Soap

(4th July 2021)

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 and historical crafts and making and baking things, so we usually start by talking about that. What have you been up to?

Hazel

I made soap!

Liz

I’m very excited

Hazel

I have seen pictures of the soap and it is excellent

Liz

Yeah, if you’ve seen our youtube channel, which is Bread and Thread, I’m gradually uploading the old episodes, you will have seen I made a video about making soap from things like lard and tallow like in the olden days, and then I came up with my own oil blend for my particular brand of problem skin, and made some fun colourful scented soap. It’s arcade carpet themed, so it’s got, it’s a dark colour with neons, and the first batch, that I messed up, is bubble gum scented, and then the good batch is tutti frutti and it’s got glitters on it and it lathers up really nice and it’s gonna be really good for my skin ‘cause it’s got all vitamin e stuff and intense moisturising and lanolin

Hazel

That’s amazing

Liz

And my skin doesn’t like to be skin, so that’s hopefully going to help

Hazel

I feel like anything would help if it was colours and glittery and smelled like an arcade carpet

Liz

I mean, I don’t want it to smell like an actual arcade carpet, that’s probably disgusting

Hazel

Well...yeah, true. I hope it’s not as sticky as a real arcade carpet

Liz

It smells like the nostalgic memory of an arcade

Hazel

Well I’m from Eastbourne, and our arcade notoriously burned down a few years ago

Liz

Ah, see we have Europe’s largest free to play arcade, we had our engagement party there, it was great

Hazel

Oh my gosh. So, many soaps

Liz

Yeah there’s currently like 30 soaps because of the historical soaps, and then the failed batch, and then the successful batch all curing, ‘cause it takes a month to properly harden up

Hazel

Oh right, I didn’t know that

Liz

So we just have one of those little folding tables in the corner of the living room covered in soap

Hazel

You have a soap corner

Liz

We do, and the living room just smells of bubblegum and tutti frutti, it’s great

Hazel

Don’t get on your soap-box at me. Ha ha ha ha

Liz

When it’s cured I will send you some of the arcade carpet soap, I promise

Hazel

Thank you, I would love that

Liz

So what have you been up to?

Hazel

I have actually started and completed a project within a week, which is a record for me, I know it doesn’t happen often. I made a woven belt for a family friend who is a shepherd, and recently gave me some more fleeces from his sheep, so on Monday

Liz

Is this the postman?

Hazel

This is the postman. It is the postman who is wonderful and

Liz

We’re building up the lore

Hazel

I know. The returning characters. Maybe I’ll even get him on this podcast one day ‘cause he has

Liz

That would be amazing

Hazel

I know. He’s got some great stories. We went to visit him, me and my friend who is a weaving artist. In fact, now that I’ve mentioned her I’m probably going to have to link to her, her name is Ismini Samanidou, and I’ll link her website

Liz

Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes

Hazel

Yes. Anyway, we went to visit him at his farm, where he keeps the sheep. So, his day job is being a postman and then his vocation is being a shepherd. He told us that that’s all he ever wanted to be, he was born on the farm next door, and he just really is into shepherding. And he’s been doing it for quite a long time, he’s also been working in the village post office for quite a while, several decades, it’s really lovely, and, yeah, so he has around 300 sheep, I think, and he seems to know them all. This one is the daughter of that one etc, and he’s got some amazing stories about the local shepherds from back in the day, and apparently there was this one guy who still...I mean, it’s the kind of life that makes you strong, and apparently there was this one guy that still into his eighties he was still shearing sheep and really strong and he would come into the pub and just clap you on the shoulder really hard and you’d just have to be like “oh hi, how you doing”. This really hench old man. Yeah, and he showed us the process of shearing some sheep, and he was amazing he was...it was amazing, in under three minutes, got it all off in one piece and not a single scratch on the sheep, you know, just running off into the field, perfectly happy, so yeah, it was really really cool to see that and learn more about it, and he was kind enough to give us some fleeces.

