From the Vault: Turkey, Wishbones and Gravy

it now. Yes, the Holy Gravy discussion is pretty fun. Well, let's ladle it up and enjoy. Hello, listeners. This is Seth, the audio producer for Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is just a quick note to let you know that in this episode Robert's microphone sounds a little different compared with our normal episodes, but it's just a one time thing, little glitch in the old technology during these COVID times.

But do not worry. We've cleaned it up as best we can and should be still a very pleasant listening experience and we'll be back to normal next week. Thank you very much. Enjoy the show. Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe mccormickan. Today we're gonna be talking about some American Thanksgiving food. Rob I've noticed that over the past few years, every year you say something like,

this year we're going to lean into the holidays. But we've been doing it a lot, and I think one I'm wondering about something psychological. Is it that you think if we actually do content about the holidays on the show, the Holidays, will we will get through them faster? Um?

Maybe that's part of it. It does kind of extend from my personal philosophy of like, you know, in the past, I have seen Halloween as sort of the end of the year, and then all this other stuff is just kind of added on and isn't as fun and maybe it's more of a chore. And then I realized, well, that's not getting me anywhere. You know. I don't want to be a sad sack um, you know, or a

grump us holidays, be a happy sack. Yeah. So so the idea, you know, lean into it, find find something to enjoy about the holidays, find that the bits that that work for me and celebrate those, and uh, yeah, I think maybe part of it is like, yeah, if you're into it, it's gonna it's gonna move a little faster. It's gonna it's gonna move along. Uh you know. Uh

and yeah, I think that's part of it. And uh also occasionally we have advertisers who are saying who come to us and say, hey, what are your holiday episodes for this year? Could have one or two in the you know, in the sheath, but you you brought up a topic that I actually thought was pretty interesting because I'd never considered this at length before. And it's the idea of the poultry wishbone. So so that's where we're

going to be starting today. I don't did you ever actually do the thing as a kid where you take out the turkey's wishbone and break it or was that just something you saw on TV? We would do it at some point or another, and it's not something I remember doing every year. It's so not a tradition. I continue I have continued on when I'm around cooked turkeys. Uh So I don't have like a strong attachment to it, but I do remember doing it. But I probably did it because I saw it on TV. Yeah, I'd say

me too. Uh. We we figured at some point we tried it at my house and I figured out I don't remember the details, but I figured out intuitively how to always get the bone to break in my favor, and I definitely did. That's a real life hack there, magical life hack, because yeah, it generally the idea is you take this wishbone, this this little you or v shate bone in the turn key. Um. You'll also, of course find in a chicken. We'll get into all the places you can find it here in a bit. But

the idea is what it's. It's you or be shaped. Two different people grab an end of it, and then you bend, you break, and whoever gets the big part, whoever gets the the lion's share of the turkey bone, gets to live. However, what they get, they get a wish Is that the thing or it's a good luck maybe that's what it's. What it's called a wishbone. I don't know. I mean it's some kind of luck thunder dome. Yeah, you get the good end of the bargain. It's not

clear exactly what the bargain is. Yeah, it's it's one of these things that it seems pretty it is pretty harmless because it's almost completely devoid of of any kind of magical thinking. I've never encountered anyone who took the wishbone seriously, like, yes, now I have a wish that I may call upon, or oh wow, but this day is gonna be great. The rest of the day is gonna be wonderful because I got the big end of

the wishbone. But it has what feels like this visual magic that has that has been passed down, like something like the turkey itself. You know, it has been so cooked and rendered it's almost unrecognizable anymore, but there is a semblance of the original organism here, and I think that's that's kind of what we see with the wishbone. Yeah. Oh maybe even in an evolutionary sense with some wishbones

and some types of birds or bird like organisms. But what I was thinking about the wishbone is maybe the tradition would would be more powerful if instead of saying the winner gets something good, you say the loser, the side of the one who gets the bad side of the break gets something bad, like those email forwards that would say, you know, like if you get the wrong side of the wishbone, you will see a ghost face in the bathroom mirror or something like that. Or how

about this one. If you get the short end of the wishbone, you're the one who has to pick all the meat off the turkey carcass for soups and sandwiches the next day. If you get the short endo the wishbone, you have to eat the turkey breasts that has been cooked to a hundred and ninety degrees fahrenheit is as dry as a pile of sawdust, and you don't get

any gravy to moisten it. Uh yeah. The The only hope for those pieces is the is the turkey sounds the next day where you can literally apply man AI's to it. Oh yeah, yeah, rescues everything, though, I do I do want to talk about gravy later in the episode and the role that gravy serves, because I think one of the big functions of gravy, in addition to just making the best of a pan that's got some good fond on it, is rescuing utterly lifeless base foods.

All right, So yeah, we're gonna We're gonna start with wishbone. We're gonna get into the turkey a little bit, and then we'll finish off with the gravy. The gravy will be necessary to go on top. Okay, So, but like biologically, what is a wishbone? I've actually wondered this before. It seems like it's in a weird place on a bird. What what does it do? So, yeah, we're talking about an actual bone. It is the fercula um or if you're talking plural, ferkually, and it is a bone between

the neck and the breast. It's flexible, it stores energy that's been released during the wing stroke. It's form via the fusion of two clavicals. It's essential to flight, and so we see it in all modern birds. Even the flightless penguin has a fercula, though it's structurally a bit

different to accommodate flipper action rather than flying. So it's sort of like um almost kind of like a spring or a little structural thing within the breast that that provide structural support when the breast muscles are powering back and forth to move the wings. Yeah, I think that would be a fair way to think about it. And uh yeah, so it's it's just an essential part of powered flights and modern and powered flight and modern birds, or in the case of the Pengland powered swimming um.

The interesting thing, though, that is that even flightless terrestrial ratites we discussed rattites on the show in the past, we're talking about things like ostriches, the emu um. These are birds that no longer fly, but they retain vestigial aspects of their wings, and you do find the remains of a wishbone in there, although in these cases it is almost entirely absent. Now that probably raises a question.

If you're listening to the show for you know, the past year or so, you might remember our episodes on the Moa. The Moa, of course, is this now extinct flightless bird that was just simply amazing. You'll have to go back and listen to those episodes for our full argument on the wonder of the Moa. But one of the many wonderful things about it is that it is this giant rattype, this enormous flightless bird that not only lost the use of its wings, but completely lost its

wings like it had no wings. It is a completely two limbed land creature, unlike virtually anything else you could think of what the snake is to the lizard, this bird is to to the flying bird. Yes, So my immediate question then, with MOA on the mind was how about the MoMA is? Did the moa have, as far as we know, have anything like a wishbone, like even

just the slimmest remnant of a wishbone. And I looked around and in some of the sources we used for the MOA episode, and I wasn't finding anything about it. So I actually looked up a researcher who had worked on some MOA stuff before, Dr Charlotte a Brassie of Manchester Metropolitan University, and I exchanged a couple of emails with them, just asking like, is there how about the moment? Did the moa have a wishbone? And this is what

they told me quote. I don't think moa had fercularly to speak of the different species of moa very a bit in their shoulder region denornis. The really big ones did have a vestigial clavical, which are are what eventually fused together to form the fercula, but they are very small and not fused packy ornis and megal electrics. Moa didn't even have of this digital clavical just totally accent Wow,

interesting by by bones. Yeah, so, uh, you know, obviously there are exceptions to the rule then, but you look at modern birds, uh, instant birds, and you're going to find a wishbone in there. But that's interesting and it makes me wonder since birds are the closest relatives of the extinct non avian dinosaurs. Uh, did dinosaurs have a have a fercula? Ever? Did that they have a wishbone on a on a raptor or t rex or something.

