@@MentalFloss Bain-marie, meaning Mary's bath, is named after Mary the Jewess. Mary was an ancient alchemist in Alexandria and lived sometime between the 1st and 3rd century. As you can imagine, performing proto-chemistry in those times brought some technological limitations, one of these being carefully heating your materials. You could use fire to control the heat, but keeping the temperature low and consistent is very difficult. To solve this, the material you are working with is placed in a container and this container is then placed in a bath(!) of liquid. If you then heat the liquid (by fire), the max temperature of the stuff you actually want to heat is limited to the boiling temp of the liquid. For ancient alchemist this was a way to control their experiments; for present me this is a way to melt my chocolate without burning it :p The concept is likely older then Mary, but this technique is named after her regardless
86!!!! I've always been told that it goes back to 86th street in Brooklyn where gangsters used to eat and also carry out hits on people. Hence the term being used for something being dead on the menu. So I always wanted to know if that was actually true.
Ha that's an interesting one! There are some great alternate explanations provided here (though none seem definitive) www.stlmag.com/dining/Ask-George-Where-Does-the-Term-86d-Come-From/#:~:text=The%20term%20originated%20during%20the,was%20derived%20from%20military%20shorthand.
As I understand it, Dashi referres to stock made from shaved, dried fish. Kombu is dried bull kelp which is also used as the base of or ingredient in some soups, Kombu being the item which provides the glutamic acid. Dashi and Kombu then seems like they're different things...but you seem to be using the interchangeably. Is there something I'm missing?
Leaving a dish with the baker was common in European Jewish communities so it would cook overnight on the Sabbath because cooking was forbidden on the Sabbath. The residual heat of the baker's oven did the "work", not the housewife or the baker
No, "à la" doesn't _literally_ mean "in the style of". Literally, it means "to the"; you could say "Je vais à la maison" and you _wouldn't_ be saying "I'm going in the style of the house".
Sooo...the painting shown when talking about 13th century England is actually 17th century Dutch. As an art historian, I don’t often get the opportunity to take my training into the real world, so I just had to mention it 😅
Ha, you got us! I think we actually used that painting in another video because there were images that could be seen underneath the finished project when viewed under certain conditions, but I can't for the life of me remember the details or the name of the piece. I think it's in this video, if you're curious: facebook.com/watch/?v=2191229317672360
@@MentalFloss thanks for sharing - I love art historical intrigue! The painting is The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Bruegel the Elder (actually 16th century - I mixed up the Brueghels 🤷♀️)
I heard a different story regarding carbonara. During World War II, when American soldiers liberated Rome, grateful Italians offered to cook whatever the GIs wanted to eat. Having subsisted on canned rations for so long, the young GIs wanted nothing more than a simple breakfast of bacon and eggs. The Italians heard this request and thought "I've never put bacon and eggs in pasta before, but it's what they asked for." There may not be any historic fact to it, but I love the story.
I believe Marcella Hazan outlines a version of this story in her (indispensable!) Essentials of Italian Cooking (but I think I also read that it was apocryphal, so who knows?)
@@stephaniehight2771 It's also the time-consuming hard part of making food, what TV chefs have their assistants do before filming an episode, then the "star" of the show just comes along and throws everything together and makes 100× the salary. ¬_¬
Oo good assignment! Do you have any particular interest you'd like to explore? For books that skew pretty sociological and not super culinary, James Scott's Against the Grain, Mark Kurlansky's Salt, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, and Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power were all fascinating. Jessica B. Harris was kind enough to speak to us for our soul food episode, and I imagine anything she writes would be great, but I can personally vouch for High on the Hog. And Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene is next on my list. Oh, and Tom Standage's History of the World in 6 Glasses was super fun!
“Amuse Bouche” is not a French term. There is a French term like it, though, which is probably where this atrocity comes from: “amuse gueule”. “Gueule” refers to the mouths of animals, “bouche” usually only refers to humans. The term “Amuse Bouche” is something restaurants created to sell the same item at twice the price, as is usually the case with Restaurant “French”.
