Snails

21st November 2021

(opening 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 love history, food history, domestic history, and also making stuff, historical or not. So, what have you been up to, before we get to the main topic?

Liz: I finished my Halloween cross-stitch

Hazel: Excellent

Liz: Unreasonably exciting

Hazel: Ok. Did you tell me about this, or have I forgotten?

Liz: I put it…it was in my last craft diary video

Hazel: Ok. I haven’t gotten around to that yet. So I will do that ASAP. Cool

Liz: So yeah, I think that’s the only thing I’ve actually completed. I’ve mostly just been working on stuff, because I do big projects

Hazel: Yaaay! I support that. I feel like everyone listening who crafts

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Can relate

Liz: I did finish the back of the Knives Out jumper, so I’m officially a third of the way through the Knives Out jumper

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: So much cabling! The final thing’s gonna be about 1.2 kilos, based on how much wool. It was a whole 400g ball just for the back of this jumper

Hazel: Oh, that is a lot of warmth

Liz: It’s a men’s large

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: But it’s also a lot of cabling. I’ve made jumpers this size before, with the same gauge, and they did not take a 400g ball for just the back

Hazel: Wow

Liz: It’s ridiculous, it’s gonna be the warmest jumper

Hazel: That’s a blanket

Liz: It is, it’s a wearable weighted blanket, basically

Hazel: That actually makes it sound amazing

Liz: See, now I’m wondering if there’s a way to incorporate some sort of weighting into a regular jumper. There probably is

Hazel: Probably, yeah

Liz: Like a thunder shirt for humans

Hazel: You can get that weighted cord, right? You could definitely sew that into a hem or something

Liz: Or even hold it double with the yarn for a bit

Hazel: Depends how thick your yarn is, I don’t know how thin they do that cord

Liz: I reckon you could do a weighted gansey

Hazel: That’s one to look up, I think

Liz: It is. What have you been up to?

Hazel: Not as much baking as I’d like, because of being busy and stuff. And having a social life. It sucks

Liz: You make it sound like you have nothing going on

Hazel: (laughs) I know. But I have started making some Christmas decorations and stuff

Liz: Ooh

Hazel: And things that I can send to people as presents, which is cool, but that means that I can’t talk about it on this podcast, because you’re getting one of them

Liz: What?!

Hazel: Yeah. So, apart from that, yeah, kind of not that much. I’m having a bit of a dry spell. I need to get my rosehips out of the freezer and do the rosehip syrup, but it’s just getting a clear day to do that, because I feel like I’m gonna need a while to sort out everything, ‘cause it involves a fine jelly bag and leaving things to drip and

Liz: Oh yeah

Hazel: Sterilising bottles, and all that jazz, so, yeah, it’s kind of a fallow time for that kind of stuff, I think, but I’m just…I’m kind of mad that I missed the blackberries

Liz: We’re just coming to end of blackberry season

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: ‘Cause obviously it’s a bit later in the north. ‘Cause there’s a couple of brambles that grow right next to the tram stop, so sometimes you just grab one, you know?

Hazel: I know

(both laugh)

Hazel: Free food is always good food

Liz: Yeah. I’m foraging like the ancestors

Hazel: (laughs) I love doing that. I go out foraging and berry picking and stuff, I’m just like “aw yes, so connected to my rural ancestors”, and then I go home to my central heating and my cosy home

Liz: Yeah, I’m sure your rural ancestors would have killed for central heating

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: So, what are we learning about this week?

Hazel: So, I picked one off our master list this week, I’m gonna talk about snail

Liz: Ooh. Effervescent

Hazel: Effervescent indeed. I feel like you need to put that rug up as the teaser image

Liz: I mean, it does now have most of the lettering. I need to adjust it on the frame, but it says “effervesce” at the moment

Hazel: That’s like a command. I can do that (laughs)

Liz: I’m not sure I want to witness that

Hazel: (laughs) Well, I’ll just leave you to imagine it. And instead, I’m gonna give you a little French children’s rhyme

Liz: Ok

Hazel: About snails, ‘cause I found this in the course of my research and it was adorable. I’m actually gonna try and do it in French as well, because it is quite short, and I feel like I can probably make an attempt. So the French goes “Petit escargot/Portait sur son dos/Sa maisonette/Aussitôt qu'il pleut/Il se sent heureux/Il est sa tête”, but you sing it, and I’ve forgotten the tune, but I will put a link to a video, because it’s adorable. Anyway, in French, this means “Little snail/carries on it’s back/its little house/as soon as it rains/he gets happy/he comes out of his shell”

Liz: That’s adorable

Hazel: It’s so cute!

