#1 Am I the asshole and other stories
First of all, welcome to my newsletter. This one’s going to be about stuff I find on the internet — sometimes off the internet — when I’m doing research for something completely unrelated. [Some people call it procrastination. I call it gaining wisdom].
For too long, the rabbit hole detours I end up on, have remained inside my head. So, I’ve finally decided to put them out — stuff that blew my mind, stuff that I’m embarrassed to say I only learned now, and stuff that I shouldn’t have spent so much time on. Some science, some culture, some human behaviour. Here you go.
Am I the asshole and soup
On one of my daily excursions to the subreddit r/AmItheAsshole, I came across this post.
OP was voted an asshole. But that’s not why this post caught my attention. It was the family tradition she mentioned, where each year, her boyfriend’s family freezes a bit of the soup stock they make, only to add it to the fresh batch they’re making next year. Apparently, they’ve had an “uninterrupted chain of soup stock for like 40+ years”.
I’d heard of a never-ending “mother” starter in the context of sourdough [I’ve written a story about the science of sourdough, by the way]. Sourdough starters—an initial culture of microbes in flour and water, that’s key to what flavour and texture the bread has— often get passed around for generations. But I hadn’t heard of something similar in the context of soups/stews.
Turns out, this practice of keeping a basic starter stock/broth/curry/stew simmering for a long, long time, and adding it to new batches of food, is something that people did historically. And it’s still common across many cultures in Europe, USA, South America, China and Southeast Asian countries, with some variations. Europeans call it perpetual stew or forever soup/hunter’s stew/hunter’s pot. In other parts of the world, it goes by other names like Lǔshuǐ in China. Either the original stock is kept going in a pot over wood fire or a stove, for years, where you top up the water and ingredients as you go, chucking in whatever is available in the season, or around you. Or there’s a “master stock” like the sourdough “mother” starter, that’s used to create different dishes, then frozen, then re-used again.
It was supposedly common in Europe in the middle ages — and I can see why. When it’s cold and you have a fire going, you might as well use it to keep a stock going. Folks from the community would keep adding meat, veggies, and other stuff to it, and when hungry, get a bowl to eat. [I wonder what would happen to you if you accidentally knocked over a pot]
I haven’t read/watched the Game of Thrones, but this perpetual stew finds a mention there too.
In the Bottom there were pot shops along the alleys where huge tubs of stew had been simmering for years, and you could trade half your bird for a heel of yesterday’s bread and a “bowl o’ brown”, and they’d even stick the other half in the fire and crisp it up for you, as long as you plucked the feathers yourself.
For more modern insights, Reddit is a great place to find stories stories about grandmas, communities, and local restaurants having decades old soup/curry/mole/stocks going.
I couldn’t find something similar for India - if you know of anything that’s like perpetual stew in concept, please share?
Meanwhile, here are some videos:
A 2,040 day old Mole in Mexico city
A 45-year soup!
I also have some questions.
How do you keep something cooking for years? What are the logistics of it?
In the original Reddit post, the family doesn’t keep cooking the stew. They freeze a part of it, then re-use it later. While I think it’s a fun tradition [although an unnecessary waste of space imo], would it be a harmless practice in our frequent power cut-filled country? Or is the subsequent heating enough to kill all germs?
How much of the original stew/stock/broth is there in every bowl after, say, a year? How many molecules? Maybe it’s like Homeopathy. Or like the evolution of life. All of us, born out of that one primordial soup.
Other stories
Electric cars in the US, in the early 1900s, were once marketed for women. This was a time when both electric and gas-powered vehicles were both competing for market space in the country. And of course, car manufacturers thought ladies couldn’t drive gas-powered vehicles, so they advertised electric cars for the nazuk mahilaen instead.
https://qz.com/1316554/early-1900s-evs-were-marketed-to-women-because-gas-cars-were-too-complicated/
ZOMBIES! There’s a super cool Twitter video story posted by Vena, where a Sphex digger wasp tries to move a cricket that she’s stung and paralysed with her toxin. Basically, the insect turns into a zombie, walking where the wasp takes it, doing what the wasp wants. Once the cricket is inside the wasp’s burrow, she lays her eggs in the burrow nest. The hatched larvae then feed on the cricket until an adult is ready to emerge. You’ve probably read about it, but it’s exciting to see it in action.
Thread: A Sphex Digger Wasp tells you her exciting story from last week (in her own words). Step 1: Dig a burrow in a slightly wet open muddy ground in preparation for my soon to be hunted and paralysed cricket haul.In response, Dr. VijayRaghavan, our Former Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, posted a video of a cockroach wasp taking a cockroach on a walk. Phew. That was a tongue twister.
@venadavenu Very nice! Here's a zombie cockroach being taken for a walk to the wasp's burrow in my backyard.The science of ASMR — I hate most ASMR sounds. All that whispering, popping, scratching, humming, makes me shudder in utter displeasure. But if you’re a fan of ASMR, or not, this podcast episode on Science Vs was really fun.
Another podcast show I really enjoyed was Firebug. About a serial arsonist in the US and its investigation. True crime. Fast-paced drama.
That’s it, folks! The plan is to bring you a perpetual newsletter. Once every week. If you enjoyed this, subscribe. If you’re shocked by how little I know, send me links to stuff I should know, so I can add it to my “stuff that I’m embarrassed to say I only learned now” list.
Have a great week.