It's interesting because, as it turns out, the wishbone has an interesting place in our in the history of our understanding of dinosaurs. So the seeming absence of the fercula in dinosaurs was long held as a case against the connection between dinosaurs and modern birds. And uh and and we see this really even with the archaeopter x discovered in the early nineteen hundreds, of which we have some pretty impressive fossil evidence of a lot of these these dinosaurs.

Especially when you're going back to the early nineteen hundreds, you're dealing with very incomplete fossil sets. You know, there were a lot of gaps we had to fill in and Therefore, when it comes to something like a wishbone being there or not, you can say, well, maybe it was and we just haven't found it yet. Um. But with the with the archaeopter X, you know, some of these are very complete looking fossil remains and they seem

to be lacking a wishbone. So Dlo's law of irreversibility at the time held that things lost to evolution would not come back, so admitt that the missing fercula and dinosaurs could not lead to modern birds. Now we know now that Dolo's law is incorrect, and the clavicles of non avian dinosaurs serve as one of the key objections to this idea. But as far as dinosaurs go, yeah, that the key thing to drive home is dinosaurs did have ferculate that they were simply missing from our early

fossil evidence in many of these creatures. Uh, And it's and it's a small feature after all. Again, we have to think about the fossil record, the missing pieces that are just a part of uncovering the fossil evidence of these ancient organisms. And as it turns out, the archaeopter X itself um actually did have these kind of cartilage uh,

fercularly in their in their bodies. What the situation was that these were these were young ones um young archaeopter x in the fossils, and they didn't have fully ossified fercularly yet and therefore, um it was softer, it was easier to lose, and it took U V examinations to

pinpoint it in these well preserved fossil remains. Oh okay, So the lack of fercule in some dinosaurs or dinosaur bird relatives um could be due not just not actually to what was present in the animal as it lived, but to biases in what types of body parts are preserved and how right. And then of course as time went by, we just found more and more fossil evidence for for the for many of these dinosaurs. So like for now, for now we know that the t rex itself,

the mighty key Rex, had a fercula um. You know, it's not You look at evidence as examples of it, and it doesn't look like the wishbone as much. It's a much more like a U shape that has been almost completely straightened out at least is leased as far as the way it's presented in a lot of these uh, these fossil displays, but it is still a wishbone. I think this is clear evidence that the tiny t rex arms were actually wings and the t rex could fly. Now now that you have everyone has a little bit

more respect for the role of the wishbone. Like no, when if you're holding a wishbone today or this uh holiday season, you know you're you're holding this thing that is universal to all living birds, that it connects to the age of the dinosaurs. But again, most of us interact with this thing simply by plucking out of out of the holiday carcass and then snapping in in half with a friend so that you can engage in some

some lighthearted divination. I could point out. Another thing is that sometimes chefs, when roasting a chicken will advocate removing the wishbone prior to cooking because this makes it easier to carve the breast of the bird in the end. Like this is the thing I've seen videos for the chef Thomas Keller recommends doing this. So you kind of like stick your knife in and you rub it around on the wishbone and then you pull it out with

your fingers. It looks kind of gross, but it makes the breast makes you able to take the breast off in one piece when you're done cooking. So this is this is this is a this is a good point to make because, yeah, we're about to get into discussions of of how the wishbone was used and interpreted by

by ancient people's. And so if you're processing the carcass of a of a chicken or some chicken like bird, uh, it's going to be potentially something you take out early right in order possibly process the carcass and then if you do take it out or what her phase in the butchery that you do this, Uh, it is it is something that look that has a distinctive shape again you or v shape. It is going to have sort of a symbolic quality to it, Uh that might be

lacking in other easily plucked pieces of the skeletal system. Sure. Yeah, So I was looking around for some more information on all of this, and I ran across a wonderful book by by Janet uh limb Key that's L. E. M. B k E. And the title of the book is Chickens Their Natural and Unnatural History. And in this book she writes a great deal just about chickens and their history obviously, but she touches on on the wishbone of the chicken and things involving the snapping of the wishbone,

et cetera. And she says that customs surrounding the wishbone may be as old as the Etruscans in what is now called Tuscany or or Umbria, and then the Romans arrived, the custom passed on to them, and of course from the Romans we we would see it entering into ultimately into European and uh in British culture, and then that would have been transplanted to the New World during the

age of of transatlantic colonization. So um. She points out that that first of all, you have to put this, you have to couch this this idea of of looking at the wishbone at all in the history of bird divination in general, and bird divination is interesting because it can cover a broad category of divination, like not just cutting open a bird to to poke around in it and look at its organs or bones as a way to understand the future, but also just observing birds in

the sky and using the flight patterns of birds as a way to try and magically understand the patterns of the world. Yeah, if you want a fuller dive on divination, by the way, you might want to go back and check out our older episode on the each ing which uh which which. This has gotten me thinking about one

possibility we talked about in the episode. And obviously this would be impossible to prove, but but an idea that we play with there is that divination could actually prove useful to people even though you can't get real hidden knowledge that's in any way accurate, it could prove useful to people just by introducing uh, motivations that spur action and what would otherwise be a sort of paralyzing state

of of you know, just not knowing anything. Yeah, it's like I'm I'm to understand that that modern sports games well sometimes began with the flipping of a coin. You need that random event in order to make it fair that one team will have what might be an unfair advantage by starting first, right um and so um, and it gets going. It's gets you going and instead of just being at a complete stand still. That's very good analogy.

