EAT MY GLOBE: THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT FOOD

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An Interview with Plimoth Plantation Culinarians Kathleen Wall & Alex Cervenak, and

Wampanoag Homesite Cultural Programs Manager Kerri Helme

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INTRO MUSIC

 

SIMON:

Hi everybody. It's Simon Majumdar here. And welcome to a brand new episode of Eat My Globe. A podcast about things you didn't you didn't know about food.

 

And this is a very special episode because the Eat My Globe podcast team have come on the road all the way from Los Angeles to New England.

 

What a wonderful place to come to particularly in Fall when everything is changing, and all the colors are magnificent.

 

But I'm here for a very special reason. I have come to revisit one of my favorite places in the whole of the United States, Plimoth Plantation. A wonderful living museum where you can come to explore the lives of the early colonists and the Wampanoag community with whom they coordinated when they first arrived. Very, very special place.

 

And I thought I would come here today and interview a number of the people here about the ways that the colonists and the Wampanoag ate, and how they would've shared food together. And I thought it was a unique opportunity while we were in this part of the world.

 

I’m joined by two very special guests who know all about this and I've worked with them before here. Once during a show for the Cooking Channel, called “Back in Time for Thanksgiving.”

 

Also, I came here to write for my book, “Fed, White, and Blue,” still available in all great bookstores.

 

So let me ask my guests first to introduce themselves.

 

KATHLEEN:

My name is Kathleen Wall. I’m Plimoth Plantation’s Colonial Foodways Associate. Um, and I've also. . . I see my job as a culinarian. So I'm not a historian. I look at all aspects of food, not just the history.

 

SIMON:

Which is fascinating stuff. And we have one more guest.

 

ALEX:

I’m Alex Cervenak. And I’m the Colonial Foodways Specialist.

 

SIMON:

So great names as well. I love it. Great titles as well as everything else.

 

So before we go on and talk some more specifics about the first, you know, colonial settlers and how they would have eaten, which is really fascinating to me. Um, tell me a little bit more about what the museum does. I'm sure most people around the United States will know about this museum. It's very famous. I know you get many, many visitors. A lot of school children obviously come here on field trips.

 

But for those who may not know what happens here, Kathleen, why don’t you start and tell us about what the museum actually does and what its mission statement is, what it’s trying to achieve.

 

KATHLEEN:

So we're a living history museum of early Plymouth Colony. But that also includes the Wampanoag people. So we have shown all the people who live on this land, um, since we opened it.

 

Um, and we're kind of unique among museums that our founder was an archaeologist. And so he started by digging in the dirt to see what were the actual fragments of the past left behind and how do we build on that. So we have people who practice trades from the 17th century. Our native staff practice traditional trades on their site. So it's establishing a context for history, not just a bunch of words.

 

SIMON:

Which is, which is one of the reasons that I love it some more. And I was saying though, the main visitors here . . . I said a lot of people are school children. But who else would be the main people to come and visit as well? What do people get out of it when they come here when they interact with some of the live action that you have going on?

 

ALEX:

It's true. A lot of our visitors, especially going towards Thanksgiving and Fall, our school children, I think every third grader in Massachusetts probably comes here on a field trip.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

ALEX:

Um, but we also get school children from around the world. We get, you know, teenagers that have come from Quebec. We get teenagers that come on an East Coast trip that are coming in from California. But we also get groups that come from Japan. We get families that come from Germany. We get people from all over.

 

SIMON:

So if you do get the opportunity to come, it really is a wonderful experience and I love that live action. The people who are in character, as it were, really portray the people with a lot of historical reference.

 

But given the. . . . Obviously, there are two culinary specialists here at the museum. Food obviously plays a really significant part in that first story. I mean, apart from the fact that if they hadn’t eaten, they would have died. And many did.

 

Um, so Kathleen, why don't you start and tell us why food is so particularly important to that early story of the settlers?

