'Tis the season to bring out those beloved family artifacts.
The holiday season is officially here, which means it’s time to head to the attic, garage, closet, or wherever you store your family's decorations. For many people, this is the one time of the year when they get to pull out their most beloved heirlooms and put them on display. Over a lifetime, simple items can become priceless personal artifacts, and we want to see yours!
Maybe it’s a Christmas tree ornament that’s been passed down over the years, accumulating sentimental value along the way. Or perhaps it’s the family menorah, layered with wax for each holiday it’s seen. Personally, I have a hand-sewn stocking that my late grandmother made me when I was just a little one. I still hang it up every year, and hope that someone in my family will continue to hang it for generations to come. Whatever your most precious holiday decoration is, we’re excited to see it.
Fill out the form below and tell us about your most treasured holiday decoration and why it means so much to you. Then email a picture of your object to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Holiday Artifact.” It’s a time of celebration, and we want to see what that means to you and yours.
A unique online resource shows how camo can make a soldier stand out.
In the animal kingdom, adaptation to one’s surroundings is a matter of survival. Take the ever-changing chameleon. These lizards are widely known for their ability to shift the color and pattern of their skin. In some cases this makes them less detectable to predators, but one of its primary purposes is as a social signal, a form of nonverbal communication between reptiles.
Naturally, humans have developed the same strategies. All around the world, military personnel don camouflage to, well, disappear. The advantage is obvious: A blur of brown and green is easily overlooked as a target, particularly against the backdrop of a lush jungle. Yet much like the chameleon, camouflage patterns have evolved into more than just a method of concealment.
Upon clicking and scrolling through Camopedia, an ever-growing online catalogue of camouflage patterns used by militaries around the world, the impact of regionalism on field uniform design becomes apparent. The database is vetted by both historians and camouflage enthusiasts alike to be an accurate reflection of what a soldier from a given part of the world will be wearing. In addition to various varieties of green, India’s offerings include a noticeably gendered magenta for women and blue for some male police personnel. The British Army’s “brushstroke” design could be as artistic as it is tactically successful. Over time, camouflage patterns have become as much about identifying nationhood—standing out—as they are about blending in.
Though India’s unsubtle variations are considered rare, they illustrate how camouflage isn’t just about hiding in battle. “When the average person thinks of camouflage, they think of something that’s put on to disappear,” says Eric Larson, Camopedia’s executive editor. “But camoflauge has actually become, for a lot of these countries, more of a national identifier.”
Larson has collected camouflage for 25 years, meaning he has been “picking up as many different uniforms from around the world as I could,” he says. His personal collection boasts more than 2,500 individual items. He started Camopedia because there were few resources available to help people identify the patterns, when they appear in photos or video, for example.
World War I is thought of as the dawn of modern camouflage’s military application. “[It was] the conflict where people started experimenting with collecting data and intelligence without being seen,” Larson says. In the following years, the art of camouflage gained momentum, and the patterns evolved to match the environments in which battles would be fought. The 1960s, professional camouflage designers began to apply science and optics to the development of new patterns. “Speaking from my knowledge of U.S. development, our participation in Southeast Asia was something that helped [camouflage design] grow into more of a scientific field,” Larson says. “So some of the native Vietnamese tiger-stripe patterns [were brought into use by Americans] … those were very effective in these new jungles because it's dark, there's a lot of shadows.”
Along with navigating by nation, users can search Camopedia by “families” of patterns, which group them based on the geographical region or ecological setting they were designed for. The aforementioned tiger-stripe pattern from the Vietnam War is one example. Bespeckled “chocolate chip” desert camouflage is another. “Obviously there was a lot of turmoil in the Middle East desert region in the ‘70s, and I know that that’s one reason why the United States started to create desert patterns,” Larson explains. “They thought, ‘Well we’re going to be involved at some point over there, so we can’t wear green camouflage.’” Even as camouflage was better designed for its military purpose, it grew into its a dual role as a way to identify soldiers and their home nations, regardless of where in the world they are.