And birds are a perfect thing to look for in this case, right, because birds also invite a kind of sacred understanding because birds can fly, they are able to to bridge this gap between the Earth and the sky, between the terrestrial world and the realm of clouds and stars and gods and what have you. But that doesn't mean it's just birds, of course. There's also a long

ancient tradition of examining the bodies of terrestrial creatures. Babylonian texts pointed the examination of sheep in trails in acts of divination, and the Romans to famously practice such readings of in trails known as horestacy, especially concerning the livers of sheep and poultry m HM. In Greece, it was known as heptosco scopie or heptomancy to give it a you know, more of a Dungeons and Dragon's feel to it. If you want to bust out some heptomancy in your

next game. Is that that's also looking at livers? I think yeah. Now, the Etruscans considered chicken sacred and use their bodies and acts of divination. They would apparently dry the fercula and touching it would bring good luck, like the fercula itself was kind of a good luck charm. Hmm. I wonder if that has anything to do with the idea of a horseshoe being a good luck charm. That could could be totally unrelated. But but then again there is there does seem to be a similarity between the

symbols right, similar shape. Now again, the Romans eventually adapted this, adding the breakage tradition apparently, and and it appears to a varied depending on who is using this tradition, whether the big scoring, the big part of the wishbone, or the small part was the good luck Like, who wins? Is it the small or the big. It's kind of like drawing straws or something. I don't know. You just

break it and then you calvin ball it out from there. Yeah. Now, the Romans subsequently then brought the tradition to England, where the particular bone was often known as the merry thought, and then the English brought it to the New World. Now, in terms of just thinking about these acts of divination involving the bodies of the movements of animals, um, there's

more to consider here. I read about some of this animals and divination by Peter Struck and he points out that among the Greeks and the Romans, these were common ways of attempting to understand what was happening and would happen in the world around you. Uh. He writes that there there wasn't anything esoteric about turning to the entrails or the bones of an animal like this, It's just

what you did. Quote. The ancients understood that the universe had certain inclinations built into it which were more or less closely tied to the inclinations of the gods. So maybe you could think about UM trying to do divination based on the behavior or the bodies or parts of animals as sort of like the modern thing where people think that animals no first, when X is going to happen, you know, when there's going to be an earthquake or whatever,

you know, some kind of natural disaster. Yeah, I mean, you could also look to the modern UM use of biomimicry and bio mimetic the designs the idea that if we're going to solve an engineering problem, let's look just to see how evolution solved it first, see how the bodies of animals or plants solve that particular design problem. Um. I mean, these are more nuanced and scientifically accurate versions of the same thing, like, I need to understand what's

happening in the world. Let me look to the physical substance of the world for hints about its design. Right, And when you have a fuzzier picture of the causes and connections between all the different parts of nature, it might seem more logical to try to infer x from the you know, the bodies of animals or something. I mean, you don't know, that's not how it works. Now, they'll struck.

In his writings here he points out that Ascalis, who lived through four fifty six b c e UH, summoned up much of this in the words of the titan Prometheus in his play from Prometheus Bound, discussing how Prometheus instructed humans and the quote difficult and murky art of reading these inclinations uh in key places, such as in the livers and thigh bones of birds. It does make me wonder to what extent we see reverberations of these ideas even in the modern scientific undertaking of of the

autopsy or the necropsy. Uh. You know, not the procedures themselves, but the sort of the grandeur afforded them in the media. You know, the idea of wise individuals poking around and the bodies of not only like murder victims and whatnot, but I think to the various sci fi scenes in which the breaking down of an alien's body or the disassembly of an artificial being such as a you know, a droid or or or an android or a replicant or something like that reveals the inclinations of the unknown,

that is interesting. Yes, So, I mean, obviously we would say that topsies necropsy is performed in the real world by competent professionals have an empirical basis, but the way they appear in media, the person doing it often might as well be a wizard. Yeah. Yeah, And I think they're like the scene an Alien where they reassemble ash and and and then manipulate his like they're really just sort of goosing around with his various um uh android

in trails and he's covering in the milky stuff. Yeah yeah, and they're able to, you know, to to to juice him into getting information, to reveal hidden knowledge about the predicament that they're facing. In a weird way, that scene is almost a perfect parallel of King Saul's summoning up the shade of the Prophet Samuel to to get advice

on how to proceed against an enemy. Yeah, so, I don't know, would be interesting to hear what other people think about that, because it is a scene you see a lot again, if not not only in detective stories, but just in any kind of sci fi tale in which an alien or robot, utter or any kind of artificial being is encountered and granted, from a scientific standpoint, it would make sense to perform a necropsy on an alien being if you wanted to understand how it works

on a biological level. Likewise, it makes sense from it now on an engineering level that you might say, take apart a captive battle droid to try and figure out what it's programming was. But I can't. I can't help but wonder if there is this kind of residual magical interpretation of the scenario as well. Totally Now you're probably wondering, Okay, we're talking about turkeys here, where does the turkey enter the picture? So again we're talking about we've been talking

about the chicken here. The chicken, of course, has has Asian origins, but then comes to sort of rule the world in its own way, slowly as it is it just spreads from one people to the next becomes incredibly popular. Um, that is it the sorry? Is it the case that the ancestral chicken is probably from originally from like Southeast Asia? Is that right? Yeah? I believe so. Yes, the idea that it's essential essentially this kind of jungly bird um

that we long ago realized had had value. Uh. And of course this is how the chicken would would make it to the America's But there was already a bird in the America's and that was the turkey. Um. Specifically, we were probably thinking here about Meligris gallopavo, which is the domestic turkey. I love it by Ben Franklin's Everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it makes a strong case as always for

the being the bird of America. And in fact, it is native to eastern and central North America, and it was first domesticated by the Mayans in in In in ancient Mexico, so naturally, surviving traditions for chicken wishbones would easily translate to the turkeys when Westerners encountered this bird. Uh, you know, here's here's something we know how to eat

a chicken. Well, here's a turkey. It's natural that you would apply some of the same ideas to the rendering of the boddy um and for for these people though the original domesticators of the turkey, the bird was used for food and materials, but also had a symbolic power as well. So we we recently discussed the papal Voo on the podcast before, so I looked at this to see if there were specific mentions of the turkey, and

there there is. There are a couple of passages that are pretty fantastic because they talk about someone running a foul of of the gods, becoming cursed and and this is what the curse looks like. Quote, even their own dogs, turkeys, tools, and houses rise against them, taking vengeance for past mistreatment. Only their descendants are the monkeys that inhabit the forest today. And then their dogs and turkeys told them, you caused us pain, you ate us, but now it is you

whom we shall eat. Now I am the master. Did we actually say, I know it, talked about it in a recent episode. But the popul Vu is a is a text that contains a lot of ancient Mayan mythology, specifically a lot of the beliefs and like myths of the Kiche Mayan people. Yes. Yeah. Now, as for magical uses of the turkey itself, the use of its bones and Mayan and Aztepe practices, I didn't find. I didn't find anything particularly that does. It doesn't mean it didn't exist,

that doesn't mean it isn't written about well. And it also doesn't mean that it wasn't practiced and then just sort of lost in the of course, you know, cultural apocalypse that was the arrival of Westerners in the America's. But I did find an excellent article titled the Oscillated Turkey in Maya Thought, and this is by Maya specialist Anna Louisa as Cuerdo y de la Cueva and Maria Elena Vega Phila Lobos, and they discussed some of the

