Arsenic Dye

(6th December 2020)

(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’re two friends who studied archaeology together and love history, and today we have an extra person. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Cate

Sure, my name is Cate, I am an amateur fashion historian and a museum interpreter, which is a fancy way of saying museum tour guide. I can be found on instagram at miss\_minutiae, and I do historical costuming, I research fashion history and broadly social history of the 19th century

H

That is a very extensive list of credentials, I am excited

C

Thank you, I was doing my best

L

I mean, our credentials are basically “we like it”

H

Well, I mean, we do have archaeology degrees

L

Yeah, but they’ve not come up much

H

That’s true. We did that because we liked it, and then didn’t do anything else. So yeah, it’s really cool to have a person who does this day-to-day as their thing, as well

C

Thank you

H

So, what got you interested in the 19th century particularly?

C

I’m not really sure, I think it’s more the “because I liked it” situation

H

Ok

C

I kind of grew up surrounded by a bunch of antiques from my great-grandmother’s house that were family heirlooms, and most of them were a little bit newer but they had that 19th century feel if they weren’t actually 19th century, and I was kind of raised on Antiques Roadshow, and that’s the bulk of what they talk about there which of course you can talk about Eurocentrism and what comes up on shows like that, obviously, but that was sort of what it wound up being, and then when I moved to Boston the museums I ended up working in are primarily 19th century house museums, you have a lot of those up here, so that’s just what it ended up being. Also I love bustle dresses, so there’s that

L

So, we always start out episodes talking about what we’ve been working on, making and baking, so Hazel?

H

Sure, I will do a thing. Ok, so, I finished my pirate shirt, and it’s glorious. It’s just so poofy and...oh man, I just...I enjoy it very much. It just makes me really confident when I wear it, like I’m about to sail off onto the high seas and raid tax havens or something, it’s fantastic

L

Excellent

C

That’s wonderful

H

Yeah. I have no new ideas, but I still have a whole entire sheep’s fleece that I need to do something with, so I think my next thing will be doing something with that. So, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this story on the podcast before, but our postman in our village is also a shepherd, and I mentioned to him one day that I did spinning, and the next week he left an entire sack at my doorstep containing a whole sheep’s fleece, so I still have that to process and I’m gonna...I wanna get quite ambitious and I’m gonna make myself a coat, yeah

L

That’s impressive

H

What about you, Liz?

L

I’m halfway through my ridiculous pi cross-stitch project. It is a glorious mess but you can kind of see there’s areas where specific numbers cluster up together. If I was in any way a mathematician, it would probably be fascinating, but it’s just pretty, and that’s ok

H

I am enjoying rainbow pi very much

C

That’s just a wonderful concept. I am working on an early 1890s winter outfit for an outdoor holiday market event I’m doing at one of the museums I work at. The coat is almost done, I have to do the buttons and the hem. Which is more work than it sounds like, I like to do the buttonholes by hand, I just feel like it gives me more control. And I’m about to start on a hat, which has a much longer brim in the front that I realised, so elegant baseball cap territory

L

Oh wow

H

That’s fantastic. I did my first ever hand sewn buttonholes a couple of days ago on this shirt that I made and, yeah, it was fun, but god I can’t imagine having to do the amount of them that there are on Victorian dresses

C

I’ve done them before. Like I said, it gives a little more control, and I find it kind of relaxing because I can pop on something on Netflix and just bang out some hand-done buttonholes

H

Ok, so this episode is gonna be about a particular kind of dye used in the 19th century, I believe

C

Yeah. So I think a lot of people are familiar with the infamous arsenic green, as you mentioned earlier it’s been in clickbait videos and listicles the world over because it’s one of those things that pop history has become aware of and latched onto, but as pop history tends to they didn’t really go much deeper, though it’s an interesting topic. So, just as a basic overview, arsenic green actually refers to two different kinds of dyes. The first one was called Scheele’s green, invented in 1775 by, I might mangle this pronunciation, Carl Wilhelm Scheele. It was more colourfast and brighter than earlier green dyes, and part of the reason was that it was full of toxic chemicals including copper arsenite, which was the copper compound that helped give it the colour, and if you were wondering, yes, Scheele did know it was toxic, he actually wrote in a letter to a friend something along the lines of “I wonder if I should say something about this, I wonder if this is going to be problem”. And then he didn’t

