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Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that can feed a family a family of four for the low price of only 19 cents. I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is… Aaron! I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that while decaf coffee, zero calorie soda, and lite beer are popular, no one wants a flat beer…Depressed depression
https://soyummy.com/great-depression-food/ In October 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed and launched the country into the worst economic downturn in its history as of yet... For an entire decade, spending and investment was at an all-time low, which meant unemployment was high and the majority of American families were surviving on next to nothing. It was during this period in time that bare-bones recipes were created. We probably wouldn’t eat most of them today — however, it was these meals that kept America going. These aren’t the most appetizing of meals, but even so, many of them have been handed down through generations and are still made by those who know of the hardships their parents and grandparents faced throughout the ’30s. The American diet was affected by economic changes. Apart from trying to be more frugal with their spending, the refrigerator was becoming more popular in American homes, impacting the food they consumed. Across the country, people were looking for ways to cut corners and save money. How would that affect their diet? Several rather revolting creations came into the forefront when the Bureau of Home Economics encouraged substituting. They suggested bland food as a motivation for people to find work so they could afford spices. Leftovers became typical meals thanks to the refrigerator, so citizens learned to cook things that lasted like casseroles. Americans at the time didn’t have a concept of hunger. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that America became nationally conscious of the issue. Soon the attitudes and behaviors of people began to change. Now tuck your napkin into your collar, because it’s time to dive into the strangest meals to come out of the Depression era. Our first recipe of the day comes from an unlikely source. You would think the food at the White House would be better than the rest of the country, you’d be quite mistaken. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady at the time, is well known for her work in feminism as well as her support of the movement surrounding home economics. She wasn’t all words and no action either. She served the same bland food in the White House that the rest of America was eating. In fact, FDR’s White House gained a reputation among world leaders for serving food that was, by their standards, absolutely horrible. This is because Eleanor Roosevelt took it upon herself to simplify the fare served to the First Family and dignitaries. This was more about image than about cutting domestic costs: Americans wouldn’t want to hear about the elaborate meals served in the White House when they themselves were struggling to find enough to eat every day. Eleanor’s most famous recipe was prune pudding, the cheap ingredient was quickly bought up by the common people and whipped into this presidential “delight.” Prunes were easy to store, widely available, and much less expensive than other fruits, while providing needed nutrients to the Depression-era diet: the fruit is packed with fiber and supplies almost one-third of your daily needs for Vitamin K. The recipe, as follows, Let prunes stand in water. Boil them. Chop them. Put them back in water and let them simmer. Add sugar and cinnamon and a cornstarch slurry for thickening purposes. Allow to cool fully. Serve in small containers. According to an adventurous eater who tried the recipe, what they created was jam… it was just a normal prune jam and it took weeks for them to finish because their family wouldn’t touch the stuff. Glowing review! Aaron had wonderful apple pies as a dessert for his wedding you weren't invited to, but what if he couldn’t get apples? During the depression many would substitute crackers for apples and make a mock apple pie. Ritz crackers hit the shelves during the great depression in 1934 and printed on the back of the box was a recipe for mock apple pie. During a time when apples were hard to get and often more expensive, innovative cooks would turn to this simple, magical recipe to make a passable apple pie, sans apples. Bakers who have made mock apple pie swear by the all-carb, mock-fruit pastry, with a broken cracker filling (made with no less than 36 crackers) that is infused with a syrup of lemon juice, lemon zest, cinnamon, and cream of tartar, then laid out in a pie crust. (The syrup is made separately before it is poured over the crackers). RITZ MOCK APPLE PIE- Makes 10 servings
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
- 1 3/4 cups water
- Pastry for 2-crust 9-inch pie
- 36 Ritz Crackers, coarsely broken (about 1 3/4 cups)
- Zest and 2 tablespoons juice from 1 lemon
- 2 tablespoons butter or margarine, cut into small pieces
- 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- Mix sugar and cream of tartar in medium saucepan. Gradually stir in water. Bring to boil on high heat; simmer on low 15 minutes. Stir in zest and juice; cool 30 minutes.
- Heat oven to 425 degrees. Roll out half of pastry on lightly floured surface to 11-inch circle; place in 9-inch pie plate. Place cracker crumbs in crust. Pour sugar syrup over crumbs; top with butter and cinnamon.
- Roll out remaining pastry to 10-inch circle; place over pie. Seal and flute edge. Cut several slits in top crust to permit steam to escape. Place on parchment-covered baking sheet. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.