Maya traditions and beliefs concerning the turkey. Okay, I gotta hear this. So first of all, they point out that the Maya would have had access to domesticated turkeys imported from Mexico as well as the more local wild oscillated turkey. Also, turkeys were royal birds and not everyone had access to them. Uh, they were seen as stand ins for messengers from the gods quote a messenger of divine will, and they were used or consumed on very special occasions. They were made

of sacrifices to ensure the harvest. And then there's this additional interesting bit as well. There's this idea of I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but why is spirits They spell at w A H y I S. And these would have been auxiliary spirits that live within the body of the possessor, but then are controlled by the possessor as well. It would be something you would

acquire through birth or through special petition throughout life. And what would happen is during sleep, the possessor would expel the wagists through their mouth to keep watch on them, to protect them for enemies. Uh. And these would I think be supernatural enemies or enemies, you know, supernatural enemies summoned by uh, living enemies that could potentially hurt us during quote the nocturnal and dream space. So you could breathe the spirit out in the night and it would

keep watch over you. Well, what's the did the spirit

take the form of a turkey? What's the turkey? Can at least some of the time, Yes, it would take the form of a turkey, which which I think is telling because the domestic turkey and domestic birds in general, I feel like it's especially in modern times, there is a tendency to degrade them and see them as these um just stupid um animals that have no no, you know, mental existence of their own, that are just they're just purely domesticated species, and we don't really acknowledge them as

as anything wondrous. And the idea here is that there was a sense of wonder to the turkey. There was a noble aspect of the turkey. The turkey was seen as something especially this this wild variety of something that that connects us to the spirit world, that connects us to the gods, and therefore it would be a fitting um animal for this spirit that is a part of us to take its form. I think it may be that just the word turkey sounds funny in English, so

it becomes the butt of a joke. Yeah. But but for the Maya it was it was somewhat different that the authors here also point out that there was at least one Maya king that took on the title of the turkey like that was his his title or nickname. You know, it was an animal that was it was perfectly suitable to be taken on as kind of the the the the animal likeness of a ruler. Well, I mean,

turkeys can look quite beautiful. It's but there was this one you were talking about that's mentioned in this article, the oscillated turkey. I mean, god, there's a picture of it um that that the authors here include, and it looks so gorgeous. It's even gut these who has sort of a blue shading on the skin of its head with red lining around its eyes. And then it's even got these strange kind of like moles or tumor looking things all over its head, these little bulbs that are yellow,

and the colors altogether are are fabulous. Yeah, I mean even you know, even a purely domesticated turkey that you encounter nowadays. I mean, it is a fact. It's a big creature, you know. I think if you really stop and look at it and consider it, you can you can you'll be impressed by it. But then also, of course, we have wild turkeys, and I feel like encountering wild turkeys, if you're fortunate enough to encounter them, it can be

quite Uh, it can be quite a moving experience. I've even encountered them here in the the the the Atlanta area. I encountered them at a cemetery once where they're out walking among the tombstones, which seems perfect for, you know, some sort of spirit being. But I also encountered one in my backyard once, which was pretty fabulous because I

heard other birds. Now, yeah, the house I live in now just in the backyard, you know, a very residential type area, but the other birds were raising a ruckus and I was like, what's going on back there? Is there a dog in my backyard or something? No, it was a full blown wild turkey. And and these are sizeable animals. Oh yeah, I mean I have definitely encountered urban wild turkeys in in Tennessee. Sometimes they'll just wander

through neighborhoods in the city. Is pretty cool. So I would in closing here, I would say, if you find yourself this Thanksgiving at the table um considering the wishbone of a turkey, that you would you would think first of all, to the the magical, the divinational practices that this bone is tied to. You know that you were at least holding on to the vestigial remnants of of

ancient divination practices. And then on the other hand, you the bird itself that you are consumed ming or present or present for the consumption of that this too is a creature with roots in the sacred I was trying to think of an animal that's commonly eaten in America that is treated with more reverence and respect to compare it to, But then I couldn't think of anything. Maybe it seems like modern American cuisine doesn't just doesn't really

honor the animal, does it now? I mean, I guess you could make a case for the turkey being celebrated more than many of the animals we can see. I'm certainly more than the chicken. Because of course, what do we do we we we include it as part of in our iconography for Thanksgiving every year, like it is a symbol of Thanksgiving. It is a symbol of a of a great feast that one has. We have that, you know, ridiculous tradition with US president's pardoning turkeys. Um,

I don't know. I don't know what that's gonna happen this year. I don't know how many turkeys are gonna be pardoned this year. Um but but we'll see, Okay. So I want to move on from turkey at this point because if if you've had a turkey prepared in the traditional American style, which is to um to cook until the breast meat is so dry you could like play basketball with it, you sit down and and it's there on the plate, and what what's gonna say, what's

going to be the saving grace of this experience? Well, obviously it's like you would want some kind of hot, fatty, wet, highly flavored stuff to go on the turkey to sort of revive it, to bring it back from the grave. And it turns out that this is actually another centerpiece

of the American Thanksgiving tradition, which is the gravy. And I so I want to talk about gravy for a bit, but I also want to just bring your attention rob to some ads I found for old like commercially sold industrial gravy products, so like canned gravs and gravy mixes. Um uh. One I found is it was in an article that I'm going to talk about in a bit, but it's for the Dirky Brown gravy mix. This is a packet mix that you throw in with water. Uh, and it says all sauce and gravy mixes are made

for convenience, but Dirkys is for dining. And the this yeah calligraphy. Everyone should look this up. It's d u r k eat um dirkeys is for dining and has it. I mean, it's kind of a snazzy looking advertisement, has kind of a Madman mad men vibe to it. Yes, yes, fancy people in suits. Clearly they're gonna be having some Canadian club on the rocks or maybe Shiva's regal with this. I love how there's a cup of coffee in the scene,

which I don't know. I never drink coffee with my meals for the most part, But is it the idea? It's like, all right, thanksgivings coming at you. You You got at let's let's move this food. Let's let's supercharge the digestive system. I think it's one of those things where they tried to promote new uses for foods to sell more of them in the mid century. So here it's obviously saying, hey, you already you put cream in your coffee, Just do gravy instead. But I found another ad. This

is for Franco American beef gravy and a can. It says easy economical beef gravy burgers, and it's suggesting that you have a piece of white bread and on top of that it looks like just just a puck of ground beef and then you spoon over or ladle over about a gallon of this canned Franco American gravy. Uh. And the copy on this set is really good too. It says made from the juices of selected beef with

that genuine roasting pan flavor. Delicious served hot with any meat and potato, dinner, on sandwiches, in stews, or added to make your own gravy stres at chin it it hyphenates out the word stretch um. And so several things here that I like, the the use of the there's like carefully chosen words made from the juices of selected beef. And what is what work is the word selected doing? There? I did? Did I guess too? Um? Set it apart from random beef? Yeah, you know, made from the juices

of beef that was found somewhere. I had to say. The photo on this one that went black and white and all it looks oddly appetizing. I feel like my family had some version of this when I was a kid, where it would be the the beef patty on top of the slice of bread with gravy on top, with

the peas on the side. I remember being fond. But another one of these Franco American beef gravy ads I found, the tagline is just smooth, brown, delicious, and I like the idea that this actually does tie into some some food science stuff. The word brown there suggests not just a color, but a flavor. What flavor is it? It's brown flavored, and that that actually does get to the

original heart of of real gravy. So I was trying to think, how would a Martian describe gravy, and like she she's making an encyclopedia of earth life, and I think it would be something like gravy is a hot emulsified sauce made by combining fat, starch and then some glutamate flavored liquid, like a savory liquid thickened to the rough consistency of heavy cream. I think that that that's

about it, um. But for the non cooks out there, the traditional method of gravy preparation is actually great because it is a sort of natural byproduct of roasting a big piece of meat, which people often do for Thanksgiving um because a gravy is usually based on the fond left over on the bottom of the pan after you've cooked meat via some dry heat method like roasting or

pan frying. So is the meat cooks, it releases liquids, It releases fats and juices, and usually the juices will contain a mixture of proteins and carbohydrates sugars, and as these juices are cooked on the bottom of a pan under high heat, their water content evaporates and they undergo browning.

