Happy Birthday to Us: Gastropod Turns Five

Support for this episode comes in part from Vitamix.

Quick kitchen history lesson.

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My favorite episode is probably the one on saffron.

Second favorite, analyzing cheese microbes.

Drink.

Hi, this is Bill from New York City.

If I had to pick just one of the many excellent episodes, I'd pick the one on locks and bagels.

I've grown up with this food for over 50 years, but I had no idea of the history.

The episode about cocktails is my favorite.

I use the facts from that, especially that pinch of salt, every time that I mix one up.

And when I recommend y'all to people, I tell them they absolutely have to listen to this episode.

The Golden Spoon captured my attention and interest like no other premiere episode of a podcast ever has before or since.

We asked you to tell us your favorite episodes because as you all know by now, it's our fifth birthday and we're celebrating.

All those years ago when we released our very first episode, who could have dreamed we'd reach the grand old age of five?

I'm fairly sure there's no chance you even imagined this when you sent me that email suggesting we join forces, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yes, this is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, and I am still Cynthia Graeber.

Five years older, wiser, and all around better, but yes, I too am still Nicola Twilly.

And this episode is our fifth birthday bonanza, and it is filled with birthday treats.

Many of you voted for your favorite episodes or stories or weird facts, and we have the results.

We're going to take a jaunt through the past five years.

We'll be revisiting some of your and our favorite moments on the show.

But although this is a birthday, not a wedding, we wouldn't bring you something old without something new, so we've also got something special on the menu.

Specifically, birthday cake.

Cake history and science, that is.

But before we put our party hats on, we have a hat for you.

i'm actually not kidding we have awesome new merch you've asked for it now that we're five we've finally got it we have four items for our fifth birthday it's not that we can't count but we're just dipping our toes in the world of swag but i want all four we have a t-shirt of course but not just one t-shirt we have a unisex and a really cool slouchy scoop neck and a more feminine cut and they are both green and have our logo and I will basically only be wearing that from now on.

We also have a lime green stainless steel water bottle with our name and logo and super cute drawings of lots of different kinds of food.

And we have a green hat, a beanie really, with just our logo.

That one will actually only be available in a couple of weeks.

I love them both.

And we built a new page on our website, gastropod.com, so you can see them and buy them too.

It's at gastropod.com/slash shop or you can find it under the About tab on our homepage.

Six years ago, something very, very important happened to me.

I met Cynthia Graper.

It was important to me too, though I had no idea at the time.

We were two of the six fellows, old lady fellows, as it happens, in the very first year of the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship, run by Michael Pollen and Malia Wallen.

It probably won't surprise any of you listeners to know that Nikki and I got along well pretty quickly.

And so we stayed in touch, and then one fateful day in May 2014, I was having a complete catastrophe of a morning when I got an email from Cynthia.

So So to back up a bit on my end, I'd been working in audio for a while and I was ready to set out on my own.

So I had this idea that would combine three things I was obsessed with, and unsurprisingly, those three things are food, science, and history.

I wanted to start a new podcast.

I wrote up my idea as a proposal, and then I wanted to distract Nikki from her catastrophic morning, so I sent this idea for a new podcast to her in an email.

I had gone to the gym to vent my rage about all the disasters that had befallen me since getting out of bed.

And I got Cynthia's email and I was like, how on god's green earth do you think you can make a show like this which has my name stamped all over it without me?

At the time, I had a blog all about food and history and science, so I was like, hello.

Well, obviously, that's why I wanted your input.

I had no idea you'd be interested in ever doing it with me.

I mean, in addition to that popular blog, you had a full-time job.

But not for much longer.

Anyway, long story short, with all the force of my rage-filled morning, I emailed Cynthia and was like, this is fine, but you need a co-host and it needs to be me.

Which, frankly, I thought was a totally fantastic idea.

And so Gastropod was born.

Well, not quite.

We had a lot of work to do for us to get ready to launch the show in September that year.

But we did it.

And you know, when we decided to celebrate our five-year anniversary by asking you all to vote for your favorite episode, pretty much every single episode we've ever made got at least one vote, which was a relief.

I would have been sad if some of my babies were left out.

But this episode, we are going to reveal your top 10 favorites.

10, 9, 8.

The first clip we're playing today from your top 10 picks is from our very first episode.

Apparently, we started with a bang.

There were so many things in that first episode that blew my mind as we were reporting them, and I couldn't wait for all of you to hear the stories.

