Journal of Coastal Research 16, no. 2 (2000): 273. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300035.
Rautanen, sanna-leena, antero luonsi, henry nygård, heikki s. vuorinen, and riikka p. rajala. “Sanitation, Water and Health.” Environment and History 16, no. 2 (2010): 173–94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20723775.
For a comparative chart of British cities’ acid concentrations in water, you can read Smith’s original report on Google Books: Robert Angus Smith, Air and Rain: The Beginnings of A Chemical Climatology (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), 332.
Veronica Edmonds-Brown, “From ‘biologically dead’ to chart-toppingly clean: how the Thames made an extraordinary recovery over 60 years,” published 21 Apr., 2022, in The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/from-biologically-dead-to-chart-toppingly-clean-how-the-thames-made-an-extraordinary-recovery-over-60-years-180895, accessed 26 Jun., 2024.
Thinking like a historian helps you understand oatmeal—and the human condition
Does pork organ cereal-soup seem strange? It’s got to be normal somewhere—or somewhen.
Image generated by the author with a prompt to Stable Diffusion AI and then heavily modified in Procreate image editor for iPad.)
By Doug Sofer1Doug Sofer, Ph.D. is a historian with a cool podcast and an even cooler draft of a book he’s trying to publish. Both projects are about how history helps us all understand the strangeness of now, and both are called You Are A Weirdo. Doug works at lovely Maryville College in lovely Maryville, Tennessee, and was recently promoted to full professor. At first he’d thought the Dean called him a “fool professor,” but luckily he got that cleared up before he burned any bridges.
Travel the world and you’ll discover that your normal is everyone else’s abnormal. Take, for example, breakfast.2Don’t take mine. I’m happy to share ideas with you, but Mister Fork gets stabby when it comes to folks mooching off my plate.In the USA only some foods make sense for breakfast. Crunchy, sugary grainy bits; hot bread products with syrup; smoked, salty, porky things; unfertilized bird eggs, ultra-processed, frosted rectangles filled with artificially flavored corn syrup goo—all make intuitive sense as morning meals.
Now go to, say, the city of Chiangmai, Thailand. And I mean really go there. Get away from your hotel and try to learn how the folks there live—how they walk, talk, work, space themselves out while standing in line, dream about their futures, play with their kids, discuss the Thai royal family, socialize with classmates—and eat breakfast. Head to a popular restaurant in the morning and you might find that folks are eating a savory rice porridge. Or the kind of chicken with basil dish that gets called a “curry” in the West. Or, say, tom luad moo (ต้มเลือดหมู), which is a bunch of slow-cooked internal pork organs cooked with pig’s blood into a kind of soup.
That concept of breakfast soup might seem weird, or maybe even disturbing to you. But in Chiangmai you are the weird one. There, all of your assumptions about breakfast are wrong.
In fact, one of the amazing benefits of international travel is that it gets you to reevaluate many things you take for granted. You might not have even known that such a yummy thing like porcine blood-and-organ soup existed. After you get over your initial hesitation, it might even become your new favorite sunrise slurp. By traveling abroad, you learn that normal is a moving target; it’s about who’s around you in the three dimensions of space.
In Chiangmai, all of your assumptions about breakfast are wrong.
This is where the discipline of history comes in. You get these same eye-opening benefits when you explore the fourth dimension: time. In fact, even if, Zax-like,3My shout-out to Dr. Seuss’s The Sneeches and Other Stories is the kind of highbrow reference you’re going to find in my writing. you decide never to move even one smidge4For readers who use the metric system, 1 standard U.S. smidge = 11.83 millismidgeons. to the left or right of your current position in space, your ordinary will eventually become weird, thanks to the passage of time.
Genuinely doing history is not just about memorizing the number of Hungarian reserves who served under the command of Gen. Vinzenz Ferrerius Friedrich Freiherr von Bianchi, Duke of Casalanza (1768–1855), in the skirmishes that took place in the general area of the Battle of Leipzig in October, 1813, during the Napoleonic Wars.5About 25,000, according to this 1863 source. Much more important, it’s about immersing yourself in other periods of time. In so doing, you put yourself and your assumptions into context; you simply don’t know when you are unless you explore the past.
That’s when you learn that you, as a person of today, are a weirdo.
Here, I’ll prove it—by once again reflecting on breakfast.6I should probably eat before I start writing so that all my examples don’t end up being about food.
You can plunge into the past right away by choosing an old range of years on an advanced Google Books search, and then searching for food terms. When you do that, you’ll come across a volume with the staggeringly on-the-nose title What To Eat, How To Serve It. It was published in 1891 by Christine Terhune Herrick from right here in the USA7If you’re not reading this in the USA, please replace the words “right here in” with the words “in that place called”. I strive for accuracy in everything I publish. who wrote about good housekeeping—in magazines such as the staggeringly on-the-nose entitled Good Housekeeping. Eight of the thirty-five chapters in her book are about breakfast and they include menus and/or recipes of typical breakfast foods. Terhune Herrick describes the breakfast-maker’s limited options this way:
The substantial part of our American breakfast is not marked by much variety. At nearly all of them will be found the steak, chops, or cutlets, varied once in a while by fish, a hash, or a stew, semi-occasionally by a dish of eggs. Potatoes in some form—stewed, baked, boiled, or fried—are in order, and these are flanked by a plate of hot biscuit or muffins, or oftenest by successive instalments [sic] of griddle-cakes.8Christine Terhune Herrick, What To Eat, How To Serve It (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 26–27.