So if there are sugars present, they can caramelize, but then the proteins and the carbohydrates can together undergo this complex suite of chemical changes collectively known as the Myard reaction, and the Myard reaction in particular is the reaction that's responsible for the fact that browned food usually tastes good. It creates this a lot of complex flavors. It's the browning on the outside of bread when you toast bread. It's the browning on the outside of meat. Uh, it's

in coffee, you know. It is that good roasty flavor so to make a traditional gravy, after your roaster pan fry a piece of meat, you'll have all this extremely flavorful gunk stuck to the bottom of the pan, all these browned juices. And from here the gravy process goes to deglazing. So you have some kind of liquid. Usually this is water or wine broth, maybe spirits uh, and then you use the liquid as a solvent to scrape

up and dissolve all the brown gunk. And then you usually add some form of fat and starch to thicken the miss mixture. So this can be a rue like butter or rendered fat from the pan, mixed with flour or even corn starch. And then you whisk it all together and you cook it until it's thick into the consistency you want. And the thickening actually happens two different ways. As you cook, the starch grains will swell with liquid

and burst, releasing carbohydrate molecules. They unravel they meshed together with one another, and that thickens the sauce. But the other method of reducing is just reducing by evaporation as the sauce cooks. And I was interested in what brought about the all of these like prepared gravy products, because again, gravy is it's like a byproduct of cooking, right, Like you've done the cooking and now you've got the basis

to make a gravy. How do you get from that to the gravy comes in a pre prepared and okay in or mixture like a powder mixture, how do we get to dirkys is for dining. So I was reading a little article in The Atlantic about this by Alexis Madrigal, and this is about the history of industrial gravy products, specifically powder mixes for gravy um. And it is interesting to think about the development of instant food products as a real sort of science and engineering challenge because I

know these products are often derided. I mean, we were just making fun of them, but it is. It's it's an interesting process that led to their development. Because you've got something that is a natural product of some other cooking process. You know what you want the final product to look like, taste like, feel like. Uh, you know what real gravy is, and you know what limitations you

have to work with. Maybe your way of getting there has to be in a powdered packet or or cannibal or something, and then you've got to use science to try to get from here to there within your limitations. And Madrigal argues that the history of dry mixes for gravy really best understood in the context of dry mixes for baking other baking products, which go further back in history.

So he mentioned that in eighteen eighty two, there's this inventor named Philip Thorne who files a patent for a just add water baking mix which incorporates flour and baking powder as a leavening agent uh and the and also dehydrated butter. But this did not immediately become a popular product in America. The instant biscuit dope bis Quick entered the market in nineteen thirty one, but it really wasn't until after World War Two that instant baking mixes like

Betty Crocker cake Mix became very popular. Now, there's one thing I will say about this article, which is that it relays a story that I found very interesting but started to doubt, and this led me down a rabbit trail. But I think this rabbit trail is worthwhile because it ties into things that people also sometimes make conservant Thanksgiving. So there's this anecdote here that Magical shares about how the recipe design for packaged foods isn't just about taste

and convenience, it's also about the psychology of the cook. Uh. If you've ever made cake cake mix from a box, Duncan, Hinds or whatever, you probably know that there are usually a couple of ingredients that you have to provide yourself. So you know, the box will give you all the dry ingredients, but then you have to combine it with water,

maybe oil, and a couple of eggs. Now, the story goes that originally the Betty Crocker brand simply required water and nothing else in their cake mix boxes, and that these weren't selling very well, and the reasoning was that the process just seemed too artificial, too impersonal, too industrial.

Uh So, so, in one influential instance, General Mills changed the cake mix recipe to require the home cook to add their own eggs in addition to the water, and so hey, suddenly you're not using, you know, just a boxed product, you're actually baking. You added the eggs, you're health And according to the industry lore, this recipe change where suddenly, instead of having dried eggs in the mix already, you had to add your own eggs. This recipe change

made the mix a hit. I even found an article on Psychology Today that was retelling the story, framing it as about guilt and authenticity. This was supposedly discovered through research by the American consumer psychologist Earnest dicter Uh that that home cooks of the nineteen fifties felt guilty serving these delicious cakes that were just so easy to make, and Dictor reasoned that adding the eggs made the process slightly less convenient, and thus people felt better about serving

these cakes to guests. But it certainly makes a certain amount of sense. You know, you would you're you're doing something other than just following some simple directions and inting out a can or a box of powder and adding milk. You know that there is some element of actual baking or food preparation to it that it makes you feel useful and not just a uh, you just just to somebody assembling something. Yeah, and I think there absolutely could

be something to the underlying psychology there. I mean, you know, people are full of all kinds of interesting psychological quirks that drive their consumer decisions, and sometimes a product will sell for reasons other than just it's you know, pure value in in whatever objective sense you you wanna classify that. But the fact that this is such a great historical anecdote, the fact that it's so perfectly ted talkie kind of made the sleeping dragons of the BS detection go off

in my mind. So I decided to check, and wouldn't you know it, Snopes actually has an article about this very story. It's by the founder, one of the founders, David Nicholson, and my hunch was correct. They ruled this story is false. And the reason they rule it as false is that while this is based on a historical reality, Yes, there were these recipe changes to adding fresh eggs. Yes, around the same time there was increasing use of box

cake mixes. But just saying, uh, the psychological insight from ernest dict that said you have to add the egg yourself at home, that is what made the box cake mix a success. That massively over oversimplifies things. Uh. For example, it overstates the novelty of the recipe change. There'd been this long running debate in the industry over the trade offs of requiring fresh eggs at preparation versus using powdered eggs in the mix. It ignores other reasons for the

success of the fresh egg recipe. One of them is that a cake made with a fresh egg is usually going to be a lot better, uh quote. Using complete mixes which included dried eggs resulted in cakes that stuck to the pan, had poor texture, had shorter shelf life,

and often tasted too strongly of eggs. Another thing is that it kind of screws up the timeline of cake mix sales, and it ignores the simultaneous success of cake mixes that did include powdered egg and it ignores other changes in marketing and advertising that took place simultaneous to the fresh egg recipe. One example is repositioning cake mixes as step one in a larger creative process that involves

icing and decoration and things like that. So if if the cook wanted to feel like they were actually doing something and not just you know, not just opening a box, and that was it, that could come at the decoration stage of the cake. And then finally I thought this

was maybe the most interesting. And the story ignores other social changes that led to the increasing sales of box cake mixes in the fifties, one of which was that high school home economics classes were increasingly teaching baking based on mixes rather than from scratch, just sort of couching it in that case, and just the the overall um