So I now have a pure romney, Kent romney fleece, which is really versatile. It’s soft enough that you can use it for garments. Probably not right next to skin, but it’s great for jumpers and stuff like that, but it’s still strong enough that it wears quite well and, you know, it’s good for outerwear, and I have a Suffolk-romney cross in a dark fleece, so I’ll be doing some dying, and I think some colourwork with that as well hopefully, once I get everything processed and skirted and combed and spun which, you know, who knows how long that will take, but they’re really great quality, and I’m really excited to get started on that.

Yeah, so I made him a belt from the fleece that he gave me last year and I, it was an inkle woven belt, so using my inkle loom, I’ll put a picture of this up, so...which is a loom that you use to weave small bands, and I tried a baltic-weave pattern. So apparently these come from patterns that were used in the Baltic area of Europe, and lots of examples of these have been found, they’re used on folk costumes a lot, and it’s a kind of weave where the threads that make up the pattern are thicker than the other threads so it kind of stands out a bit, and it was really fun, so, yeah, I think he liked it, and it was great, and I feel very good about that. Very wholesome. So yeah, that is what I was doing

Liz

That is incredibly cool. You know how I become very very interested in things?

Hazel

Yeah

Liz

What with my neurotype and everything

Hazel

It’s a thing

Liz

So this episode’s on soap. I made soap. I’m gonna talk about soap. Soap soap soap

Hazel

I mean, it’s a good thing that we have a podcast where people are in fact interested in listening to us talk about very specific historical obsessions

Liz

I sure hope so, otherwise there’s about 100 people out there who should probably talk to someone

Hazel

So is this gonna be about all of soap ever?

Liz

That would sure be something. I’m mostly gonna talk about Europe, just because...well partly ‘cause I need to have a cut-off somewhere, but there’s gonna be trips to other places

Hazel

Ok. I’m excited to get soaped

Liz

Yeah, I feel like a lot of our histories tend to be very Eurocentric, but also that’s what we have stuff about the most in English, and also we live in Europe

Hazel

Yeah, that is what is easiest for us to research just in terms of language limitations, really

Liz

Yeah

Hazel

Hopefully as the podcast grows we will be able to get some cool guests on to talk about other places

Liz

That would be very cool. So, I am actually starting us off in Mesopotamia, because we have a soap recipe on a Babylonian clay tablet

Hazel

Oh my goodness

Liz

From over 4000 years ago

Hazel

This is why I love history so much, 4000 year old soap

Liz

This is why we studied archaeology

Hazel

So much cool stuff

Liz

So soap, to make soap basically you need fat and you need an alkali, normally something like lye or potash. This recipe used cassia oil, which I feel like would be quite pleasant compared to some of the soaps that I’m going to talk about, especially once we get up to the industrial era quite frankly

Hazel

Compared to tallow that sounds quite nice

Liz

There’s also the Ebers Papyrus from about 1550 BC in Egypt, which talks about creating a soap made from a mix of animal and vegetable fat that was used both for bathing and for cleaning wool for weaving

Hazel

Ok

Liz

Very multipurpose soap in Egypt

Hazel

Are you going to be making any of these soaps? ‘Cause you can’t tell me 4000 year old ancient soap recipe and then not make it

Liz

I don’t know if I can get hold of cassia oil. I’m definitely looking

Hazel

Ok

Liz

I am gonna be making Sunlight Soap, but I will talk about that later because that’s 19th century. We also have a recipe from the reign of the last Babylonian king, which is quite cool, talks about using cypress oil and sesame oil to make soap “for washing the stones for the servant girls”

Hazel

Stones?

Liz

Not entirely sure what these stones are, but...just because I don’t have access to the article

Hazel

Apparently they’re gonna smell quite nice

Liz

Yeah that’s...yeah, ‘cause cypress is gonna be a very green smell and then sesame oil’s quite nutty, so I imagine that’s gonna be a delicious smelling soap

Hazel

Yeah

Liz

And, yeah, in Palestine we have lard and suet being used

Hazel

Ok, that one a little bit more on the animal fat side

Liz

Yeah, which is interesting ‘cause apparently it tends to make a harder soap if you use a fat that’s a solid at room temperature, so the Palestinian soaps would have been harder than, say, the Babylonian

Hazel

Ok, that makes sense, ‘cause you use oil to soften up various creams and balms, right?

