Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Move over, Charles Adams.
Speaker 1: I have a new history crush, and it's Alexei say Hey.
Speaker 1: I love everything about him, everything about him. I love
Speaker 1: that he woke up with no pants on and became
Speaker 1: save us for it listen. He seems like he was
Speaker 1: very fun. Yeah. I love that he, whether this is
Speaker 1: really where it starts or not, that he set up
Speaker 1: a lot of the early chef tropes right like you have. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, he could have written Kitchen Confidential, but it
Speaker 1: would have probably been less edgy and just more fun.
Speaker 1: I was thinking that as I was reading it. Maybe
Speaker 1: not that exact thing, but I was like these seven
Speaker 1: or eight things that I've that like, this all sounds
Speaker 1: like the stories we hear of kitchens and a particular
Speaker 1: variety of chef today. I love that he, if the
Speaker 1: story is true, was so ridiculously charming that with people
Speaker 1: brandishing guns at him, he not only got out of it,
Speaker 1: but they were all in love with him. But I
Speaker 1: also want to talk about his wife though, because Emma,
Speaker 1: while they were only married for five years. It sounds
Speaker 1: like she was really his perfect match and was herself
Speaker 1: very funny. She at one point, there's a story that
Speaker 1: she went to visit him at the Reform Club and
Speaker 1: waited in his office and he was busy in the kitchen,
Speaker 1: and she waited for an hour, and then she had
Speaker 1: had it and she left. But on her way out,
Speaker 1: she told one of the members of the staff, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I left my calling card in his office. And what
Speaker 1: she had actually done was taken out her crayons and
Speaker 1: drawn a portrait of herself in the office on the wall.
Speaker 1: Alexie loved it so much that he just put glass
Speaker 1: over it in a frame and like kept it there
Speaker 1: for the remainder of his time at the club, which
Speaker 1: I think is so charming. Um. She also is really interesting.
Speaker 1: There's not a ton of information about her enough to
Speaker 1: make an episode, but she, even when she was very
Speaker 1: very young, was already doing abolitionist paintings UM, and was
Speaker 1: one of those people that was doing portraiture of enslaved
Speaker 1: people to try to convey their humanity to white people
Speaker 1: that did not get it. UM. So she was just
Speaker 1: in and of herself a fascinating person, and the fact
Speaker 1: that that was his choice of like, this is the
Speaker 1: one for me kind of cements him as great in
Speaker 1: my book. Um, that tulip story. I love the tulip story.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about the tulip story. That is
Speaker 1: some cute business. That's very cute. It's so sweet, and
Speaker 1: I think also is a good insight into their like
Speaker 1: ridiculous cuteness. Yeah, he was known throughout his life as
Speaker 1: a practical joker, which I think is why she thought
Speaker 1: it would be funny, and he did too, to draw
Speaker 1: on his office walls. Um. There was a story I
Speaker 1: didn't include in this episode about when he was in
Speaker 1: Crimea and he was traveling with a colleague and they
Speaker 1: were at a Russian camp that had been abandoned, and
Speaker 1: they decided, kind of on a dare, that they would
Speaker 1: try some of the bread that they found their left over.
Speaker 1: And they had each taken a bite and Alexei said, oh, no,
Speaker 1: it's poison, and his colleague freaked out at Alexei was
Speaker 1: laughing because it was not poison. He was just being
Speaker 1: a jerk, but he was a hardcore practical joker. Is
Speaker 1: really funny. One of the books that I used for research,
Speaker 1: which is that when we referenced by Ruth Brandon called
Speaker 1: The People's Chef. She does a really interesting approach to
Speaker 1: his biography where she includes, like each of the chapters
Speaker 1: is themed to a course of a meal, and she
Speaker 1: includes at least one recipe of his as part of it,
Speaker 1: and like an entree into talking about like that phase
Speaker 1: of his life. And she apparently made the Famine soup
Speaker 1: and she did not love it because sounds tasty to me.