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Interested in what we have to say about this story? Good news, it’s available right now to subscribers at Patreon.com/iit! Well, that was… depress...ing. Ha! But let’s move from the yee-oldie money-troubles to new fangled micro-gravity micro-breweries! Space, the final frontier. These are the stories of the Starship… station… Mir and ISS. Their continuing mission to explore strange new foods, to seek out new microbial life and new booze, to boldly pass out where no one has passed out before… I should say, right at the onset, that I intended to make this story about space food but it’s all kind of boring. I’ll toss out some of the more interesting bits then we can move onto the main course--booze! I think most people are familiar with Tang, a disgusting orange watery Kool-Aid fail, and freeze drying--the process sublimating moisture out of food at very low temperatures. In a nutshell, most of the food provided by NASA to astronauts today is little more than lightweight MREs. Which is good for morale, I assume, given that the other options were… not great. Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, took some… “food” with him: two servings of pureed and undisclosed “meat” in what are essentially toothpaste tubes. But don’t worry, he also had a tube of chocolate sauce he could squirt onto his runny meat. Yum. The Mercury astronauts had it good by Russian cosmonaut standards. They got freeze-dried and powdered food packages and compressed cubes of nutrients. Everything the body needs to stay alive and appease The Jetson’s… just don’t eat anything Rosey the Robot gives you, I’m pretty sure she’s with Skynet… The availability of water stores, eventually even hot-on-demand water, would mean that austronoughts could connect their MRE-like packages to water dispensers and rehydrate their food cubes. Because yes, the poor Mercury crews ate their powdered food … powdered. These days MREs and other considerations make space-food less terrible but Japan’s sounds the best. Rather than microwave hamburgers or raw pizza made from pre-cooked ingredients, Japan sends sushi, ramen, yokan and rice dishes. Because when you’ve got hot water and uncooked rice, you can do a hell of a lot more than canned borsch. Anyway, enough of that. Let’s move on to space booze! So, officially, alcohol is basically banned in space. Apparently there’s some nerd reason for it, something about alcohol breaking the air, water, etc. recyclers and killing everyone. But that’s stupid so we’re going to ignore it. Early cosmonauts brought the first alcoholic drink to space 1984. On his way to Salyut 7 (a low-Earth orbiting space station used from 1982 to 1991) Igor (or is it eye-gor?) Volk did what, apparently, all good cosmonauts did and following his official weigh-in, immediately fasted and took diuretics to lose some additional weight. How much weight? Approximately the weight of one bottle of cognac, which he hid inside his spacesuit. Space contraband! According to cosmonaut Alexander Poleshchuk, it was common to hide cognac, vodka, and other high abv alcohols in the lining of their space suits, inside hollowed out books, or behind the rocket’s interior panelling a la Firefly. Once in space it was the practice for them to drink, but never offer any to the Americans NASA set up, because screw them. Eventually, cosmonauts were allowed cognac, vodka, and “ginseng liquor” on the MIR space station for “health reasons” which I assume is code for “if I can’t have a drink I’mma kill one of these freaking Amaracuskies!” It wasn’t all fun and games though, according to Georgy Grechko drinking in micro-gravity took real effort. In microgravity the smell of wine causes an immediate gag reflex. They tried to find wine that worked in space through tests on the vomit comet… but it didn’t go well. Of wine, it should be mentioned that there is, or was anyway, Moooooooooooooon-wine. On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin drank a wee-bit of wine when he, apparently, took communion on the Moon inside the Lunar Module Eagle out of a chalice that they somehow found reason to bring to the fucking moon. It wasn’t broadcast because of protests against what was seen as a breach of separation of church and state… ah for the good old days eh. So booze has found its way into space, both intentionally and illegally. Making booze in space is an entirely different story. Making hard alcohol for example is, at this point in history, impossible. First the water consumption would be life threatening, but also because distillation requires that alcohol vapor rise and condense along a still’s pipes but in microgravity there’s no “up” for the steam to rise to. Without further ado, let’s talk about space beer! Then graduate student Kirsten Sterrett at the nearby University of Colorado wrote her thesis on fermentation in space with support from US “beer” behemoth Coors. I guess they provided the rice and unfiltered rocky mountain spring diphtheria. She sent up the kit needed to make like, one can of beer in a purpose built carboy that looks like a space-made AeroPress. NASA called it a “Fluid Processing Apparatus” which is… accurate, I guess. So… yeah sugar and yeast work in space… I mean… inside a controlled environment in space. No word yet on space-exposed, Fantastic 4, super yeast yet. In addition to the trouble of getting beer to space, or making it there, drinking beer in space is a real problem. Because there’s no up “obviously the foam isn’t going to come to a head”, says Jonathan Clark, a former flight surgeon and now the space medicine liaison for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston, Texas, US. If you look at your phone you’ll see a beer bubble as it happens in space. It’s… weird. Not