This cracks me up too, it sounds as if someone in the PC police didn't want to use such a colloquial term for so called "haute cuisine". The more likely reason this was changed is because no foreign person can pronounce "gueule" without sounding like they had one too many marshmallows... ;)
@@imarockstarification @Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith I don't get what's the difficulty with "gueule", can't you pronounce the English word "gull"? I would've thought "amuse" is the hardest bit to say as Anglo-Saxons tend to struggle with the pronunciation of the French "u".
This would be accurate if only an amuse bouche wasn’t a dish given for free before the meal. You don’t order it separately and it isn’t on the bill. It started being used in the 80s, when novelle cuisine came in.
@@SandlotRider I actually did the test with some of my non French speaking co-workers and it was definitely harder to say. Not the sound itself, but understanding how the letters led to the sound. Amuse and bouche have pretty common letter arrangement and once you know it's French it's pretty easy to get to the right around. Gueule was a challenge because they knew it couldn't be that we pronounce every vowel, but they couldn't guess what the combination could sound like. Not saying that's the reason for the distinction tho.
You skipped _à la mode_ (in the popular style). Since styles and fashions (of everything) tend to change over time, I can only assume there was a period where putting ice-cream on pie was new and exciting. 🤔
You missed the curious origins of the Chicken Balti. The Punjabi word balti means "bucket" (or karahi in Bengali). So it really is just a bucket of chicken curry.
I wish you had transcripts in your webpages promoting videos just like your podcasts. I prefer to read rather than watch a video. And I super miss the comment section on the Mental Floss webpages.
I can't help you with the comments section, but I can tell you that all our video scripts eventually end up on the site in (slightly modified) transcript form. www.mentalfloss.com/article/642405/sea-monkeys-history and www.mentalfloss.com/article/643218/stories-behind-pasta-shapes for example
english and japanese are too far apart linguistically. 鲜杂(鮮雑) make perfect sense in chinese as well. in fact there's a reason why they're written the way they are.
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
You should team up with the Tasting History with Max Miller here on YT
➡️ ssur.cc/PJjn4 ⤵️
B.e.S.T f'u"l'l D.a.T.i.n.G h.o.T G.i.r.L's
-L-o-V-e-S-e-X---❤️😘
..👍
!💖🖤❤️今後は気をライブ配信の再編ありがとうです！この日のライブ配信は、かならりやばかったですね！１万人を超える人が見ていたもん（笑）やっぱり人参最高！まさかのカメラ切り忘れでやら1かしたのもドキドキでした,.
💖🖤在整個人類歷史上，強者，富人和具有狡猾特質的人捕食部落，氏族，城鎮，城市和鄉村中的弱者，無`'守和貧窮成員。然而，人類的生存意願迫使那些被拒絕，被剝奪或摧毀的基本需求的人們找到了一種生活方式，並繼續將其DNA融入不斷發展的人類社會。.
說到食物，不要以為那些被拒絕的人只吃垃圾。相反，他們學會了在被忽視的肉類和蔬菜中尋找營養。他們學會了清潔，切塊，調味和慢燉慢燉的野菜和肉類，在食品市場上被忽略的部分家用蔬菜和肉類，並且學會了使用芳香的木煙（如山核桃，山核桃和豆科灌木 來調味食物煮的時候
Au bain-marie has an interesting backstory involving alchemists in Egypt thousands of years ago!
Oo tell us more! (Forgive me for not googling- it's a busy week!)
@@MentalFloss Bain-marie, meaning Mary's bath, is named after Mary the Jewess. Mary was an ancient alchemist in Alexandria and lived sometime between the 1st and 3rd century. As you can imagine, performing proto-chemistry in those times brought some technological limitations, one of these being carefully heating your materials. You could use fire to control the heat, but keeping the temperature low and consistent is very difficult. To solve this, the material you are working with is placed in a container and this container is then placed in a bath(!) of liquid. If you then heat the liquid (by fire), the max temperature of the stuff you actually want to heat is limited to the boiling temp of the liquid. For ancient alchemist this was a way to control their experiments; for present me this is a way to melt my chocolate without burning it :p
The concept is likely older then Mary, but this technique is named after her regardless
@@Theuntjeeee Oo, that's great! Thanks for the info (and thanks for the crème brûlée, Mary!)!