H

Oh

L

Well when there’s money to be made

C

I suppose, yeah, can’t let scruples get in the way

H

Of course not. Spirit of the Victorian age

C

Or even earlier, yeah

H

I mean, I guess technically all of the time

L

It’s just capitalism

C

It’s capitalism. It was improved upon in 1814 with the invention of something that was called either Paris green, emerald green, Vienna green, or Schweinfurt green, so try keeping track of all of those, by a pair of dyers in Bavaria named Russ and Sattler. It was even brighter, there was more variation in colour allowed, depending on the grain size of the dye, it was even more colourfast. They finally published the recipe in 1822, which revealed oops all arsenic! so to speak. So basically arsenic dyes were very popular in the 18th and mostly early to mid 19th centuries, and the thing of it is it wasn’t just green. Lots of the new aniline or chemical-based dyes contained toxic chemicals, mauve was actually another one that was known for causing particular amounts of trouble

H

Ok

C

And interestingly enough, Paris green was the first widespread chemical insecticide

L

That’s always a good sign

H

Wow

C

Yeah, just what you like in your clothing. Starting in the 1880s people would spread it on their crops to get rid of insects

H

Just as it was, the dye? The same thing?

C

Yeah I think it was just the powder, you can find advertisements for it, for Paris green insecticide or weed killer, things like that

L

I mean, I guess you probably don’t have to worry about moths if your clothes are dyed with insecticide

H

Sure

C

Really a good question, I would love to do a study on that or something. So, you could find arsenic green pretty much in anything, the most popular image nowadays is the green ballgown, the fatal ballgown, fatal vanity, and I’ll get into that later, but it was in candles, it was in toys, in was in upholstery and garment fabric, especially in silk foliage, so silk leaves and flowers. Even candy, actually, coloured candies and desserts

H

That doesn’t sound like a good idea!

C

No. If you used small enough amounts it would probably be ok, emphasis on probably, and it was very different for children and adults. There were news stories, including one 1840 Christmas party in London, of course everyone’s unnamed because it was society people, where the host burned green and gold candles and a bunch of children died from the arsenic fumes

H

Oh my gosh

L

Wow

C

Again, nobody’s named, so you can’t really confirm how much of that was true, so grain of salt and all that, but there was a danger, and of course wallpaper was probably the biggest culprit, because the pigment could flake off, or it could outgas under warm or damn conditions

H

Ok. So, was there any public concern about this at all?

C

There actually was. There was a very interesting article published in 1861, where a silk flower maker named Matilda, another name I’m probably going to butcher, Matilda Scheurer

L

Great name

C

It’s a wonderful name. She was a 19-year-old silk flower maker, and she died on November 20th 1861. I’m not sure how the newspapers got ahold of this story, but they published, typically lurid, accounts of her dying, and the horrible agonies she went through as she died of severe arsenic poisoning, and as a result that whole thing became sort of a cause celebre for upper class women, who ran organisations like the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, dedicated to various social causes. So, Punch, the magazine Punch, published an article called “Pretty Poison Wreaths”, with a quote that said “under circumstances such as these, death is evidently as accidental as it is when occasioned by a railway collision occasioned by arrangements known to be faulty”, so basically, even though Matilda’s death was ruled accidental everyone was not buying that.

One lady named Miss Nicholson went around and visited other silk flower workshops around London and found absolutely wretched working conditions, with these young girls and teenagers working with, you know, content warning semi-graphic medical descriptions ahead, sores on their hands, bloody bandages, some had to just refuse to work because they couldn’t take it any more, and all they knew was that the dye gave them “a dreadful cold”

H

Pretty dreadful cold

C

Yeah, absolutely

L

Yeah. I’m just finding it interesting how people definitely knew. ‘Cause I was listening to a podcast, Things in Jars, hit us up, they were talking about this woman who arsenic-murdered some family members and blamed it on the wallpaper, saying “obviously they just inhaled it, that’s why there was arsenic in their stomachs”

C

Interesting, I didn’t come across that

L

I just find it interesting it being that well-known that you can use it as a defence in a murder trial, and all of these things coming out about the working conditions and people still using it

