an edible cracker with just one side. mathematically impossible and yet here I am monching on it.
‘scuit’ comes from the french word for ‘bake’, ‘cuire’ as bastardized by adoption by the brittish and a few hundred years
‘biscuit’ meant ‘twice-baked’, originally meaning items like hardtack which were double baked to dry them as a preservative measure long before things like sugar and butter were introduced. if you see a historical doccument use the word ‘biscuit’ do not be fooled to think ‘being a pirate mustve been pretty cool, they ate nothing but cookies’ – they were made of misery to last long enough to be used in museum displays or as paving stones
‘triscuit’ is toasted after the normal biscuit process, thrice baked
thus the monoscuit is a cookie thats soft and chewy because it was only baked once, not twice
behold the monoscuit/scuit
Why is this called a biscuit:
when brittish colonists settled in the americas they no longer had to preserve biscuits for storage or sea voyages so instead baked them once and left them soft, often with buttermilk or whey to convert cheap staples/byproducts into filling items to bulk out the meal to make a small amount of greasy meat feed a whole family. considering hardtack biscuits were typically eaten by dipping them in grease or gravy untill they became soft enough to eat without breaking a tooth this was a pretty short leap of ‘just dont make them rock hard if im not baking for the army’ but didnt drop the name because its been used for centuries and people forgot its french for ‘twice baked’ back in the tudor era, biscuit was just a lump of cooked dough that wasnt leavened bread as far as they cared
thus the buttermilk biscuit and the hardtack biscuit existed at the same time. ‘cookies’ then came to america via german and dutch immigrants as tiny cakes made with butter, sugar/molasses, and eggs before ‘tea biscuits’ as england knew them due to the new availability of cheap sugar- which is why ‘biscuit’ and ‘cookie’ are separate items in america but the same item in the UK
the evolution of the biscuit has forks on its family tree
I love it when a shitpost turns into an actually interesting post.
i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave”
at one point during the deal the professor turned to the woman selling it and he said “isn’t this just the most beautiful rubens you’ve ever seen outside of a museum?” (because the fbi had told him earlier that this piece had been stolen from a museum) and THEN he said “where on earth did you get it from?” and the group of people the woman had with her was like taxidermy-fox.png but the woman was like “inheritance” can you IMAGINE the fbi agent about to have a fucking aneurysm when this random guy you’ve brought in just to nod if it’s the right painting not only starts giving an impromptu lecture but then he asks how they got it
Girls pose by a jail that recalls the witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Photo taken in 1945.
I recently learned that the water in Salem was contaminated with the fungus from which LSD is derived and a legitimate theory for the whole thing is that everyone in the town was tripping balls
This might be the greatest thing ive ever seen on the internet
We did a whole massive thing on this in history. I believe the fungus in question is called Ergot and it’s terrifying. It makes your muscles spasm so when they had seizures that was the reason, not because they were possessed. One woman had to be strapped to her bed, she was seizing so bad. And, like ‘theybuildbuildings’ said, it had the same effects as LSD; as soon as you touch it, let alone consume it, it messes with your entire system. The worst thing is, you practically always had a bad trip. Many complained about bugs crawling under their skin or monsters emerging from the shadows to scratch and bite at them until they were screaming. It was a horrendous thing and the worst part is, Ergot is still around. It grows on crops and, if your wheat isn’t properly treated, it can be eaten and you’ll most likely experience the same as the women of Salem.
god i love history
This is hella cool and almost correct…
The effects on the people of Salem were probably from consuming bread with the fungus in it, not from contaminated water. And apparently rye is way more commonly affected than wheat. In fact, often the members of the clergy were able to afford nicer bread made from wheat and thus were not as commonly affected.
You don’t go on a spasm-y trip just by touching it. You have to consume it for weeks, which results in chronic poisoning. ( If you stop eating it early enough, you may recover. So when people suffering from these “demonic possessions” took refuge in churches and stopped eating low-grade rye bread they were sometimes miraculously healed.
