Lighthouses

(music)

Liz: Hello and welcome to Bread and Thread, a podcast about food and domestic history. I’m Liz

Hazel: And I’m Hazel. We are two friends who studied archaeology together and who love history and making things, and we normally start by talking about what we’ve been making/cooking or baking recently, so what have you been up?

Liz: I have mostly been up to having covid

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: But after last episode, we did make rhubarb crumble, which, I’ve never had rhubarb before. I’ve had rhubarb and custard sweets

Hazel: Oh yeah, those are nice

Liz: But I’d never had actual rhubarb

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Turns out rhubarb crumble is great

Hazel: You live so close to the rhubarb triangle. How have you not?

Liz: I live in Lancashire!

Hazel: That’s next to Yorkshire (laughs) Unless you don’t want to support the Yorkshire economy, in which case

Liz: No

Hazel: (laughs) I’m glad you liked it though

Liz: It was really good, and it is April’s patreon recipe

Hazel: Good

Liz: That’s how tasty it was

Hazel: (laughs) Actually, related, I made the khoresh rivas, the Persian rhubarb lamb stew

Liz: How was it?

Hazel: The other day. Also after the last episode, I guess we’ve just been on a rhubarb craving after that

Liz: Well it’s spring

Hazel: It is

Liz: It’s the time of rhubarb

Hazel: It was really nice. I was quite sceptical about how it would be as a savoury flavour, but it wasn’t as sour as I was expected

Liz: Mmm?

Hazel: It was sour, but just when you eat the rhubarb, not in the entire stew, and it balanced quite well, and the herb flavours went really nice with it. It was really good, would recommend. I forgot to take any pictures or anything, but I will put up the link to the recipe I used if anyone else wants to make it

Liz: It does sound very good

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: But yeah, I have not done a lot of making. I’ve mostly just been making progress on existing things, although I’ve not completed both creatures and the ocean on my big cross-stitch project

Hazel: Nice

Liz: So I’m currently working on the mountain in the background

Hazel: Is that

Liz: ‘Cause it’s got Mount Fuji in the background

Hazel: Aww

Liz: And then I’m gonna do a sky thing, but I’m just working on the mountain at the moment in 4? 5 different shades of purple

Hazel: Ok, nice. How are you gonna display it, when it’s done?

Liz: I’m gonna attach it to the back of my denim jacket like a giant patch

Hazel: Oh, amazing! (laughs)

Liz: ‘Cause why not?

Hazel: Exactly! That is the best thing about making stuff, is that you can just why not. I haven’t really…this is uncharacteristic for me, but I’ve spent the last few weeks only working on one project, and that is a knitted lace shawl

Liz: That takes a lot of work, to be fair

Hazel: It does (laughs) And I think, ‘cause I’m doing a lot of different things at the moment in non-podcast life, it’s just nice to have the continuity of one thing sometimes

Liz: Mmm

Hazel: Surprisingly, you can make a lot of progress when you just work on one thing for a few weeks

Liz: What?!

Hazel: I know. It’s also in cobweb weight yarn, which is one of the thinnest yarns you can get

Liz: It’s basically the thinnest thing that isn’t thread

Hazel: It is diaphanous, yeah, it’s really nice. Which is the first time I’ve worked with that, I think?

Liz: Is it a Shetland, with being cobweb, or

Hazel: Sorry?

Liz: With it being cobweb, is it Shetland, or

Hazel: This particular one isn’t, no, it’s just a nice shawl design that I found, it’s not a traditional Shetland one, but that is my ambition. I do one day want to make a Shetland cobweb shawl. But it’s not been as scary as I thought, working with it, it’s just slightly thinner lace, so yeah

Liz: Mmm

Hazel: That has been nice. I’m on the border. I do love a knitted on border, so

Liz: That’s good practice for Shetland, ‘cause most of the patterns I looked at when I was doing mine had a knitted on border

Hazel: Yeah, it does seem to be that for a lot of them, especially the big square ones, you knit the border first, and then you pick up stitches along the border and work in

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Yeah, interesting construction. But I like it because it just feels so clever, the way you’re attaching the border as you go

Liz: It feels like you’re cheating

Hazel: (laughs) Yeah. And it’s fun to, because it feels like it’s all bunched up on the needles, especially if you’re on a circular, and then as you knit on the border it flattens out and emerges and it’s great. Anyway, I’ll stop talking about my knitting in such detail. We can go onto the episode. What are we gonna talk about?