C

It really was, yeah, it was interesting because, especially after all these things came out about the working conditions, and that wasn’t the first time, there was an 1859 study of workshops in France which actually resulted in French and German governments banning the pigments before the concern had even been raised to that level in Britain and America, but the popular press sort of, from what I’ve found, and of course my research was not exhaustive by any means, they chose to focus more on the idea of the careless wealthy young lady, who goes to a ball in an arsenic-dyed gown and is dropping her suitors like flies, because her dress is outgassing arsenic pigments, so it’s kind of interesting to me that the whistleblowers were upper class women, and the people who were suffering the most were these working girls and teenagers, and yet the popular press chose to turn it into a thing of, you know, women’s fatal vanity and the effect on others around her, not even the wearer of the dress herself

H

I was gonna say, where’s the concern for this lady who is wearing the arsenic dress

L

I’m sure it’s nothing to do with wealthy newspaper owners, who probably, maybe also had some money invested in these dyes, at a guess

C

The interesting thing about looking where the money’s coming from is more in the case Williams Morris, the wallpaper designer, who actually, despite campaigning for better working conditions for some workers he inherited stock in an arsenic mine

L

Wow

C

So, he famously, yeah, he famously called the concern over arsenic dye “witch-fever” and actively campaigned to get people to not believe in it

H

Really?

C

Yeah

H

That’s super interesting to know, ‘cause I have recently got quite interested in the life of William Morris, and was reading around it a bit, and I guess that’s one of the things they don’t tell to tell you

L

Well yeah, William Morris is a hero of British art

H

He’s held up, as well, as this person who fought for art for the masses and better working conditions and things, so

L

And turns out he was evil

C

It’s interesting the way that people in history can be really amazing socially on one axis and then you look at something else and there’s a clear conflict of interest, because people are complicated

H

Sure

C

And of course, that’s not to say consumers didn’t suffer from the arsenic poisoning, just to go off a laundry list there was an 1848 article in The Lancet, a lot of these come from The Lancet, about a brother and sister who got sick after licking a toy rabbit their mother had given them, I guess it was a green rabbit, or a rabbit with green elements, or maybe another colour of dye. 1858 a 3-year-old boy died after eating fallen flakes of wallpaper pigment, 1862 Dr Thomas Orton was called to a family’s house when everyone, including their pet parrot, got sick after they hung new wallpaper with a really bright pigment to it, and then one of the few American examples I found was in 1861, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, right here in my hometown, of a boy made sick from sucking on a concert ticket

H

Wow, so even that little amount

C

Mm-hmm. It was worse with children, because adults can metabolise more arsenic safely, but obviously children can’t handle the same dosage, so to speak

H

Hmm, ok

C

And interestingly, in terms of the whole green ballgown thing, which is still what you see in modern depictions and museum exhibits and things like that, clothing wasn’t actually the worst offender, because the clothing isn’t really touching your body, especially if you’re a woman you have like five layers of underwear between your outer dress and your actual skin, so the most you’ll see with clothing is things like gloves and stocking, which are actually in contact with the body. There was one account of, “Poisonous Socks” was the title of the article in The Lancet, where a Mr Webber brought some harmful dyes to the attention of his local aldermen, in a council meeting or something, and there was a dancer at the Drury Lane theatre who suffered a rash on one foot where she was wearing a bright red stocking, and they knew it was the stocking because the other foot, which had a white stocking on during the performance, so you get more issues where the clothing actually comes into contact, but, again, it’s only a rash, you’re not really dying from wearing arsenic dyed clothing

H

Ok, so it’s when people are actually ingesting it

C

Or breathing it in, yeah

H

Ok. Ok, so with things like wallpaper it’s the fumes or the particles?

C

Yeah, or flakes of paint that fall off the wall with wear

H

Yeah

C

There’s some theory that it might have contributed to Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, because something about, I forget when the actual study was done, something about the tissues. They maybe did a test of some of his remains and the tissues contained really really unusually high levels of arsenic, so there’s a theory that the wallpaper where he was on the island outgassed in the damp and gave him slow arsenic poisoning, but of course, you know, there could be other explanations, arsenic was also used as a medicine in some cases, interestingly still used in some medicines today, in very very small quantities, so, sort of interesting brush with fame there for the arsenic green poisoning

H

So, I wonder if there was any effort, you know with how they remove asbestos from houses today, and there’s whole industries of people who are trained in removing asbestos, and I know that ‘cause I used to work transcribing, and one of the things I had to transcribe was a podcast about asbestos removal