Like this bit about how the fork is such a recent invention.

And the fork, when it first was introduced into Europe, in most places, was seen as this bizarre, weird,

slightly fetishistic device.

Why would you want to put metal prongs into your mouth along with the food?

It just didn't seem like a natural way to eat, except in Italy, the reason being pasta.

The Italians were far quicker to adopt forks than any other European country.

And they started off with these single-pronged devices called puntavrole.

And then they figured out that if one prong was very good for eating noodles with, then two prongs would be better and three might be better still.

But it took centuries after the Italians for people in England or France to see the need of forks.

That, of course, is Bea Wilson, one of our favourite food writers.

She's been back on Gastropod lots of times since.

But the other piece that blew people's minds was about what those forks and spoons and knives were made of.

In the episode, we spoke with materials scientist Zoe Laughlin.

Here's the clip where she describes her research.

She studied how different materials like tin and copper affected the taste of food.

For me, the non-taste of the gold spoon

is just sort of divine.

And it's got this ever such a slight sweetness to it, or maybe it's just, it reveals your own mouth chemistry as slightly sweet, but there's something about it that's just incredibly delicious and makes everything you eat feel more delicious because you're, you know, you've never tasted mango sauber until you've eaten it off a gold spoon.

That's what it was like.

That was the moment when I thought,

I can't believe I'm ever going to eat off anything ever again other than gold.

But sadly, I do.

I sadly am not the proud owner of a gold spoon, but I'd like to focus on the mango side of that equation.

We did an entire episode about mangoes.

I am still dreaming about some of the ones we tasted in Florida that I may never get to eat again.

I love mangoes, and I was crushed to learn that since I'm an American, I've never actually had a good one.

Yep, we made an entire episode about mangoes, including Harley-Davidson's and George W.

Bush, and we did another entire episode about ice cream.

Some of you wrote in to say how much you loved those episodes, and some some had other favorites.

I love the episode on David Fairchild.

I found myself thinking about it and talking to others about it for weeks and I still wonder what other agriculture could be grown in the U.S.

if the seeds and fruit hadn't perished at sea.

What is Native American cuisine?

Your episode dealt with the horrors and dualities of colonization with great care and tenderness.

The Pawpaw episode.

I grew up in California, having never heard of pawpaws, then moved to Pennsylvania, where the fruit was talked about in a sort of fairy tale mystical way.

The episode made me feel closer to my new home and it got me thinking about and appreciating fruits and vegetables native to North America.

It's also the episode that I used to get my PhD advisor hooked on Gastropod.

He is very proud of his two pawpaw trees.

Also, we study slugs, so he gets a kick out of the podcast name.

The pawpaw episode was another one that made it into your top 10.

And it was another big moment in our relationship, Cynthia.

We went through one of life's great milestones together.

Let's revisit that moment.

Uh-huh.

We're about to lose our pawpaw virginity.

I'm very excited.

Chris burst our bubble before the grand defling.

Well, no, you're not.

This is frozen pulp, which is not the same as because of the delicate sugars in the pawpaw.

You know, there's really

no substitute for the fresh pawpaw.

But this is all we got right now.

Go ahead.

Okay, here we go.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Are you ready?

I love that we're going through this milestone together.

This is a big deal.

Yeah.

Okay, here it goes.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Finally, I see what the fuss is about.

This is good.

It is, it's

like a more floral, better banana.

If you're wondering what a pawpaw is, we did, of course, figure that out in the episode.

Pawpaws are not papayas, they're not prickly pears.

They are a delightful and not particularly well-known fruit native to a huge swath of North America.

But enough of all this fruit, delicious though it may be.

It's our birthday, and I want cake.

And we now interrupt our top 10 countdown to bring you exactly that, the history and science of birthday cake.

Well, my name's Elisa Levine.

I'm a reader in history at Oxford Brooks University, and the book we're talking about is called Cake, The Short Surprising History of Our Favorite Bakes.

Unsurprisingly, Elisa was the expert we turned to to bring some cake to our birthday episode.

And we started with the obvious first question.

When was cake invented?

Who was eating the first cakes?

Well, that's very difficult to answer because there's a very fine line between cake and bread.

So we know that civilisations, ever since they've cultivated any sort of agriculture, have made bready type cakes.

But just because it's round and bready doesn't make it cake in my book.

But if we start to think about cake being something more special, then we probably need to move ahead to the ancient Egyptians who really started to sweeten up their bread doughs and make them for special occasions and give them special significance.