(both laugh)

Hazel: Anyway, so that is my segue into talking about snail middens in the early palaeolithic period

Liz: Oh! Oh shell middens excite me, is the thing

Hazel: I know, right? I

Liz: (laughs) Archaeology time

Hazel: So much archaeological nerdery

Liz: (inaudible)

Hazel: Apologies to everyone who did not come to this podcast to listen to two grown people enthuse about snail middens

Liz: I mean, if you didn’t, what are you even here for?

Hazel: I mean I feel like our listener base is people that would want to hear that, that is true, so welcome, fellow snail nerds

Liz: Snerds

Hazel: Snerds! (laughs) Is that gonna become our annoying cutesy nickname for our listener base?

Liz: It can if we say it enough

Hazel: I think that way danger lies. So snails are, as it turns out, among other things, very high in protein, and so were really useful in the hunter-gatherer diet. I’m gonna talk about snails from the perspective of being eaten as food, as well as ornamentation, decoration, and as medicine a little bit as well. So, we have a deeper relationship with snails than one might realise. Snails, I think, are best known for the French dish or escargot

Liz: Mm-hmm

Hazel: Which I will get to later. But they have actually been eaten for thousands and thousands of years, because, as I say, they’re high in protein. If you’re a hunter-gatherer looking for stuff to eat that will keep you going, a snail is one of them. It’s kind of thought that they weren’t really eaten until the upper palaeolithic, apparently it’s to do with people were probably focusing on hunting bigger animals at that point, but at that point there seems to be a bit of an explosion in the variety of diet and stuff, and I actually found several articles that were talking about this, because of the presence of a lot of snail middens. So, if you’ve not come across one, a midden is like a big rubbish heap

Liz: It’s a historical landfill

Hazel: Yeah. And often you come across middens that are entirely one kind of thing, which is quite exciting, and probably shows there was a lot of eating of that thing, so we get snail middens, and they appear almost all over the world. I couldn’t find that much on the Americas, but certainly in Europe, in Africa, and a little bit in Asia, they’re being consumed, I think in the Pacific region/New Zealand as well. There’s only a few types of snail that are edible, so they tend to be the same kind of snail. One of these, and what, as far as I can gather is the earliest evidence of snail exploitation for food, is in Spain, and this is about 10,000 years previous to evidence for snail mass consumption in Morocco, France, Italy, and the Balkans, where there’s evidence for other eating of snails, and this is because of the presence of a lot of snail shells

Liz: I think, just ‘cause of what I looked at when I was doing undergrad, I know that there’s a lot of middens at Skara Brae, and Orkney in general. Are there snails up there or is it more warmer areas?

Hazel: It seems that the earliest ones that we can find are in the Mediterranean. So, there’s a couple in Spain, in Cantabria, and the oldest one in a place called Cova de la Barriada, where they found large, concentrated amounts of snail shells, along with other animal remains, in pits that were apparently used for cooking, and that’s dated to about 30,000 years Before Present. Which is 1950. Because that’s the present in archaeological terms. But still, a pretty long time ago, and that’s just about the earliest evidence we have, as far as I have been able to find, for large amounts of snail consumption, and that’s about 10,000 years before the evidence for snail consumption in other parts of Europe, in the Balkans and more northerly, and in Morocco as well

Liz: I guess it makes sense, but that’s…I dunno, whenever you see numbers like it’s just like “that was so long ago!”

Hazel: Oh yeah

Liz: It’s still a thing and it was so long ago!