Warren Riley, a retired Master Sergeant for the U.S. Air Force, used camouflage designs in exactly this way during his active years of duty. “When I was in service and was based in several different countries, [other countries’] uniforms were very different from ours,” Riley says, listing attributes of the outfits of soldiers from Switzerland, Russia, and then-Yugoslavia as being the most “out there.” As an active service member, he was deploying regularly and being exposed to new places and thus new patterns. He found a knowledge of the patterns helpful, particularly as a safety precaution. “[You’d] look for certain things no matter where you were … you start looking for a certain uniform,” he says. “When you’re in that environment, it definitely was a way to identify a friendly person [versus] an enemy.”
For journalists reporting on military conflicts, Camopedia is a useful resource to help verify the identities of soldiers, and to provide accurate information to the public. Samuel B. Thielman Jr., a journalist and editor at Columbia Journalism Review, says, “So much of the work around information we see on the internet, especially video and photo, is reconstruction,” so relying on Camopedia to provide context for uniforms seen in different forms of media helps reporters fact-check more thoroughly. “People who are involved in conflict mistake or mislabel photographs of soldiers performing their duties,” Thielman says, but “if you use something like Camopedia, you can see that the pattern on the soldier's uniform was, in fact, an Arab Egyptian soldier,” rather than a soldier from a different country or unit, for example. The media landscape has undoubtedly changed over the years, and in today’s world of fast-traveling content, journalists and politicians need to be able to properly and efficiently deduce who’s who in videos from conflict zones. “There’s a really interesting sub-industry of journalists parsing photos for information about time and location,” Thielman says. “It’s a very different world we report in now.”
Through a series of clicks, Camopedia makes this evident. The curated encyclopedia is also a living document, and open to contributions from users. This is critical given how often military uniforms change. Riley, who retired in 2006, says that the U.S. Air Force uniform alone has gone through “probably two or three iterations” since he wore it.
Camopedia’s status as a definitive resource on camouflage identification is well deserved. It offers information on how different countries approach military tactics and national pride. For instance, Canada’s CADPAT digital pattern is “camouflage that uses computer algorithms to assist in designing patterns that are going to be able to fool the human eye to the greatest degree of effectiveness,” says Larson, while India’s colorful options invoke identification and hierarchy. Today, camouflage uniforms can be understood as both invisibility cloaks and wearable flags.
America’s coasts sit 3,000 miles apart, and are separated by differences both geological and philosophical. But they sit under the same sky—and when disaster strikes on one edge, the air sometimes carries it to the other.
In the parched spring of 1935, dust blew eastward. New York newspapers wrote that Cleveland, Ohio, had been “darkened by a silt cloud” that dampened visibility. The air fouled over the New York cities of Albany and Corning, too, where residents reported an “acrid odor” in the “yellowish fog” that hid the hills. Now, after the Woolsey, Camp, and Hill Fires have scorched more than 200,000 acres in California over the past few weeks, residents father east are witnessing the tail effects.
The blazes’ most devastating consequences were felt nearby, of course, where the fires snatched lives, displaced families and animals, and reduced homes, attractions, and towns to rubble. But proof of them drifted through the sky—carried along the jet stream, high above the ground.
When plumes stretch several miles up in the atmosphere and are carried along the jet stream, they move pretty quickly through the air. At high altitudes, "smoke from the U.S. can reach Europe, and smoke from Siberia and Russia can drift to Canada and parts of the U.S.," says Ravan Ahmadov, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who works on air modeling. In August, smoke and particles from 15 fires burning across California reached New York, and smoke from billows in British Columbia drifted across Canada, and were visible from a satellite more than one million miles away.