C

Oh wow

H

It was not the most interesting two hours I’ve ever had, but very necessary, certainly. So, yeah, I wonder if there was, what it was like for people in rented accommodation that might have had this, and whether there was a push to remove it or not

C

I don’t know for sure about that. I do know that after a certain point manufacturers started advertising wallpaper in particular as arsenic free, so you can find ads from mostly the 1870s and into the 80s and beyond of these beautiful wallpaper images and then in big letter, alongside things like “vibrant colours” and “new designs”, “arsenic free”. So I don’t if there was necessarily much of a removal push, but there was certainly a push among manufacturers to respond to consumer demand that their wallpapers not contain, you know, massive levels of lethal poison

L

The public are so picky

C

And of course new dyes were found as well, that had other ways of being colourfast without quite the same level of harmful chemicals, and some people still used older forms of dye too. There’s this misconception that if you look at any green Victorian item in general, but again, this usually gets applied to upper class women’s dresses, which is a really interesting prejudice, that you can tell that it has arsenic dye because of the shade of green or just if it’s green in general, and that’s really really not true, even less so with wallpaper, so I’d imagine if you did live in rented accommodations you might be wary of green wallpaper if you knew about it, or maybe you just find yourself coming down with some symptoms and not really knowing why

H

Ok. So it’s interesting that people would pick out this, although it’s absolutely right that it’s extremely toxic, it’s interesting that there was all this focus on this one...also I’m sure a lot of other dyes that were quite toxic at the time, and still are. I suppose that would have had something to do with the society lady vanity thing

C

Yeah, it’s interesting because even at the time green seems to have been latched onto despite, as I said, mauve enjoyed a brief period when that was known in 19th century popular press as the toxic dye, the colour to watch out for, but green seemed to be latched on to, and I have to wonder if it had to do with the studies done into the silk flower workshops, because the primary issue there was the green. They used a lot of it, because you’re replicating leaves and stems and things like that, and there were some images, some drawings, some colour drawings actually, published with the 1859 French study that have these very affecting visuals of hands with bleeding sores that are tinged green from the dye, green under fingernails, things like that, so I have to wonder if maybe the green just had better publicity, that it just became the better known colour even though other dyes...like the story with the dancer, her stocking was red, not green, and that still caused skin irritation, so maybe it’s just good publicity

L

Would the red and purple dyes have been arsenic-based as well, cause I was just wondering, ‘cause there’s definitely a period where arsenic was big in the public imagination ‘cause of the penny dreadfuls and things and calling arsenic “inheritance powder” ‘cause you use it to knock off your wealthy relatives

C

Yeah it’s interesting. Other dyes did contain arsenic, yeah, they did contain arsenic and/or other equally harmful chemicals, so yeah I suppose it was dumb luck that green was siezed on, but yeah, I really am interested in that green wallpaper case with the woman who poisoned her family and then blamed it on the wallpaper. I actually didn’t find that, and it sounds really fascinating

L

I’ll send you a link to the podcast episode

C

Please do, yeah, yeah

H

I wonder if that kind of thing was inspired by all the press coverage

L

Probably, like “this is an excuse I can use”

C

Exactly, yeah, that might definitely have been where you got the idea to bump off your family and blame it on the wallpaper. I do want to touch again on the whole feminine vanity thing, because I found a really interesting later urban legend that plays into this whole poisoned gown, careless woman, female vanity type of situation, because first of all it’s putting the focus on individual responsibility as opposed to manufacturer oversight, which may sound a little familiar to anyone living in this time of climate change, where have you heard that before?

But also there’s a later urban legend, first recorded in the 1930s, about a girl who goes to a dance in either a second-hand gown or a gown from an unscrupulous department store, and then dies of formaldehyde poisoning from sweating in the dress because, oops, it actually came off a dead person. And then some of these have a ghost element, the earliest versions were also racist because they pointed out that the original owner was black specifically, so there’s an element of “oh well you know, someone getting above her station”, so to speak, and then dying and being a vengeful spirit, but that really reminded me of the idea of the arsenic belle in the 1860s spreading the poison around her and hurting others, although now it’s been shifted so that the punishment for the vanity is not on other people, but on the woman herself