Hazel: That was, yeah. That’s the upper palaeolithic

Liz: Paleo diet includes snails, confirmed

Hazel: Confirmed. We’re building the paleo diet one step at a time. But yeah, it absolutely did include snails, according to this. There’s also evidence of them, not sure about being eaten in sub-saharan Africa, around similar kind of times, but also being used as ornamentation, so making beads out of snail shells, which there is also evidence of in Britain and in western Europe, and being used as ornamentation. These are land snails, by the way, that I’m mostly talking about. Sea snails have been eaten as well, but I didn’t see any particular evidence of large sea snail consumption, so I’m gonna suggest maybe that was a regional thing? Because I know people do still eat sea snails, winkles are fairly popular in Britain, in coastal areas, tiny sea snails

Liz: They are delicious, as well

Hazel: They are, yeah. But yeah, it seems to be mostly certain kinds, the edible kinds of land snails, that are being consumed in prehistory, sometimes in quite large quantities, as evidenced by these snail middens, which is quite exciting

Liz: Hmm

Hazel: Apparently there was some debate over whether or not they were being used for food, but because so many have been found in with other animal remains, and with other things related to cooking, and some deposits of snail shells have been found appearing to be roasted, so I feel like that makes it kind of obvious

Liz: So we’re thinking that it’s kind of a kitchen waste midden

Hazel: Yeah. Interestingly, apparently they managed to determine these snail shells had been roasted using high-resolution microscopes to look at the minerals that were on the shells

Liz: Oh, that’s cool

Hazel: It’s so sciencey and cool. Is your little bioarchaeology heart happy?

Liz: It makes my BSc happy, yes

Hazel: (laughs) I am just a weak and wobbly BA. So yeah, we have pretty strong evidence that it was part of the hunter-gatherer and early agricultural diet in prehistory, and we know that snails as food remained fairly popular, because we still see that in ancient times. So there was a Hellenic colony in the Middle East where they found the remains of a single feast, this is dated to 150BC, and they found the remains of what appears to be a single feast, where they included snails, along with the other remains of the feast, and it’s also fairly well-documented in Roman literature. So, the Romans actually…sorry?

Liz: I have heard of the Romans eating them

Hazel: So the Romans

Liz: Salty milk to fatten them up

Hazel: Yeah, the Romans had snail farms. (takes a couple of attempts) Heliciculture is the word for the practice of snail farming

Liz: Probably the safest kind of farming to do

Hazel: Maybe so, yeah

Liz: Nothing’s gonna trample you

Hazel: Maybe if you’re Sean Bean it will happen

Liz: What?

Hazel: Oh, he gets trampled by a herd of cows in one of his many film deaths

Liz: Ok! I thought there was something where he gets killed by snails that I’d missed

Hazel: I would watch that movie

(both laugh)

Hazel: The one where Sean Bean fights the angry giant snail. Halloween blockbuster, just saying. But yeah, in the Roman Empire snails were pretty much in demand, as evidenced by the presence of snail farms. I’m gonna say it wrong again, probably, because I’ve forgotten, but Pline-ee the Elder

Liz: Pliny (pron. Plinny)

Hazel: Oh my god, I always pick the wrong one. I always feel like Pliny is the wrong one, I don’t know

Liz: It’s because there’s only one N. The rules of English mean it should be Pline-ee, but the rules of English are stupid, and inconsistent. And also he’s not English

Hazel: So Pliny the Elder talks about heliciculture being practised on the estate of a guy called Fluvius Hippinius in 50AD, this is in Italy, and apparently he fed his snails with wine and meat, which I assume would make them taste better, I don’t know, but I think that that shows that there was a pretty big demand in the Roman Empire

Liz: Mmm

Hazel: And then there have been mentions of snails throughout later history as well. A lot of the ones I’ve been able to find come from France, which I think would add to this idea of French cuisine being associated with snails, although they are definitely not the only modern food culture to have snails in it, which I will get to later as well, but apparently in France, in the Middle Ages, the snail trade was monopolised by the monasteries, which is kind of hilarious, I don’t know. I always think

Liz: It’s something to do

Hazel: I always think of monasteries as brewing beer or spirits, or wool farming or something, but the idea of lots of monks tending a snail farm

Liz: It’s kind of the dream

Hazel: I know! Become a monk, nobody bothers you, you just get to spend time alone and tend to some snails and live in a nice house. Yeah, so apparently snails were proclaimed a kind of fish, so that they could still be eaten during Lent