 

KATHLEEN:

So, um, part of it is the food and their concepts of food that they brought with them. These are, um, English farmers for the most part. Some of them also lived in Holland though. So they have this layer of sort of foreign city food on top of what they grew up with. And then they come to New England and it's not quite as much like England as some of them might've thought it was going to be. So within the course of their first year, their diet changes significantly. Um, and, but they're always trying to make you English. Um, but the thing is their diet is making them New English.

 

SIMON:

So there's a tension there between what they thought they were going to eat, what they brought with them to grow and what they ended up eating.

 

KATHLEEN:

Absolutely. Um-hm.

 

SIMON:

So, Alex, perhaps you could expand on that with. . . . Give us some examples of that where they had things that they thought they were going to first eat, they brought with them, they thought they were going to be able to grow here. And either the terrain was difficult or whatever else happened. That'd be a really fascinating insight, I think.

 

ALEX:

We do you have writings, uh, that survived today from people that were here that came on the Mayflower. And one of them talks about the very first harvest that the Pilgrims had. And it says that they grew peas that weren't even worth gathering. And they grew barley, which was indifferent good, which was so-so. Um, so those were the things that they were expecting to grow. But what really took off for them was maize or Indian corn. And in the end that becomes their real sustenance.

 

SIMON:

That becomes the staple diet. As I, as I, I guess it remains in many ways since for a lot of people.

 

KATHLEEN:

For a very long time.

 

SIMON:

For a long time.

 

So before they arrive, let's, let's think about what they would have been eating, as in England primarily. Although, obviously, you've talked about that layer of people from Holland. And what they would have had on the ships when they came over before they actually set foot here and realized that things weren’t going to be quite as they expected.

 

Alex, why don’t you start with that? Why don't you tell us a little bit about what they would have been eating in England at that time. You're talking about kind of the middle of the 17th century. What they would’ve been eating in England and what they would have brought with them on the ships in terms of, you know, some. . .  you know, rations, as it were, on the ship.

 

ALEX:

And some things that they would have been eating in England, maybe made fresh, like beef, you could also bring on a ship if you, uh, salt it. So that would be something that they could transport with them. And a lot of the common grains. Like I was saying earlier that they expected to grow here, but they would've had in England -- besides barley and peas, there was wheat, there was rye. All of that too could have been dried and taken on a ship.

 

Um, on the Mayflower, too, they probably had biscuit, which is really just flour and water and sometimes it's baked twice together. So it makes a very hard sort of cracker. . .

 

SIMON:

Hence the name, I guess, biscuit – twice cooked.

 

ALEX:

. . . will last a long time. Um, and we also know that they brought on the Mayflower, cheese. Specifically, Holland cheese. And so like Kathleen was talking about earlier, people were living in Holland. So obviously cheese is a very big deal there. So that's something that they brought with them as well.

 

SIMON:

Let’s talk about the, the early settlers to begin with. We talked about the things they brought on the ship and the things they had as rations and how they can survive on the crossing and how that reflects what they ate back in England. And I think the, the average kind of person in England or certainly the ones who came here as settlers wasn’t particularly  a meat heavy diet. Tell us a little bit more about the notions of their diet?

 

KATHLEEN:

So what they actually ate and what their ideal diet was were kind of not always together. So some of it depended year to year, depending on the economics of the situation. They thought the ideal diet was beef, bread and beer. Um, and so the barley nut farming here kind of put beer out of the equation. Um, so that was a sort of a hardship for them.

 

Um, the beef in. . . for many people in England was actually pork. Bacon was what poor people ate. Um, and you were pretty poor if you couldn't afford a little bit of bacon. Um, but they brought pigs with them when they came here. But then they had the hunting.

 

So they have venison here. They have wild ducks of different kinds. They have wild turkeys. Turkeys are wild to New England. That's huge. And they're big.