Liz

Mm. Interestingly, there’s a theory that the first soaps were probably animal fat, made by accident from just fat dripping from something being cooked above a fire into the ashes

Hazel

Oh I see

Liz

Which, I can definitely see a human finding a weird substance in the remains of a cooking fire and just going “I’m gonna play with this”

Hazel

“Wonder what it does in water”

Liz

‘Cause humans are just like that

Hazel

Yeah

Liz

But yeah, you have in the Levant and other Mediterrainean areas you have much more use of olive oil

Hazel

Ok

Liz

Which, you might know if you’re interested or just covered the Romans in school, the Romans and the ancient Greeks, rather than using soap on their bodies, they did have soap, but it was for laundry

Hazel

Ok

Liz

But would use just olive oil on their skin and then scrape it off and it’d take all the grossness with it

Hazel

Yeah, bringing back memories of learning about this. I think I’ve seen some of the curved scrapers

Liz

Yeah the strigil? Or (says strijil)? Don’t know how to pronounce Latin. Which sort of looks like a sickle, but that you just use on your body to scrape the mix of olive oil and dirt and sweat and grossness off your body

Hazel

If it works

Liz

Yeah. But Pliny and Galen both talk about using soap made from animal fat and ashes or lye extracted from ashes for laundry soap. Apparently, according to Galen, the best soap came from the Germanic tribes

Hazel

Ok, what was their soap?

Liz

That was also an animal fat soap, I guess maybe they purified it more? He doesn’t say why, just their soap was the best, and then the Gaulish soap was the second best

Hazel

Maybe it’s the whole being a foreign import thing, right? Like the prestige of French wine

Liz

Possibly, but the Romans were kind of the reverse of that in a lot of ways like “our stuff is obviously the best”

Hazel

That is true

Liz

But it’s like if you’re gonna buy soap from somewhere, because the olive oil isn’t good enough for you, you should get the Germanic soap

Hazel

Well, I mean they do talk a lot about “oh Rome is the best, our stuff is the best” but they were still importing a lot of foreign goods so…

Liz

Yeah. Interestingly Galen talked about prescribing soap for getting the impurities out of your clothes and off your body, so kind of making that connection between hygiene and health, which does make sense for this period, the ancient Greeks did have a health goddess literally called Hygeia, which I think is where we get the word hygiene from. Interestingly she had a sister called Panacea. And then, you know, the classic thing in Europe happens where the Roman Empire collapses and everyone goes back to what they were doing before, which in this case probably wasn’t actually that different, it’s just, you get the animal fats left over from various processes, you extract the lye from the ashes, you mix it together, you make soap. Meanwhile the Islamic Golden Age was happening and they were like “hey, what if we made olive oil soap and that’ll be nice?”, to the point that once what...I don’t want to say civilisation because it’s a very loaded term, but you know what I mean if I say that, starts coming back in Europe, we get people like Charlamagne using oil-based soaps, and you very quickly get by the 9th century you have this separation of tallow soap that the women of the house make is the cheap soap for the poor people, and the posh people are importing their olive oil soap from the Middle East, and then later on getting soap makers who make olive oil soap, and it becomes a status thing of “this is my soft, olive soap rather than the hard, smelly tallow soap”

Hazel

Oh, ok. I feel like that’s something that probably continued, the soft soap being the fancy one

Liz

Yeah, I mean in the 15th century you’ve got almost an industrialised production of olive oil soap in places like Marseilles, Venice, Antwerp, and Castille

Hazel

Ok

Liz

To the point where “Castille soap” became the phrase for fancy olive oil soap, and is still actually a phrase now that just means soft, nice, white soap

Hazel

Ok, yeah, I’ve heard of Castille soap, especially in Victorian sources

Liz

Yeah, that’s basically “the good stuff”, and it’s still being used interchangeably with detergent, ‘cause we don’t have specialised laundry soap at this point, you basically grate your bar of soap into the water and you do laundry with it. Sorry, just checking my notes. And in this period as well you have a lot of people not bathing as we would describe it, you just wipe yourself down ‘cause of concerns about getting diseases from water, so instead you have your underclothing that you change every day, and you wash that with soap, but your actual body you just scrub with water. Yeah, so Castille soap was the nice, white, bubbly, clean soap, whereas everyone else is making do with what they make at home, or what they could get cheaper from places that made it with lard or tallow. This is where I would talk about the soap tax in about 1715, but I’m genuinely struggling to find sources on it that don’t basically just go “and then everyone was filthy”. So yeah, the soap tax was basically whichever George it was at the time and his government trying to get as much money as they could, because the Georgians were basically always at war, and also spent a lot of money