Liz: Oh yeah! I think it’s parts of the south-west wallfish is a slang for snails

Hazel: Really? That is fantastic. I love that that is still a thing. Wallfish

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: So apparently they’re being called escargot as early as the 14th century, which kind of surprised me. Escargot, it turns out, just means edible snail, as opposed to unedible snails, which I think have a different word in French, and there are some advice cooking them in the 14th century, which advises to collect them in the morning, wash them in salt and vinegar, and then cook them. In 1543, a small book was written by a guy called Étienne de Laigue called “Noteworthy Treatise Concerning the Properties of Turtles, Snails, Frogs, and Artichokes”. Now, one of these things is not like the others

(both laugh)

Liz: Ok? Interesting choice

Hazel: Apparently he wasn’t that keen on the eating of all of these animals

(crosstalk)

Liz: Including the animal the artichoke

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Is that why it’s in there? It’s just four things he didn’t like

Hazel: This is just a collection of all the edible things I don’t like

(both laugh)

Liz: I dunno, picky eaters

Hazel: So, yeah, he doesn’t seem to like snails being eaten as food. A quote is “I know snails are ugly, but not so hideous as turtles, nor so vile, and nothing like as poisonous. I also know that the ancients ate them, but I cannot accept people eating them daily, as other foods are more nourishing and of better substance”

Liz: I have two qualms with this

Hazel: Go on

Liz: Food is not fuel

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And I resent the implication. Poisonous turtles?

Hazel: Yeah, I don’t know anything about turtle toxicity, so I can’t comment on that

Liz: I mean, if it is a thing, it’s certainly not a widely known thing. I’m googling poisonous turtle right now. I have to know

Hazel: I would like to know as well. But he does note that they’re apparently beneficial for stomach illnesses, so there you go

Liz: There are no poisonous turtles and there are no known venomous turtles

Hazel: Get wrecked Étienne. I don’t know what turtles he was eating

Liz: Maybe he just got food poisoning from one once, and then doesn’t like them any more

Hazel: Yeah, just had a grudge against turtles, and artichokes

Liz: The artichokes are still boggling me

Hazel: But yeah, apparently snails are pretty good for curing stomach illness. I don’t know the reasoning behind that, I couldn’t find anything

Liz: I mean, half the time there isn’t any, let’s be honest

Hazel: But yeah, maybe someone ate a snail once and got better and was like “oh, it must have been the snail”

Liz: I like to imagine, when people say things like that, there’s just a physician in the corner shaking their head

Hazel: So, it seems like the snails got a little bit unfashionable for a while, don’t really hear about them…I didn’t find any mentions in any of the popular cookbooks from 18th/19th century, really, although it seems like they hang on as a rustic food

Liz: Mm-hmm

Hazel: As they have all over the world, really

Liz: Which is presumably why Mendip wallfish is a thing

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: I think that’s Somerset? I know it’s south-west, I think it’s Somerset

Hazel: Ok. Wait is that a place?

Liz: The Mendips?

Hazel: I thought Mendip Wallfish was a village or something

Liz: Oh, no

Hazel: It wouldn’t surprise me

Liz: Oh no, it’s just with saying about wallfish still being a regional slang term

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: Mendip wallfish is like, you go to Somerset, you eat some snails

Hazel: Ok, right. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, it seems like a lot places have regional snail cuisine, as it were

Liz: That is very cool

Hazel: In fact, there are actually records of families of peasants being poisoned by snails, and things like that

Liz: That’s less cool

Hazel: Yeah, I mean, apparently if prepared properly they’re safe to eat, but it can be about eating the right kind of snail because a) even the right kinds of snail, if they’re wild, can have nematodes and stuff inside

Liz: Gross

Hazel: Poisonous parasites and things, yeah. Interestingly, when I was looking at the articles to do with snail middens and stuff, I did also find one from the Journal of Nematology entitled “My Favourite Nematode”, which just, I love academics

Liz: Thinking about it, I do remember having to regularly give our dog preventative worming treatments because he loved to eat slugs and snails

Hazel: (disgusted noise) That sounds sensible. Yeah, so I would not recommend to anyone to just go pick snails out of the garden and start cooking them, because you could get nematodes inside ya, and you probably don’t want those, they can be fatal, or at least very uncomfortable. But, yeah, most snails consumed in the present day are farmed snails, and they’re prepared in a special way, so you know what’s in the snail, I guess, but wild snails are probably tricky. But it seems like, at least in the 19th century in Europe, the snails came back, as a fancy thing this time

Liz: Is that because French?