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like a good, solid soup recipe, right,
Speaker 1: It doesn't sound fancy, but I could see that being
Speaker 1: super yummy. Um, apparently she didn't find it. Mummy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's got a lot of things in it that I
Speaker 1: feel like would work well together. And um, I do
Speaker 1: love a barley soup. I have a I haven't made
Speaker 1: it in a long time because as I've gotten older,
Speaker 1: it's ingredients don't and just agree with my digestion so
Speaker 1: much anymore. But like a mushroom and barley soup that
Speaker 1: has like a really hearty flavor to it. It reminded
Speaker 1: me a bit of that, even though it was based
Speaker 1: on drippings and cut beef. I mean, I will send
Speaker 1: you the recipe and you can alter it and try
Speaker 1: it if you want. There's an interesting side road to
Speaker 1: go down here that isn't Again, it's not something that
Speaker 1: got explored a lot, but in his writings about his
Speaker 1: time in Ireland, it seems clear that he felt like
Speaker 1: things were a little upside down there, not maybe in
Speaker 1: the ways you're thinking, Like he was like, why are
Speaker 1: these people using fish a protein source just as fertilizer
Speaker 1: for potatoes when they could eat the fish and have
Speaker 1: better nutrition, Like why won't they let me teach them
Speaker 1: how to prep even what they think are mediocre fish
Speaker 1: to actually be tasty and good. Like he was definitely
Speaker 1: having some struggles around how that was all working. But
Speaker 1: of course there's that bigger issue of like people being
Speaker 1: trapped in the cycle of needing to produce potatoes to
Speaker 1: be shipped away to other countries or they would lose everything,
Speaker 1: Like there are there are bigger things in play than
Speaker 1: what he could necessarily see. Yeah, yeah, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of it's been so long since we did those
Speaker 1: episodes that I haven't really listened to them to see
Speaker 1: how they hold up. But we have a two part
Speaker 1: on the famine, and there was so much stuff that
Speaker 1: was going on. It was like people were sustaining themselves
Speaker 1: on potatoes because that was what gave them enough time
Speaker 1: to grow the other crops that were required for exports.
Speaker 1: And then during the famine, even though people were starving
Speaker 1: to death, were not permitted to keep any of those
Speaker 1: crops for themselves. Right, So yeah, there's a whole much
Speaker 1: bigger social and political and economic layer to that. Then
Speaker 1: why are they using the fish as spartalizer? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: also love that he was super inventive. There was another
Speaker 1: story that I read about him very late in his
Speaker 1: life which kind of made me adore him all the
Speaker 1: more where he was just he was so no nonsense,
Speaker 1: Like apparently he had been riding a horse to visit
Speaker 1: a friend and he got sort of throne, but his
Speaker 1: foot was still stuck in the stirrup and he got
Speaker 1: dragged for a while, and like he wasn't old. He
Speaker 1: was in his fifth ease at that point. But when
Speaker 1: the horse stopped and he got free, he wasn't like, oh,
Speaker 1: I just got dragged by a horse. I'm going home.
Speaker 1: He was like, let me just straighten my suit because
Speaker 1: I still have a lunch appointment. Went Okay, I I
Speaker 1: have an affinity for him now because one time some
Speaker 1: years ago I was going to some kind of like
Speaker 1: continuing education training workshop kind of thing that I don't
Speaker 1: even remember what the topic was of now, because I
Speaker 1: was walking from the Marta station to where the class
Speaker 1: is happening in Atlanta, which is a place that is
Speaker 1: often not pedestrian friendly, and there was no sidewalk where
Speaker 1: I was. I was walking on the shoulder of the
Speaker 1: road of a big road to a road that by
Speaker 1: all rights should have more sidewalks, fewer car lanes. Um.
Speaker 1: And I stepped into a hole in full view of
Speaker 1: this line of cars and just fell and all of
Speaker 1: my stuff went flying. Um. And I picked myself up
Speaker 1: and brushed myself off and continued walking the rest of
Speaker 1: the way to my workshop and like tidied myself up
Speaker 1: in the bathroom when I got there, and like went on,
Speaker 1: it became clear I was seriously injured, not the correct
Speaker 1: course of actions that have done. Um. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: not that seriously injured. It was all fine. I was
Speaker 1: fine eventually. But yeah, I love him so much. I
Speaker 1: loved researching him. There are also we didn't it didn't
Speaker 1: come up in the episode because it's it's weird and
Speaker 1: it's hard to know what's going on. There was a
Speaker 1: thing that happened very late in his life, and some
Speaker 1: accounts suggests that his illness had made him not entirely himself,
Speaker 1: like he was doing some uncharacteristic things and engaging in
Speaker 1: some behaviors that didn't always make sense. But he apparently
Speaker 1: wrote Florence Nightingale not exactly a love letter, but very
Speaker 1: much a very flowery admiration letter that could be interpreted
Speaker 1: that way after he had gotten back. And there are
Speaker 1: people that are like, was he in love with Florence Nightingale? Maybe?
Speaker 1: I mean they went through a lot together, truthfully, like
Speaker 1: they were in some dire situations, but um unclear. He
Speaker 1: really was all for all for Emma his whole life,
Speaker 1: even though he was pretty infatuated with Fanny Crito. I
Speaker 1: think yeah, I mean, it was Emma for him, for
Speaker 1: him forever, Tulips and his The most famous portraits you
Speaker 1: will see of him are ones that that his wife made,
Speaker 1: and they're beautiful. She really was like an extraordinary portraitist.
