Sun Protection

1st August 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, and trying out things from history, and just making things, and we normally start by talking about what we’ve been making, so what have you been up to?

Liz: I don’t remember if I mentioned it on a previous episode, but I did make sunlight soap

Hazel: I can’t remember, but that is cool

Liz: Without the colonialist palm oil, I just used the pine-nut oil

Hazel: Okay

Liz: But having it side-by-side with the lard soap, you can see why people flocked to it

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: It smells nicer, and it feels nicer

Hazel: I imagine lard soap doesn’t smell that nice

Liz: It doesn’t smell bad, but it doesn’t smell good. There’s…you know aftertastes? There’s an aftersmell

Hazel: An aftersmell! Ok, yeah, I can see why you would want a sunlight soap, cause I don’t want to be walking around with an aftersmell

Liz: All on your clothes as well

Hazel: Oh no!

Liz: ‘cause we said, didn’t we, that it would have been laundry soap as well as for washing your body

Hazel: Oh that’s true! You’d just be covered in aftersmell

Liz: Just a balcony aftersmell

Hazel: (laughs) Oh gosh

Liz: So that’s the main thing I’ve done, I’ve been experimenting with punch-needle but I’ve only done a kit so far. It’s fun though, it’s nice to stab things in a less precise way than with embroidery

Hazel: That sounds really cool, what kind of texture does it have?

Liz: Like a really tight pom-pom?

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which I guess makes sense because it’s just little loops of wool

Hazel: Yeah it’s often used for rugs, isn’t it?

Liz: Yeah, the kit I had was for just a picture of a bee, which you can hang up, which, I’m gonna keep that, I like bees

Hazel: Awesome, bees are good

Liz: But I am gonna try making a rug

Hazel: Cool

Liz: Not 100% settled on a design yet, but I will keep you updated

Hazel: Excellent

Liz: What about you, what have you been up to? How did your grandmother portrait go?

Hazel: So I finished it, just in time, I pulled a couple of late nights just before, but I made it, I made it to the birthday. Well, it wasn’t her actual birthday, but it was the birthday weekend. Yeah, so I got it done. I’ll hopefully remember to put a picture of it, I didn’t get great pictures because at the time I was giving it to her I was also being dragged off by a 3-year-old to go and play, so I didn’t really get time

Liz: That will happen with 3-year-olds

Hazel: This is my cousins’ kid, she’s such a great 3-year-old, she’s so bossy when you play with her, she’s just like “come here!” “sit down!” “no not there!” She told me to lay on the floor and then she was just like “stay there for 3 hours!” She hasn’t really grasped the concept of time yet

Liz: Did you?

Hazel: No, I pretended to look at my watch, which I wasn’t wearing, and said it’s been 3 hours, and she was like “ok”. Anyway, I finished the embroidery piece. It was really difficult for me, actually, ‘cause I’m not used to so much…I like to work from a pattern usually and this time I had to make it from a photo, and the realistic embroidery technique was quite new to me, and choosing all the colours and everything is actually quite hard, the colour you think you need isn’t always the one you need, like she’s wearing a white nurse’s uniform, and I thought I needed a bright white but it turns out, no, it looks more realistic if you use off-white or cream or almost beige it’s…yeah. But that was interesting. I’m quite proud of that, and it’s now done, and I think she liked it, and that’s good, and now I can work on projects that are less stressful again, which is fun

Liz: That is always nice

Hazel: Yeah. So, what is our topic for today?

Liz: Well, you might have noticed it’s been very hot lately

Hazel: Yep, it has been somewhat warm

Liz: And the thing that makes that happen is called the sun

Hazel: You learn a lot of things here on Bread and Thread

Liz: So I thought I would look at sun protection

Hazel: Oh that’s a good one

Liz: Thank you

Hazel: Just complimenting you on your choice of episode topic. Yeah, so I hadn’t actually thought about that, but now that you mention it I guess the sun has been hot for pretty much all of history

Liz: It has

Hazel: So we must have been doing something to protect ourselves

Liz: So I have kind of a round-up of sun protection in various places, and then I’m gonna get into sun cream

Hazel: Ok

Liz: So you can probably guess that the most common form of sun protection in the past were big hats and smearing stuff on yourself

Hazel: I think I like the first one more

Liz: Yeah it’s…I don’t know if you remember from primary school the slip-slap-slop thing?