 

Um, and fresh fish. And fresh fish is expensive. If you don't live on the coast, you don't have a lot of fresh fish or you have fish that are freshwater fish, which are nowhere near the size of a 50, 60 or a hundred pound Cod fish from the Atlantic Ocean.

 

SIMON:

So there were elements here that the early colonist found. . . where they really started and you know, beguiling that they got to eat far more than they did back in England.

 

KATHLEEN:

Yeah. Absolute selling points. The fish, the fresh fish is a selling point. The venison is a selling point. The turkeys are a selling point. Almost everybody writes about how big the turkeys are here in New England. Um, and make jokes about them.

 

One man says they fly by our doors and salute them with our guns. . .

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

KATHLEEN:

. . . and invite them into dinner. So you know, it's, it's not to be believed.

 

On the other hand, the corn, the maize is a much coarser grain than they're used to. So they’re eating flatbread and they're cooking water, which are what the poorest of the poor people have back in England. So it's very uneven in terms of what their actual diet is in terms of their concept of it.

 

SIMON:

Perhaps you could just tell us that from the moment they opened their eyes to the moment they closed their eyes at the evening, let's talk about how their meals were structured and then perhaps Kathleen, as well, we could add in some of the dishes that they ate. Cause I think that'd be really fun to find out what their daily diet was like.

 

ALEX:

And as Kathleen touched on. . . a lot of it depends on the time of year. Um, so in the Summer, no matter what, you're eating a lot of fish. And then towards the Fall things are going to start to change and they would have been eating more wildlife like ducks and geese and so forth.

 

Um, but meals in general, they would have a small breakfast usually. And there's this Dutch paintings from the time period that represent they had fish on the table for breakfast. So that's a possibility here too, since they have so much fish.

 

And then they would have a big meal in the middle of the day, referred to as dinner, and then they would have a smaller meal towards the end of the day called supper. Um, and I read a 17th century medicinal book, I guess you'd say, and it says that your supper should not be very big because your body doesn't have the heat anymore to decoct and digest what you've eaten. So you want to keep that mostly simple and small.

 

SIMON:

So those three meals then. But the biggest meal of the day. . .

 

ALEX:

Is your middle.

 

SIMON:

. . . is your middle meal of the day.

 

I know we've talked about fish, but what else would a breakfast consist of, say?

 

KATHLEEN:

So every meal has bread in it. So bread's the first component of every meal. And then. . . so it might be fish left from the day before. It might be roast meat left from the day before. So, it's usually whatever your protein was for dinner the day before. A  portion of that is put aside for the next day. So it's not a big meal because your sleep refreshes you. So that's what sustains you in the morning. Um, and in fact, in winter time when the days are shorter, they often don't have breakfast because they get up late and then they'll have dinner at mid day. So you don't need to eat at that time of day. Um, again, dinner is bread, which is the first thing on the table. And then whatever meat you have, if you have that, and, and then, um, often meat mixed with grain to make a dish, they call a pottage. Um, so they call it spoon meat. So porridge or pottage.

 

Um, and there's a saying in the time, no spoon meat, no belly full. So hardworking people want to have that porridge cause it fits into their stomach and it fills it all up. There are no empty spaces and that's the best thing you want to have.

 

Um, and supper. . . it um, you would have bread with broth on it, again, probably made from the meat you had at dinner. So that same meat is going through all three meals. Um, and so a sop. . . or a s. . ., uh, a sippet is bread that has broth on it and the word supper comes from that same broth.

 

SIMON:

That's supper.

 

KATHLEEN:

Yeah.

 

SIMON:

That's, I mean again, those are the things that I know listeners to Eat My Globe love. Those kind of origins of words that we often take very much for granted, but have a real. . . got a rooted history and you can see that, that, that notion of supper.