Hazel

Ok

Liz

So there were huge levees on soap makers, they were only legally allowed to make huge batches, which meant that a lot of companies basically couldn’t keep going, and you basically couldn’t make smaller batches to just sell locally

Hazel

Ok…

Liz

To the point that the soap pans would be locked up so that people wouldn’t make extra, illegal soap

Hazel

Oh my goodness!

Liz

But, again, this is a time when people would not have been filthy because of this, they would have, again, been washing...have undergarments that are what we would consider covering up everything, and you’d wash those every day. People in the past were not as filthy as you think and I need everyone listening to understand this

Hazel

Yeah, people have always had some way of keeping themselves clean, right?

Liz

Yeah, they didn’t have deodorant and stuff like that, but also everyone smelled like that? People just had a normal level of “it’s been a hard day where I’ve been sweating” smell, they didn’t stink

Hazel

Yeah, sweating isn’t unhygienic

Liz

Sweating’s normal!

Hazel

It’s just that we had different tolerances for smelling that I guess

Liz

Exactly! People’s tolerance was higher because deodorant and making you feel ashamed of normal bodily functions didn’t exist yet. But they washed their clothes every day! They changed their clothes every day! And that was what kept them clean! And this is turning into a rant!

Hazel

It’s ok. People need to know

Liz

People listening to this understand that. You guys know

Hazel

If you’re listening to this podcast you get it

Liz

Yeah, you get it

Hazel

So, soap!

Liz

Yes! So, eventually that gets repealed and small-scale soap production resumes, and there’s all sorts of companies popping up making soap, normally from a mixture of potash and tallow or lard, and then the Lever brothers come along. You’ve probably heard of Unilever, which is the company that seems to make every cosmetic product

Hazel

Definitely heard of that, yep

Liz

So in the 1880s they establish a small soap-works in Warrington, which is in the Lancashire-Cheshire border. That soap factory incidentally was still open making laundry soap until last year

Hazel

Oh wow

Liz

Which is quite cool

Hazel

Yeah

Liz

So they start making soap from things like pine kernel oil, and later palm oil, rather than tallow, which makes a softer, very lathery soap that they called “honey soap” and then “sunlight soap”, which led to them making a lot of many, because this was cheap nice soap, and they end up setting up further factories and building a workers’ town called Port Sunlight, which is in Merseyside, and we will do a separate episode on places like Port Sunlight and Bournville ‘cause they’re fascinating

Hazel

Oh yeah, of course

Liz

Early company towns but set up for, depending on your perspective, either altruistic or paternalistic reasons

Hazel

Sort of quote-unquote “philanthic company towns”, yeah

Liz

Yeah, and Port Sunlight especially was very “this is a model village where we think about our workers’ welfare, don’t look at our workers elsewhere in the British Empire where was have literal slavery right up until 1945, we’ve got great working conditions in Merseyside and it’s great and we’re definitely not pushing for expansion of the British Empire throughout the late 19th century so we can have access to cheap palm oil”

Hazel

Ok. There’s some stuff hiding under the carpet there

Liz

Yeah! So yeah, eventually they merge with a Dutch margarine company to form Unilever

Hazel

Ok! That is not how I expected Unilever to have been founded (laughs)

Liz

Yep! But yeah, the Lever brothers’ soap company is widely considered the first industrial-scale company

Hazel

Ok

Liz

On an international level

Hazel

Wow

Liz

I’m gonna read you this list of soap companies that they acquired. A. F. Pears - Pears soap still a thing - John Knight of London, Gossages, Watson’s, Hazelhurst and Sons, and Hudson’s. They founded a town called Leverville in the Congo because of the amount of business that they were doing there, they had their own palm oil plantation

Hazel

Wow

Liz

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on there. Some of their soap names though, there’s Sunlight Soap, there’s also Lifebuoy, Lux, and Vim