They had quite an exciting cake culture.

They developed cakes for all sorts of different occasions.

Texturally, they were probably still more like a flattened bread, but the Egyptians might have sweetened those special doughs with honey, maybe they'd have added dried fruit, they might have enriched the dough with eggs, and they decorated them.

Cakes only got better with the arrival of the ancient Greeks, whose word for cakes in general was placus, which, by the way, is the origin of the word placenta.

Apparently, the idea is that cake is a life-giving source of nourishment, which is kind of the role it plays in my life, too.

And like the Egyptians, the Greeks went to town with their decorations.

So, we know that the ancient Greeks and Romans as well started to get really imaginative in the shapes that they made.

So, there were a lot of round ones, partly because they were made in honour of the goddess of the moon.

But then there were ones shaped like pyramids, ones shaped in much more sort of naughty shapes for particular occasions.

Like in the shape of female genitals to honour the gods Demeter and Persephone, and also in the shape of breasts.

Ancient Greeks do often come across sounding like contemporary frat boys, to be honest.

But credit where credit is due, they also started the classic cake and candle combo.

Partly because candles and fire always had great significance across many, many cultures, warding off of spirits and obviously warming people through the long winters, and then also having a ceremonial function in temples and so on.

And so one suggestion is that people started to light candles on cakes again in honour of the goddess of the moon.

So Elisa's pretty convincing that the Greeks had a great cake culture, but how does she figure that out?

Where was cake history written?

There is intriguingly, apparently there was, a whole treatise written about cakes, but it hasn't survived.

It's only ever referred to, so that's a bit annoying from a historical point of view.

But we see it written about.

They feature in plays, in artistic depictions on jugs and earthenware.

And then in the ruins of Pompeii, we even have some preserved remains of cakes and of shaped cake tins as well.

So adding all those things together means that we can start to build up a picture of what people were doing.

So we know that ancient Greeks and Romans were eating plenty of cake, but would they have eaten it on their birthday?

Perhaps if you were very wealthy, but for most people, a fixed notion of time and of age wasn't really thought of in the same way as today, so probably most people just didn't really celebrate their birthdays at all and probably couldn't really afford something very rich and lavish.

Apparently, the ancient Roman poet Ovid was one of those, very wealthy, and he described his birthday as a white robe hanging on his shoulders, a smoking altar, grains of incense and holy fire, and quote, myself offering the cakes that mark my birthday.

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I love all of the Gastropod episodes, but if I have to pick an absolute favorite, it would be the United States of Chinese food because of how it blends all of the things I love about your episodes.

Hi, I'm Natalia from Colorado.

I love your show.

One of my favorite episodes over the years has been the tea episode because of obscure history, fun facts, and espionage.

I do sometimes think about Robert Fortune when I drink tea, and I drink tea literally every day.

It's one of my favorite food groups.

This episode made it into your top 10, so let's listen to some of Robert's undercover adventures.

The story begins with Brits getting fed up with having to buy tea from China to feed their raging tea addiction.

So they sent Robert Fortune to steal tea plants to plant in India, which was a British colony at the time.

Minor detail.

Robert is a tall white Scotsman who doesn't speak Chinese.

No white people are allowed beyond the treaty ports.

For Robert Fortune to go exploring, he needs to not be a white person.

And so he shaves his head, he sews a Q into it, a ponytail down the back, which is how people sort of would signify that they are Chinese, and wore Chinese clothing.

And I know it sounds absurd that some six-foot-tall white guy could pass as Chinese, but the idea was that China was so big and really so diverse and also so closed from the world that they wouldn't know what they were looking at since nobody was having trade with the West.

Nobody knew that Westerners had long noses and round eyes.

And also, China at that moment is ruled by the Manchurian court, and the Manchurians are foreigners.

So there's this idea that foreignness is something internal.

And as as long as he was wearing the signifiers that made him Chinese, he could be Chinese.

There isn't even a one national language at this moment.

There are many different languages.

So it's possible he just didn't speak the local dialect.

So did this incredible plot to steal tea work?

You'll have to listen to the episode again to find out.

We've had a number of stories about food theft on Gastropod.

In fact, we had an entire episode called Grand Theft Food.

But another story of thievery made it into your top 10, and it told the tale of plant explorer David Fairchild.

Here's a little tale from some of Fairchild's undercover plant theft adventures.

This story comes from his first mission.