Hazel: What?

Liz: Where you’ve got to slip on some long sleeves to protect your skin from the sun, you’ve got to slap on a hat, and you’ve got to slop on some sun cream. Did you not have that?

Hazel: No I don’t remember that

Liz: It was like a national sun protection campaign

Hazel: Okay. Man, I’m not sure if slap is…

Liz: I think we stole it from Australia

Hazel: That would make sense, but I’m just like…if you tell a child to slap on a hat, I’m not sure you’re gonna get the desired result

Liz: (laughs) I mean I think as a kid I just enjoyed saying slip-slap-slop

Hazel: I mean I guess it works in that sense

Liz: I mean no-one ever actually did the long sleeves part, because it was also hot when it was sunny, but the thought was there. So yeah, you have things like the very stereotypical sort of conical southeast Asian hat. Apparently the Vietnamese name for them is nón lá, which I probably pronounced wrong ‘cause I’m really bad at tonal languages, I don’t control my voice tone that well sometimes

Hazel: I would give it a go, but I can’t remember if the nón is pronounced with the falling or rising tone

Liz: Does it help that the vowels have both got accents on them in this transliteration?

Hazel: Yeah, no, I do remember vaguely how it’s pronounced, I think it’s like non (falling) la (rising) but I might have mixed up the tones, so please tell me if that was terrible, because I was always quite bad with my pronunciation

Liz: But however you pronounce, it apparently means “leaf hat”

Hazel: That is cool, I like that

Liz: Because they would traditionally be things like you see in a lot of Japanese and Chinese cartoons I think, where people just get a lotus leaf and put it on their head, but obviously these are properly constructed garments, but that’s kind of the vibe I guess, but because they’re entirely plant matter you can just dip them in water and then put them back on to help keep you cool

Hazel: Ooh

Liz: Which sounds really refreshing right now if I’m being honest

Hazel: Yeah, that sounds really nice

Liz: And obviously similar to that you’ve also got parasols, which, Assyria apparently had parasols, made of palm fronds

Hazel: Okay

Liz: And again in places like southeast Asia you have a lot of parasols, made from things like bamboo paper and silk

Hazel: That sounds so fancy

Liz: Long before they took off here

Hazel: I guess we don’t necessarily have enough sun to merit inventing something like that

Liz: No, I think they were mostly a thing during the “if your posh you keep yourself pale to show that you don’t have to go work outside” kind of eras, which I will get to, but in terms of protective garments there’s also people like First Nations people in the very north of Canada and Alaska, as well as Siberia, Greenland, that whole sort of North Pole area, there’s actually snow goggles

Hazel: Okay

Liz: As a part of traditional wear to protect your eyes from the sun, because obviously snow-blindness is a real risk up there

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Which are basically a glasses shape made of ivory, wood, whatever material you can get hold of, basically, with just thin slits to look through to help reduce snow blindness, which I think is really cool because it’s not necessarily a sun protection thought, but also it is going to protect you from the same thing that sunglasses protect you from

Hazel: Yeah, that’s really clever

Liz: I am gonna do a separate thing on sunglasses, but there were, there have been sunglasses found…sorry I’ve forgotten the era now…I can’t find where it was from now, but you know, people in the past did have sunglasses made from things like smoky glass or certain stones, which were sort of a translucent dark look, I will find a picture to tweet, I don’t remember the era off-hand, which wouldn’t necessarily protect you from the UV, which is the main issue with the sun, but it’d at least be easier to see when it was bright

Hazel: Ok, that’s at least something

Liz: Yeah. That’s why I haven’t included sunglasses properly in this, ‘cause a lot of it is just about, historically is just about “make it less bright” rather than actually protecting your eyes, which is a whole thing ‘cause if you make it less bright it can also make you more susceptible to the UV in your eyes, if they’re not also UV protective

Hazel: Oh, really?

