In the last episode, we saw how food and household ingredients could be and
were extensively used to try to peer into the murky depths of what the future
held for individuals desperate to know. It seems that mostly all people wanted to
know was who they were going to marry, and today's stories aren't wildly far
from that same theme. However, where today's stories do take a detail is
that not only do we explore some of the causes for suspicion during the now
infamous Salem witch trials. In fact, we dive even deeper to see how
food and the poor farming practices of the age may have led to the whole
disaster starting in the first place. So if you've ever doubted food's integral place
in history, today's stories are sure to remind us all that, no matter
what, life and history in general wouldn't and in fact couldn't be the same
without the daily rituals that food brings. These are the bizarre but true stories
from history that in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and
this is the Fantastic History of food. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens.
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we start off by looking at one of the stranger foodstuffs used for divination
purposes, the humble onion. Now also known as chrom neomancy. It was
historically found to have been performed across Europe, Africa, and Northern Asia.
The onion itself was already regarded as a mystical symbol of spirituality and eternity,
so much so that the ancient Egyptians took sacred oaths while holding an onion in
their right hand, much like how we today use a holy book like the
Bible to swear upon while taking an oath. Chromnomancy had various forms and outcomes
from which they hoped to divine the future. They were of course the marriage
related ones, but they were also sometimes used to predict the weather. By
judging the thickness of an onion's skin. Onions were often used to gain insight
into the health and well being of loved ones far from home. They would
be placed upon a sacred altar in the home and then have the names of
the loved ones carved into them. Onions would then be left alone, undisturbed
until they began to sprout. The real magic began, because the faster an
onion sprouted, the better the health than the well being of the loved one
inscribed upon the onion. As usual, they were also used to provide advice
for those who found themselves caught in a love triangle. Not knowing which of
the suitors to choose, the lovelorn woman would carve the names of the two
lovers on too separate onions, and then whichever onions sprouted first would tell her
everything she needed to know about which lover would be most suitable and worthy of
her affections. In fact, this method didn't just work for choosing between two
lovers, who could have been used to answer any yes or no question by
simply inscribing yes or no on too two separate onions and applying the same methodology.
In Southern Germany. They would also attempt to predict the weather of the
entire following year by means of onion divination with the use of his vibal calendar,
literally an onion calendar. Twelve large round onions were removed from the fields
and placed inside a barn, lined up in a row along a large wooden
board. There were twelve onions to each represent one of the twelve months of
the coming year. In a simple method to try to divine how much rain
would fall in each of the coming months, Salt was then sprinkled onto each
of the onions. They were then left over night in a barn without heating
but also warm enough to prevent frost, and then inspected the following morning.
The amount of liquid present in each of the onions the next day would tell
them how much rain and or snow there would be in each of the respective
months to come. Now we move on to and in fact end with the
rich history of a particular foodstuff's influence on witchcraft and fortune telling, and this
practice went by the name of umancy. Do you know yet which ingredients this
involves? Well, you've got a few minutes to work it out while I
give you some of the backstory. Back in the seventeen hundreds, the witchcraft
panic was in full swing and a boy by the name of John Hale would
witness his first execution of a witch when he was just twelve years old,
and this moment was burned into John's consciousness and would dictate much of the life
that lay before him. He would grow up to become a Puritan reverend in
his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts, and would end up being one of the
pivotal figures in the now infamous Salem witch trials. Just before his death in
seventeen hundred, he would write down his memoirs in a book published after his
death titled A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft Now. In his time
as a reverend, he listened to many confessions from his parishioners and would then
use these secretive confessions to accuse certain woman of witchcraft, testifying against at least
two of them at their trials. One of them was rather ironically named Goody
Bishop, and the other poor woman who was accused had possibly one of the
most unfortunate names in history, a certain Missus Dorcas Hall. These women was
simply just two out of more than two hundred women accused just in the span
between sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three. Conveniently, however, John would
go on to regret much of the accusations, in which trial nonsense, right
around the time that his own wife was accused herself of being a witch.