He'd been sent to Corsica by the U.S.

government, which sounds like a sweet deal, but his job was to steal a citrus fruit called a citron, and he'd been accused of being a military spy, thrown in jail, and had to talk his way out of it.

And on his way out of Corsica, he dips into a grove of citron and he takes three cuttings and he takes three fruit, stuffs them in his jacket, and before he leaves, he sticks the cuttings in potatoes so that they will be nourished on the month or two month long voyage back to America.

They are sent to USDA experiment stations in California, citrus zone, and they are infused into the citrus.

crop and the citrus industry out west in a way that really fuels new growth, the exact sort of thing Fairchild had in mind.

Fairchild kicked off the citrus industry in California, and in our citrus episode, we got to visit the citrus variety collection, also in California, which was totally amazing and delicious.

But what you all particularly loved was the story of what happened in Sicilian lemon groves in the 1800s when lemons were a hot commodity.

Wealthy landowners in the region saw all these poorer people wanting to get into the lemon business, and they came along and made a quote-unquote friendly offer to help them dig wells and build walls and get their lemons to the docks.

Like, hey, why don't I do that for you and you can pay me?

But that, why don't I do that for you was more of a command than a question.

The lemon farmers had to pay them off.

And so they had the whole industry absolutely in their hands and it's here really that you see the beginnings of mafia behaviour because you've got intimidation.

You know, if you said no to any of the services they were offering, the same guy who'd come and offered you so kindly so much help would dispatch a gang to scale the walls of your lemon grove, hack down your trees, smash up your irrigation plant, and spoil your fruit.

The story of lemons and the mafia takes us halfway through our top 10 countdown, and now it's time for some whiskey.

Halftime refreshment of champions.

Fortunately, in at number six in our countdown is the story of Jack Daniels and Nearest Green, the enslaved man he learned how to make whiskey from.

Vaughn Weaver is the one who uncovered Nearest's role.

Here's a bit of that episode.

And so we then were able to start piecing together, well, if Jack Daniel Distillery began on this property, that makes Nearest Green their first master distiller.

This is Vaughan's biggest discovery.

The Jack Daniels company didn't know this.

She's rewriting American Whiskey History.

The story is an amazing one, and if you haven't listened to it yet, you should.

And if you have, you should go listen again.

So, four more episodes to go in our countdown.

We've had some whiskey.

I fancy a second slice of cake.

Is that greedy?

Not at all.

In fact, I'm in the mood for some more cake as well.

And we have Elisa Levine to answer all of our pressing cake questions.

Such as the important scientific principles that underlie cake and what she calls its four basic elements.

Flour, fat, sweetener, and air.

Let's start with the flour.

So for centuries, people were milling grains, but it was really hard work.

So you would get something that you could turn into a stew or that you could turn into some sort of bread or paste.

And that wasn't a fine enough flour to make the type of cake we enjoy today.

it would have been heavy and dense.

But there were a whole lot of things around the time of the 18th century that seemed to converge that meant that cakes became a lot more like we think of them today.

And one of them was the quality of the flour.

It was much lighter, much finer, and much whiter, which meant that it was much more sought after and therefore more expensive.

The big difference came with the invention of steel roller mills at the start of the 19th century.

That's when fine white flour became much cheaper.

And now the fat.

Obviously fat makes a cake have that kind of moist mouthfeel and rich taste, but that's not all it does.

So the fat and the sugar, which in most cake recipes are creamed together, do two things.

They tenderize the wheat protein, which means that it's not as tough and chewy as it is in a bread dough, but also they introduce more air into the batter.

When you whip fat, the fat molecules trap air and sugar actually brings along some more air on its rough crystalline surface.

And air is really the critical thing in cake.

Well if you're going to get a a risen cake in the way that we think of today, you have to introduce a lot of air into the batter.

And that was one of the key differences in this sort of difference between 17th century, 18th century cakes.

So, prior to that, most of the cake recipes that we have in cookbooks are big dense fruit cakes.

And when you're using not particularly finely milled flour and quite heavy, unrefined sugar, and then a lot of dried fruit, the batter's just going to be really heavy.

It's so funny, fruitcakes seem so old-fashioned today, today, but that's because it literally is.

It's cake technology 1.0.

The upgrade, refined sugar and refined flour, made fruitcake obsolete in some ways.

Although I still like it at Christmas.

But the main thing is, refining sugar and flour meant they were light enough to get more air in the batter for fluffier cake.