Liz: Yeah. So there’s different categories of sunglasses, which are basically how much UV protection you get, and a low category, which doesn’t give you any, is really bad because your eyes go “oh it’s really dark we need to let more light in”

Hazel: Oh, so it’s worse than not wearing sunglasses?

Liz: Yeah ‘cause

Hazel: Oh no

Liz: If you’re letting in more light and not being protected from the UV you’re letting in more UV

Hazel: Oh no!

Liz: Which is a problem

Hazel: Yeah, that’s an issue

Liz: But in the putting-stuff-on-your-skin category of sun protection, which I think we’re more familiar with, there’s definitely a lot of get what’s around you and put it on your face

Hazel: I do really love the idea of just grabbing a big leaf and then just using that, it’s so whimsical

Liz: I do love the leaf hat, ‘cause it must have evolved from just putting a leaf on your head for the shade, musn’t it

Hazel: Yeah it’s just a ready-made parasol, it’s there

Liz: And the construction of them now is so intricate, I’ve seen videos of people making them and it’s so much delicate work

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: Like it must take you years to learn to do it properly

Hazel: Can you put a link to any of those videos if you can remember which ones?

Liz: I will, I’m gonna tweet the old sunglasses and I’m gonna tweet either a leaf hat or a bamboo parasol

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Video. ‘Cause there’s a specific bamboo parasol video that’s really fun to watch, it’s just really satisfying, but I will see if I can find a leaf hat one as well. So yeah, actually putting stuff on your skin. One of the bigger ones that know about is the Himba people of Namibia, who still do this, they use a mixture of fat and red ochre to protect

Hazel: Ok

Liz: You put it on your skin and on your hair

Hazel: Ok, I’ve seen pictures of the hair covering, but I didn’t realise it was used for skin as well

Liz: Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because there’s…some ethnographers say that it’s this traditional sun protection and protects you from insects, and it does do that, but a lot of Himba now say it’s more of an aesthetic thing, so it’s that interesting thing of which one was it originally, no-one really knows

Hazel: Okay

Liz: But it…I mean, I think it’s a good look

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: And it does provide sun protection

Hazel: I mean I guess why not both

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Actually, maybe sun cream manufacturers are missing a trick with tinted sun creams

Liz: I mean, the amount of people that complain about sun cream leaving a white residue, or especially on more pigmented skin leaving an ashy look, leaning into it with just pigmented sun cream would be interesting

Hazel: Yeah, maybe there’s a market there, I dunno

Liz: Look into it, Nivea

Hazel: Yeah, and if you do it you have to give me the royalties ‘cause it was my idea. No-one else has ever had that idea ever apart from me on this podcast. I definitely think that’s true. So yeah, money please

Liz: If you invent tinted sun cream you have to give Bread and Thread half of the profits. In Myanmar there’s a paste called thanaka, which is made from tree bark, and, again, is sun protection and an aesthetic thing. The source I was reading describes it as “a decorative shield against the sun”

Hazel: That is an excellent description

Liz: Ancient Greece obviously using olive oil which, maybe not the best choice

Hazel: No, that doesn’t sound like a good idea

Liz: I think we know now that oil is more of a tanning-encourager than a sun protection

Hazel: Famously gets hot easily

Liz: It’s a classic sitcom prank, isn’t it. Ancient Egypt used one that sounds quite nice, rice bran and jasmine

Hazel: Ooh, that sounds like it would have a good aftersmell

Liz: It does. We’ve created the word aftersmell and I don’t like it

Hazel: We have. In fact, I’m gonna create my own aftershave, and it’s gonna be called “Aftersmell”, and it’s gonna smell of rice bran and jasmine

Liz: Interestingly, rice bran actually does provide a lot of UV protection, and is still used in some modern sun creams

Hazel: Ok, wow

Liz: Maybe we should bring that back

Hazel: That’s really cool, yeah

Liz: Get some jasmine-scented tinted sun cream. And then there’s…you get to 16th Century Venice and there’s people with black velvet masks to keep your face pale