H

That’s quite interesting actually, because the whole poison dress thing is actually quite an old device. There’s...it goes back to some of the Icelandic sagas, the viking sagas, there’s one I can’t remember off the top of my head the name of it because it is in Old Norse, but there’s a story about a woman who wants her son to inherit her husband’s lands, and not her step-son, and so she makes a shirt for the step-son and weaves into it all these evil curses, and of course her own son accidentally puts it on and dies

C

Naturally

H

There’s also things about jealous, jilted lovers making, gifting a dress to the husband’s new wife and poisoning the dress so that when she puts it on she graphically dies at the wedding

(C speaks but cuts out)

H

Yeah that whole kind of poison clothing, poison dress is quite an evocative image

C

It really is, it really is, and there was an exhibit at the Bata Shoe museums, in Canada, some years back where it was all about arsenic green dyed clothing. Well, ok, it was about fatal clothing or harmful clothing, and they included a bunch of arsenic dyed clothing from their collection, and they actually did the only way to tell if something is dyed with arsenic. So they went through their collection, chemically tested pretty much everything green, because green was the best know, but they did admit that it was other colours too, and the opening room of the display had a skeleton wearing an arsenic dyed ball gown in the display case, and it harkened back to an image in Punch when there was that first scandal over the dye workers, or the silk flower workers, where they actually had a comic called “The Arsenic Waltz” where they showed a female skeleton, “female skeleton” in quotes, in a ballgown, and then a male skeleton in a suit bowing and offering his hand to her, so it is, it’s a very evocative image

H

I guess that kind of poison green thing as well, green is associated with that

C

Yeah green with envy or…

H

Like, the classic bottle of poison, it’s always got green liquid in

L

Yeah, Disney villains always have green don’t they

C

Yeah

L

All the evil magic is green

C

Yeah, and it’s interesting, because so much of the silk flower thing was designed to create that feeling of nature and pastoral and goodness, and yet that wound up being one of the primary avenues for the toxic dye

H

Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah, I guess there’s always that selling something on the basis of nature, or it looks natural, or it’s supposed to be natural, and it’s not necessarily...In terms of dyes, I hear a lot about natural dye being more sustainable or better than synthetic dyes which, I mean, I’m not an expert on this, they may well be, certainly in some respects they probably are, but then they weren’t necessarily perfectly good on the environment, certainly in the quantities that were being produced at certain times in history it could cause environmental damage, and there are chemicals used for them, so I guess the most well-known one is allum, again I’m not an expert, I don’t know whether or not that’s harmful, but they did use chemicals to bind these things

C

I learned that some kinds of green dye apparently can’t be recycled or composted even now. They’re not likely to give you a rash or kill you in your paint or wallpaper, but apparently it’s still a difficult colour to create in a way that’s completely safe in all respects so, yeah, that was interesting

H

Wow. Yeah, I guess you don’t really think about the dye affecting the compostability or the life of an item that much, I suppose because there’s just such a variety available to us today we just don’t think about it

C

Yeah, it’s not something often considered. I did also want to mention that I have touched many green Victorian things with my bare hands, I used to work for an antique doll dealer in New York city, and I have not yet experienced rashes or skin irritation. There was one doll dress I encountered once that had green spots that we all speculated, and I felt like my hands itched a little after I touched it, but that also could’ve been psychosomatic ‘cause there wasn’t any redness or rash or anything, which I think just goes to show that it might be, I don’t want to say less common than people think, but it’s definitely not the situation you expect where it’s like “any green Victorian dress is going to kill you, it’s lethal and it’s going to give you arsenic poisoning”. That’s not really the situation

H

Do you know how long, or whether or not it has an expiry date? Is it...would these things be as potent as they were for people handling them today?

C

Very interesting question. I know the chemical studies about it, as far as I know, tapered off in popularity. So there were those first few studies in the mid-19th century, the ladies’ sanitary association actually sent off some silk to be studied when they were doing their inquest into the silk flower workshops, and there was another study done in the 1890s but it was using then-contemporary fabric. There was certainly still enough to be detected by researchers like those at the Bata Shoe museum or in the hidden killers show, where they did the wallpaper sample book test. I don’t know, you would have to...I feel like you would have to have taken test results from a textile originally, and then have the same textile and test it now

H

Yeah. I mean, I guess you could dye something with arsenic dye for scientific purposes

C

And then have your grandchildren come back in a hundred years and test it and see. Yeah. Yeah. I dunno, all they said about the current toxicity of the dresses at the Bata Shoe museum, one of the curators said “we’ve been advised not to lick it”, so

L

Amazing

C

That covers a lot of things

H

It does. I also find it interesting that with the silk flower workshop thing, which I didn’t know before, that that sparked off all this interest in the working conditions, people were just kind of having these lovely silk flowers on their clothing, not really thinking about it, and then all this came out and people were collectively like “oh. No! What? There’s bad working conditions?!”