And then the whisk was invented in the 1840s.

We actually talked about that in our marshmallow fluff episode, more air, even fluffier cake.

And then chemical leaveners were invented in the 1930s.

Now, Now almost everyone can enjoy the easiest, fluffiest cakes of all.

Well, it all started to come together that people started to appreciate this very light, fluffy cake rather than the heavy, dense ones that they'd been used to before.

And that was aided by the fact that they started to drop all of the dried fruit, which was another way that they were sweetened, and instead use more refined sugars.

And then that started to be the thing that was fashionable.

It was lighter and it was whiter and it was more refined and more elegant served on the dinner table.

And that, of course, was then the foundation for an enormous slew of innovations in presentation and layer cakes and so on.

Thank you technology for bringing us cake.

We are not done with cake.

We will soon reveal everything you ever wanted to know about the birthday cake.

Plus listeners share how Gastropod has changed their lives and we finish our countdown and reveal your very favorite episode.

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Hello Synthia, Nicola.

My name is Kate.

I am a long-time gastropod listener from Moscow, Russia.

Congratulations on the big

In the survey, you were asking what some of our favorite episodes and surprising facts are that we learned from Gastropod,

and there's just so many.

The story of citrus fruit being the root of a mafia is really surprising, as is the fact that olive oil is actually juice.

Lord Byron weighed himself on an agricultural scale.

That medieval nuns were getting lit on saffron.

A real knee slapper.

The story about how the Michelin of Michelin stars is the same as the Michelin of Michelin tires,

because that fact got me a date.

Dutch research is mentioned in your podcast quite often.

I had no idea it was so important, and I am Dutch.

My favorite fact comes from the episode Crunch, Crackle, and Pop.

I found it fascinating that people can distinguish between hot and cold liquids being poured into a glass while blindfolded.

We'll actually do it again right now.

Can you tell which liquid is hot and which is cold?

All right, have you decided?

If you thought the first one was hot, you're right.

Isn't that weird?

But wait, there's more.

From the balsamic vinegar episode, we learned the essential phrase, microbial death cask.

Cascade.

And we also learned how to distinguish between real balsamic and imitations.

That cilantro tastes like soap to some people.

I love cilantro and my mind was blown when I learned this.

That Queen Anne's lace are wild carrots.

I always grew up seeing them on the side of the road and had no idea.

There are so many amazing things that I have learned from Gastropod, but I think my favorite has to be the story of where the word cocktail comes from.

You asked what was the most interesting, astonishing, or fascinating thing I had heard on the show.

I responded that I heard that saliva is filtered blood.

Ew.

Speaking of grossness, it's not all fun and games and deliciousness here at Gastropod HQ.

We suffer for our art.

The worst for me was when we had to eat those disgusting muffins and weigh every single morsel of every ingredient for two whole weeks.

That was horrible.

That was not my idea of a good time either, but the closest I came to vomiting was probably the kombucha episode.

Let's relive that moment, shall we?

We each brought a small segment of our personal blobs in their brewing liquid into the lab.

We're donating our kombucha cultures to science, but really, we want to know whose is best.

So, first, the snip test.

My blob went first.

Oh, hello.

Whoa.

Oh, it's pretty strong.

Smells good.

Smells like kombucha.

It does.

It smells like a classic kombucha.

I love it.

Yeah, how to mind.

This is my first ever batch, you know.

Oh really?

Congratulations.

I was feeling pretty good at this point.

And then Ben sniffed Cynthia's blob.

Oh.

Oh, yours is less

mine's more venigated.

Yeah.

I think I won the sniff test, but that's not the end of the kombucha competition.

What we're going to do is look at them under the microscope to sort of get a feel for what they look like, and we may already see some differences there.

And then what we're going to do is incorporate them into our culture collection and see how fast they grow to see if they grow differently.

We'll sequence the yeast and the bacteria that are there.

So we'll learn a lot about what's inside your kombucha.

And is there prizes for everyone, or does only one of us win?

It's unclear what winning is in kombucha.

So

I can tell you my winning would be to know that I am not poisoning me and Tim.

I think we'll find that out for sure.

Yeah.

So Ben sterilize the scalpels and prep the petri dishes and set up the slides for the microscope.

So this is Cynthia's blob.

Let's get a chunk of it.

Cut it this morning.

I'm not sure how perfectly sterile everything was.

I should have fished it out for you guys.

I wasn't

wanted to touch it as little as possible, to be totally honest.