Hazel: Oh, I’ve actually heard about these from…I saw a portrait that had a woman wearing one of these in, and there were people commenting on it like “what’s going on here, is this some kind of representation of something?” and then somebody pointed out that that was actually a thing, that ladies would wear these black masks that makes your face look like void

Liz: If you can find a picture of that, that’s gonna have to also go on the twitter

Hazel: Yeah, I’ll do my best, it was quite a striking picture

Liz: Yeah, it’s genuinely creepy to look at

Hazel: I didn’t realise that was a sun protection thing as well though

Liz: It’s to keep your face pale when you’re walking around

Hazel: Ok, that makes sense, but also it sounds like it would just make you look terrifying

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, so if we jump forwards to this article that I found on Sci Hub…so people knew that skin cancer was a thing, and they knew that sunburn was a thing

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: But it becomes a formal connection in Western medicine in the, right at the end of the 19th century, a study by a German doctor called Unna in 1894, where he basically goes “hey, maybe these are connected, I did some science and I think they might be connected”

Hazel: Well done

Liz: Did you say “well done”?

Hazel: I did. You just made him sound really unsure of himself, like “hey guys (exaggerated stammering), no worries if you’re not but I just thought you might be interested in some science that I did? But I mean it’s really just a first attempt”

Liz: I feel like he was probably more confident than that but, you know. So yeah, he referred to “sailor’s skin carcinoma”, where he talks about sailors, who obviously got a lot more sun exposure than most people, having more cases of skin cancer, and then another doctor, whose name I cannot pronounce, and I can’t work out where he’s from because the paper’s name is in latin so I cannot figure it out, came up with a similar theory about vineyard workers, who would also be out in the sun all day, and we pretty much figured out that sun exposure was linked to skin cancer by the start of the 1920s

Hazel: Ok. That one took a while

Liz: Yeah. I guess at that point we were still at the point of “all disease is either germs or your brain messing up, these are the two things”. And then these guys are like “but what if it was the sun?”

Hazel: And they were right!

Liz: They were right!

Hazel: It was the sun!

Liz: I would like to make it clear that they were correct

Hazel: (laughs) We’re just becoming a science conspiracy theory podcast from here on in

Liz: What is the conspiracy theory here?

Hazel: That the sun is blameless

Liz: That is a hot take, but you know that there’s gonna be someone who believes it

Hazel: A “hot” take?!

Liz: To quote a tumblr post, you go knocking on enough doors asking for the devil, eventually he’s gonna answer. You cannot come up with a spicy take that someone doesn’t genuinely believe

Hazel: I’m sorry, I’m just trying to calm down from having possibly made the greatest pun ever

Liz: So yeah, some sunscreen becomes commercially available in 1928, so they were pretty fast on that, although how useful it would have been…it probably had zinc oxide in it, which is a useful one

Hazel: Okay

Liz: Well because basically there’s two kinds of sunscreen, which is the word I’m gonna use ‘cause it’s the more technical term, I guess, even though it’s not the UK word for it, there’s ones that reflect the UV back, and there’s ones that absorb it, which is why a lot of sunscreen has things like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide in, because they’re bright white and reflective, so they leave that layer on your skin

Hazel: Ah I see, ok

Liz: Yeah, one of the earliest sunscreens, was created by a World War 2 pilot called Benjamin Green, was red veterinary petrolatum

Hazel: Oh gosh, that’s a name

Liz: Or red-vet-pet for short, which was a sort of sticky, slimy, red petroleum jelly-like substance

Hazel: (disgusted noise)

Liz: But he eventually ended up founding Coppertone, which is a sunscreen manufacturer

Hazel: Ok. Are they still going?

Liz: I believe they are still going

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: But the first…most of the sources I found say that the first sunscreen was invented in Australia by H.A. Milton Blake, which was a UV filtering thing, rather than just zinc oxide

Hazel: Ok. That sounds somewhat more useful

Liz: Definitely, yeah. And then in 1974 they started introducing actual formal measurements of how effective sunscreens were, that’s when you get SPF

Hazel: Oh I see

Liz: Which is sun protection factor

Hazel: So there wasn’t until the 1970s?