Liz: It’s a very special kind of house

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: It’s a lighthouse

Hazel: (gasps) Ok, I’m excited

Liz: ‘Cause I like them

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: And certain parts of the internet have been thinking a lot about the symbolism of lighthouses lately

Hazel: Really? Ok that’s a reference I don’t get. I also like lighthouses

Liz: Our Flag Means Death

Hazel: Our what, sorry?

Liz: Our Flag Means Death. There’s a running thing of lighthouses

Hazel: Oh! I still haven’t watched that. I’m gonna have to watch it before all of my friends have finished it, otherwise I’m gonna miss the moment, but I do like lighthouses, regardless

Liz: Lighthouses are cool

Hazel: They are cool. I live near a famous one

Liz: Ooh, which one?

Hazel: I’m not gonna say, ‘cause then people will know where I live

Liz: You’ve already said where you live before

Hazel: Have I?

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Ok. It’s the Belle Tout Lighthouse, on the South Downs, which was famously moved back out from the cliff, about 20 years ago, I think. They just picked up the whole entire thing and just moved it

Liz: Why?

Hazel: Because it’s no longer a working lighthouse, and people live there, and they didn’t want it to fall into the sea

Liz: I’ll give them that, that’s fair

Hazel: But there is a new one, that’s actually a lighthouse, it’s in the sea just underneath, and it’s a classic red and white stripe. It’s very good

Liz: I was a little bit borderline whether this comes under our purview, but I think it does

Hazel: I think it’s adjacent, if nothing else. I’m into it

Liz: What the first lighthouse was is one of these debates

Hazel: Ooh

Liz: There is a legend about Palamedes, who shows up in various Trojan War things, inventing the first lighthouse

Hazel: Inventing?

Liz: Basically coming up with the idea of signal fires on platforms to show where the coast is, for ships

Hazel: Ah. But that’s not a house

Liz: But Palamedes isn’t real

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: The earliest lighthouses that we know about for definite are in Greece and Egypt. You’ve probably heard of the Lighthouse of Alexandria

Hazel: I have, yeah, yeah. Is that, did they possibly find the remains of that a few years ago?

Liz: I’m gonna have to look up whether they did

Hazel: I think I remember something about it, or did I confuse that with another thing? I don’t know

Liz: Yeah, in the 90s they found possibly the remains of the lighthouse

Hazel: Ok. Definitely have heard of. Was that one of the Wonders of the World? The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Liz: One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, yeah

Hazel: Ok

Liz: At the time it was the tallest manmade structure in the world

Hazel: Wow

Liz: The time being the 3rd century BC, though to have been at least 100 metres tall. However, there were some excavations in Gujarat, where they may have found what’s called a platform lighthouse, which is basically a 10 foot platform that would have had the fire one top

Hazel: Ok

Liz: From potentially 2000 BC

Hazel: Wow

Liz: This is why I say the earliest lighthouse really depends on your definition of lighthouse

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Because the progression is from signal fires on hills to mark where the ports are, ‘cause obviously you don’t have artificial light, so it’s more about “here is where is safe” rather than “here’s a big string of lights to show you where isn’t safe”

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: To fires on platforms, to actual…I was gonna say purpose built structures, but the platforms were probably built for that purpose, but buildings

Hazel: More permanent, yeah

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Houses

Liz: See, the definition of a lighthouse as a house is tricky, because people didn’t live in most of them. You would spend your day in them, but more because this was your place of work. Your family would live elsewhere, and you would go to them, for most of history. Wouldn’t be “this is my house, it has a light on it”