But what does this have to do with food and fortune telling? While in
the sixteen hundreds, the Puritans and their clergymen were strongly opposed to any form
of magic at all, and one of the most pervasive and therefore most heinous,
was fortune telling. Now, naturally, this didn't stop people from practicing
it, despite the severe potential for downside should one be caught. But in
John's book he describes one particularly fascinating form of divination. That's right, oomancy,
the practice of using eggs to interpret the few. But even by this
time, the idea of umancy was several hundreds, if not thousands of years
old. Ancient Greek fortune tellers known as soothsayers, coined the term itself,
stemming from the words un for egg and manchia, meaning divination. Gaius Suetonius
tranquilis a Roman historian who lived from one twenty two BC until sixty nine BC.
Once described how the Roman Empress Livia Drusilla kept a chicken egg in her
cleavage in the belief that the sex of the chick that hatched from it would
determine the sex of her unborn child. Cultures all across the globe have relied
on eggs to predict the future. From Asia to South America, a variety
of different methods were employed, and one method was described as the venus glass.
The concept for this one is simple. All you needed to do was
take a glass of warm water and slowly pour your raw egg whites into the
water. Then watch and wait as the proteins and the egg whites began to
denature. The shapes left behind offered clues to such things as who you may
marry or how you may die, and in a very similar way to how
people interpreted the shapes left behind in tea leaves. If the egg whites formed
the shape of a plow or a horse, your husband might be a farmer.
If it looked like a castle or a fortress, he may be a
soldier, or better yet, a nobleman. And if it looked like a
boat, then your husband was going to be a Fisherman. This episode is
presented by Chemists in the Kitchen by lab x, a YouTube video series spotlighting
the power of chemistry and how science and food can bring people together. In
each episode, real scientists walk you through things like making your own pickles,
the chemistry behind ceviche, or the formula for perfect homemade pretzels, and so
much more. Essentially, it's a love letter to science, cooking, and
individuality, with some great tips on how you can apply real scientific principles to
your everyday cooking. On top of that, it's just a lot of fun.
Season two is airing right now, and you can catch up with every
episode for free on YouTube by searching Chemists in the Kitchen or by simply going
to YouTube dot com slash lab x nas. Again, that's YouTube dot com
slash lab x nas now. A quick detour to the Ozarks of all places,
where there is a commonly held superstition that if a girl hollowed out a
hard boiled egg, filled that hollowed out egg with salt, then ate it
and went to bed desperately thirsty, she would then dream of her future beloved
bringing her a glass of much needed water. But back to ancient history,
and in the Celtic plans Umancy was an important part of the aforementioned Sammayan festival,
celebrating the end of the harvest season and the winter that was fast approaching.
Druids would employ this egg greeting ritual into their festival celebrations to predict what
lay ahead for the coming year. Similarly, German pagans also did this ritual
and referred to it as the egg oracle or air oracol. Jacob Grimm even
describes a similar ritual in his eighteen seventy eight book Deutschen Mythology as a means
to determine if a child had been bewitched by the devil. The connection of
eggs to spirituality is fairly clear in its deep connection to birth and the cycle
of life, as well as its almost ubiquitous availability to almost every culture.
And perhaps it was just that fact that almost anyone could make one of these
so called venus glasses that the Puritan ministers took particular umbradge with it. But
it's hard to stop people who at the best of times were living in an
uncertain world from wanting to try their very best to know what lay ahead of
them. And there were few more unstable times for the villagers in Salem than
Right around this time, immigrants and refugees from all over Europe were flooding into
New England, mostly thanks to King William's war with the French. As the
population numbers grew, so did the melting pot of cultural practices and rituals.
No one knew what to expect in this new land that they had arrived in,
and so they consulted with astrologers and fortune tellers to help them navigate what
lay ahead of them, even if that meant ignoring the advice of the local
reverend. Particularly for single women ripped from communities in which they knew almost everyone.
Now they found themselves at a pivotal moment in their young lives, knowing
that they needed to find a partner, but not knowing how or where to
find one, let alone a good one amongst a sea of unknown faces.