C

Yeah, it’s the kind of thing that perhaps they were aware of obliquely before, but didn’t really think about, and someone had to bring it to their attention. I find it really interesting that France and Germany responded by being like “oh, we can’t have this” and banning the dyes. I’m not sure it was actually ever banned in the UK

L

Just sort of an agreement not to

C

Mm-hmm. I can’t find any dates of banning in the UK or here in America, so it’s entirely possible that it was never banned in those places. Now, I could be wrong, I could be missing something and it could have been banned, but it could have just been that consumer pressure and technology improvement sort of phased it out

L

Well, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us, that’s, that was fascinating

C

Thank you for having me

H

Yeah it was a great and slightly creepy journey into the textile past

C

It was really interesting to research about. I had done some looking into it before, but never in the kind of depth where I would record names and dates of my sources so thank you for having me, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to look into it more

L

So, before we go into local larder, this episode was actually requested by one of our patrons, so if you want to request an episode yourself you can email breadandthreadpodcast@gmail.com, and our patreon is just breadandthread, we have exclusive recipes and a discord server. So, now that I have plugged that, would you like to know about fish and chips?

H

Very much

C

Absolutely

L

So fish and chips is known as, it’s sort of one of the quintessential British foods

H

Yeah

L

No part of it is British

H

Honestly, that doesn’t surprise me at this point

L

Well no. So, we think that the battered fish itself come from either Dutch or Iberian Jewish communities. Find it interesting that it’s one of those two ‘cause they don’t really touch, although there is...there was a lot of conflict between Spain and The Netherlands at various points, so maybe that’s got something to do with the confusion? The idea of battering and frying fish on the Friday evening so that you can eat it on the Sabbath without having to cook, and then that gets combined with the idea of chips

C

Yeah, sounds really useful

L

So, it made its way to Britain somewhere in probably the 1860s, although fried fish itself and chips themselves are mentioned separately in several Charles Dickens books, including Oliver Twist, which is 1830s. But there is strong debate about whether the first chippy, that is, a place selling fish and chips specifically, was in London or Mossley, which is now part of Greater Manchester

H

I imagine there will continue to be strong debate about that for years to come

L

Oh for sure. You’ve got the North versus London, it’s not going to go away. But it basically became this stock working class meal during that industrial period, because there was suddenly industrial fishing, so fish is...just become accessible to working class people, and is basically the first takeaway meal, as opposed to - we’ve talked about before - street food snacks. This is somewhere you can go in and you get a big lump of tasty stodge to get you through your terrible life for another day

H

It is, I mean, it still is one of the only things where you get proper value for money

L

Oh for sure

H

You get a good amount of chips

C

Ideal. I’m just used to that as “authentic British pub food” here in the states, where you have a pub that has union flag garlands, and probably some model of the tardis somewhere

H

It’s not a model

L

Just like every pub

C

Exactly, authentic British pub, clearly

L

So yeah, a lot of chippies now are actually combination fish and chips and Chinese food, which I find interesting ‘cause you’ve got the Chinese immigrants in relatively poor areas basically combining their cuisines with that is already established working class British cuisines in one shop

H

Yeah, I think actually yeah you can get at least chips from pretty much every takeaway, I think

L

Yeah, I know there’s a lot of curry places you can get half and half

H

Oh yeah

L

Which is half a portion of rice and half a portion of chips

C

So interesting

L

So a couple of fun fish and chips facts. There is exactly one chip shop on Gibraltar, and I looked on its facebook page and it has a lot of reviews which are basically “this is the best chippy in Gibraltar” which I love

H

I guess

C

By default

H

They’re not wrong

L

It’s called Roy’s Fish and Chips, and yeah, they’re hanging in there

C

Good for them

H

I love chip shop names, as well, some of them are like, the one in where I live is called The Swan, and then you get some that are like Roy’s Chips