Hell of an episode. Good work!
86!!!! I've always been told that it goes back to 86th street in Brooklyn where gangsters used to eat and also carry out hits on people. Hence the term being used for something being dead on the menu. So I always wanted to know if that was actually true.
Ha that's an interesting one! There are some great alternate explanations provided here (though none seem definitive) www.stlmag.com/dining/Ask-George-Where-Does-the-Term-86d-Come-From/#:~:text=The%20term%20originated%20during%20the,was%20derived%20from%20military%20shorthand.
Also, a few foreign dishes were invented in America like fortune cookies, chop suey Russian dressing, etc
and fucking pepperoni or "American sausage" as the Italians call it 😅
As I understand it, Dashi referres to stock made from shaved, dried fish. Kombu is dried bull kelp which is also used as the base of or ingredient in some soups, Kombu being the item which provides the glutamic acid. Dashi and Kombu then seems like they're different things...but you seem to be using the interchangeably. Is there something I'm missing?
Leaving a dish with the baker was common in European Jewish communities so it would cook overnight on the Sabbath because cooking was forbidden on the Sabbath. The residual heat of the baker's oven did the "work", not the housewife or the baker
No, "à la" doesn't _literally_ mean "in the style of".
Literally, it means "to the"; you could say "Je vais à la maison" and you _wouldn't_ be saying "I'm going in the style of the house".
The thumbnail told me I was signed up to a channel called Motherf*ckin Food History..... I was intrigued
Great! thanks enjoyed this one a lot
Sooo...the painting shown when talking about 13th century England is actually 17th century Dutch. As an art historian, I don’t often get the opportunity to take my training into the real world, so I just had to mention it 😅
Ha, you got us! I think we actually used that painting in another video because there were images that could be seen underneath the finished project when viewed under certain conditions, but I can't for the life of me remember the details or the name of the piece. I think it's in this video, if you're curious: facebook.com/watch/?v=2191229317672360
@@MentalFloss thanks for sharing - I love art historical intrigue! The painting is The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Bruegel the Elder (actually 16th century - I mixed up the Brueghels 🤷♀️)
I heard a different story regarding carbonara. During World War II, when American soldiers liberated Rome, grateful Italians offered to cook whatever the GIs wanted to eat. Having subsisted on canned rations for so long, the young GIs wanted nothing more than a simple breakfast of bacon and eggs. The Italians heard this request and thought "I've never put bacon and eggs in pasta before, but it's what they asked for."
There may not be any historic fact to it, but I love the story.
I believe Marcella Hazan outlines a version of this story in her (indispensable!) Essentials of Italian Cooking (but I think I also read that it was apocryphal, so who knows?)
Should have mentioned the saltimbocca (jump into your mouth), the italian amuse-bouche :)
And tiramisu, while we're at it :)
Mise en place, one of my favorites
I was just going to suggest that one. It's all the ingredients of your dish pre measured and ready to assemble into your dish.
It's a pretty common expression in French; not just used in cooking. Maybe that's why they didn't mention it.
@@stephaniehight2771 It's also the time-consuming hard part of making food, what TV chefs have their assistants do before filming an episode, then the "star" of the show just comes along and throws everything together and makes 100× the salary. ¬_¬
Are you/have you been a professional cook at some point, by any chance?
@@MentalFloss I am now, own a meal prep company and help a local soul food restaurant a couple hours a week
Can you recommend any good Food History Books please. Thank you 😊
Oo good assignment! Do you have any particular interest you'd like to explore? For books that skew pretty sociological and not super culinary, James Scott's Against the Grain, Mark Kurlansky's Salt, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, and Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power were all fascinating. Jessica B. Harris was kind enough to speak to us for our soul food episode, and I imagine anything she writes would be great, but I can personally vouch for High on the Hog. And Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene is next on my list. Oh, and Tom Standage's History of the World in 6 Glasses was super fun!