Hazel: Possibly so, I mean apparently there’s records of them being served to the Tsar of Russia when he visited Paris, as a special dish, but there’s quite a few Victorian, I suppose not Victorian, because it’s France, but there’s quite a few 19th century recipes and adverts and stuff, and I think this is when it gets really associated with France, as l’escargot

Liz: Interesting

Hazel: Because it seems like it didn’t come back in the same way in other countries in Europe, although they are still eaten in Portugal and Spain, and other places as well, but it seems like it came back in certain countries and not in others. But it’s fancy now

Liz: It is fancy. It’s one of those things that’s fancy but also a lot of people go “oh that’s kind of gross”, which I always find really interesting, like oysters and that

Hazel: Yeah. I’ve never been able to get the hang of oysters. Not that it’s an average thing that I’d consider buying, but they just look kind of slimy. Although, I have eaten snails

Liz: I’m the other way around

Hazel: Ok

Liz: I have had frogs’ legs though, so I feel like I’m halfway there

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: I just need to find somewhere I can get snails, so I can try them

Hazel: You’re halfway to being a stereotypical French person

Liz: (laughs) I do love garlic and Bastille Day

Hazel: (laughs) That’s not what I thought you were going to say!

Liz: Just the general concept, you know?

Hazel: So, I’m…I think one of the main reasons for snails being a fancy dish now, in Europe anyway, is because they have to use the farmed snails. By that point they’d worked out that eating wild snails is not great for you, and so the snails needed to be farmed and taken care of in a certain way, and that all costs money, so the snails, if you have them in a restaurant, they’re expensive now, so you have the get the organic snails. So, apparently in France today they’re still considered a special occasion thing, you can buy snails in cans with the shells as well, on the side, ‘cause it’s quite popular to cook them, and then put them back in the shell with a dressing or something. So yeah, they’re still quite popular, apparently, but kind of a special occasion thing, and they are still eaten…you can get them in the UK as well, probably not in a can, but in a restaurant. They’re pretty popular, I think, France is one of the biggest consumers of snails for food, but Portugal isn’t that far behind

Liz: (inaudible)

Hazel: Yeah, Portugal isn’t that far behind, and Spain as well. Apparently there are some quite well known Catelonian dishes that use snails cooked in their shells, and around the Mediterranean, I think, it remains a popular food, and elsewhere in the world as well. So I ate snails for the first time in Vietnam, and it was served with, they were served in the shell, with a spicy sauce on the side. It was really delicious, actually

Liz: Did you have those tiny little forks?

Hazel: No, I think you just used a pin thing

Liz: Ok, just a little spike?

Hazel: Are there snail forks?

Liz: I mean, do you not remember the list from the forks episode? There’s a fork for everything

Hazel: (laughs) But yeah, snails, kinda tasty, in my opinion. Oysters, maybe not

Liz: I stand by a smoked oyster

Hazel: Ok

Liz: They’re not as slimy

Hazel: Yeah, I think stuff like this is very much to your own taste kind of deal

Liz: Oh yeah, I would never judge anyone for not liking a food

Hazel: But by the way, snail caviar is now more expensive than fish caviar. People eat snails’ eggs

Liz: Huh

Hazel: Apparently they are very expensive and luxurious

Liz: But do they taste good?

Hazel: I don’t know

Liz: That’s always a question with these things: does it actually taste good

Hazel: Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t imagine, but maybe, I dunno. I can’t find anything mentioning them being eaten in the past. Who knows. Someone fancy, eat them and then write us an email

(both laugh)

Hazel: But yeah that is a…I was trying to make a pun about a potted history of snails, but make it about a shell, but that doesn’t really work, so that’s all my snail information

Liz: That’s snails in a nutshell

Hazel: Uh

Liz: No

Hazel: No. It’s the wrong shell!