As recent fires singed California, low winds held the smoke stagnant around the Central Valley, Ahmadov says. "The region probably had one of the worst air qualities in the world for several days," Ahmadov adds. When the winds finally picked up, the smoke began to drift eastward. As the smoke moves farther from the source, it often appears as a diffuse haze. This might be especially noticeable at sunset, because the smoke particles block shorter wavelengths on the spectrum of visible light, while allowing the longer ones to get through. That’s why a smoky sky might be a rich red or orange, even far from the embers.
Some types of smoke are especially troublesome for people on the ground. NOAA tracks both “near-surface smoke” and smoke that hangs higher the atmosphere. The smoke within 26 feet of the ground is the most dangerous—that’s what aggravates coughs and wheezes when inhaled. That danger is one reason that NASA and NOAA wants to predict its path.
For a long time, that was hard to do. With that in mind, a few years back, the agencies rolled out a model that uses satellite data to forecast smoke’s path and density based on how much heat a particular fire throws off. Ahmadov was a lead developer on the model, known as HRRR-Smoke, which also accounts for temperature, wind speed, and precipitation, as well as the vegetation on the ground (because some plants go up faster than others). It generates four forecasts each day, every six hours, which look 16 miles up into the atmosphere. It's able to estimate conditions up to 36 hours in the future.
Like any forecast, it’s not guaranteed. The orbiting satellite only captures images of each location a handful of times per day, and a lot can change from one image to the next. But the data the satellites collect and funnel into the model are already translating into action on the ground. Over the past few months, the model’s forecasts contributed to officials’ decisions to halt Amtrak service and close portions of Yosemite, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. The forecasts meant that schools and sports teams in Utah and Oregon could cancel or relocate recess or sporting events before their sky became choked by smoke.
As Thanksgiving neared, some residents of the U.S. East Coast took to Twitter to report the smell of smoke, and to share pictures of a sunset that appeared fiercely red and orange. Ahmadov was skeptical: A few days earlier, the model had shown smoke hanging high in the sky, sufficient to tint the sky at sunset, but likely not low enough to be sniffed out on the the ground. On Thursday, the near-surface forecast showed relatively low levels of smoke drifting across Utah, Arizona, and Texas, some of which could be from prescribed burns.
California, meanwhile, was expecting rain. While wind pushes smoke elsewhere, "rain completely removes the smoke from the air and washes it away," Ahmadov says. Until it does, any lingering smoke is a reminder of the environment we all share—even if we only experience of sliver of it firsthand.
After escaping the Holocaust, Manfred Anson paid tribute to his new home.
Hanukkah celebrates a miracle that occurred in 165 B.C., and the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1886. The two moments are separated by two millennia and thousands of miles, but Manfred Anson thought it perfectly appropriate to bring them together.
In 1986, for the statue’s centennial, Anson designed a Hanukkah menorah with nine Lady Liberty–shaped branches, and donated it to the Statue of Liberty National Museum. On each of Hanukkah’s eight nights, Jews light another candle on the menorah to commemorate the miracle that took place in Jerusalem, when the Jewish Maccabee warriors rededicated the Temple after overthrowing the Seleucid occupation. They had estimated that they only had enough oil to light the seven-branch menorah for one night, but the fire burned instead for eight. (The ninth branch, the shammash, is used to light the others.) Anson drew a connection between this story and his restorative journey to the United States, after decades of exile and persecution.
As Grace Cohen Grossman, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, writes in a blog post for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (where one of Anson’s menorahs is on display), a young Anson fled his native Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He was one of 20 boys selected by the Jewish Welfare Guardian Society of Australia to move there, where he served in the army during the war. His younger brother, Heinz, was killed in Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, while his sister Sigrid survived several camps. Anson followed his sister to the United States in 1963. (Their parents had also survived the Holocaust, but had died by the time the siblings reunited.)