Liz: No

Hazel: Wow. So you’d just buy sun cream and then be like “well, is this gonna protect me, is it gonna make UV worse? Let’s find out”

Liz: “What’s the worst that could happen? Oh yeah…” So SPF was actually invented in the 60s but it wasn’t a formal, official, well-known thing until the 70s, basically

Hazel: Ok

Liz: So do you know what the numbers mean on SPF? Because I did not until researching this

Hazel: Ok, so I know the higher the number is the better protection it’s meant to be, right? But apart from that, I know nothing

Liz: So the idea is it’s basically…so if you have SPF 30, that means that 1/30 of the radiation will get to your skin

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which basically means you can be out in the sun for 30 times as long, not accounting for the fact, obviously, that the protection wears off over time and you have to reapply

Hazel: Mm-hm. Oh wow

Liz: That’s why the higher the number the better

Hazel: That’s actually pretty useful to know

Liz: Yeah. So the example that I found in one of the articles I was looking at is, if it will take you 10 minutes to get sunburnt without anything on, if you wear SPF 15 you can be out for 150 minutes

Hazel: Alright

Liz: But most sun creams still say to reapply every couple of hours, which is fair, because it does wear off over time, because you shed skin and friction and all that stuff

Hazel: Especially if you’re swimming, right? It can wear off quicker

Liz: Oh yeah, even waterproof ones will wear off, and obviously sweat is a form of water. This is just turning into a little bit of a PSA, but also I did have to have a mole removed last week, so I’m very aware of the dangers of the sun right now

Hazel: I feel like we do stray into the realm of PSA on occasion

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: But always in the interests of historically related things

Liz: Oh yeah, it’s like “we’ve known about this connection for about a hundred years now, you’d better be aware of it”

Hazel: Put your sunscreen on, kids

Liz: Slip slap slop

Hazel: Slip slap slop indeed! I need to do that more often, actually, I often forget sun cream, although I have been acquainted with the benefits of a massive hat

Liz: I do enjoy a massive hat

Hazel: I think massive hats need to make a comeback

Liz: I was on-site doing some digging last week in my massive hat, and I felt very good about myself

Hazel: Amazing

Liz: So yeah, now we have sun cream. You can list up to SPF 50 in places like the EU and Australia. In the US I believe you can’t actually advertise as SPF 50 yet, because the FDA isn’t convinced that all of the things that say 50 are definitely actually factor 50

Hazel: Ok

Liz: There’s also different sun creams are more protective against UVA or UVB, so you do need to keep an eye out for when they say…do they actually say both, because some of them don’t

Hazel: This is all…I’m just jotting this down, this is really good information to have

Liz: Yeah the UVA/UVB thing’s a much more recent discovery, that there’s actually two different ones

Hazel: Ok

Liz: There’s also some ingredients in some sun cream that can cause coral reef bleaching, apparently, which are being phased out. Should I say the names of them

Hazel: Yeah some people might be interested

Liz: For our listeners. Oxybenzone and octinoxate. That’s hard to say. So yeah, we’re now at a point where people are trying to find different things to put in sun cream to make it as effective as possible and as coral reef safe as possible

Hazel: I mean, yeah, that’s pretty good. I’m glad we’re doing that. I do think bringing back the historically sound method of big hats, and possibly also parasols, is probably a good idea as well, alongside our modern methods

Liz: Definitely. I mean, everyone looks good in a big hat, is the thing

Hazel: But everyone is sun protected in a big hat

Liz: You look good in a big hat, you don’t look good with sunburn

Hazel: That is true

Liz: That’s the takeaway from this. So yeah, there’s my brief history of sun protection. I definitely missed some stuff out, but I didn’t want this to turn into a whole TED talk

Hazel: Yeah it seems like a pretty big area. I mean there must be other…even things like cultural practices like going for a nap in the afternoon could be a way of dealing with sun so…

Liz: Yeah, and there’s also things are definitely just cosmetic, like lead make-up, to be like “yes I’m definitely pale and have not been in the sun at all”

Hazel: Oh gosh yeah, then there’s pretending not to have been in the sun, when in fact you may have been