Hazel: I think my rule of thumb is if you can make tea in it, it’s a house

Liz: By that logic a tent is a house

Hazel: Yes

(both laugh)

Liz: Flawless

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: There’s theories that they might have used glass lenses to magnify those fires

Hazel: Nice

Liz: But we don’t have any evidence of that, sadly, it’s kind of a “well they must have”

Hazel: That is a shame, because that would be really cool

Liz: Yeah. I definitely support the “well they must have” theory, because that’s basically what we’ve always been doing in lighthouses, is “we’ll put this special glass in front of it and we’ll make the fire bigger and brighter. Interestingly, actually, the stereotypical lighthouse lens

Hazel: The ripply one?

Liz: Yeah. That wasn’t actually introduced until the 1700s

Hazel: Oh

Liz: It’s called a fresnel lens. How it works is it’s reflective on the inside, and then those concentric circles - please note that I am not an optics expert

Hazel: Another list of things that we are not experts in

Liz: They refract the light. Because it’s reflected around so much, it’s brighter that the original light, and then it shoots it out in this big wide bright beam. Before that, you had mirrored boxes that you would have them in, which were called catoptric mirrors

Hazel: That is a good name

Liz: Obviously we get lighthouses, because they show up in Trojan War stuff, obviously we have them in the Roman era, there’s one in A Coruña in Galicia, which is actually still functional from the Roman era

Hazel: Oh my goodness

Liz: Obviously it’s had some upgrades, but it’s the same basic lighthouse

Hazel: Ok. It’s still used for its purpose?

Liz: Mm-hmm

Hazel: Wow

Liz: Sorry. My brain isn’t functioning

Hazel: It’s alright, you had the ‘rona

Liz: In the US, actually, you get some quite old ones. We have the first purpose-built one in North America in 1716

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which is in Massachusetts, but there’s a lot of speculation, it seems, ‘cause there’s a lot of structures with towers on coasts, pretty much everywhere

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So there’s an idea of “is the reason we’re not finding evidence or accounts of a lot of purpose built lighthouses before this point that they were just using the towers that were already there?” Because if you’re just indicating the port, you don’t need a hugely bright light, you just need something visible, so you can just have a fire in a watchtower or something similar

Hazel: (a noise)

Liz: Sorry

Hazel: Where do you get the stereotypical lighthouse keeper lighthouse, then. When I think of lighthouses, I think of that. There’s a load of spooky stories and things about lighthouse keepers, and the rule that there has to be two of them, or something. Is that all true?

Liz: I am gonna get to this

Hazel: Oh, ok, alright

Liz: I have a story for the end

Hazel: Ok

Liz: You start getting, in the early modern period for example, 1611 in Cordouan in France, you start getting much more elaborate purpose built structures. The one in Cordouan is absolutely gorgeous, actually, I’m gonna…I will post a picture, but I’m gonna send one to Hazel, ‘cause you get this quite, I think, neoclassical structure

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: Which then has the more modern lighthouse just kind of built on top of it, which is quite fun

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: You can see it kind of looks like a Roman rotunda, it’s that very early Renaissance we’re just gonna make stuff look Roman kind of vibe

Hazel: Yeah, definitely. Got a lot of windows

Liz: You need to be able to let a lot of light in I suppose, for the people in there

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Eventually you get…interestingly, you don’t seem to get basic, almost hearth fires replaced with lamps until the 1780s, when they get replaced with oil lamps with these mirrors and lenses. The first one of that classic vaguely conical shape seems to be the Eddystone Lighthouse, which is near Plymouth. UK Plymouth, I should clarify

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: There’s a rocky area near Plymouth Sound called the Eddystone Rocks, which were incredibly difficult to build on, but also quite dangerous to shipping

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So you want to indicate where those rocks are, and then you end up with granite blocks, fixed together with dovetail joints, marble dowelling, and something called hydraulic lime, which is a special kind of cement that sets underwater