Speaker 1: Um So I love the idea that, even though I
Speaker 1: hate that she died so young, I love the idea
Speaker 1: that for five years they were like the cool it
Speaker 1: couple of you know, she with her French chef husband
Speaker 1: and he with his cool art wife. Like who wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to hang out with them? I do, I do
Speaker 1: build the time machine. I'm ready for a visit. He
Speaker 1: talked about Marcater projections on the show this week. We
Speaker 1: sure did. I am guessing that you grew up like
Speaker 1: I did seeing Mercater projection maps hanging on the wall
Speaker 1: in school with a gigantic greenland. We didn't specifically say
Speaker 1: this in the podcast, but like, the most accurate way
Speaker 1: to see what the world looks like is a globe,
Speaker 1: A well made globe, A well made, accurate globe, because
Speaker 1: the globe is roughly spherical in the Earth is roughly spherical,
Speaker 1: and that's going to be the most accurate way to
Speaker 1: do it. When I was a child, our public library
Speaker 1: had a gigantic globe. It was like I remember it
Speaker 1: being bigger than like taller than we were, like we
Speaker 1: had to reach way up. And then it also had
Speaker 1: some relief elements to it, so like the Himalayas were
Speaker 1: on there that you could just physically touch, and man,
Speaker 1: we loved that global lot. I love a good globe. Surely,
Speaker 1: surely they do not have that same globe forty years later.
Speaker 1: It would be wildly out of date in terms of countries.
Speaker 1: Now many things are very different since then. But man,
Speaker 1: I love that globe. But yeah, if I try to
Speaker 1: call up a flat map image of the world in
Speaker 1: my head, I definitely see a Mercator projection. I remember
Speaker 1: as a child, I had a particularly good in um
Speaker 1: like middle school or what some people would call junior high,
Speaker 1: like the low end of that early middle school. I
Speaker 1: had a particularly good social studies teacher, and she was
Speaker 1: very clear, like, this map has messed up, you guys,
Speaker 1: but it's what we have. And she would try to
Speaker 1: show us other maps and how they had worked. But
Speaker 1: I was a staunch defender of Mercater for the stupidest reason.
Speaker 1: Oh tell me why, which is that even as a child,
Speaker 1: I was like, yes, but when I look at those
Speaker 1: other maps, there's dead space, and this is more aesthetically pleasing,
Speaker 1: although I did not know the word aesthetically yet. I
Speaker 1: was just like, I don't want a map where there's
Speaker 1: circles and weirdness and left out parts that aren't printed.
Speaker 1: What a dangling reason to be obsessed with the map.
Speaker 1: But maybe one day I will have mercater printed on
Speaker 1: fabric and I will make a skirt out of it
Speaker 1: that will be wrong, wrong, wrong, That would be fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had a similar I feel like this is probably
Speaker 1: closer to high school, uh, sort of the lesson about
Speaker 1: different map projections and sort of comparing the pros and
Speaker 1: cons of different ones. And there was one that we
Speaker 1: did not talk about, but it was one that had
Speaker 1: sort of like cutouts, so like if you like blow
Speaker 1: up a balloon of the earth and then cut pieces
Speaker 1: so it will lay flatter. We had some like did
Speaker 1: you have to do the craft where you cut those
Speaker 1: out and taped it together to make a little globe.
Speaker 1: I don't think we did that, but we did do
Speaker 1: drawing on the balloon and then stretching out the balloon
Speaker 1: in different ways. Oh, we did a little little papercraft.
Speaker 1: It was I also remember um a television show, probably
Speaker 1: something like Mr. Wizard's World that was very similarly maps
Speaker 1: versus globes and mercater projection versus other stuff and stretching
Speaker 1: out balloons. One of the explanations I found in doing
Speaker 1: research of like here's how to visualize with the Mercater
Speaker 1: projection was like was like, take a cylinder, blow up
Speaker 1: a balloon and draw the world on it, and then
Speaker 1: put that balloon inside the cylinder and keep inflating it
Speaker 1: until it has totally filled the inside of the cylinder.