 

Alex, what. . . I know earlier Kathleen talked about beverages and beer. So I want to talk about. . . One of the kind of. . . Maybe it's a myth, I don't know. When I, when I looked at the history of beer for more general history right through the Mesopotamians up to the American craft brewing. Um, one of the stories that came out is that the captain of the Mayflower kind of threw everyone off, as it were, off the ship because they were running out of beer and they wouldn’t have had enough and they would have had to go and drink fresh water because it was all. . . they were all drinking beer on the thing. Now is that one of those great myths or is there some truth in it?

 

ALEX:

There's a kernel of truth in it? It comes from one of the books we have that survives and people. . . that they're running low of their beer. But that's not the reason why they necessarily stopped at Cape Cod.

 

The Mayflower was actually headed towards modern day New York, New Jersey, the mouth of the Hudson River. But then it got cut off on some bad shoals and some bad winds around the underside of Cape Cod and had to turn around. Which is why the Mayflower eventually stopped at where Provincetown is today.

 

And they were out on Cape Cod for just over a month. And then the Mayflower finally came to Plymouth, um, in the middle of December, 1620. And even when the Mayflower came to Plymouth, we know they still had a little bit of beer. . .

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

ALEX:

. . . because they mentioned that. A lot of people that were ill. . . there's a story about a sailor that was sick and all he wants is a can of beer cause he’s asking for it.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

ALEX:

Um, so they do run out of beer, but that's not the sole reason why they stopped.

 

SIMON:

So one of the earliest things that I read about the colonists is they were in pretty constant contact back with England. Uh, with letters and everything else.

 

So we often think of them being these settlers as so far away and their completely blocked off from their Old World. But many of them are writing back and they're writing stories and they're telling their tales. And one of the things I've found were advertisements in British publications for brewers and for other farmers obviously to come out, but particularly for brewers. And I was really interested in that, from a historical point of view, that they were actually writing back and asking for people to come here as they began to grow things from which they could make beer.

 

KATHLEEN:

And they're definitely doing that. And they're trying to make beer with the grain they have available with them here. So they write about maize. So they say it's no good for malt because it's sprouts on both ends. Um, so it just has a different component than barley does. So they are trying to brew with what they have.

 

And throughout the rest of the 19th century they’re brewing with all sorts of things. There's a man, John Joslin, in the 1650s up in Maine and he's making beer from maize, wormwood sassafras. I don't know. He has a few other things thrown in.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

KATHLEEN:

It doesn't sound like any kind of beer, like even craft beer, even strange craft beer.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

KATHLEEN:

It sounds like nothing.

 

SIMON:

There’s plenty of that.

 

KATHLEEN:

It just, um, and so it's like, I have no idea at all what this, what this came from, but they were calling that beer. And so I think their definition of beer might be slightly different than what we think of today.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

I often get asked by people to help define what American cuisine is and obviously that's a very hard thing to do particularly in the United States now with so many different communities.

 

But at what point do you think with the colonists, do you think you could point to a period where you go, well now this is a completely unique cuisine that has some roots in Great Britain, but it's now completely its own. So someone, if they've come from England, they would go, this is completely alien to us. At what point did that begin to happen? How soon after the first settlement? When do you think?  Do you, do you think that's a fair question even.

 

ALEX:

No, I think it is. I think it happened pretty soon, if not immediately. As you were talking about the modern day America, we have a lot of different communities and that was even the case for these first settlers. There was people coming directly from England, there was people that maybe grew up in England but then lived a lot of their life in the Netherlands. And they already have that influence and they’re off traveling on the same ship together. And then they get here and there's new stuff that they're growing. There's maybe some things that they recognize but didn't eat a lot of back home. Like the fresh fish we mentioned earlier. So even from the beginning they had to synthesize all of that together to feed themselves.

 

KATHLEEN:

I think it's interesting you think there's one British cuisine in the 17th century. Because a lot of these communities are pretty rural. And so even if you say, I was looking at oatcakes, which are really common in the country. . .

 

SIMON:

Yeah.