@@MentalFloss thanks great info!👍
@@MentalFloss Mark Kurlanky's books "Cod" and "The Big Oyster" are also excellent.
I was expecting pasta puttanesca to be on the list.
Discretely ignored. 😂
“Amuse Bouche” is not a French term. There is a French term like it, though, which is probably where this atrocity comes from: “amuse gueule”. “Gueule” refers to the mouths of animals, “bouche” usually only refers to humans. The term “Amuse Bouche” is something restaurants created to sell the same item at twice the price, as is usually the case with Restaurant “French”.
This cracks me up too, it sounds as if someone in the PC police didn't want to use such a colloquial term for so called "haute cuisine". The more likely reason this was changed is because no foreign person can pronounce "gueule" without sounding like they had one too many marshmallows... ;)
@@JeanLoupRSmith definitely easier for English speakers to say "bouche"than "gueule" 😂
@@imarockstarification @Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith I don't get what's the difficulty with "gueule", can't you pronounce the English word "gull"? I would've thought "amuse" is the hardest bit to say as Anglo-Saxons tend to struggle with the pronunciation of the French "u".
This would be accurate if only an amuse bouche wasn’t a dish given for free before the meal. You don’t order it separately and it isn’t on the bill. It started being used in the 80s, when novelle cuisine came in.
@@SandlotRider I actually did the test with some of my non French speaking co-workers and it was definitely harder to say. Not the sound itself, but understanding how the letters led to the sound. Amuse and bouche have pretty common letter arrangement and once you know it's French it's pretty easy to get to the right around. Gueule was a challenge because they knew it couldn't be that we pronounce every vowel, but they couldn't guess what the combination could sound like. Not saying that's the reason for the distinction tho.
Interesting
4:03 Did he pronounce Onomatopoeia with two Ns?
...No? (Hangs head in shame)
You missed out the great culinary invention from Birmingham UK, the Balti.
the term South African Skottel Braai cooking methods also a nice backstory
You skipped _à la mode_ (in the popular style). Since styles and fashions (of everything) tend to change over time, I can only assume there was a period where putting ice-cream on pie was new and exciting. 🤔
You should do one on James Fortenberry and the dunk.
You missed the curious origins of the Chicken Balti. The Punjabi word balti means "bucket" (or karahi in Bengali). So it really is just a bucket of chicken curry.
There wasn't a Baker's Guild during Medieval times?
1:04 in-bread! 🤣
When I tell you the strength it took to not make a joke in poor taste...
Flambe 🔥
Umami in English is Savory...It's not that hard to figure out...
There's a million other onomatopoeic words Japan uses for food, in case you wanted more.
Swear to God, half of Japanese consists entirely of onomatopoeias.
Always down for onomatopoeia! What are a couple of favorites?
Soffritto instead of mirepoix
I wish you had transcripts in your webpages promoting videos just like your podcasts. I prefer to read rather than watch a video. And I super miss the comment section on the Mental Floss webpages.
I can't help you with the comments section, but I can tell you that all our video scripts eventually end up on the site in (slightly modified) transcript form. www.mentalfloss.com/article/642405/sea-monkeys-history and www.mentalfloss.com/article/643218/stories-behind-pasta-shapes for example
You missed Amuse-Gueule and Poutine
english and japanese are too far apart linguistically.
鲜杂(鮮雑) make perfect sense in chinese as well. in fact there's a reason why they're written the way they are.
white balance is of. other term? roux.
No more TH-cam for you.
WHAT??!! A bakers dozen is 13 in case one fell on the floor so they would still have twelve. Full stop, yanks.
I like the thumbnail. Who is the girl?
it's just a stock image you creepo
Why does this guy give me the creeps?