Liz: There aren’t enough snail idioms

Hazel: There aren’t. There really aren’t. That is something that we should remedy. Later. I’m sure no-one wants to listen to two hours of us trying to come up with snail puns

Liz: Unless they sign up to the patreon and ask for that episode

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: £10 a month, we’ll make any episode you want. Hint hint

Hazel: (laughs) So, what are we talking about for Local Larder today?

Liz: I wanted to talk about fermented milk

Hazel: Oooh

Liz: Because I have seen people talking about it a lot as a superfood lately

Hazel: Oh really? Ok, I am clearly not in the news spaces enough. What is it about fermented milk that’s meant to be so good?

Liz: Supposedly it is very good for your gut microbiome

Hazel: Ok

Liz: So, the main kind is called kefir

Hazel: Oh, I’ve heard of that!

Liz: Which is milk fermented with kefir grains

Hazel: Ok, what is kefir? Is it kind of like cereal, or?

Liz: Yeah, it’s just a kind of cereal grain

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which grows especially around the northern Caucasus and the Balkans

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So kefir, which refers to the grains and also the actual drink, but the drink itself is kind of a yoghurty texture

Hazel: Ok. Yeah, when I worked in the supermarket we had it next to the yoghurt section

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: So I thought it was yoghurt, but apparently not

Liz: It does share a lot of microbes with things like Activia, a lot of the lactobacillus

Hazel: Ok

Liz: There’s a lot of overlap, and the general help-your-bowels kind of yoghurt drinks

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: But like I said, it comes from the Caucasus. (loses their words) You made it in, traditionally, goat-skin bags

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which you hang by the door, and anyone going past would hit it, or you could go out and hit it yourself, to keep the milk and the grains mixed together

Hazel: That sounds kind of fun

Liz: I feel like it’d be good boxing practice, honestly

Hazel: Yeah “I’ll just go and beat up the milk”

Liz: ‘Cause I mean, it’s a leather bag, it’s gonna hold, right?

Hazel: I guess you’d hope so

Liz: It’s like how you get water-weighted punching bags, I feel like it’d be a similar vibe, honestly

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So, because of this, it was known as a wine-skin, in areas like Western Russia and the Afyonkarahisar province in Turkey, it’s basically known by different local words for wine-skin, and the idea was spread around Russia, Eastern Europe, right the way to Japan, actually. Mostly, interestingly, from the late 19th century is when it took off as a Thing, beyond a local thing

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: But right back in the 18th century you had people talking about it being this great health drink

Hazel: Ok, that’s interesting, so it’s not just a new superfood

Liz: Oh no, and there was whole things of, kind of like with sourdough starters being passed down, you’d have people passing down their kefir culture

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: Down through the family, and in the northern Caucasus it’s still a taboo against sharing your family’s culture, because it makes ancestral spirits angry

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: And there’s these elaborate “oh, I’m totally stealing your grains” kind of thing to try and trick these spirits if you want to share it with someone

Hazel: (laughs) Fantastic. I love how people always find a way ‘round that kind of stuff

Liz: It’s great. But there’s a full-on, I’m not going to get into it now, but if you look up Irina Timofeevna Sakharova, there’s a whole heist around getting these kefir grains for a medical company at the start of the 20th century, so they can start producing kefir at a more industrial level for sale, and she was actually praised by the minister of food in the Soviet Union in the 1970s for bringing kefir to Russia

Hazel: Ok. Was it smuggled out of the country?

Liz: Basically. There’s marriage plots involved

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: Like I said, I’m not going to get into it, because I feel like that’s a whole thing on its own

Hazel: Yeah, that’s a whole story

Liz: Look up Irena Sakharova

Hazel: Ok!