Liz: Yeah, which I find funny, the sort of switch from “I’ve definitely not been in the sun” to “I definitely have”. There’s places advertising “come on our sunbeds for your pre-holiday tan”, because you can’t go on your tropical holiday without a tan, you need one when you get there

Hazel: Yeah, when you think about it, it’s

Liz: Being able to travel to sunny places has flipped the status symbol thing

Hazel: And it’s been quite a fast flip, actually, to the point that we’re still…in some places you can go into the supermarket and they’ll have tanning products next to the skin lightening products and you’re like, ok

Liz: Oh yeah, when you get into colourism as well, it’s like a whole extra thing

Hazel: Oh yeah

Liz: Between colourism, racism, classism, there’s this general idea that there’s this one specific colour you’re supposed to be, but not if it’s your natural skin tone

(crosstalk)

Hazel: I mean, that’s an interesting one, and I suppose that’s getting more into the realm of social commentary, but

Liz: Yeah. And also we’re both white, so I don’t want to…this is someone else’s rant to do

Hazel: But certainly if anyone’s interested in doing that, there’s an interesting historical episode to be made on “fashionable skin colour” throughout history

Liz: Oh yeah, if this is something that you know about, or you know someone who knows about, get in touch with us, honestly

Hazel: Do you want to hear about bears?

Liz: I do want to hear about bears

Hazel: So this is a local larder

Liz: Are people eating bears?

Hazel: Yes, people are in fact eating bears, and have been for a long time

Liz: Ok

Hazel: Yeah. So, I was a bit stumped for a local larder this week, so thought that I would have a flick through our good friend Alexandre Dumas, and his “From Absinthe to Zest: An Alphabet for Food Lovers”

Liz: Did an episode on that right?

Hazel: And he did not let me down. We did do an episode on that. I forgot what number it was, but

Liz: Let me check

Hazel: We did do an episode on Alexandre Dumas, who was famously a food lover, and wrote this whole dictionary of food

Liz: He was episode 10!

Hazel: Episode 10! Oh my goodness, was that our second person episode? Or was that our first?

Liz: It was our first person episode, because the…episode 5 was The Forme of Cury, he was our first bio

Hazel: Wow. Aww he was our first man

Liz: A year ago

Hazel: Our first dude, ok

Liz: We love and support Alexandre Dumas

Hazel: We do, we do. I mean, he’s kind of insufferable sometimes, but I love him. So, there is an entry of bear in this food dictionary, and this is gonna lead onto the actual regional food that I’m gonna talk about, but I just wanted to read out what he says under “Bear”, because it’s amazing. “There are few people of our generation who do not recall the sensation caused by the first installment of my Impressions de Voyages, when people read the article entitled ‘Bear Steak’”, so, you know, being totally modest about his book here. “There was a universal outcry against the audacious narrator, who dared to say that there were places in civilised Europe where bear is eaten”

Liz: Oh dear

Hazel: “I could, at that time, have given to readers the advice which I give them today, but I took good care not to. There was a big commotion about the book, and since, at that time, I was just embarking on a literary career, I could ask for nothing better.” Our boy knows how it’s done

Liz: He does. You’ve got to play the game

Hazel: “But, to my great astonishment, the person who should have been most pleased by the uproar, the innkeeper De Martineau” - he wrote he’d eaten bear at this guy’s place - “was furious. He wrote to upbraid me. He wrote to the newspapers to get them to state in his name that he had never served bear to his travellers, but his fury kept increasing as each traveller asked him as his first question ‘do you have any bear?’” I love the fact that Dumas told this story in his book, and now this poor innkeeper’s just getting tourists coming in being like “do you have any bear? I want to try the bear? Have you got any bear?”

Liz: I don’t blame them, I think I would as well

Hazel: Yeah, although Dumas goes on to say “if this stupid man had thought to answer ‘yes’ and then served ass, horsemeat, or mule instead of bear, he would have made a fortune”, which is true!