According to Grossman, Anson collected thousands of pieces of American memorabilia, including items associated with the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Capitol. He also had between 20 and 30 Liberty menorahs cast from a miniature Lady Liberty souvenir. Anson passed away in 2012, but in 2013 received his highest public honor yet. At that year’s White House Hanukkah ceremony, President Obama lit one of Anson’s Liberty menorahs, and said that Anson “sought a place where he could live his life and practice his religion free from fear,” and that his menorah is “a reminder that our country endures as a beacon of hope and of freedom wherever you come from, whatever your faith.”
Though Anson found refuge, we know that Americans of all faiths have faced bigotry throughout the country’s history. In 2018, Hanukkah comes barely a month after the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents increased in the United States by 57 percent between 2016 and 2017. Anson’s Liberty menorah is a testament to what the United States is capable of, and a reminder that there’s still work to be done.
In the 19th century, pumpkin pie ignited a culture war.
The night before Thanksgiving, I routinely find myself bent over the hot oven, gently shaking the racks to check for the jiggle of just-set custard in my pumpkin pie. My family doesn’t even like pumpkin pie that much; they prefer a latticed caramel-apple pie or an autumnal cheesecake. Still, I bake the definitive Thanksgiving dessert every year.
Each time I serve pumpkin pie, I get to share a little known slice of American history. Although meant to unify people, the 19th-century campaign to make Thanksgiving a permanent holiday was seen by prominent Southerners as a culture war. They considered it a Northern holiday intended to force New England values on the rest of the country. To them, pumpkin pie, a Yankee food, was a deviously sweet symbol of anti-slavery sentiment.
The first account of American Thanksgiving is a letter written about the Pilgrim’s meal in 1621. The holiday evolved from a traditional harvest supper to a Puritan day of gratitude to God in colonial New England. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it further changed into a more secular celebration as the feasting portion overtook prayer. Northern governors often declared state-wide thanksgiving days. They were usually in late November or early December, but there was no unified national holiday.
Thanksgiving may have remained a regional, ad-hoc holiday if not for the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, a Northern writer who is often considered the “Godmother” of American Thanksgiving. In 1825, she initiated annual letter-writing campaigns to governors asking that they collectively declare the final Thursday of November a celebration of thanksgiving. As the editor of Godey's Lady Book, the most widely read magazine of the 19th century, she devoted pages of editorial space to pitching the national holiday as a unifying force in a young and diverse nation. Her 1827 novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England, gives the first detailed account of the Puritan Thanksgiving feast. She dedicates an entire chapter to the meal, in which she describes the “celebrated pumpkin pie” as “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”
Hale was not the only one to associate pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving and Northern tradition. Two pumpkin pie recipes appear in American Cookery, alongside other Thanksgiving favorites such as cranberry sauce and turkey. Considered the first “American” cookbook, American Cookery is known as an example of traditional New England fare. Plus, pumpkin pie calls for Northern ingredients such as squash and molasses. As more states—mainly in the North—recognized Thanksgiving, the pie became closely associated with Northern tradition.
Hale’s cheerful, relentless, and decades-long campaign spread Thanksgiving to 29 states by the early 1850s. But simultaneously, tension was growing over the strengthening abolitionist sentiment in the North. Soon enough, this ignited Hale’s goal of a nationwide (or even trans-national) Thanksgiving.
Southern leaders attacked Thanksgiving as the North’s attempt to impart Yankee values on the South. Virginians, especially, retaliated against Hale’s campaign. In 1856, the Richmond Whig published a scathing editorial on the District of Columbia's “repugnant” declaration of thanksgiving, arguing that the holiday did nothing but rob men of a day’s wages and encourage drunkenness. As for the Northerners who started the celebration: “They have crazy society within New England’s limits, where they have been productive of little but mischief—of unadulterated and unmistakable injuries to sound religion, morals, and patriotism.”
A few years later, according to historian Melanie Kirkpatrick, Governor Wise of Virginia answered letters from Hale by telling her he wanted nothing to do with “this theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving, which has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching ‘Christian politics.’” Wise’s statement directly referred to anti-slavery politics.