to be snubbed, Dutch researchers have suggested a flexible membrane inside a keg that would allow gas and liquid to be mixed and separated as needed to dispense beer. Space-keg! It was not approved for use. The other problem of space-beer is that, with no where for the gas to escape to, you’ll drink all the carbonation in the solution. Which any freshmen doing their first keg stand will tell you is a real problem. Additionally, with no up, the gas doesn’t collect or disperse from your stomach causing nightmarish beer-burps. So terrible in fact NASA gave them the name “wet burps.” “That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have carbonated beverages on the space menu,” NASA spokesperson William Jeffs told New Scientist. Apparently MIR used to stock Pepsi, but that also causes Rick-like wet burps getting all over everyone. All that said, beer uhhh, finds a way. There have been a handful of trial-and-error style attempts to make low carbonation beer. Most are successful because making flat beer is super easy. Unfortunately, it tastes like ass. In 2014 Eugene, Or, based brewery Ninkasi started the Ninkasi Space Program… which was basically just a marketing campaign, but they did buy a truck-trailer sized rocket. Unfortunately, the first launch landed some 9 miles from the desired location causing the rocket and yeast to be lost in the Nevada desert for 27 days, very much killing the yeast. For their second flight they had some help from Denver-based UP Aerospace, because rocket science is, you know, rocket science. The second flight reached 77.3 miles above Earth with six vials of yeast onboard. Having recovered the yeast which spent about four minutes in microgravity, they brewed Ground Control* and Imperial Stout with hazelnuts, star anise, cocoa nibs, and Apollo, Bravo, and Comet hops and, of course, the space yeast those other ingredients completely mask. There are actually a lot of brewers and sciencers trying to make “the first space beer” and a big portion of that is how you define having made space beer. Surely the crew who did Kirsten’s science made beer in space. Coors, Ninkasi, 4 Pines Beer in Australia, Sapporo, and Bell’s Brewery have shot elements of their beers into space. InBev, parent company of Anheuser-Busch announced their intent to make the first brewery on Mars at SXSW. They’ve also sent barley seeds into space, both to test space-based germination, but also to use the grown barley in their beers. The goal is to “compare malt to controls produced on the ground to identify morphological and genetic alterations caused by microgravity.” Unfortunately, Mars’s soil contains high levels of perchlorates which cause thyroid problems in humans. So there’s that to figure out. Sadly, because shooting stuff into space is a real chore Sapporo’s Space Barley beer is $110 a six pack because getting the ingredients to space costs around 10k per pound. I mentioned 4 Pines, they’re partnering with Saber Astronautics to make the first commercially available, fully space-brewed, beer. The beer is called Vostok, after Yuri’s 1961 space ship. They’re currently working on solving the “how do you drink in space without a straw” problem and the solution is… if you look at for you phones… weird. The basic ideal is that, through a series of springs, tubes, and nozzles, create a beer bottle that allows you to drink more or less normally in microgravity. Check out the YouTube video if you want to see it in action. So far they’ve spent $250,000 of Indiegogo money and expect the final product to be a million dollar beer… literally. Closing things out, a quote from James Watt, co-founder of the Scottish “punk” beer company BrewDog, about space-Budweiser: “It’s not so bad if it means it leaves this planet.”- https://www.discoverspace.org/exhibit/space-food/
- https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_eating
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_spaceflight
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12388-beer-in-space-a-short-but-frothy-history/
- https://www.nasa.gov/aeroresearch/resources/artifact-opportunities/space-food/
- https://www.wired.com/2015/03/ground-control-space-beer/#:~:text=Ground%20Control%20is%20an%20Imperial,And%2C%20yes%2C%20space%20yeast.
- https://www.craftbeer.com/news/beer-release/ninkasi-ground-control-space-traveled-yeast
- https://nsp.ninkasibrewing.com/the-beer.html
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a30141192/budweiser-space-beer-brewing/
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a30141192/budweiser-space-beer-brewing/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/eustaciahuen/2018/04/30/beer-2/?sh=64d7075678a2
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-to-make-beer-in-space-180968404/
- Available: November 2017
- ABV: 10%
- IBU: 50
- OG: 1100
- Malt: 2-Row Pale, Black, Chocolate, Munich, Crystal, Honey, Special Roast, Peated
- Hops: Apollo, Bravo, Comet
- Packaging: 22oz. Bottles, Draft
- Distribution: Alaska; Alberta; Arizona; California; Colorado; Idaho; Maryland; Nevada; New York; Oregon; Utah; Washington; Virginia; Vancouver, British Columbia; and select retailers across the country.
Outro
I’m Shea, and this week I learned the term domestic housewife implies that there are feral housewives. I’d like to thank all our listeners, supporters, and my co-hosts. Find out more about the show, social links, and contact information at InterestingIfTrue.com. Music for this episode was created by Wayne Jones and was used with permission. The opinions, views, and nonsense expressed in this show are those of the hosts only and do not represent any other people, organizations, or lifeforms. All rights reserved, Interesting If True 2020.Join The Discussion
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