Liz: This is why we love and support you

Hazel: Absolutely. “Since that time, we have become more civilised. Bear hams have been a dish which one doesn’t meet in every salted provision dealer’s premises, but which one can find without too much difficulty”. And he gives a recipe that he says comes from Monsieur Urbane Du Bois, the cook of Their Majesties of Prussia, for the way in which you can serve bear feet, and I looked into this guy, and in the late 19th century he was the cook for the King of Prussia, and he was also previously to that the cook of a Russian ambassador, so presumably that was where he learned this recipe, I dunno. So, “here, according to Monsieur Urbane Du Bois, the cook of Their Majesties of Prussia, is the way that these feet are served in Moscow, St Petersburg, and throughout all of Russia. The paws are served skinned. One started by washing them, salting them, and putting them in a terrine, and covering them in a marinade cooked with vinegar, in which they are allowed to sit for two or three days. Then line a casserole with bacon and ham trimmings and chopped vegetables, lay the bears’ feet on the vegetables and cover with the marinade, some bouillon and some bards of bacon. Let them cook some seven or eight hours on a very low flame, adding liquid as it reduces. When the paws are cooked, leave them in the liquid until they are nearly cold. They should then be drained and wiped, divided lengthwise in four, sprinkled with cayenne pepper and rolled with melted lard. Roll them with breadcrumbs, and grill them gently for half an hour, then arrange them on a platter onto which you have poured a piquant sauce.”  So this is a recipe for breaded bear legs

Liz: So you pickle them, and then you slow cook them, and then you turn them into fingers

Hazel: Kind of, essentially yeah

Liz: Bear nuggets

Hazel: Bear nuggets. So this took me on a quest to learn more about this supposed Russian bear culinary tradition, and it turns out that when you do an internet search for “bear ham” you get a lot of entries for Billy Bear ham

Liz: Oh I remember Billy Bear!

Hazel: The ham that’s shaped like a bear’s face. And people are very divided about this, apparently, some people are like “beloved childhood memory” and some people are like “if you’ve ever eaten Billy Bear ham, you don’t need to worry about what’s in the vaccine”

Liz: Aww I loved Billy Bear

Hazel: But I was, in fact, looking for information about real bear, and in turns out that it is in fact a meat that was widely eaten pretty much around the world actually, wherever there are bears, because people have been hunting things for a long time

Liz: Sure, if you’re killing it anyway

Hazel: Yeah, and bears were famously throughout history hunted for their fur, and their fat as well, which was used in creams and things

Liz: When you say creams, cosmetics do you mean?

Hazel: It was used for skin conditions

Liz: Ah, ok, weird medicines

Hazel: Yeah. But then also apparently it was quite good for…apparently it was used by some indiginous groups for protecting your skin during the winter

Liz: I guess it would probably be quite a powerful moisturiser

Hazel: Yeah. So bears being a thing that was eaten is pretty well known, there’s plenty of black bears in Russia. Dumas says that that is the kind of bear that lives in the Kamchatka region. In fact he also says “the forest and countryside of Kamchatka are full of bears who only attack when they are attacked themselves, and a peculiar thing is that they never harm women, who they nevertheless follow to steal the fruit that they are gathering.” So there you go. Bears: femisnist icons

Liz: I support the Kamchatka bears

Hazel: Me too. So this led me through a few recipes from modern hunters on how to prepare bear, the main thing being you have to be very careful if you’re preparing bear meat, it’s easy to get ill from it if you’re not

Liz: Yeah, I’ve heard that if you eat bear liver you can die of vitamin A poisoning

Hazel: Oh gosh. Ok yeah, that’s a bad one. Bears are also the leading cause of trichinosis in North America, which is a parasitic disease that used to be quite common in pigs until

Liz: Yeah, not a fan of that one

Hazel: Yeah not great. Not great. So due to improved healthcare of farm animals that’s much less common in pigs, but still pretty common in bears, and due to bears not really being a thing that is farmed, except in some cases - which isn’t great, but they’re generally a wild meat if people are eating them, so you don’t know what they have. So if you are gonna hunt a bear and eat it, which you shouldn’t do unless you know whether or not they are endangered in your area and all of that, it needs to be cooked at the right temperature to kill any potential trichinosis parasites. Anyway, I came across a recipe for pelmeni, which are a kind of

Liz: After all that, that’s quite a nice name

Hazel: It is, and they are dumplings. They are a kind of sourdough dumpling originating in the Ural regions of Siberia, but apparently they’re now really popular all across Russia and Eastern Europe

Liz: I mean, you can’t go wrong with a dumpling

Hazel: Oh you cannot, you absolutely cannot. They look a little bit like really hench tortellini

Liz: Tortelloni!