It looks like raw chicken breast.

I've been sitting on a sidewalk for a second.

And then he took a look at Nikki's blob.

Oh, my.

Oh, yours gets a lot goopier than mine does.

Mine doesn't look like that.

It looks like a manta ray.

Look at him.

Mine just forms the layers.

I don't get all that weird goop.

So we're really fascinated by...

Nikki's totally grossed out.

Do you need a barf bag?

We have a biohazardous waste bin over there.

You can just go vomit it if you want.

Sorry.

Getting rid of that kombucha blob was a huge relief.

I'm actually still brewing with mine.

I love kombucha.

And I love Ben Wolf.

Longtime listeners will recognize him as our in-house microbiologist.

Sneak peek.

He'll be back on on the show this autumn to talk microbes again.

Drink.

And a lot of you are drinking kombucha because well I didn't manage to convert Nikki well.

It did help me overcome my fear of kombucha.

Gastropod is responsible for my husband's kombucha hobby which is gradually taking over our basement one microbial mat at a time.

Gastropod has changed our lives obviously but it turns out it's also changed your lives too.

I use balsamic vinegar on my eggs and everybody looks at me funny.

I can't thank you for that.

Love you guys.

The David Fairchild episode was my favorite episode.

I was so inspired.

I'm going to apply for grad school in horticulture.

Hello, Cynthia and Nikki.

This is Alicia from Pismo Beach, California.

Thanks to listening to Gastropod.

I started an algae farm company with two friends in California called Helpful.

Thank you so much for everything you do and happy birthday!

Since I've been listening, my hair has all come back without any gray, my teeth have straightened, my skin glows with vitality, and I'm now extremely attractive to other people.

Thank you so much.

Oh, I can't say that's happened to me yet.

I mean, we have years to go.

There's still hope.

Quite the reverse.

I found my first gray hair after starting to make this show.

But it has changed my life in other ways.

I'm now a person who mail orders peanut butter, thanks to our peanut butter episode.

It's so embarrassing, I can't believe I even said it out loud.

What happens to me is that I tend to eat a lot of whatever it is that we're reporting on.

But let's get back to your favorite episodes.

One of those was our episode on Native American foods.

I did love traveling to Minnesota with Nikki for this story.

It was incredibly moving to speak to the farmers and scientists who are bringing back Native Foodways.

Another top 10 pick was our fake food episode, which was one of my personal favorites.

I still sort of fantasize about an alternative career where I am a food detective.

So meeting the world's first food detective for our episode was amazing.

We are down to the final two favorite episodes.

Unsurprisingly to me, the pudding episode got a lot of votes.

It was extremely exciting.

Listener and great British Bake Off star Tom Gilliford rounded up a couple more Bake Off friends, Jan and Selassie, and we set a challenge to create a mini spotted dick.

My partner Tim was the rookie baker we threw into the competition with his incredibly enthusiastic agreement, of course.

And so back home in Boston, Tim invented his own spotted dick recipe for the competition, a Yankee dick, and he and I gave it a try in this clip from the episode.

Mmm, mmm.

Hmm.

Okay.

So I think it's a little too sweet because the cranberries are very sweet.

They're sweet.

And just the dough, like the

pudding part itself is pretty sweet.

And you're going to put a custard on it.

And so I agree it needs to be a little less sweet.

Cut back the sugar, but the cornmeal has a really nice, crunchy texture.

So I have to say, neither of us have ever had spotted dick before, so we actually don't know how this compares.

This is the best spotted dick I've ever had.

Okay, I know they're all my favorites, favorites, but the pudding episode might actually be my favorite favorite, even though it was also the most nerve-wracking because I was so starstruck.

Can we play some more?

Of course.

The whole evening was so exciting.

All four bakers made their mini spotted dicks and the custards.

Selassie nearly set the kitchen on fire, and then the puddings came out of the oven.

Jans were first.

Let's listen.

Which is not as good as what we did in person, which was smell them.

Wow, Jan, that's beautiful.

Oh, it's pudding.

Smell it, smell it.

Oh my god!

Smell it!

Smell it!

Oh wow!

Oh lovely!

And then as the bakers brought their spotted dicks out to the table, our expert panel of Felicity, Sam and Danny grabbed their spoons and prepared.

The fact is we're determining what the best spotted dick is based on.

Sam, if you don't know how to judge a spotted dick at your.

I don't know, but

is it look, is it texture, is it feel?