Despite Southern resistance, Hale and other Thanksgiving proponents continued to campaign. Eventually, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared the first national Thanksgiving on the final Thursday in November of 1863. This was actually his second thanksgiving proclamation of that year; he also called for a thanksgiving feast after the Union victory at Gettysburg.
In his national Thanksgiving proclamation, however, Lincoln did not speak to the Union or the North alone. Instead, he addressed the whole of the bloodied nation. Lincoln’s proclamation specifically called out “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers, in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.” He implored “the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.” If Lincoln intended to impose Thanksgiving’s Northern, anti-slavery connotations on the South, it did not appear in his speech, which drew on Hale’s unifying rhetoric.
Lincoln set an annual tradition of presidential Thanksgiving proclamations. But for decades, the country grappled over Thanksgiving as a marker of national identity. In Texas, Governor Oran Milo Roberts, a former Confederate army officer, refused to declare Thanksgiving a holiday as late as the 1880s. Some Southern governors would follow the annual presidential proclamations, but move the date of Thanksgiving to resist its message of national unity.
As politicians fought over the symbolism of the holiday, Americans made Thanksgiving celebrations their own. Southern cooks adapted the traditional meal to local traditions, and the Yankee pumpkin pie was often transformed into sweet potato pie, a Southern favorite. In 1941, Congress officially made Thanksgiving a national holiday. By this time, presidential declarations of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November were not only commonly accepted across the country, but expected. In fact, in 1939, President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving one week earlier to allow for more holiday shopping time, and the public turned against him.
Pumpkin pie is an iconic Thanksgiving dish, and a symbol of the struggle to define American identity through the harvest holiday. While the traditional version was once decried as an invasion of Northern foodways on American culture, Southern adaptations such as mixing in bourbon, adding pecans, or swapping out squash for sweet potato now create an opportunity for cooks and diners across America to feel both connected and culturally independent.
For generations, Muslim caretakers have worked at the Magen David Synagogue, one of the last Jewish houses of worship in Kolkata. Children of the employees grew up among members of the synagogue, and some eventually began working there too. Caretakers and members of the congregation share a respect for the historic building, as well as the community it serves. But as the Jewish community in Kolkata continues to dwindle and age, the synagogue faces an uncertain future.
In the video above, Atlas Obscura visits the Magen David Synagogue and learns more about its history.
On a brisk November night, Tagine, a Moroccan restaurant tucked away on a quiet side street near Times Square, is alive with conversation. Nearly 20 people pack in around two tables cluttered with heaping, communal plates of steaming couscous, chickpeas, and yellow lentils. People exchange stories, laughs, and soft wedges of bread dipped in bright green chermoula. Multi-colored disco lights dance across the walls, and the swell of conversation rises and falls against a soft pulse of music and noise from the bar. A young, blonde woman walks through the door and surveys the crowd.
“Is this the singles’ event?” she asks, pointing to the tables. I shake my head.
“Nope,” I tell her. “This is the Death Cafe.” She thanks me, brow furrowed, and heads to the back of the restaurant.
While it may seem strange for conversations about death to be conflated with courting, our group could easily be mistaken for speed daters. Relatively young, open, and inquisitive, my dining companions exude a curious energy, solid appetite, and hunger for good conversation. But, unlike the majority of small talk with strangers, dialogue here is all about death—from philosophical musings about post-death life to the physiological components of dying.
“When the body is dying there are lots of … secretions,” says Tanya, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit at a local hospital. "We sometimes give patients medicine to try to dry them out and stop them from gurgling."
“Is that what they call the death rattle?” someone asks from across the table.
Those noises, we learn, arise once the dying person can no longer swallow or clear fluid from the throat, and often indicates that they're within a day of passing. But as disturbing as it may sound, the death rattle typically doesn't cause the individual pain or discomfort. We talk about the sounds of death, and how to attempt to interpret them, sipping mint tea from delicate, warm glasses. “Having to take care of somebody who’s dying, and their family … it can be a lot. I want to talk about it with my husband, but I don’t want to fatigue him with it,” says Tanya. “But I think about it all the time.” It can be months, even years, she says, before she stops thinking about a patient who has passed away under her watch.