shift towards industrial food products, right. Yeah, And so it seems like there's a bunch of different stuff going on here, and this story just kind of like, you know, a cherry pick like a couple of little facts from this period and then makes it a self contained, causative story. I'm not sure exactly what it was about that story that set me on alert. I guess it just has it has that shape, you know, the shape of a story that is a little too tidy, where the solution

to the problem is very cutely psychologically revealing. It's the kind of thing that you know, you love to have as an anecdote to lead off your motivational talk. Huh, that's interesting. I mean, I can't help but thinking about just the basic idea of providing your own egg or not. Um, I see this today and some of the box meal kids that are out there, Um, because box meal kids very like there's some box meal kids that are basically just TV dinners, um, and then most of the more

famous ones involved chopping and preparation. But there's one major brand, uh that I won't name because they're not paying us to right now that includes eggs. And there's another major brand that I won't name because they're not paying us right now that ask you to provide your own egg And it's interesting to think about. Of course, just the shipping demands of mailing eggs to people, I imagine that is a huge part of it. But but maybe there is also the sense of preparation, you know, like it

is it is good to provide your own egg. Uh, it's good that I had to procure my own eggs. I don't know or or think about where my eggs came from by exactly the type of eggs that I want, like if I want to you know, cage free. Yeah,

that's a good point. And I mean, the the underlying premise of this story I think does have something to it, which is that, you know, like we were saying there, there are these different sort of psychological pressures that are operating us when we're making decisions about what types of food products to buy, and those psychological pressures might not be only how does it taste, what is the cost

and things like that. It could be things about how we feel about methods of preparation or even methods of eating. Here's one thing, you know, Taco Bell they put they give you the sauce packets on the side, and there's like the question of like, now, what's the why why do they give you the sauce packets on the side instead of just putting the sauce on your taco and

then handing it off to you. I mean, there's something that they've reasoned about, Like people like to be able to put the sauce on themselves that you know, there's something pleasurable about that process, or like being able to determine exactly how much sauce and where it goes and stuff. Well, spice control is a big thing, you know what I mean. You can have that taco as bland as you want, or you can you can start, you know, superpowering it

with with multiple spicy packs. So I also wonder about like box macaroni and cheese, uh, you know, so they'll give you, like the cheese sauce fully made in a powdered form, or a you know, like gooey velveta form or whatever ahead of time. Or I think there's some fancier brands that ask you to supply something of your own, you know, use your own butter, or use your own milk that may contribute somewhat to the texture the final product.

But I wonder also if that's like if you're trying to up sell a brand, you're trying to sell a more expensive boxed macaroni and cheese. Is there is there a calculation that people will think, oh, this is a more legitimate meal, more legitimate food product if I provide some of my own fresh ingredients. Yeah, is this a meal in a box? Or is this an ingredient for a meal? Um? I guess the difference can can can play a major row and whether one purchase it or not.

But let's get back to the gravy too. Oh yeah, so where does gravy enter the picture again? Here? Well, thinking about these industrially produced gravy mixes. Um, so again, you know we've we've said gravy is usually a byproduct of cooking meat. What is the gravy factory supposed to do? Like you cook a million roasts and then you deglaze the fond or the drippings from that, and then you

find something else to do with the meat. I mean, it seems like kind of impractical at an industrial scale, and for this reason, a lot of package gravies, you know, they'll have to like use a secondary animal aroduct as the flavoring to begin with, or they in fact maybe have little or nothing to do with the meat they're

supposed to taste. Like. In this article, Madrigal quotes a food scientist at the University of Minnesota named Gary A. Rhinesius, who says the gravy mixes are a little more sophisticated because the flavor from the gravy mix maybe a beef gravy, but it's never been near a cow, so that you might get a beef gravy that just has no beef

content at all. So where does the flavor come from? Well, they're they're all kinds of flavorings that can be like wheat based flavorings, there can be I mean, a big one for gravy mixes in history is MSG, which we've

done whole episodes about before. Monosodium glutamate originally isolated by by Japanese food scientists from from seaweed, and this recreates a lot of the savory flavors that we associate with things like parmesan cheese or tomatoes or soy sauce or meats, but has apparently been a huge bugbear in the history of powdered gravy mixes, and that is lumps. So if if you ever made gravy yourself, you you might have

encountered lumps before. When when you add starch to a mixture of water and fat, it can be very easy for the starch to form little clumps that don't fully dissolve into the sauce. So if you you know, if you get a clump of raw flour or corn starch in your mouth while you're eating gravy, that is very unpleasant. Uh. And on the on the On a slightly related note,

you should never eat raw flour. By the way, when when people tell you not to eat raw dough for some reason, they only emphasize the presence of raw eggs, But you should be at least as concerned about raw flower because raw flower can easily pick up bacterial contamination like E. Coal I and other things. Um and bacteria can survive until the flower is cooked. You should think about raw flour in sort of the same way you think about raw hamburger. Uh, you know, don't eat if

it's not cooked. So that to be clear, you're saying, don't eat unco cookie dough, right, Well, I mean it depends like you could make cookie dough from something that is safe. But yeah, if it's got raw flour in it, you should not eat it because it might hurt me. I mean, so good there are outbreaks. Well, I mean yeah, I don't know. I think there are things that are safety use like there. You know, there are companies that sell cookie dough that's just ready to eat cookie dough,

ice cream and all that. I think that does not have raw flour in it, or if it does, it's somehow been through a process that renders it safe. I'm not saying one should definitely ignore you on this one, but I'm just saying it's it's gonna be it's gonna be hard to to make this life change when the cookie dough or the cake batter or even the pancake batter is often the most delightful part of the whole process. I mean, I guess it can be I don't know

the taste of raw flower. I think is is kind of gross and chalky on its own, But there's obviously no I mean, I understand the appeal. I mean I've had cookie dough too, but no, raw flower can have contamination, just like raw meat can. There's been major outbreaks of ecal live from flower in the US. There's one in sixteen, there was another one in twenty nineteen. According to the CDC, these sickened at least eighty people. Uh. And a fun fact, I was looking up, Oh, how exactly does flower get

contaminated by e coal? Lie? Does that happen in the factory or whatever? It can happen at multiple stages of the process, but sometimes it appears to be literally just contamination by animal feces in the fields where the wheat is grown. So cool, huh ah, man, you can ruin cookie dough. But back to lumpy gravy. Hey that you know it's so so maybe you've got some lumps of that same flower in your gravy. Uh. There are ways

around lumpy gravy. So first of all, it helps to add starch when the mixture is cool will instead of hot. And then dissolve it before as the mixture heats, rather than adding starch to liquid that's already hot or boiling. Another method is, of course, just good old fashioned whisking.