The Venus glass was therefore a simple way to provide these women with at least
an inkling of what to look outful going forward. But it also may not
then be a coincidence that food based magic was such a large proponent of the
Salem which trials themselves Accusations of witchcraft often scented around food and its tangential elements.
If a farmer's butter would in churn properly, it was because a witch
had put a curse on the cream itself. If food spoiled faster than usual,
or a cow produced rotten milk out of its udders, this could surely
only be the work of a local witch. And the tie in is obvious
when you remember that at the time, women were responsible for almost all of
the food production, including the brewing of beer for people to drink because the
water was too unsanitary. So if a woman dared to disrupt the domestic order
of things, it was a serious threat to the social hierarchy and the stability
of these young and still extremely fragile communities. So when a woman was seen
to show curse so called responsibilities, by heaven forbid, living according to her
own it's not then a major leap to see how people could begin to view
that woman as a threat. And when even the smallest thing went wrong in
a housewives food production, rather than incur the wrath of an angry husband,
how much easier it was to simply say that the old crone who actively shuns
the requirements of society must have been the one behind the mishap. Eventually,
however, the mass hysteria around witches began to fade. But only recently have
we potentially discovered that the entire witch panic saga itself may have in fact also
been caused by food. As we know, the panic in Salem all began
when two young girls began having unexplained convulsions and illnesses. Then when other townsfolk
also began to experience these same illnesses, that was when the accusations began.
But in nineteen seventy six, doctor Linda Corporeal found evidence that supported a truly
mind boggling hypothesis that in fact, witches had nothing to do with these illnesses
all, but rather it was the infestation of the town's rye bread with a
particular fungus known as ergot Interestingly, the behavior exhibited by the townsfolk as a
whole fits the bill perfectly for what has been studied in other cases of rye
bread induced ergotism. Now, ergotism forms in Rye after a particularly harsh winter
followed by a damp spring, exactly the same conditions experienced in Salem. The
year the panic started. After the rye plant contracts the ergot fungus, it
grows and replaces the shoots on the grain itself with purplish black growths containing lysurgic
acid and ergotamine. Being that the communities back then were still finding their feet
and didn't have a wealth of expert knowledge, it's theorized that even when the
villagers saw the darker shoots, they more than likely simply attributed them to overexposure
to the sun. Alongside this, they also didn't have the luxury of throwing
away an entire crop of food in what was already a fairly under resourced time,
and so the rye was turned into bread and consumed anyway. Or Once
the rye bread is eaten, the ergotism can cause severe convulsions, can cause
muscle spasms, and the sensation of insects crawling under the skin, the exact
symptoms described by the girls in Salem. Now in another entirely coincidental turn of
events, this can also cause extreme delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia in people
due to the lysurgic acid from which the drug LSD is manufactured. At the
time in Salem, the village doctor was also part of the clergy of the
church, and so was predisposed to first assume the cause was something evil,
especially considering his lack of intensive formal training leading to his lack of any knowledge
of ergotism as a viable disease. So when he began making accusations of witchcraft,
the townsfolk were quick to jump on board with his theory, not helped
by their own experiences with ergot induced delusion and paranoia, and in surely one
of the strongest cases for this argument. The panic which so quickly engulfed this
town just as quickly disappeared a year later, very much coinciding with the town
running out of the ergot contaminated grain. So as you can see, food,
for all of its joy and sustenance, can also bring with it the
means by which to debilitate an entire population. For most of us, we're
lucky to live in a time and a place when quality control, food availability,
and for the most part, food security are just a part of daily
life. But let's never forget there are still many parts of our world to
day with human beings just like you and I, who are still living each
day not knowing within next meal may come from, So maybe take a minute
think about how you and I can actively make a difference in seeing that come
to an end, possibly even in our own lifetimes. This show is made
entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having been made
by the Enigma that is, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to
support the show, the simplest way to do that is over on our Patreon
account. There's just one option, so for just two bucks a month,
you'll help me keep producing the show, and in return, you'll get your
name forever etched onto our supporters Wall of Fame over on our website, and
then maybe listen out for your name in an upcoming episode. So until next
time, bonappetit.