More interesting facts:
Ergot poisoning can result in convulsions & hallucinations, or it can cause gangrene, depending on which group of active alkaloids are present. (Horrifying, either way.) It killed a lot of people in Europe in the Middle Ages.
In Europe, often there was a strong correlation between wet summers (which provide ideal conditions for ergot) and reports of witchcraft/ possession. And in Norway and Scotland, records of witch persecution are only found in areas where rye was grown and used to make bread.
And I just learned right now that one author dude translated the word “Beowulf” as “barley-wolf” which could indicate a connection to ergot. The LSD-like effects could be a valid explanation for stories of Old Norse warriors going into the a sort of trancelike battle rage.
(this is exactly the kind of stuff my herbology medicinal plants class is about, it’s so cool omfg. we had a lecture on ergot last week.)
… is this like the one time I get to be like ‘well, I mean, I probably would have died for other reasons, but at least my celiac ass probably ain’t gonna die from RYE GANGRENE’
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
John Mulaney, a man who is iconically known for loving his wife, after being told by Jerry Seinfeld that his wife only thinks shes good at something
Well done OP, you’ve managed to capture the moment John’s spirit left his body
Jerry’s lucky that John is too polite to throw hands
Okay but I just went and watched this for myself and it’s WORSE
He’s. So uncomfortable. It’s obvious. I cut out the part where John kind of muttered, “That is true, isn’t it” about how all men think they’re funny, but his face is just screwed up in this ‘oh god what have i done what have i signed up for this is not good and this will probably go into my next comedy special of awkwardness’
Just watched this omg bless john bc jerry just keeps trying to do some “take my wife” bullshit and john very politely goes no, no.
proud of John for restraining himself from murdering a man on camera
What’s so horrifying about this to me is that this is literally Jerry Seinfeld trying to teach John Mulaney how to gaslight his wife.
Look at that dialogue. “She thinks she knows.” He’s trying to get Mulaney to see his wife’s expertise as instead a weird misperception. He’s coaching him to undercut his wife’s confidence in the truth and her own abilities.
And Mulaney replies exactly the right way: “She does know.” He asserts not only that she’s perceiving the world accurately, but that she is an expert at something he’s not good at.
Dudes, don’t take this shit from other dudes. Mulaney isn’t by any means perfect but he aced this. Stand for the truth. Defend women’s objectivity. Promote women’s expertise.
Doesnt his wife also work with antiques too?like. Isnt that part of her actual job?
I reblog this every time because I don’t think people understand that Anna is literally an interior designer. She makes absolutely stunning Victorian Lampshades. Which she designs.. for the interior of a home… she’s literally an interior designer. She doesn’t think she’s good at it, she knows she’s good at it because it’s her fucking job
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
Pop up right after I add an entire scene. I see how it is.
Greek mythology: aren’t the god great they only sexually harassed my wife and turned one of my children into a stag beetle this week
Norse mythology: dînghïr œne nüt got his name when he killed a lizard the size of every mountain in the world without Odin’s permission so Odin thought it would be funny to punish him by making him fart so hard one of his nuts flew off
Chinese mythology: This guy just shot down 9 of the 10 suns scorching the planet but he’s mean now so his wife and her rabbit overdosed on immortality pills and floated into the moon so he won’t be a tyrant forever and we made cake in her honor
Yoruba mythology: a project team of gods was sent to earth on THE most massive project ever and the men decided to exclude the lone woman on the team because har har girls suck, and she responded by taking ALL OF THE WATER ON EARTH and watched the men take L’s until the team lead made them take her back
This same goddess is the one a group of male human villagers had to appeal to when the women of their village got so pissed off at their fuckery, they literally left and set up shop somewhere else and had zero plans of coming back
Aztec mythology: Tezcatlipoca is at it again. Which Tezcatlipoca? Does it even matter at this point? Also, Quetzalcoatl had a bright idea again. It ended up in disaster. Again.
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