Like, you know,

what makes a good dick?

What do you value in the spotted dick?

Or a mini dick, I should say.

It's a horrible wormhole, isn't it?

I was going to get excited about mouthfeel, but that's.

When you see the blushes on radio.

Everyone's like, oh, a little bit awkward.

Everyone's suddenly aren't really awkward.

We are British.

I was gonna say not the

not the Americans.

We have no problem with this.

As much as I love spotted dick and I do really love spotted dick it is not what is called for this episode though.

This episode, we need a different bake.

We need some birthday cake.

It's time for one last slice of cake with Elisa before we reveal your very favorite episode.

Elisa says the first recipes specifically for birthday cake start being published in the late 1800s.

Fanny Farmer's famous Boston Cooking School Cookbook only had one birthday cake recipe.

It was an orange-flavored fruit and nut cake that also included a generous slug of sherry.

Well things like sherry harken back to an earlier era where there would often be some sort of alcohol in the cake and again that goes back to the sort of fruit cake era.

And I suppose we people just thought in a slightly different way about what was appropriate for children.

Perhaps it was seen as a preservative or something that just enhanced the flavour of the cake.

Cakes for children in the 1800s were usually actually kind of boring and not too sweet.

Children weren't supposed to be overly stimulated, they needed plain food.

But then, into the start of the 20th century, we see more and more birthday cakes, decorated cakes, so we're starting to think about cakes as something appealing for children as well as just the ingredients.

In the past, at least in America and the UK, it was also considered less appropriate to make a big hoopla of children the way we do today.

There was even some superstition around celebrating their birthdays, given the much higher child mortality rates back then.

But in the 20th century, that all began to change, and birthday cake became a thing, particularly for children.

Didn't raise their status too high in an inappropriate way, but in an increasingly child-centered society, it made them feel special for that day.

Speaking of child mortality, Elisa told us it's a myth that parents didn't invest as much love into their children before the 1800s, but they were certainly aware that many of their children might not survive into adulthood, and that fact probably inspired having your birthday year marked by the number of candles on your cake.

We know that there are German traditions going back a long time of lighting candles, but not so much in a celebratory way, but to keep away evil spirits.

The smoke would waft up towards the ceiling and take away those evil spirits.

And gradually this seems to have become lighting as many candles as the child's age, sometimes adding an extra one for the child to grow on, which again is a bit of a superstitious belief that it will will help the child get through its next year.

So it was really tangled up with quite a lot of superstitious beliefs still dating back to a time when child mortality was much higher.

Luckily, the candles today are celebrating a child's life and years, or a podcast's life and years, and not wording off the Grim Reaper.

In case you hadn't noticed yet, I love cake.

But birthday cake today is not my favourite kind of cake.

It's become shorthand for plain yellow cake that tastes of not very much and is buried under a ton of icing and sprinkles and fondant decoration.

Frankly, I'd rather have Fanny Farmer's sherry cake.

So when did birthday cake become kind of gross?

Yes, I think that's a good point.

I think that's partly to do with catering to children's tastes because a lot of the idea of the birthday cake is the entire ceremony around it.

So the birthday child seated at the table and the procession of the lighted candles on the cake coming in.

So it's a lot more about the presentation and the act of blowing out the candles.

And especially for children, the taste is actually fairly secondary.

So I think probably we've developed cakes that will just be sturdy enough to take the weight of all that icing and all the expectations that are thrown on them.

And then the actual eating of them is fairly secondary for most children.

They lick the icing, send them home in the party bags, and the taste doesn't really matter too much.

Sad but true.

But although Gastropod is only five, we actually have a very sophisticated palate, and I'd like to do something a little more exciting for our birthday cake.

Heck, we don't even need to restrict ourselves to cake as we know it.

There's a whole world of birthday foods to explore.

So, I think Britain and America share fairly similar cake cultural heritages.

So, something quite light, increasingly, something brightly decorated with the candles on the top traditionally round.

But in other countries, it could look quite different.

They might be much more bready doughs.

In China, there's much more of a history of steamed buns with sweet fillings, which could be used for celebrations and all sorts of ceremonies dating different life events.

I'll go for the steamed sweet bun this year.

And I'll have a slice of sherry cake and a steamed bun with you.

Sounds like a plan.

Alright, time to end this party with a bang.

It's your most favorite episode from the 117 episodes we've made.

Three, two,

one,

go,

start,

blast off.