Hazel

I like Vim

Liz

Vim is a household cleaning product, and I just...I love the name

Hazel

It’s very 1950s comic isn’t it, like “put some vim in your soap”

Liz

It really is. And yeah, about a decade after the founding of Lever Brothers you have Johnson inventing Palmolive, as a liquid soap

Hazel

Ok

Liz

Which is a big deal for domestic cleaning, and then obviously eventually we also get liquid hand soap, which I’m sure everyone is intimately familiar with over the past couple of years

Hazel

Yeah, this episode is also kind of topical still

Liz

This episode brought to you by covid. And then now there seems...there’s a movement towards smaller producers again, which I think there is for a lot of stuff just as we start to look more at the impact of capitalism and big businesses, and one thing that seems to be becoming popular in some circles, actually, is African black soap

Hazel

Ooh, what is that?

Liz

Which is...there’s various ones, which are very very old, I’m not sure how old because we don’t have written sources for a lot of these, ‘cause it’s people like the Yoruba people in Nigeria, Ghana tribes making soap from things like the camwood tree. There’s also the Igbo people making a soap whose name translates to “soap you can scoop” because it’s very soft

Hazel

I like that

Liz

But African black soap has been found to have actually antimicrobial properties, more so that regular soap, including against potentially things like MRSA

Hazel

Wow. That sounds handy to have in a hospital

Liz

Yeah. And frankly African black soap is also really pretty. There’s one called dudu-osun which honestly just looks like it’s made of wood. It’s dark and streaked and really pretty

Hazel

Awesome

Liz

That tends to be made with things like coconut oil and shea butter, and the ash portion which provides the alkali is things like cocoa pods and shea tree bark and plantain skins. It’s very much a what-you-can-get soap which sounds exotic because of what we’re used to as ingredients, but it’s also apparently a very good soap

Hazel

It does sound very nice

Liz

Yeah. I would love to try some at some point

Hazel

Yeah definitely, I’ve got to look this up

Liz

But yeah, hopefully I will make some Sunlight Soap in the next couple of months. That’s a very quick run through the history of soap. We’ll probably do a separate one for detergents and some point, and definitely one for company towns

Hazel

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Awesome, that is a lot I did not know about soap. I think soap is one of those things that, like you said about there being a trend towards smaller producers now, and artisan soap is a thing, I feel like it’s one of those things that it’s easier for people to form a very small business around, because you don’t need a huge amount of space to do it, you can do it out of your house

Liz

Yeah. Of course you do then get places like Lush, which is very much a commodification of that concept

Hazel

Yeah

Liz

Because this is late-stage capitalism and everything can and will be commodified

Hazel

Yeah, definitely

Liz

I feel like we get political a lot on this podcast

Hazel

I think we’re quite open about that though. I mean, history is very political. You can’t really have a completely unbiased, unpolitical history media. It’s all about...whichever way you analyse it, it’s gonna be informed by what you want to present

Liz

History is interpretation

Hazel

Yeah. our interpretation just happens to be very angry about capitalism

Liz

And colonialism. But yeah, the Lever brothers are sure an adventure

Hazel

Mmm, yeah. I had not heard about that stuff before. Admittedly I don’t know a lot about soap, I just vaguely knew about Port Sunlight

Liz

Well yeah, generally I think Unilever likes to talk about the Port Sunlight part and less about the 20th century slavery part

Hazel

Yeah...I mean, I can see why, but also that’s kind of an important thing

Liz

Yeah

Hazel

That should be known about. Now you know

Liz

If you want to help me buy oils to make various historical soaps, we do have a patreon, patreon.com/breadandthread, where you can get access to a discord server and recipes, and if you donate at the higher level, which I think is called cake, I think we went bread - brioche - cake as our level names

Hazel

We did

Liz

We’ll make an episode on anything you want

Hazel

Anything

Liz

Anything

Hazel

More soap

Liz

More soap! Talk more about soap!