Just break it up with a whisk. But in reference to a patent that he found, Madrigal rights, quote home cooks can prevent this simply by stirring the mixture, but that required quote considerable skill, as General Mills Harold Keller put it in a nineteen fifty eight patent application. I'm not sure how much skill it takes to stir something or to whisk it. But I don't know. Um, I don't know. I've been accused of improper whisking before, so

oh yeah, what do you do wrong? Um? I think it was just like scrambled eggs that I did not whisk properly, you know, because you gotta get it, you know. It's it's not just stirring rapidly, like there's a whole like a wrisk orientation that needs to be right to do it if you're really whisking something. Yeah, oh, well, here's a tip actually for for the cook's out there. Uh, if you want to emulsify something really good with a whisk,

or fork, you're beating it. I used to always think it would be best to stir in a circle, but I have read that it is better to go just back and forth side to side than it is to go in a circle, because there's actually more mechanical agitation if you go back and forth in a straight line that I think that was one of the problems I had previously, is that I would kind of I was whisking like I was stirring rapidly, and so I was going in a circle and I wasn't doing that that

just fast whipping. It's more like point A to point B in the back to point A. So you're one of these people who who Harold Keller just thinks that you do not have considerable skill. Correct, I can't do it. I think I'm better now, I'm I'm improving, but but yeah, I I don't think I was good at whisking nothing or passable at whisking until very recently. So was there a way around the lump problem? Well, some more food science came in. Manufacturers discovered that, of course the addition

of leavening agents could help a little bit. They could help prevent lumps from forming, and especially if mixture was again added at lower temperatures, but lumps would still come together if you had already boiling water and you poured the mixture in. So finally, the solution to the lump problem was to add long chain carbon hydrates, specifically multidextron in a one to one ratio, and that sort of gets us up to the instant packet of gravy we

know today dirkys is for dinner. Thank thank you, I've got weirder territory to get to. Even then, this this strange packet of of of gravy stuff or gravy like food, because you know that we love the intersection of religion and food. Of course, I was wondering if I could find any good gravy rituals or gravy superstitions, gravy mythology. I I wasn't expecting to find anything, but I actually did sort of, at least in a very old classic book of religious ethnography that is coming from a scholar

named Uno Holmberg. He's He's a Finnish scholar of religions. He's apparently also known as Uno Harva, and he wrote in the early twentieth century. He wrote a volume of this Big Mythology series that was about the beliefs and rituals of what he called the Finno Ugric people. So this is gonna include Finnish people and people of much of the northern Northern Eurasia and northwest Siberia by region at least, I mean they might identify as different than

Russian ethnically. And this volume mentions recorded observations of several interesting rituals involving gravy. So the first is in rituals honoring the memory of the dead among some of the language groups of Northern Eurasia. Again this would be like Western Siberia, and among some of these cultures, after a person dies, it is customary to honor them by bringing food to their grave or placing food out somewhere in

the dead person's memory. Quote. Fish and meat are cooked and together with other eatables, placed in vessels, either on the ground by the house against the door on the side of the hinges, or taken to the cemetery, where they are put on the ground above the head of the deceased, or below the window of the grave house if there is one on the ground t gravy Gin and finally some cold water are poured, whence the term water pouring is derived. Uh so gravy and gin for

the dead. I was also surprised by the specification of gin, because I don't usually think of that as uh the commonest spirit to find in like western Siberia. But yeah, it makes me wonder if it's specifically gin we're talking about here, or they're just referring to some regional alcohol that might be comparable on some level to jin. Yeah, that could be sort of some sort of clear herbal.

Another one that I thought was interesting was there there is a memorial gravy practice that Holmberg mentions as taking place among the fins of the Vulgar region. And he says that so there are these memorial feasts for the dead in which quote at the door near the fireplace, a trough is placed on which, as on the head of a bed, little wax tapers And I think that would refer to little objects that you would use as if to like light a candle with little wax tapers

are fixed into the trough. Pieces of meat are thrown, and some gravy poured when the names of the dead are mentioned with an appeal to them to eat and drink, and to receive the lately deceased with a contented mind into their company. And so I like this because it it almost seems to mirror the presence of gravy at Thanksgiving.

It's like you're using meat and gravy as a kind of bribe or offering to the long dead so that they don't give a cold shoulder to the recently dead, and they bring them into the family of the dead. But there's also a description of practices related to the killing of a bear by some of the Sami people's and I thought this was really interesting, So I'm just gonna read this paragraph here. When the flesh is being cooked, the hunters sit on each side of the fire according

to their rank in position. First it's the one who tracked the bear, then the interpreter of the magic drum, the bear killers, etcetera, all according to the importance of the duty which they have had to do during the kill. The vessel in which the flesh is cooked must be of brass, or at the very least ornamented with brass rings. It must be carefully watched during the cooking, as the running over of the tiniest trifle of gravy into the fire is regarded as a very bad omen should the

gravy commenced to boil too violently. It is not regulated by adding water or thinning out the fire, but one of the men must go to the tent to see whether any of the women has caused the trouble by unsuitable behavior. Should nothing blame worthy be found there, the chief person of the gathering tries to stop the gravy from boiling over by the customary singing, singing to the gravy to prevent it from boiling out of the pan into the fire, which would be a horrible symbol of

bad luck to come. But only if you can't blame it on the women. On the women in the tent, yes, um, and so as always the You know, this is an older work of of recorded observations of religious rituals. I don't know how this would hold up to more modern scrutiny of what the same tribes would practice, but these

are interesting reports. Oh absolutely, yeah. I have to admit I never even considered the possibility of of sacred gravy or sacred traditions involving gravy, I mean the gravy It is a it's it's a liquid essence of the body

of an animal. And so if you have sacred thoughts about the flesh of an animal, it clearly, uh, there are sacred practices revolved around the hunting of a bear among the Sami People's Yeah, I guess, I guess that it comes down to the rendering, you know, like once something is rendered or processed into another food product, this

is problem. Maybe this is more the modern sensibility where we often want to distance the end result of the food from the animal, so we don't think of you know, we don't don't want to think of the pork as the pig, and we certainly don't want to think about the uh, the anna sausages as presumably a pig. I'm not even sure what animal on the other end of

that that the foul process. But but but at any rate, Yeah, it's like the modern sensibilities to think, well, the thing you make out of the animal no longer has any connections to it, you know, we're not supposed to have that connection in place, whereas that's completely ridiculous, like why wouldn't the gravy of the bear still have bareness to it?