We traveled all the way to Belgium for this particular episode.

We got in a car and rode to the very edge of the country to hang out with two scientists and a dozen bakers.

Keep your eyes on the door.

Well, let's go for some magic.

Three,

two,

one.

And with that, we stepped inside the world's one and only sourdough starter library.

It's a library, yes, but instead of bookshelves, there are 12 illuminated refrigerators with glass doors so you can see the jars inside.

Carl's collected 93 different sourdough starters from 17 different countries, and they look totally different from one another.

Some of them are liquid, and some are stiff, and then some are very dark, dark, some are spickled, some are almost looking like crumble because they're so dry.

So there's a lot of colors, very dark ones to brownish ones, to yellow ones, and then the normal white ones.

Carl took some of the jars out and allowed us to smell the starters.

Some smelled fruity, some were acidic, some were biscuity, some were creamy.

The Chinese, for example, one of them is very meaty.

When I open the jar, it's like like almost a sausage, very savory.

Some of them are really very pungent.

That when I open the jar and I smell the first, that you really feel the

acids go into your nose, and it's like if you would have a spoon of

very heavy mustard, so the Dijon mustard that you've well, that reaction.

Making our sourdough episode was the most bread-centric 48 hours of my life.

We ate bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks that weekend.

It was a carb fest.

But as was the case that weekend, I still have room for a little bit more.

Let's listen to the scientists swabbing the bakers to find out what microbes live on their skin.

I'm going to be swabbing your hands.

And I'm going to ask that you put your hands out just in a way that I can apply some pressure.

And I'm going to spend kind of a few seconds just going over the front, and then I'm going to ask you to flip.

And then I'll do the back.

And if we could not talk over the swab when it's out so that we can not introduce some of our oral microbes.

Sure.

Thank you.

Anne was swabbing the baker's hands because if any microbes are going from a baker's body into their sourdough starter, they're probably getting in there via their hands.

It would be wonderful in some future version to top to bottom swab all these bakers and really start to tease out, you know, which body part is really contributing.

But we had to start somewhere, and so we start with the hand connection.

If you want to find out where the microbes in sourdough come from, you will have to go back and listen to the episode.

And I am going to go and have a lie down.

I can't believe that we made all these episodes with just the two of us.

We have occasionally had a little help from some wonderful volunteers, specifically Ari Lebowitz, Emily Pontecorvo, and Sam Panzer.

But really, we do pretty much everything ourselves.

We get emails addressed to Nikki, Cynthia, and the Gastropod team, and I'm like, I wish it's just us.

And we keep getting more and more ambitious, which is great, but it's more and more work and, frankly, more money.

Gastropod started off as a labor of love, and now, yes, we can pay ourselves a full-time salary but it's still a huge stretch.

Thanks to our growing number of listeners we can sell ads.

That's a place where you've all been a huge help telling your friends and family to listen to us.

That gets us to nearly 50% of our budget.

Then we have some support from foundations.

Thank you Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology and economics and the Boroughs Welcome Fund.

And thanks to all of you who are able to donate to the show.

Every even small donation helps.

We get nearly a quarter of our entire budget from donations.

And the more support we have from you, the more ambitious we can keep being.

We are so incredibly thankful for all of your support and love.

So grateful that we're spending our birthday giving you presents.

That's right, if you give during our birthday month this September any amount at all, we have a special prize for you.

And we've got some rewards for long-term supporters too.

Keep an eye on your inbox.

You'll hear from us in a month or so about that.

Because remember, it's just the two of us making the show, so sometimes these things take a little while to get to in between making making all the episodes.

Okay, that was a good party.

But there's no rest for the wicked.

Cynthia, we've got another episode to make.

Right, okay.

Onwards and upwards.

Thank you so much for listening and voting and recording your voices.

We wish we could have used all your recordings, but listening to them was quite delightful.

Thanks so much to Elisa Levine, author of Cake.

We have a link to her great book on our website, gastropod.com.

Obviously, she covers a lot more than birthday cake.

And really, hugest thanks to all of you who wrote in and who recorded snippets for us and who donated in celebration of our birthday.

This has been the best podcast birthday party ever.

Thanks also to Sam Panzer, who dug up some awesome birthday cake stories for us.

We have more of that to share in our special extras email for supporters at the Superfan level.

That's $5 per episode or $9 per month.

This episode's extras will include JFK and Ben Franklin, so you know, get in there.

We'll be back in two weeks to get started on our next five years.

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