Summary

Do you want some candy, little girl? Of course you do, it’s delicious. But what was candy a thousand years ago? Turns out at least some of it was kind of similar to what we get today.

Annotations

Some book recommendations:

Steven Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500.

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.

If you are downloading this podcast on 11/16/21, you can get a free copy of a journal with two of Em’s weird speculative fiction poem-things here. For the week following 11/16, it will be on sale for under $4 CDN (so like $3 freedom bucks) for a week. Please consider downloading (and if you do, leave a review)!

1/ John Mirk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mirk
Mirk’s Festial or Liber Festivalis (The quote about getting souls out of purgatory is in the middle of page 270):
https://archive.org/details/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft/page/270/mode/2up

17:30 I (Em) actually didn’t know there was a tie between how many people say kaddish for you and how fast you get into heaven–there is another tradition that you don’t say kaddish for someone after a year except on the anniversary of their death, because to do so suggests that you think they’re in hell. Meaning that if you sin so much that you go to hell and one year’s worth of kaddish doesn’t get you out, it’s going to take a while, I guess.

2/ 21:xx: French toast, or pain perdu. Looking this up isn’t too easy, but a number of websites claim that bread in “pain perdu” is lost because they are using stale bread (bread that is lost, i.e. dead) and bringing it back to life. The name in English is occasionally suggested to have come from a guy named Joseph French (so similar to German chocolate cake).

3/ Apicius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

The recipe is: “Aliter dulcia: siligineos rasos frangis, et buccellas maiores facies. in lacte infundis, frigis, ex [in] oleo, mel superfundis et inferes.” For the recipe, scroll down to the number 302 (the number is in parenthesis in the left margin): https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16439/pg16439-images.html#bk7

4/ “Sweetbread is something else.” For those who didn’t watch Silence of the Lambs as children, sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas.

The pudding is from British Library manuscript Harley 279 (c1430). Here is a blog that includes a transcription: https://coquinaria.nl/en/strawberye/

5/ The Middle Ages also used almond milk. And yet not mentioned in Dante’s Inferno. . . [Yes, more on this will be upcoming in a future episode!–Jesse]

6/ In VN, this drink is called nuoc mia and it is much better than Gatorade when you’re out and about on a hot day.

7/ Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”:  https://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/

8/ Robbie McCauley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_McCauley and a brief excerpt of Sugar https://vimeo.com/131050638

9/ Ama Ata Aidoo (b1942) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ama_Ata_Aidoo

Aidoo’s play Anowa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anowa

10/ This recipe is from British Library MS Harley 2378. Here is the recipe “To Clarifie Sugar”: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_2378_f155r
Here is the recipe I read, “To Make Penydes” (begins at the bottom of folio 157v): http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_2378_f157v

11/ Here is an article about child labor and the chocolate industry.
The decision (see here, from June 2021)is a little different than Em represented it–basically, six adult survivors of child trafficking/slave labor were denied the opportunity to sue Nestle USA and Cargill under a law called the Alien Torte Statute based on the fact that they didn’t establish that the companies made major operational decisions in the US. In the words of the great philosopher Dan Le Sac, “Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.”

12/ Here is a fun article on the history of licorice: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7125727/

The OED’s etymology for licorice helpfully tells us that the “Greek γλυκύρριζα (latinized glycyrrhiza by Pliny), < γλυκύς sweet + ῥίζα root.”

13/ Ann Reardon using marshmallow! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkjUBcjlaz4

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