Foods described in this book are probably not as unfamiliar to you as ต้มเลือดหมู.9Apologies in advance to my Thai readers.But asserting that nearly all breakfasts include some big hunk of meat may feel a little off by today’s standards. And how about that casual mention of stew, just thrown in there between hash and eggs? I don’t know about you but breakfast stew is pretty much the same thing as breakfast soup.
The recipes themselves are a mixture of normal and alien. There are some familiar breakfast foods with familiar names—“parsley omelet,” “corn muffins.” Then there are in-the-ballpark-familiar breakfast foods with unfamiliar names: “Graham brewis,” for instance, which seems to be a kind of porridge made from Sylvester Graham’s whole grain bread.10This 1708 dictionary defines a brewis as “[A] mess of thin slices of Bread soak’d in the Fat that swims on Potage.” If you’ve never read about Sylverster Graham and where graham crackers come from, go Wikipedia that sucker. You’re welcome. She lists a kind of roll called a “Sally Lunn”; this bun seems to still be popular in the UK but here in the USA,11See footnote 7. this food is literally history.12See, e.g., Amanda Fiegl, “Colonial Recipes: Sally Lunn Cake” in Smithsonian Magazine, 11 Mar., 2010), at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colonial-recipes-sally-lunn-cake-82438919/ accessed 18 Jan., 2024. There are various hot preparations of Cerealine, a 19th century brand of malted maize flakes; but Terhune Herrick’s book includes actual recipes for these flakes, including “Cerealine porridge,” “moulded Cerealine,” and “Cerealine fritters.”
Lastly, there are a few foods that are far too fishy to be considered conventional breakfast fare in most of the USA today. “Scallop patties,” for instance, or “creamed cod with potatoes.” And then there’s my favorite one: “Shad roes in ambush.” If you’re not from a Mid-Atlantic state—the Eastern Shore of Maryland, say—the words shad roe probably doesn’t mean much to you. If it does, it’s unlikely to stimulate your salivary glands in the early AM. Yet for a good deal of early U.S. history, the egg sacs of these bony fish were the pumpkin spice lattes of their day.
I’m less sure of the ambush part. I’d been hoping that part of the recipe would involve hiding behind an armoire and hurling these globs of proto-fish at unsuspecting family members when they entered the room. Instead, they seem to be in ambush because they’re hiding under two other ingredients: Boiled chicken eggs and a white sauce. Either way, you’re not going to find shad roe on most US breakfast menus; even mid-Atlantic folks agree that it’s weird.13See Mimi Montgomery, “Shad Roe—Washington’s Favorite Weird Fish Dish—Is Back on Restaurant Menus” The Washingtonian, https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/03/09/shad-roe-washingtons-favorite-weird-fish-dish-is-back-on-restaurant-menus/ , accessed 21 Jan., 2024.
I’d been hoping that part of the recipe would involve hiding behind an armoire and hurling these globs of proto-fish at unsuspecting family members when they entered the room.
In other words, reading what an 1891 author has to say about A.M. eats in the U.S.A. can be like exploring your breakfast options in Chiangmai. Whether journeying through space, time, or a combination of both, your horizons will expand. Even if you return to ultra-processed pastry rectangles as your morning munch, your understanding of human possibilities will have expanded. That is, the Venn diagram stored in your brain that represents the category of Things For Breakfast now includes organ soups and stews and brewises and stealthy globules of fish eggs lying in wait to assault unwitting passers-by.
Good history expands your mind. Like good international travel, it allows you to discover yourself through gaining other perspectives. It helps you understand how you, as a person of the present, are similar to those who came before you. Probably even more important, it’s about grasping how you’re different—how you and your peeps have diverged from the traditions and assumptions of those who preceded you. And it’s far larger than both breakfast and the Battle of Leipzig combined. It helps you see beyond your narrow normal, beyond your here and now, liberating your mind and showing you other possibilities for yourself and the human species.
Doug Sofer, Ph.D. is a historian with a cool podcast and an even cooler draft of a book he’s trying to publish. Both projects are about how history helps us all understand the strangeness of now, and both are called You Are A Weirdo. Doug works at lovely Maryville College in lovely Maryville, Tennessee, and was recently promoted to full professor. At first he’d thought the Dean called him a “fool professor,” but luckily he got that cleared up before he burned any bridges.
2
Don’t take mine. I’m happy to share ideas with you, but Mister Fork gets stabby when it comes to folks mooching off my plate.
3
My shout-out to Dr. Seuss’s The Sneeches and Other Stories is the kind of highbrow reference you’re going to find in my writing.
4
For readers who use the metric system, 1 standard U.S. smidge = 11.83 millismidgeons.
I should probably eat before I start writing so that all my examples don’t end up being about food.
7
If you’re not reading this in the USA, please replace the words “right here in” with the words “in that place called”. I strive for accuracy in everything I publish.
8
Christine Terhune Herrick, What To Eat, How To Serve It (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 26–27.
9
Apologies in advance to my Thai readers.
10
This 1708 dictionary defines a brewis as “[A] mess of thin slices of Bread soak’d in the Fat that swims on Potage.” If you’ve never read about Sylverster Graham and where graham crackers come from, go Wikipedia that sucker. You’re welcome.