 

KATHLEEN:

. . . they have a different name at almost every town. And so they're tharf cakes, they're riddle cakes, they're jannocks, they're bannocks. And how you make them changes from town to town. And everyone knows how to make them.

 

It's not until later on that they say, “Oh, my grandmother did it this way,” that we start to get those clues. And we start to see how different they are. It's almost like Italy is, you know. My mother's from Italy and every town uses the same raw ingredients. But you go from one village to the next and they have different names for all of the sauces and different combinations. Um, and so I think that was actually much more true in England in the 16th and 17th century than you think of now.

 

SIMON:

So it's, I guess there's that danger of imposing a kind of modern view of everyone having much more communication. Whereas it’s much more small pockets as they did here. So they would have just. . . People who came here from Great Britain would have come here just thought it was a totally different regional . . . variation of British cuisine, I guess, using one of the ingredients.

 

KATHLEEN:

But I also think their response was individual. And so Alice Bradford who grew up in the West country and lived in Holland is going to have a different response to this food than Mrs. Standish, who was probably from Lancashire and 20 years younger.

 

SIMON:

So I know we're going to wait. We're actually going to be joined in this episode later by one of the culinary specialists from the Wampanoag community here. But I want you just to tell me about the first connection with the colonists with them, and then we'll also ask that question, as it were, not to take a side, but to get the full view.

 

Tell me about that first connection and how it helped because you know, again, one of the kind of stories, whether it's a bit. . . is that without that connection, the early colonists would not have survived here. It's now. . . Alex, perhaps you could talk about that and begin telling us whether that really is, again, the, the s. . . the case.

 

ALEX:

I mean, of course, the most famous story is the first Thanksgiving. But it even happened before that. So, um, in the Spring after the Mayflower arrived, one of the first native men that came into Plymouth was named Samoset. And it's. . . in the story that's written about him, they mentioned food a lot. So, uh, he stayed the night with the colonists and they fed him beer, biscuit, a Mallard, pudding. So this is even for one of their very first interactions, they're sharing food with each other.

 

KATHLEEN:

And I would go back a little further. When they're on Cape Cod, they found corn buried in the ground and they take it. Um, and they defend themselves later and saying, “wait, there, no one was around. We didn't see anyone there or we would have paid for it.” Um, on the other hand, this is two dozen men wearing armor marching on the coast so that nobody came out to say hello. Probably shouldn't be surprising. Um, and they did pay for the corn later on. But they would have planted that corn much the same way you plant peas or barley. They would've turned ground over and broadcast it. They didn't seem to realize those bigger stocks of the corn that they would just chuck it all out and it wouldn't have grown to anything. So it was that same Samoset who brought Squanto, who showed them how to plant the corn in hills at a distance apart from each other that gave them that opportunity. So there's a lot of. . . there's a lot of things going on here.

 

SIMON:

So that relationships, that was very important to the early colonists.

 

KATHLEEN:

Yes. Um-hm.

 

SIMON:

Let's, let’s touch on Thanksgiving because obviously that was one of the things that I came here to talk about and when people think about Plimoth Plantation, it's, it's many ways the most famous story, particularly with the connection between the two communities.

 

It's such. . . Obviously for me coming from, from Britain, I, I wasn't as aware of the kind of scale of the Thanksgiving holidays until I moved here and realized just how important a part it is in American culture. Um, but let's talk about that first Thanksgiving and the meals that they would have had there. Um, Kathleen, perhaps you could start telling us about why they had this meal and what it was. Uh, and even though I know it didn't really get to develop as a holiday until much later, what it comprised of.

 

KATHLEEN:

Why they had the meal, we don't know. What they had on the meal, we don't know. Um, and that's my historian hat talking. Um, but the meal became important later on. So it became a retrospective look about these two peoples sitting down at the same table. A lot of what we see as traditional Thanksgiving is actually a 19th century interpretation of what is the meal that brings families together. So we're still eating the menus that Sarah Josepha Hale decided in Godey’s Lady’s Book long before Thanksgiving was a national holiday that we should be having together to celebrate. And sort of they've added the harvest to that and they've added the first Thanksgiving to that. So the meal came first and the history came later.