Hazel

We also have a twitter, @breadandthread, where we post about upcoming episodes, teasers for them, various things from the show notes, and we just generally try to retweet food and food history related things

Liz

We are also on tumblr and youtube now, as well, as breadandthread

Hazel

We have a social media sweep now

Liz

We’re in all the places

Hazel

We are everywhere you look, you can’t get away from us

Liz

So, what is this week’s local larder? You wouldn’t tell me ‘cause you wanted me to live-react to what it is

Hazel

Ok, so, to start out, and we’ll get to the part, the good part later

Liz

Ok…

Hazel

So on a few of the local larders that we’ve done something has turned up about a food museum, a lot of these regional feeds have a random specific museum dedicated to them, usually really small, but sometimes bigger, and I thought that was quite interesting, that people so loved this food that they went and made a museum out of it. And a lot of these are just pop-up things, or things that people have collected all this stuff for ages and then turned it into a display, really community-based museums, which is really cool, and so I thought there must be more of those around, so I went looking for some, and sure enough there are quite a lot of very specific food museums around the world, some really big, some tiny. So, we’ve talked about the Choco Frito Museum in Setubal, Portugal, we’ve talked about the Spätzle Museum in Germany, I think there’s been a couple more, and so I went looking for some more, and the world does not disappoint. My first thought was the Kimchi Museum in Seoul, South Korea, but I feel like kimchi is something that deserves a whole episode because there is a lot to dive into there. So, this museum...this local larder isn’t necessarily a regional food, but it’s a food museum, a regional food museum. It is in San Bernardino, California, on Route 66, USA

Liz

Mmm

Hazel

And it is a McDonald's memorabilia museum

Liz

Ok!

Hazel

Yep! It is run by a third-generation Japanese-American called Albert Okura, and he already owned a fast-food chain that he founded in 1984, but he was also kind of a fan of, he was just very into fast-food and a fan of various fast-food restaurants and the history of them, and specifically he was quite into the history of McDonald's, and I think it’s a little known fact that the original McDonald's fast food restaurant, that opened in 1940, is now not there anymore, and this…

Liz

That seems like a place a lot of people would want to go

Hazel

It is! And, in fact, they do, because this museum is on the site of the original McDonald's restaurant

Liz

Oh that’s wonderful

Hazel

Yeah, so this guy...it just fell out of history. So, the original restaurant, run by the McDonald brothers, and in fact one of the reasons that it doesn’t exist any more and hasn’t for a long time is that after the restaurant was bought by Ray Kroc and franchised and turned into the megacorporation that we know today, they were forced to give up the name of the original McDonald's, as it was now a trademark, so they had to change the name of their restaurant, and then McDonald's opened a McDonald's opposite, down the street, so there you go

Liz

Wait, so they basically got Amazon’d by their own company?

Hazel

Yeah, kind of. So Albert Okura decided this was kind of sad and ended up moving the office of his fast-food chain there, which is called Juan Pollo, by the way, apparently it’s a Mexican-themed chicken restaurant. Anyway, I don’t know, maybe that’s really popular in America, I don’t know, but I’d never heard of it before I looked into this. So, he has also collected loads and loads of memorabilia of the original McDonald's the original company

Liz

Pre-franchise stuff?

Hazel

Yeah, pre-franchise. I think they had, they did have several restaurants, but this was before national franchise, and they’ve got loads and loads of memorabilia, and it just turned into this unofficial museum, it’s one of the Route 66 museums that you can stop at, and it’s free to go around

Liz

That’s unusual over there

Hazel

Yeah, definitely. And one of the reasons, in fact, that it is free to go around is that this entire thing...unlicensed

Liz

Illegal McDonald's museum?

Hazel

Not affiliated with the McDonald's corporation in any way, shape, or form!

Liz

Illegal McDonald's museum!

Hazel

No, it’s not illegal! He’s very careful to keep it within the letter of the law, and there is nothing McDonald's can do about it

Liz

Barely legal McDonald's museum!