Hazel: Oh! Wow. I didn’t know that was a thing

Liz: Yeah, it’s…I mean, it wasn’t for a long time

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Originally it had a wooden lighthouse, which was constructed in the 1690s, but, unsurprisingly, was destroyed by a storm not long after

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Because it was made of wood. This new design was by a guy called John Rudyard, who was actually a silk merchant and property developer

Hazel: Ok

Liz: But he designed this lighthouse

Hazel: Just for funsies

Liz: Which actually lasted until it burnt down

Hazel: Oh. How do you burn…I was about to ask how you burn a lighthouse down, and then I remembered they have a big fire in them

Liz: Specifically an oil lantern

Hazel: (laughing) Yeah

Liz: Which, yeah, throwing seawater isn’t going to do anything on that

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: One of the lighthouse keepers at the time was 94 years old

Hazel: Gosh!

Liz: Just a fun fact

Hazel: Ok. Was it a good retirement job?

Liz: It was the 1750s, I don’t think such a thing existed. But then you get Robert Stevenson, not to be confused with Robert Louis Stevenson, or George Stephenson, a completely different Stevenson

Hazel: Although is Robert Louis Stevenson a relative of the lighthouse Robert Stevenson

Liz: Not as far as I can tell. He was on the Northern Lighthouse Board, because he was Scottish, so obviously in the northern bit, in 1810 he added the idea of a specifically rotating light, so it would be more distinct from just a light on the coast

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: But it was also under his tenure that they started painting that iconic stripe on the lighthouses

Hazel: Oh

Liz: In the same area you would generally have different patterns on the lighthouses, and sometimes blue paint instead of, or as well as, red, so that you could distinguish them better from far away, which I think is quite fun

Hazel: Ok, I think I confused it, I remembered hearing something about Robert Stevenson and being related to another famous Stevenson, and it turns out that his dad invented the locomotive, I think that’s it

Liz: Did he? Robert Louis Stevenson’s dad was a lighthouse designer

Hazel: Oh! But not this

Liz: But not this lighthouse designer

Hazel: Oh no! I got the wrong lighthouse man!

Liz: I was wrong about the relationship though, this man is Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather

Hazel: I got the right lighthouse man!

Liz: Right lighthouse man, wrong relation

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: So I guess we were both wrong

Hazel: This has been a rollercoaster. Anyway

Liz: (laughs) Interestingly, most lighthouses in the UK were privately owned until 1836

Hazel: What? I guess now that I think about it that doesn’t seem weird, because it was before publicly owned things, but

Liz: They were mostly sponsored by companies with a vested interest in keeping shipping safe

Hazel: I guess that would make sense

Liz: But they were brought under the control of what’s called Trinity House, because in those days all the branches of government were just named after the building they were in, in 1836, and that’s when they started going “ok, all the lighthouses have to have this this and this to make sure that they’re functional and safe”

Hazel: Were they not?

Liz: I told you about the 94 year old lighthouse keeper, right?

Hazel: Ok, point taken

Liz: But also things like making sure that they all had these fresnel lenses

Hazel: Ok

Liz: And providing a specific salary for the lighthouse keepers

Hazel: Oh good

Liz: So yeah, it’s a little bit shorter than usual, but I do first want to tell you about the reason that there are three people in a lighthouse

Hazel: Ok. I think I’ve heard of this story before, but I don’t

Liz: The Smalls Lighthouse tragedy

Hazel: Ok

Liz: The Smalls Lighthouse is a significant distance off the Welsh coast. Specifically, off Pembrokeshire, I think. The story is that there were two lighthouse keepers, as was normal at the time, this was 1801

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith, who, people knew that they didn’t get on, which is already one problem with just having two people stuck on a very small island for weeks or months at a time

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Griffith died, just as an accident, ‘cause obviously this was a dangerous job

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Howell built a makeshift coffin for him, because he was worried if he just buried him at sea, quote-unquote, everyone would assume that he’d killed him which, to be fair, they probably would have

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: The story goes that a strong wind blew the coffin apart, and Griffith’s body was thrown basically against the window, and apparently the arm blew as though it was beckoning, and obviously it was not doing particularly well at this point