Speaker 1: And like that's approximately a cylindrical projection of the world's
Speaker 1: Like that sounds like a fun craft time to do
Speaker 1: with somebody's children. Uh, do you ever have that moment
Speaker 1: when you're we're working on one of these episodes and
Speaker 1: your brain clicks together pieces of history that you didn't
Speaker 1: realize had lined up so closely. Sometimes so in this case,
Speaker 1: it actually is about a person you referenced in your research,
Speaker 1: which is Thomas Harriet. Like I was thinking about how
Speaker 1: Mercator did his work in the sixteenth century, I in
Speaker 1: my head would have put that later because we were
Speaker 1: If I weren't, like, you know, looking it up, I
Speaker 1: would have just intuited it that it happened more like
Speaker 1: seventeenth century, because I remember that, you know, Thomas Harriet
Speaker 1: and Galileo were first looking through a telescope at the
Speaker 1: moon in the early sixteen teens, and so to me
Speaker 1: that had to have come first like the world of
Speaker 1: astronomy and how it might impact maps. Seems like it
Speaker 1: must be different, particularly considering that we're still using that
Speaker 1: map or we were into the century when you and
Speaker 1: I were in school, and that just it's one of
Speaker 1: those weird things where I was like, that is not
Speaker 1: what I thought what was going on concurrently, and it
Speaker 1: makes me think about Thomas Harriet's work. As you recall,
Speaker 1: I have a map that he drew tattooed on my person,
Speaker 1: which is his first map of the Moon, and knowing
Speaker 1: that he was also sorting this stuff out but then
Speaker 1: was drawing very flat maps of you know, the Moon
Speaker 1: because it only looked like a disk to him at
Speaker 1: that point, like he knew it was it was spherical,
Speaker 1: but all he could see through a telescope was like
Speaker 1: the flat image. And so I wonder if he took
Speaker 1: any of that into consideration when he was sketching out
Speaker 1: his first maps of the Moon, and I good question.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know. We've
Speaker 1: talked about so many things on the podcast over the
Speaker 1: last many years that when his name came up in
Speaker 1: the research, I think I told you this story, like
Speaker 1: I just had like a disconnect where my brain was
Speaker 1: not recalling who that was, and so I was like, Hi, this,
Speaker 1: why does this name ring a bell? I keep wanting
Speaker 1: to think he's the person who like was the a veterinarian.
Speaker 1: That's not right at all. Oh yeah, Like then it
Speaker 1: all came together. This has been on It had been
Speaker 1: on my on my list of things to do for
Speaker 1: an episode for a while because it had come up
Speaker 1: in some previous research, and I was like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get back to that at some point. Um. And there
Speaker 1: is a web comic called x K c D that
Speaker 1: occasionally has a bad map projections as the topic, and
Speaker 1: there was recently a it was I think a Mercater projection,
Speaker 1: but with the focus being somewhere else on the map,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, yeah, a Mercater projection. I
Speaker 1: should circle back around to that. And then I researched
Speaker 1: and wrote most of it before we went to Italy
Speaker 1: and picked back up after we got back from Italy,
Speaker 1: and I was like, wow, I don't remember any of
Speaker 1: this because I've been gone for almost two weeks. Maps.
Speaker 1: It also made me it drew my attention to various
Speaker 1: maps that we saw while in Italy, like there were
Speaker 1: some fascinating maps we saw in the Vatican City museums.
Speaker 1: And then also while I was on the plane, and
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes on the plane there's a screen where
Speaker 1: you can pull up a map of where you are.
Speaker 1: I kept looking at it and being like, is this
Speaker 1: a mericater projection? Because Greenland looks really big, but not
Speaker 1: as big as I expected to on a ricater projection. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that's the thing we didn't really talk about.
Speaker 1: It's inherently understood, but like if you're trying to put
Speaker 1: what's going on on a globe on a flat map,
Speaker 1: Like I said, we didn't explicitly state this, but we
Speaker 1: we certainly talked about it. You have to give in
Speaker 1: some area and be like, well, this isn't gonna be right,
Speaker 1: but it's which is why it gets to that thing
Speaker 1: of like, yes, but which is closest and what are
Speaker 1: your criteria for closeness? You know, which wrong thing is
Speaker 1: acceptable to you? In this context, more incorrect ocean versus
Speaker 1: more incorrect land mask, there's a concession has to be made,
Speaker 1: at least one often more so. It's tricky. This is
Speaker 1: how it works when you're trying to make something that
Speaker 1: is roughly spherical into something flat. So yeah, I saw
Speaker 1: a number of very angry forum threads and whatnot about
Speaker 1: people fiercely defending their Mercator projection because all maps are distorted,
Speaker 1: and I was like, yes, but there are better options
Speaker 1: for teaching children with the world looks like, most of
Speaker 1: which are in use now, but we're not when Holly
Speaker 1: and I were children. Well, and I think there's a
Speaker 1: weird thing. And I don't know why this is, Like
Speaker 1: people get attached to a thing and they think if
Speaker 1: you say yes, but that's not as accurate as it
Speaker 1: could be, Like you're somehow trying to in the map
Speaker 1: maker or the map and like he did great for
Speaker 1: the information he had at the time. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: if you want an accurate thing, that's not the best. Still,
Speaker 1: it was a useful map for a particular reason, and
Speaker 1: that reason was just not hanging on the wall in
Speaker 1: a third grade classroom. So anyway, maybe we'll have some
Speaker 1: other map something at some point in the future. Whatever
Speaker 1: is on your your plate this weekend, I hope it
Speaker 1: goes well. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow
Speaker 1: and then some brand new episodes next week. Stuff you
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
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