But not all Death Cafe diners come from professions that deal with death. According to Nancy Gershman, the facilitator of our cafe, attendees come from all walks of life, from college students with a philosophical curiosity about death to those who have witnessed something supernatural. Some people want to understand death better in order to prepare for their own. “I had this one 80-year-old who kept asking these roundabout questions,” recounts Gershman. “It turned out she wanted to know what dying was like.”
Gershman, who has been facilitating this Death Cafe for the past three years, says there’s no agenda. Meetings often meander thematically, driven by the questions and stories people bring to the table. But she’s quick to remind me that, while the Death Cafe is a safe space to talk about loss, it’s not a support group. “When you lose someone, there’s a particular period right after it happens where you keep repeating, like a groove on a record,” she says. “We’re not here to stay stuck in that groove.”
Instead, Gershman says, it’s a place to speak openly and inquisitively about the end of life. Formally established in 2011, the original Death Cafe arose as the brainchild of the late founder, Jon Underwood, in his East London home. Inspired by Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz’s café mortel, he set out to create an intentional space dedicated to talking death in order help people “make the most of their (finite) lives.”
Strangers began gathering in Underwood’s London basement to sip tea, munch on cake, and casually discuss death and dying. Before dying unexpectedly from undiagnosed leukemia in 2017, Underwood and his mother created accessible guidelines and protocols so anyone could create Death Cafes within their own communities. Since then, more than 7,300 cafes have cropped up in over 60 countries—an indication that they address a deep-seated desire to understand death, one that's been ignored, if not avoided.
After remaining relatively tight-lipped on the topic for centuries, those in the U.S. are more willingly peeking into the abyss—a cultural moment that’s been dubbed the “positive death movement.” From the growing demand for end of life doulas to the creation of apps that send daily reminders that you’re going to die, it’s apparent that more people are interested in confronting death.
“There’s a growing recognition that the way we’ve outsourced death to the medical profession and to funeral directors hasn’t done us any favors,” Underwood told the New York Times in 2013. By avoiding the topic until it happens, we’re left with all sorts of strange feelings about this universal life event. And yet, many of us prefer to keep it at a distance.
Part of this aversion, Gershman suggests, is that talking about it reminds us that it’s real. It shakes the comfortable illusions many of us cling to—that our bodies and brains are ours to control and keep. Sitting around the table, talking about how to financially plan for our funerals (to keep our partners and families from going into debt) can feel alien, even morbid, at first. But, through sips of mint tea, mouthfuls of warm lentils, and a few laughs, I'm reminded that it’s as necessary as making a financial plan before any big life event, such as going to college or getting married.
The strangeness of talking about death, Gershman says, goes beyond the mere fact that it’s been a longtime taboo topic in some cultures. There’s a lot of subject matter that’s taboo, she says, but death is different—largely because it’s inevitable. She compares it to the sex-positive movement in the U.S., where much of the silence surrounding sexuality has been stripped away to increase transparency and dismantle stigma. “People still have a choice when they’re talking about sex. You can either have sex zero times ... or many times. But with death, you don’t have a choice. It’s going to happen, and it’s not going to be in your control.”
While making death less taboo will help us understand it and plan for it, it can’t help us prevent it. So planning for it is both frightening and necessary. But by ensuring tea and food are present, hosts of the cafes are able to make discussions of dying a little less scary. “There’s a superstition that if you talk about death, you invite it closer,” said Mr. Underwood. “But the consumption of food is a life-sustaining process. Cake normalizes things.”
My tablemates seem to agree that eating makes engaging with death easier. Tanya mentions that the pediatric unit has a giant bowl filled with candy, and it’s intended for the staff, not the patients. Digesting and processing death might be easier when accompanied by something sweet, something that nourishes us, something we understand to be routine. Like death, eating is something all living bodies simply have to do.