Hazel: Oh

Liz: Just in terms of freshness

Hazel: Oh no

Liz: And Howell, you know, he didn’t have a way to inform anyone that this had happened, so he kept working the lighthouse on his own

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: By the time that the next team came, he was just a broken man

Hazel: Uh

Liz: Because he’d been alone with a body for a very long time

Hazel: (faux screams)

Liz: So they changed the policy, to make sure that there would always be at least three people in the lighthouse, in case something happened to one of them, and it remained as three people until the 1980s, when they switched over to mostly automated lighthouses

Hazel: Wow

Liz: Anyone who’s watched it will be unsurprised to learn that this was part of the inspiration for the 2019 film The Lighthouse

Hazel: I have not seen that film

Liz: It is very good. It is very spooky

Hazel: Ok

Liz: It’s about two people who go to work a lighthouse, and they don’t get on very well, and then spooky stuff happens

Hazel: Oh, ok, yeah, that looks, that looks spooky. And Willem Dafoe’s in it, ok

Liz: Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, it’s very good

Hazel: (laughs) Oh yeah, it is Rob Pat. Ok, ok, that sounds like a thing that I would definitely watch. Robert Pattinson is in some actually good films these days. I can kind of see where the whole spooky lighthouse thing came from now

Liz: Yeah, you just…you kept having incidents, because it’s something that is built to be in a dangerous place

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: It’s isolated, so you simultaneously get this very romanticised idea of the isolation, especially…you start getting whole literary movements that are about “Ah, the sea!” and being alone, and it’s all very capital R Romantic

Hazel: Not good

Liz: But at the same time people keep dying

Hazel: Mmm! I guess

Liz: It’s spooky

Hazel: It’s easy to romanticise something when you don’t have to actually do it

Liz: Yeah. I don’t think I would enjoy being a lighthouse keeper

Hazel: No

Liz: So that is my brief history of lighthouses

Hazel: I enjoyed it. It was interesting, and slightly unsettling. I do wanna look up ancient lighthouses now, though, because that sounds cool

Liz: There’s some very cool pictures of the Lighthouse of Alexandria

Hazel: Neat!

Liz: What is our local larder this week?

Hazel: It is something kind of relevant to the time of year. This past weekend it has simultaneously been Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. I think for the first time in quite a long time

Liz: 30-something years I think?

Hazel: Mmm, so I thought, in honour of that, I would do a food related to one of those things, and we already did Easter hot cross buns, I think, either last year or the year before, so I’m gonna do a traditional Ramadan food

Liz: Ooh

Hazel: Ramadan, of course, being the Islamic holy month of fasting, where you fast from dawn ‘til dusk, so you don’t eat or drink anything between those hours, but before dawn and after sunset there are the traditional meals of suhoor and iftar, leading up to the festival of Eid, which is another one that has a lot of cool foods that we can talk about, but the food I’m gonna talk about today is a food that is apparently very popular, and traditionally eaten in many Arabic countries during Ramadan, especially for the after sunset meal. It’s a kind of sweet food, although it does have savoury variants, and it is called qatayef. Apologies if I don’t pronounce this perfectly, and that’s spelled Q-A-T-A-Y-E-F. And that is basically a filled pancake

Liz: Ok, now I’m interested

Hazel: They look delicious. I am gonna send you a picture. This will also be up on the twitter when this episode comes out. There you go

Liz: Oh, those look yummy

Hazel: They look so good

Liz: Is that pistachios?

Hazel: It is pistachio, yep (laughs) Qatayef is a stuffed pancake. It can be sweet or savoury, some can have cheese inside and be deep-fried, or this specific version that I’ve just sent you, Liz, is called qatayef asafiri, which means size of a small bird, apparently, and they’re mini ones, that are a sweet version. They’re stuffed with flavoured cream, and they’ve got pistachios, apparently there’s a syrup as well and it’s flavoured with rose water and it…uh! Uh!

