Did you know...
Billie Holiday’s famous, haunting song Strange Fruit was about lynchings in America’s Deep South? (I had no idea…) According to David Margolick’s book, Strange Fruit (Harper Collins, 2001) Holliday first sang Strange Fruit at Cafe Society in New York. Extraordinary YouTube video of Holiday singing the song here and lyrics here:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
“There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished,' she later wrote in her autobiography. 'Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.' The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as Strange Fruit became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform."
Did you know...
Coffee seems to have been a Yemeni invention, according to Tom Standage in his A History of the World in Six Glasses (Walker, 2005):
"The custom of drinking coffee seems to have first become popular in Yemen in the mid-15th century. While coffee berries may have been chewed for their invigorating effects before this date, the practice of making them into a drink seems to be a Yemeni innovation, often attributed to Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a scholar and member of the mystical Sufi order of Islam, who died around 1470. By this time, coffee had undoubtedly been adopted by Sufis who used it to ward off sleep during nocturnal religious ceremonies in which participants reached out to God through repetitive chanting and swaying.
"Coffee shook off its original religious associations and became a social drink, sold by the cup on the street, in the market square, and then in dedicated coffeehouses. It was embraced as a legal alternative to alcohol by many Muslims. Coffeehouses, unlike the illicit taverns that sold alcohol, were places where respectable people could afford to be seen. But coffee's legal status was ambiguous. Some Muslim scholars objected that it was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same prohibition as wine and other alcoholic drinks, which the prophet Muhammad had prohibited. ... [A ban against coffee was therefore enacted by a local governor, Kha'ir Beg, and] was proclaimed throughout Mecca, coffee was seized and burned in the streets, and coffee vendors and some of their customers were beaten as punishment. Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha'ir Beg's ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again ... [since] coffee clearly failed to produce any intoxicating effects in the drinker ... [and] in fact, it did quite the opposite. ...
"By the early seventeenth century, visiting Europeans were commenting on the widespread popularity of coffeehouses in the Arab world, and their role as meeting places and sources of news. ... They were also popular venues for chess and backgammon, which were regarded as morally dubious. ... George Sandys, an English traveler who visited Egypt and Palestine in 1610, observed that 'although they be destitute of Taverns, yet they have their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There they sit chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drink called Coffa in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.' "
Did you know...
A spice is not an herb … “herbs are leafy, whereas spices are obtained from other parts of the plant: bark, root, flower bud, gums and resins, seed, fruit, or stigma,” writes Jack Turner in Spice: The History of Temptation (Vintage, 2005).
“Herbs tend to grow in temperate climates, spices in the tropics. Historically, the implication was that a spice was far less readily obtainable than an herb--and far more expensive. ...
"Chemically, the qualities that make a spice a spice are its rare essential oils and oleoresins, highly volatile compounds that impart to spices their flavor, aroma, and preservative properties…
Briefly, the chemistry of spices — what in the final analysis makes a spice a spice — is, in evolutionary terms, what quills are to the porcupine or the shell to the tortoise. In its natural state cinnamon is an elegant form of armor; the seductive aroma of nutmeg is, to certain insects, a bundle of toxins. The elemental irony of their history is that the attractiveness of spices is (from the plant's perspective) a form of Darwinian backfiring. What makes a spice so appealing to humans is, to other members of the animal kingdom, repulsive.
"By any measure the most exceptional of the spices, and far and away the most historically significant, is pepper. The spice is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a perennial climbing vine native to India's Malabar Coast. ... Black pepper, the most popular variety, is picked while unripe. ... White pepper is the same fruit left longer on the vine."
Did you know:
“The Indians introduced the colonists not only to new foods, but to more interesting ways of preparing them,” according to Bill Bryson in Made in America Made in America (Perennial, 1995).
“Succotash, clam chowder, hominy, corn pone, cranberry sauce, johnny cakes, even Boston-baked beans and Brunswick stew were all Indian dishes. In Virginia, it was the Indians, not the white settlers, who invented the Smithfield ham. Even with the constant advice and intervention of the Indians, the Puritans stuck to a diet that was for the most part resolutely bland. Meat and vegetables were boiled without pity, deprived of seasonings, and served lukewarm. Peas, once they got the hang of growing them, were eaten at almost every meal, and often served cold. The principal repast was taken at midday and called dinner. Supper, a word related to soup, was often just that — a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread — and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, snack meant the bite of a dog. ...
"By the time of the Revolution, the main meal was taken between 2 and 4 p.m. A typical meal might consist of salted beef with potatoes and peas, followed by baked or fried eggs, fish, and salad, with a variety of sweets, puddings, cheeses, and pastries to finish, all washed down with quantities of alcohol that would leave most of us today unable to rise from the table — or at least rise and stay risen. Meat was consumed in quantities that left European observers slack-jawed with astonishment. By the early 1800s the average American was eating almost 180 pounds of meat a year, 48 pounds more than people would consume a century later, but fresh meat remained largely unknown because of the difficulty keeping it fresh. Even city people often had chickens in the yard and a hog or two left to scavenge in the street. Until well into the nineteenth century, visitors to New York remarked on the hazard to traffic presented by wandering hogs along Broadway. Even in the more temperate North, beef and pork would go bad in a day in summer, chicken even quicker, and milk would curdle in as little as an hour. And even among the better classes, spoiled food was a daily hazard. One guest at a dinner party given by the Washingtons noted with a certain vicious relish that the General discreetly pushed his plate of sherry trifle to one side when he discovered that the cream was distinctly iffy but that the less discerning Martha continued shoveling it in with gusto. Ice cream was a safer operation. It was first mentioned in America in the 1740s when a guest at a banquet given by the governor of Maryland wrote about this novelty, which, he noted, 'eat most deliciously.' "
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