As the night progresses, one attendee whose husband passed away a few years ago tells me that, when she lost him, she lost her appetite, too. But in the past few years, her love for food, particularly dark chocolate, has returned forcefully. “Now, I eat it and I can’t stop,” she chuckles. She reaches into her purse, shuffling around a bit before pulling out three wrapped Hershey’s Dark Chocolate with Almonds nuggets, and hands one to each of us, smiling.
Even after years of facilitating Death Cafes, Gershman finds herself surprised by the feverish interest the cafes continue to garner. Month after month, newbies and returners come to talk death with strangers. A big part of the appeal, she ventures, is that death is great fodder for in-person conversation. “This is a subject that people can stay on, as opposed to babysitters and real estate,” says Gershman. “Death is such a rich topic that you could approach it in a million different ways and never be bored.”
Back at Tagine, conversation shifts from the life and death lessons learned from watching Golden Girls to the weirdness of grieving on social media. In a group of complete strangers, no one looks awkward or distracted, and no one is fiddling with a phone. “I really think that people are starved for interesting conversation at dinner,” laughs Gershman.
As I gulp down my piece of chocolate, another swell of laughter erupts from the table to my left. In comparison, the singles’ event in the back seems relatively lifeless. Gershman tells me that what I’ve seen and felt tonight is no anomaly.
“One of the waiters told me, ‘Whenever your group comes in, there’s always such great energy.’” she says. When she told him that this was a Death Cafe, a group focused on death and dying, he thought he had misheard her. “I think it’s because there’s a tremendous sense of relief. When you have relief, there’s more laughter.”
Bowie, Marley, Zeppelin, and more recorded on this piece of music history.
It takes more than guitars, bass, and drums to make rock music. You also need dozens of input channels, a small army of knobs, dials, and switches, and someone who knows how to work all of it.
Well, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and Bob Marley needed those things. They are only a few of the iconic artists who recorded music on the HeliosCentric console going up for auction next month at Bonhams, in London. In its current state, the console is a composite of two historic recording control centers, both designed by Helios Electronics, that saw action during the 1970s. After years in retirement, the two units were merged in the 1990s. The console still works, and is expected to fetch six figures when it hits the block, says Bonhams specialist Claire Tole-Moir.
The older part of the HeliosCentric dates to 1970, and sat in Island Records’ Basing Street Studio 2, in West London, until 1974. During that time, it saw Cat Stevens record “Peace Train,” the Rolling Stones add strings to “Angie,” and Bob Marley and the Wailers lay down “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Stephen Stills also used the console to record his eponymous debut solo album in 1970—the only album ever to feature guitar contributions from both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
But the unit’s towering achievement might have been during sessions for Led Zeppelin’s officially untitled fourth album, released in 1971. While most of that record was famously produced in the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio while Zeppelin stayed in Hampshire’s Headley Grange house, work on it began at Basing Street in December 1970. It was there that the band completed most of “Stairway to Heaven,” and Jimmy Page even returned months later to record his climactic guitar solo, cementing the console’s place in rock history very early in its career.
The second half of the HeliosCentric comes from part of the console used in Alvin Lee’s personal studio between 1973 and 1979. Lee, the guitarist and vocalist for the band Ten Years After, worked during that time with collaborators such as George Harrison, Mick Fleetwood, and Ronnie Wood (who later joined the Stones). In 1996, Elvis Costello and Chris Difford of Squeeze commissioned the merger of the two consoles when they developed HeliosCentric Studios in the small town of Rye. Since its 1998 completion, it has served artists such as Dido, KT Tunstall, and Keane, who recorded their hit “Somewhere Only We Know” on the device. Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley called it the “inspiration machine …”
It remains to be seen whether this piece of recording history will eclipse the EMI TG12345 MK IV, on which Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon. Bonhams sold that last year for $1.8 million.