 

SIMON:

It is based then on a myth of a, of a meal that two people had together. Although I'm certain they had meals together, the holiday that we have now.

 

KATHLEEN:

Well, there, there was one they had together. So in September of 1621, we know that Massasoit came with 90 of his men and they brought several deer and they stayed together for three days. And there were certain entertainments. And this is in a letter and it's hard to tell if that letter was supposed to be published. But because it was added to a book that also went back on the same ships sort of as an afterword. We have this information. But we don't have any context for it. And we don't even know about the treaty until papers that are published in the 1660s here on New England. So this is information that doesn't go back to Old England. This is part of the New England story. Um, but remember they’re an English colonist even in the late 17th century. So you know, should a hundred people who come to New England be making treaties and recognizing foreign nationals, question one. Um, but they had this event. They had these men. They had the deer. Um, we also know that their harvest being in, they celebrated because the harvest was good. So we've had these two different elements who were there altogether on the same weekend.

 

SIMON:

If you were to try and recreate the first meal that you thought that the community here had with the Wampanoag, what do you think would have been on the table over a variety of things – so it wasn’t obviously just one meal – what do you think you would have expected to find on that table?

 

ALEX:

Uh, venison, certainly because that is one thing that was mentioned being what we consider the first Thanksgiving. Um, and other meals that the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims shared together venison also played very prominently. A few years after the first Thanksgiving, the governor, William Bradford, was married and Massasoit came again, bringing even more people and they also had venison then. Um, and that's very significant. So the English people that. . . here is a King and he is bringing them venison because in England venison was considered the King's meat.

 

SIMON:

Absolutely.

 

ALEX:

Um, and of course there probably would be maize on the table because we do know that first Thanksgiving they were celebrating that the harvest had come in. That’s what was the best for them was their maize. Um, they also mentioned that the governor, when Bradford sent four men fowling before the first Thanksgiving, so there probably would have been fowl on the table. Uh, whether it was ducks or geese or pigeons, we don't know. There probably would have been. . .

 

SIMON:

Do we know if there were any turkeys?

 

ALEX:

Well, turkey is a possibility. Um, but we don't have anything listed specifically saying that there was turkey. But like Kathleen mentioned earlier, they're very abundant here, so it is a . . . possibility.

 

KATHLEEN:

I’ve been called. . . I’ve been called a turkey denier. . .

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

KATHLEEN:

. . . in terms of history. I can't say there was turkey on that table. But I can say they ate a lot of turkey in those years. Um, but also pigeons, passenger pigeons are extinct now, so we forget to put them on the table. And I suppose what I want to add is it's not just one turkey. It's not just one bird. There were lots of birds on the table and they’re eating over three days. And so how you're eating this food is going to vary over the course of three days. Lots of roasted meats that then get boiled up into stews and pottages. Um, so we have lots of roast for day one and day two and then lots of, um, what I would call spoon meats for day three. Sort of wrapping it all up. So there's a change in how they're cooking. And there's also things available on the shore. Mussels, lobsters, crabs, clams, all of those sorts of easy to take shellfish to kind of fill in the empty places on the table.

 

SIMON:

Sounds like it’d be quite a nice few days, by the sound of it. Particularly if they'd started brewing some beer at that point as well, then that wouldn't be quite so . . . But probably not by then.

 

ALEX:

No.

 

KATHLEEN:

No.

 

SIMON:

Water to drink for everyone.

 

KATHLEEN:

So, William Bradford says they have Springs in the country of excellent water, but they have yet to find a Springs that carry beer and wine.

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

KATHLEEN:

Because there are people who complained in 1627. So we know about that point. They're not seeing a lot of beer there.

 

SIMON:

So they, they were sober curious, I think they'd call it that. Poor things.