L

I enjoy the ones with pun names, so there’s one, there’s a train station near my parents’ house that has a chip shop in it that’s called The Plaice Station, like Playstaton

H

That’s terrible, I love it

C

Oh that’s horrible. Perfect

L

It was one of the few foods not subject to rationing, ‘cause Churchill thought it would basically keep the working class going

H

Interesting

L

It’s also mentioned in The Road to Wigan Pier as a “panacea to the working classes”

H

I mean, I don’t agree with everything in The Road to Wigan Pier, but that’s not wrong

L

But a very important question for you, Cate, is in the places near you that do fish and chips can you get scraps?

C

Never tried. That’s the scraps of fried batter, right?

L

Yeah

C

Ah yeah, I have been informed by my British friends. I’ve never tried. I don’t know that anyone would try here, I think that most Americans are kind of foreign to the idea, so if you suggested it they would probably say “so you go round the back of the restaurant”, ‘cause you’d have to go round the back of the restaurant ‘cause most of the places that do it here don’t do counter service, they’re sit-down restaurants even if they’re just diners, so you’d have to go round the back and be like “hi, can I have your bits of fried batter?” I don’t know, even here in New England where there’s so much cultural overlap I feel like you would just get looked at funny. Maybe I’m totally wrong, American people listening, let me know if you’ve ever done this or comment on the twitter if you’ve ever done this, and I will be thoroughly corrected, but I don’t think it’s part of the culture here

L

It’s interesting cause the thing is when I was a kid living up near Newcastle, used to be able to get them for free

C

Oh wow

L

And I don’t know if it’s time or geography, but now places charge you for them, fifty whole English pence for a bag of batter scraps, it’s a scandal

H

Wow. Honestly I think it might be more of a northern thing perhaps because I, and, you know, this is admitting something, but I had never heard of scraps until maybe last year

L

Not even when you lived in York, you didn’t come across it?

H

No. I guess I just didn’t branch out enough in my fish and chips culinary journey

L

I remember bullying you into trying chips and gravy, so…

H

Yeah, that was worth it. Yeah, I just hadn’t really heard of it. It’s not on the menus or anything down here but I don’t know, maybe if you asked they would give it to you, but it’s not a thing, or at least not that I know of

L

Oh ok. So I have one more bit of trivia about fish and chips. So, Hazel will be well aware that there is a lot of debate about what, if any, wet substances you have with your fish and chips. You can have gravy, mushy peas, just vinegar, if you go to a Chinese chippy you can get Chinese curry on your fish and chips

H

Isn’t that also a Welsh thing, curry sauce?

L

I don’t know if it’s a Welsh thing or if it’s just a thing that you can get in Wales, because like I say it’s a lot of the combination Chinese and chippy places do it, although some, I’ve been to some just chippies that do have a thing of curry sauce in the back if you really want it

H

I wonder how often it gets refreshed

L

But apparently around Edinburgh there’s a substance called chippy sauce. It is a combination of brown sauce and vinegar, which I would try I think?

H

What’s the consistency? I think it depends on that

L

I cannot find what the consistency is. What I found is mostly just that it’s those two things, and then pictures of chips with a brown substance on them

H

I don’t know how I feel about that

L

So yeah, that is a brief guide to fish and chips

C

Good to know

H

Now I want fish and chips

L

Yeah me too

C

Honestly, same

L

I’ve just had food and now I want fish and chips

C

I have to actually go out of my way to get fish and chips

H

How far?

C

To a sit-down restaurant. Well I can’t right now, because the restaurants are mostly closed, it would have to be to a sit-down restaurant that does fish and chips, ‘cause chip shops aren’t really a thing here

L

You’ll have to make your own

C

I will, I’ll have to learn and make my own

H

I did try to do that once when I was living in Vietnam. I tried to make it on my birthday for my friends, and the kitchen floor was covered in grease for the next week. It’s quite...if you’re an amateur fish and chip maker it’s quite tricky to manage

C

Noted

L

So yeah, like I said we have an email and patreon, we’re also on twitter at breadandthread if you want to keep up with what we’re doing and see the hints that I keep insisting on posting about what the next episode’s going to be on

H

They’re fun

L

Thank you for listening, and we will be back soon

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