Hazel

It is a barely legal McDonald's museum. Apparently he was able to do this because he doesn’t claim any affiliation with the McDonald's corporation, it’s entirely just a collection of memorabilia that happens to be on the site of the original McDonald's restaurant

(they both laugh)

Hazel

Yeah, he doesn’t even advertise it, the link to the website is just his fast-food business, but it is on TripAdvisor

Liz

That’s amazing

Hazel

It is fantastic, and I kind of want to go here. Apparently McDonald's are not too please about this, but yeah, he’s so within the law that there’s very little they can do about it

Liz

That’s going on the list of places to go if this podcast ever gets big. We’re going to the barely legal McDonald's museum

Hazel

It’s so adorable though, because he’s just really into this stuff, and not only has he collected a lot of memorabilia, people have donated stuff that they have. It’s just kind of community-built unofficial McDonald's museum

Liz

That’s so wonderful

Hazel

And they have all sorts of stuff, they’ve got tiles from one of the original restaurants, they’ve got utensils that were used at them, there’s decorations from them, there’s just everything you can think of. Yeah. It looks...I mean, some of this going to from 1940. All of this memorabilia, statues, mascots, you name it. Cool

Liz

That’s very cool, but the coolest thing about it is just the phrase “barely legal McDonald's museum”

Hazel

It absolutely is, and I thought that I would perhaps read out some snippets from the TripAdvisor reviews

Liz

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

Hazel

So here we go

Liz

I’m having a great time

Hazel

“Holy cow, I had no idea how much McDonald's stuff was out there! I love seeing the plates and cups we used to collect and all the old playground equipment we used to play on at our old indoor play place in Ohio” “Not affiliated with McDonald’s, but a fantastic collection of Mickey D’s kitsch and memorabilia, including a selection of McD’s toys and giveaways from various countries. The outside of the museum is great too”

Liz

I love that reviewer number 2 takes the time to mention that they’re not affiliated

Hazel

I liked that. “Whether you want to see examples of failed food items, early happy meals, get the true and complete history of McDonald’s or, like me, all of the above, it is well worth getting off the I-15 for half an hour”

Liz

People are having so much fun!

Hazel

I know, people are just loving this, it’s fantastic. This is one of my favourites. “This is the original McDonald’s site and museum. It had all the items of McDonald from the beginning, and it continues with new ones as well. There were all kinds on the walls with all kinds of items that was used in the past. There was a table to eat. However, they don’t cook here. It is only a museum. They have a grill, lots of pictures, and item for kids. It had a Wurlitzer” don’t know what that is “small item for kids. Remember the happy meal? Coca cola! Quite a lot here. It is all in this original McDonald’s site museum and McDonald’s site and museum. Worthwhile to see, it is completely free”

Liz

That is poetic

Hazel

It is. It’s kind of like a haiku

Liz

Just a really long haiku. I enjoy “Coca cola!”

Hazel

I know, that is fantastic. That one is by Robbie GC, from Toronto, Canada. There you go, you’re famous on this podcast

Liz

I think a Wurlitzer’s one of those old-style organs

Hazel

Is it? There’s a McDonald’s organ?!

Liz

Yeah, it’s an old-fashioned electric piano thing, they have one at Blackpool Tower

Hazel

Wow. Yeah, most of these reviews seem to boil down to “this is incredibly kitschy and I loved it”

Liz

I need to go to this place, and this is my favourite local larder, even though it is not a food. I’m in my happy place right now

Hazel

Yeah, I thought you guys would enjoy this. “This is the only place I know of to get a fried apple pie any more”. There you go

Liz

Wait, so do they have food or don’t they?

Hazel

I don’t know

Liz

If we have any listeners in California, we need a report

Hazel

Absolutely. We’ve got to know. Please, go to this place

Liz

I will send you home-made soap if you give us a report from the McDonald’s museum

Hazel

Last one. “We came to the birthplace of the McDonald’s food chain and were not disappointed. They had many fine artefacts and a nicely chronicled history of how this food giant got its beginnings.” They are fine artefacts

Liz

So, if you do have a review of the barely legal McDonald’s museum to send us, or you want to suggest an episode or a local larder, or you just want to say hi, or complain about the Lever brothers in our inbox, you can email breadandthreadpodcast@gmail.com

Hazel

You can also tweet us @breadandthread

Liz

And as we said, we do have a patreon which, I think my current patreon goal is to get enough money for me to get the oils for the historical soaps. I wanna make Babylonian soap so much you guys

Hazel

Oh yes

Liz

So that’s patreon.com/breadandthread. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next time

(end music)