Hazel: Uh-huh. That one

Liz: Sorry, that was just me playing with Italian

Hazel: And they are traditionally made with sourdough dough and wild meats, such as moose or bear in Siberia, and yeah, they look absolutely delicious, and apparently they are. Apparently these days the commercial versions that you can find in a lot of Eastern Europe are made with just regular dough, and obviously not with wild meats or anything, but the traditional way of making it is with a fermented dough like a sourdough, or soured with whey, so you would just leave the dough a little bit and then

Liz: Are they similar to bao then, the meat in the middle and then bread around it?

Hazel: Bao are much fluffier I think. Yeah the meat is inside, but it’s more like pierogi I guess, kind of a crescent shape that’s…like a miniature pasty that’s then pulled ‘round into a circle

Liz: I get you

Hazel: Yeah. They also have onions and things inside, and apparently they are delicious. And I have to say, I kind of want to try making these, probably not with bear, ‘cause I feel like that’s kind of difficult to get

Liz: I kind of feel like on our youtube at some point we should just do a dumpling round-up

Hazel: Oh yes, dumplings are a whole episode. Every culture has its dumpling and all of them, without exception are delicious. I haven’t even tried all of them, and I can confidently say that because a dumpling is a dumpling

Liz: Tell you what, 50 patron goal, I’m making it official, 50 patrons, we make a bunch of dumplings from around the world

Hazel: Yes! Ok, I’m looking forward to that already. So, yeah, that’s pretty much it for my local larder: the pelmeni. The Russian bear dumpling. And I’m going to put a link to this recipe that I found, if anybody is interested in trying to make those at home. Apparently, obviously, you can use a different meat. But an interesting thing was, apparently it definitely matters as well what the bear has been eating, because if the bear has been mainly feeding on fish then apparently it tastes awful, so there you go

Liz: You want a vegan bear?

Hazel: I guess? I doubt that anyone listening to this is ever going to hunt a bear, but just in case you do, there’s some advice

Liz: Sure

Hazel: However, I am definitely going to try these dumplings. So yeah, there you go, a very winding and…we took the long road to dumplings, but we got there

Liz: Well you had to bring in friend of the show Alexandre Dumas

Hazel: I did, absolutely. I needed to give you his take on it, because it is glorious

Liz: So if you want to get us one step closer to our big dumpling adventure, you can visit patreon.com/breadandthread, where you can get access to a discord server where we talk about food and crafts, and monthly recipes, written by me, our most recent one was a blueberry cheesecake sundae, which I made for some friends who came ‘round a couple of years ago, and it went down very well

Hazel: I’m not surprised. Oh gosh, sorry, I got distracted by sundaes. We also have a twitter, @BreadandThread, where you can find teasers of upcoming episodes, and links to things that we talk about on the podcast, and we have a youtube channel, that is also called Bread and Thread, which has our episodes but on youtube, and also a video on soapmaking

Liz: Yeah, I put up a video of me making tallow soap. There will also be other videos soon

Hazel: Yeah, I did actually make a video of looking inside the Encyclopedia of Needlework, which I put on my own youtube, but I don’t know if it’s worth putting on Bread and Thread as well?

Liz: I think that’d be good

Hazel: Ok, yeah, what else do we have?

Liz: We have a tumblr, which is also BreadandThread

Hazel: Oh yeah

Liz: Which has pretty much the same stuff as the twitter, but, you know, tumblr

Hazel: We’re just covering all our bases

Liz: And yeah, if you want to suggest an episode, or tell us about if you’ve eaten bear meat, or just tell us about your favourite dumpling, so we can make a list

Hazel: Please tell us about the dumplings

Liz: Either message us on one of those or email breadandthreadpodcast@gmail.com. And we will be back in a couple of weeks