 

Well this has been. . .

 

KATHLEEN:

[Laughter]

 

SIMON:

. . . this has been so much fun. I really appreciate that.

 

But I'd also like to ask a few fun questions. So I hope you prepared for this, but I did ask you in advance. So for each of you, in turn. Kathleen, we'll start with you and we’ll come to you, Alex, for this one.

 

So Kathleen, if you were a meal, what would it be?

 

KATHLEEN:

See that stumped me.

 

[Laughter]

 

Because if you are what you eat, I am a lot of different things and so I don't know if I could pick just one meal.

 

SIMON:

 

Now what about you Alex, could you, could you, can you give me any, any solace here since I'm not getting any from the other side of the table?

 

ALEX:

Uh, well, my favorite food is pierogi. So, I would just eat like a tableful but that would be a different story.  

 

[Laughter]

 

SIMON:

That would, that would be, that would work for me. Right, let's get back see if you could, see if you could bring yourself back into my good books now.

 

If there was any single meal or any period in history to experience it, Kathleen, what would it be?

 

KATHLEEN:

See there's, I want to eat all the food all the time.

 

[Laughter]

 

I’m, I just have a hard time. . .

 

SIMON:

You’re no good at this game.

 

KATHLEEN:

No, I’m not good at this game.

 

SIMON:

I just expected you to say the first Thanksgiving and I would have gone, thanks very much.

 

KATHLEEN:

Oh. I should have said.

 

SIMON:

Yeah.

 

KATHLEEN:

Darn.

 

SIMON:

You’ve lost it now. You've blown it. We might have to edit you out of the episode, you've just disgraced yourself.

Alex, you’ve been playing this really well so far. You’re, you’re one in zero so far. So let’s see if you can make it two in zero. . . If you have to have any period in history having a single meal, what would it be?

 

ALEX:

I guess, go through some personal history. Um, growing up my grandparents had a farm and so there's things that they grew there that I like I haven't been able to taste in years. So I remember my grandparents had a great farmer and my grandma in the summer would make grape juice, like it was so good. But since the farm doesn't exist anymore, you can't have that. So I guess I would go back to my, my childhood.

 

SIMON:

Definitely two and zero. I think that’s. . . you're just blown out of the water.

 

Okay. Let's. . . last chance. We’re dining in the last chance saloon now here, Kathleen.

 

What would you argue is. . . now, this is right up your street. You've got to get this right. What would you argue is the most important food invention in history? You're going to tell me all of them, aren’t you.

 

KATHLEEN:

No, I'm not. I think salt.

 

SIMON:

Excellent answer. Excellent answer. Okay. I think you've saved yourself. Congratulations.

 

KATHLEEN:

Well, fermentation was my second choice.

 

[Laughter]

 

SIMON:

Both things you can use to preserve food. So perfect answer.

 

KATHLEEN:

. . . so you can harvest it today and eat it later, but also make it good.

 

SIMON:

Absolutely. Improved flavor. And so that was a great answer. As for your final answer, what would you argue is the most important food invention in history?

 

ALEX:

Uh, I guess this is a little more modern, but what came to mind was baking soda and baking powder. So how it changed how we bake. I mean, takes a lot of 17th century cakes and stuff that's done with yeast. And so it's a little more like bread, so to, you know, eat chocolate cake I like. . .

 

[Laughter]

 

SIMON:

[Laughter]

 

Oh great answers. Fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so much fun.

 

KATHLEEN:

Thank you very much.

 

ALEX:

Thank you for having us.

 

BREAK MUSIC

 

[SIMON ADVERTISING: Hi everybody. If you're enjoying these podcasts, you may want to check out a fun series of videos I did with my friends at Pureflix dot com. In “Simon Says,” I cooked dishes from around the world and give a little bit of history about how they were made. It's a lot of fun. So do go and check them out. Streaming exclusively on Pureflix dot com.]