Liz: Yeah, so it’s also seen as a better way to ingest dairy, which obviously has some good things for you, because it’s lower in lactose

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Because it gets broken down to lactic acid by the bacteria during fermentation, which apparently makes it taste buttery

Hazel: Ooh. Delicious science

Liz: Mm. It also lasts longer than regular milk, because it has a slight alcohol content

Hazel: Oh wow. Can you…

Liz: Traditionally about 1-2%, so it would take a lot to get drunk

Hazel: Ok

Liz: You’d have other problems at that point

Hazel: So you can’t really get drunk off yoghurt

Liz: No. Plus, like I say, that’d be a lot of dairy to have in a sitting, a lot of tart tasting, very very slightly fizzy, dare I say effervescent, plain yoghurt

Hazel: That is true, actually. I feel like being drunk would probably be the least of your problems at that point

Liz: But there have been some studies that show that it can reduce rheumatoid arthritis, it has slight anti-inflammatory properties

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: You can also make it with water, but it doesn’t have as many beneficial properties, apparently, which, I don’t really know enough about the science to go further on that, but I think it’s interesting

Hazel: Hmm

Liz: But there’s also a fermented milk drink which pops up in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and was apparently drunk by Genghis Khan, called kumis

Hazel: I think I’ve heard of this

Liz: So this is fermented mare’s milk

Hazel: Wow

Liz: Which, again, you would keep in bags - in this case hung off your saddle - and people would hit it as they went past, to help agitate it for fermenting

Hazel: Wow

Liz: Which, I love that that’s a thing. “Punch my milk bag, it’ll help me out”

Hazel: You punch my milk, I’ll punch yous

(both laugh)

Liz: But it was really good travelling food, because obviously you could ride a lactating horse, and then milk it, and ferment that, and just keep that cycle going

Hazel: Yeah, that sounds like a really handy method of production

Liz: And specifically you would want to ferment it before you drank it, because apparently mare’s milk can be a laxative, because it has so much lactose in it that, even if you have lactase persistence, it can cause you some downstairs problems

Hazel: Ok. Noted

Liz: But once it’s fermented you can give it to babies. And people do give it to babies

Hazel: Wow

Liz: ‘Cause, again, it’s very low alcohol

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Kind of a similar level to kefir. So yeah. I just find it interesting that…because, I think we’re odd about milk that isn’t from a cow in, especially, Western Europe, I think. I know people who will not eat sheeps’ milk cheese, only cows’ milk, which

Hazel: Ok

Liz: You’re already using milk from another animal, why is that where you draw the line, you know?

Hazel: Yeah, I suppose that is a bit strange. I can see people not realising that you can drink milk from other animals, but cheese? I guess goats’ milk is one that is a bit more popular

Liz: But it’s still a thing that a lot of people will look at and go “oh, I dunno”

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: But yeah, apparently in Eastern Europe you’ve got horses’ milk and fermented milk

Hazel: Wow

Liz: And you’re just like “yeah, I’ll drink that, I’ll give that to my baby, I’ll drink that on the road”

Hazel: Cool

Liz: I just think that’s really interesting. And, yeah, at least the kefir, I can’t see anything about the health benefits of kumis beyond “it makes the mare’s milk not a laxative any more”, but yeah, apparently kefir could be a similar thing to, as like I say, things like Activia and Yoplait, not Yoplait, Activia and Yakult as a general bowel health drink, which I find quite interesting

Hazel: Ok. Yeah, yeah that’s cool. Huh. I kind of want to go try it now

Liz: Yeah, I’m tempted to get some next time I see it

Hazel: Yeah. I mean, I guess a good thing about these kind of things becoming popular is that, I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t have been able to get that in the UK a couple of decades ago

Liz: Not until relatively recently, no

Hazel: But yeah, like I said, I’ve seen it in supermarkets recently. Yeah, I’m gonna pop down and get some, give it a try

Liz: So, thank you for listening. Like I said, we do have a patreon, Bread and Thread. As well as that £10 amount, at £1 you get access to the Bread and Thread discord, where we talk about things we’ve been cooking and making, and for £5 you get monthly recipes. October’s recipe was garlic soup

Hazel: Mmmm

Liz: Yeah. It’s a soup that makes me very happy

Hazel: Oh yes. You can also email us at breadandthreadpocast @ gmail.com, if you’ve got any comments or ideas on things that we should do an episode on next, or anything like that, or if you want to tell us how snail caviar tastes

Liz: You can also contact us on twitter or tumblr, both as Bread and Thread, and we’re on Youtube as Bread and Thread

Hazel: And I think that is all of our things

Liz: That is all of our things

Hazel: Cool. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next time