Liz: They sound gorgeous

Hazel: They sound so good. It’s a semolina pancake, by the way. It sounds amazing, and they look amazing, and I really want to try them now. Apparently these are really popular across many Arabic countries during Ramadan for a little after dinner treat, or you could have them savoury with the pre-dawn meal as well, and they’re just a little sweet thing you can have after dinner, and they are eaten at other times of the year, but they are popular enough that is quite associated with Ramadan. The sweet version, as well, the cheesy version, it looks like they’re normally fully closed, kind of like a pasty, and then deep-fried, whereas the unfried version is, they just close it on one side, and then you stuff the pancake, so it’s open

Liz: Yeah, it looks like a little cone, almost like you’d do a crepe

Hazel: Yeah, just little cone parcels. These…I had a little look into the history of these, as much as I can find, and they seem to go fairly far back in Arabic culture. Like with a lot of these things, it’s kind of unclear exactly where they came from. Apparently they used to be more of a savoury thing, but over the years there have been lots of different versions, and there are different versions in the different countries. The recipe that I’ve got, that I will link to, is an Egyptian one that’s got pistachios, but apparently you can have walnuts with it, or you can have it deep-fried, not deep-fried, different flavourings, you can have hazelnuts or almonds, you can have raisins in it, it can be baked as well. So many different kinds, and now I want to try them all. The first concrete mention of it, although it’s, there’s a rumour that it might go back all the way to the Fatimid Dynasty, but the first mention of it in history is from a cookbook called The Book of Dishes, that dates back to the Abbasid Caliphate, so that’s in the 10th century, which is an interesting book that we might need to check out for one of our book episodes

Liz: Definitely

Hazel: Yeah. Apparently the mediaeval version was, although, like I said, one of the traditional versions was cheese and nuts, apparently in the mediaeval cookbooks it was filled with crushed almond and sugar

Liz: Oh! Like a marzipan

Hazel: Yeah, kind of marzipan tasting, and sometimes it would be baked, or fried in walnut oil

Liz: Ok. I could definitely get into that

Hazel: Which actually will be familiar to some of the recipes in the mediaeval British cookbooks, ‘cause there were, in a lot of the more high status recipes from Britain at the time, there is, despite Hollywood stereotypes, there’s actually quite a lot of Middle Eastern influence on British cooking

Liz: That makes sense, ‘cause people…we were popping over to the Middle East fairly often for terrible reasons, and also for trade

Hazel: Yep, yep, combinations of those things. Not only for terrible reasons, it was also people traded, and went around and saw each other and were like “that thing is delicious, I’m gonna bring it back”, but also terrible reasons

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: But yeah, there is actually a lot of this flavour in traditional British cooking as well, but anyway, back to the qatayef, that’s the umbrella, and then there’s lots of different versions, and that’s it, really, it’s a pretty short one. I couldn’t find that much more on the history, but it is a recipe that seems to be really associated with Ramadan, and really popular, and I can see why it continues to be popular, because they both look and sound delicious

Liz: They really do

Hazel: So I’m gonna put up this recipe for qatayef asafiri, on the twitter, in case anyone wants to give it a go, and if you’re someone that has made it then please let us know, and if there’s anything special to your recipe

Liz: Thank you for listening. As I mentioned at the start, we do have a patreon, at bread and thread, if you want access to a discord where we chat about food and crafts and whatever we feel like talking about, as well as monthly patreon recipes

Hazel: We also have a twitter under bread and thread, where we will tweet pictures of things that we talk about on the show, teasers for upcoming episodes, and tweet about related things to our podcast

Liz: You can find those same things on tumblr at bread and thread

Hazel: We are also on youtube, bread and thread, where we have youtube versions of our episodes, so still just the audio, on the youtube, ‘cause some people prefer it that way

Liz: And we also have an email, if you want to send us your recipe, or if you want to suggest an episode. We have received a few suggestions, that we are definitely getting to, but people tend to suggest ones that require a lot of research, so you’ve gotta wait. You can email bread and thread podcast @ gmail.com. I think that’s everything

Hazel: We will see you next time

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