That is a really good point. I think about this in the psychology of food a lot actually the d naturing of the food, the removal, the ways that you change food and process it so that it no longer resembles or even reminds you of the animal or the plant that it once came from, the making of everything into like patties or into chicken nuggets, you know, things that that you you couldn't even mistake for a muscle or for a part of an animal's body, and that's

clearly antithetical to some of these sacred practices where you are not only not processing the food so that it's unrecognizable, you are constantly making reference to and thinking about the animal it came from as you eat it. Yeah. I also think it's interesting that you see a lot of

this denaturing specifically in foods for children. And I don't know if that's just a quirk of modern American culture or if that's a more common thing around the world and throughout history that you have to for kids, you have to make foods less resemble the organisms they originally came from. I don't know what do you think about the I mean, I can main they only speak to

my my own experience with a child. But and even this example, there's some contradictions because on one hand, Um, as soon as he knew the distinction that you know, the chicken is this, uh, this bird, you know, etcetera, he decided he didn't want to eat those animals anymore. Uh, and has has remained firm on that point, on on

on this. At the same time, as far as marine animals go, Uh, it's the complete opposite, Like like he gets excited about crabs if he has helped to catch crabs before, and he makes him want to eat them even more, you know, And he seems totally into the like the experience of of eating oysters, um, you know, the opening of the shell and pulling it, pulling it apart. Now all the like, the consumption of an oyster is very tied to an understanding of its um of it,

of its biological origins. And uh yeah, so I don't know, I kind of see both things in him. You know. Well, that's funny because modern secular oyster culture reminds me very much of these sacred rituals where like with the bear here, where you're very much wanting to think about the animal itself and even uh not wanting to spill any of the liquor out of the shell. You know, you want to get it all in your mouth. Yeah, I mean yea,

oysters are very ritualized really at every level. Like I'm I'm kind of a I'm still kind of old fashioned with my appreciation of oysters. I like I like my my catch up the horse radish sauce. I like my saltine crackers and uh and you know a little bit of lemon um and and but that in and of itself is very you know, it's it's almost like communion. You know, you have these different elements that come together.

But then of course you have fancier versions of the same ritual that involve like like you know, little little glass tubes of liquid that are poured on top. Uh and and it gets it gets even fancy, or even feel it feels even more sacred in some way. This is the body of Poseidon. Eat this in remembrance of me. Yeah. Now, I know we've been talked thing about a lot of meat products here because they are very central to you know,

a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in American culture. But I want to add a brief culinary note which is that if you are a vegetarian, you need not miss out on gravy for the rest of your life because gravy made from mushroom broth, I think, is not only as good as gravy made from meat, it's often better. I think probably the best gravy I ever made was mushroom based, and you can make these yourself just by like simmering dried mushrooms with aromatic vegetables to make a mushroom broth.

Then you reduce that, then you mix it with a with a ru or whatever seasonings you want in order to thicken it. Even if you're a meat eater, a good mushroom gravy is absolutely worth trying. It's delicious. Yeah. There was some sort of meal my family would make when I was a kid, and it was I can't remember the details, but I feel like the idea was it was a less um fancy cut of meat well and and adding a mushroom sauce to it was an

essential part of enjoying it. Like it it. It alone elevated this cut of meat to something that was was suitable for consumption. I think this brings us back to one of the core things about how gravy is used because and this actually ranges across different types of customs. It's true for the dry, overcooked underseason turkey that a lot of people would eat, you know, you save it

by pouring gravy all over it. But it's also true, I say biscuits and gravy, you know, I think that's a recipe that where the gravy was brought in to save just these like gross lumps of You just got to get this food into your body to power you through the day. But it's this nasty baked product that is not very good on its own. Well, you pour some gravy over it. Now it's a hot meal. Yeah.

This reminds me of our Invention episode on Catchup, which I anybody who's digging this episode definitely go look up that episode of Catchup. It's either in the Stuff to boil your mind feed from earlier this year when we kind of dumped a lot of Invention episodes into the feed, or you might have to go over to the Invention

show feed itself. But but it's a similar history, like the the the origin of ketchup is the origin of these various sauces that were created oftentimes it's like a secondary product from the from preserving the preservation of you know, fish or whatnot, and then using these as a way to make potentially vile tasting foods more palatable. Yeah. Well this this also reminds me one of the early recommendations for uses of ketchup an American cuisine was to add

flavor to graves no joke. Wow, so you'd like mix it in? Yeah? Okay, One last bonus fact. I just wanted to talk about real quick before we end. Cranberry sauce. Do you have cranberry sauce thoughts? Do you like the can stuff? I've seen people say like they don't want it unless it has the the can ribs still visible on it, like you know, bones poking out under the flesh of a beast. I don't have a particular preference.

I'm I'm better, but I remember growing up, we would the rest of the family would have like a more elegant cranberry sauce that clearly has an organic origin. But my dad, I believe it was my dad that insisted on or maybe it's my grandfather, can't remember. I think it was my dad insisted on the canned version. Where if it's like clearly it's in the shape of a can, it still has the lines on it, the ridges, and

it's just been sliced in half. It's just like a chopped up segment of a pink snake and you can see it's bones. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. As far as traditions go, I kind of love them both. Like I even though I don't think I ever ate the canned cranberry slice stuff like that, just thinking about it makes me happy, So I guess I'm all for it. Well, so I was wondering quickly, why is it that cranberry sauce gets so thick like that, you know, you get the jelly version of the can now in the canned

to product. It's possible that some brands will add further things to make it hold its shape even better, but that that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, because there are natural parts of cranberries that will make it gel quite nicely if you just prepare it the right way. Um. And this is a nice reminder that, like we've been talking about with with animal products, many of the culinary properties of food are also just straightforwardly the biological properties

of plants and animals. It's a strange thing to remember. In the case of cranberry sauce. Part of the answer of what makes cranberry sauce gel so thickly and hold its shape is a molecule called pecton. Pecton is a natural polysaccharide that's found in plants, and it works as a type of biological cement that holds plants sell walls together, and fruits that are high in pectin will release their

pectin content as their cells are destroyed through cooking. And this is one reason that longer cooked cranberry sauces tend to gel together more than a short cooked sauce. Well, the longer you cook it, you extract more and more of this biological glue that gets all mixed into the sauce you're making and helps it sort of hold its shape once it sets. Interesting, all right, I know what what everyone out there is is asking. At this point,

you're saying, what about stuffing? I gotta know about stuffing. Well, we're out of time, so we're not gonna do stuffing this year. Maybe we'll do stuffing next year. We need to have portion control on this show. Thanksgiving meal itself is not about portion control, but the show has to be so as far as stuffing goes, maybe we'll cover it next year, or maybe you can just go listen to our episode about pie crete and that'll be close enough to stuffing for your taste. It's a low carb

Thanksgiving what everyone wants. All right, Well, this is this was pretty fun. I got to learn. I got to learn a few things about turkeys and witch bones that I wasn't familiar with. I got to learn about sacred gravy. This is. This has been great. Alright, We're gonna let it go. Then we hope everybody, if you're celebrating Thanksgiving

or some version of Thanksgiving, we hope that that goes well. Uh. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. If you have the ability to rate, review, and subscribe to the show, we asked that you do that.

It's a great way to help out the show. Another thing you can do, and this is it's kind of mostly for fun, is that if you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that will take you to the I Heart page for our show, and there's something you can click on there for our store that'll take you to our T shirts store. We have a number of different designs. You can get them on a sticker or a shirt or what have you face mask I think even now, and there's several different designs there.

Some of them are logo and some of them are some other fun things. We have a new shirt in there. It's a Pandora shirt that a listener of designed for us, and it's really fun. It's got a Pandora Moti and she's opening in the box and it's releasing these various uh mythological concepts and ideas. It's pretty cool, so go check check that out. I think there are all sorts of sales going on right now, because of course this time of year, it's just internally black slide huge things.

As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.