No genre of eatery tries harder to create a unique atmosphere than the theme restaurant. Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to recommend their favorite theme restaurants from around the world, and they came back with some truly unusual places.
Each one of these restaurants has clearly gone to great lengths to bring their singular little worlds to life. The Frankenstein Pub in Edinburgh, for example, offers a campy horror show, while Milwaukee's espionage-themed SafeHouse makes guests present secret codes to gain entry. Read on to discover some of your fellow readers' best theme restaurant suggestions. Keep them in mind the next time you've got a hankering for a high-concept meal.
“You eat in total darkness, and you don't know what you'll eat before (say if there's something you don't like). An awesome experience!” — Valérie, Paris, France
“The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings–themed. It’s built in an old house and the walls are covered in memorabilia. My favorite piece is an oversized chair made out of tree limbs and covered in faux fur.” — Jennifer Machala, Houston, Texas
“The best Tiki themed restaurant bar on Earth, with a live band playing on a boat in a pool in the center of the restaurant. While swimming is frowned upon, the pool is quite inviting…” — Jarryd Commerford, Incline Village, Nevada
“It is a tiki bar/restaurant, so far pretty normal, but it goes the extra mile. It has sound effects, sometimes they have thunderstorms where the lights go very dim and they simulate lightning, and sometimes the volcano 'erupts' and the whole restaurant gets pumped full of 'smoke' via a fog machine. I'm a big fan of their short ribs, but for ‘theme’ it would be their ‘volcano bowl’ a large (generally shared) cocktail that is lit on fire and erupts with cinnamon.” — Mike, Portland, Oregon
“Spy theme—secret location, code words to enter, hidden rooms. There’s a signature martini that gets shaken by an old bank deposit tube that goes around the bar.” — Julia Phillip, Washington
“The restaurant is built into an old train caboose. It's themed around the tale of Casey Jones, with some really interesting features, such as tables and cubbies in the plough!” — Kia Irving, England
“A witch-themed bar with special effects and incredible ambience. It isn’t campy or silly. At its heart, it’s a great pub with terrific food, great cocktails, and the decor is like walking into something from Harry Potter.” — Erin Jefferson, Cypress, California
“Frankenstein-themed. There’s a Frankenstein’s Monster-coming-alive show, with themed food and cocktails, and old Frankenstein movies playing.” — Rachel Sage, St. Louis, Missouri
"Food is delivered by an overhead train and you order by phone from your booth. The best way to enjoy it is to take three 10-year-olds and give them their own booth.” — Roger Feeley, Falls Church, Virginia
“Edgar Allan Poe/goth themed. Best feature is a restroom hidden behind a bookcase, accessed by removing the correct book.” — Ethan Nicholls, Nottingham, United Kingdom
The pictures were taken for science, but found a wider audience because they're gorgeous and a little trippy.
Sam Droege really loves bees. He thinks they’re cute, for one thing. (Just look at that wee proboscis, those dangly antennae, and those compound eyes, wider and more open than a doe’s.) He can’t get enough of them and, at times, his enthusiasm gets the better of him. “I would argue, as would many other beeologists,” he says, “that most bees are arguably cuter than most kids.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s joking. But Droege’s job at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is part-science and part–public relations. His clients are the bees, and he’s on a mission to persuade humans to love them as much as he does.
Droege is a wildlife biologist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, where he is developing a program to inventory and monitor North America’s native anthophiles. Some of his duties involve fieldwork, which he enjoys so much that he describes a trip to analyze the bee fauna in South Africa’s Kruger National Park as a “vacation.” “I can't think of anything that feeds my spirit more,” he says, “than to be doing uninterrupted natural history in a warm, sunny, bee-filled part of the world while others endure snow up north.” Fair enough. Even if you never trek along with him, Droege will do his darnedest to convince you that bees pausing above the dry landscape’s flowers are just as worth swooning over as the pride of lions stalking past.
For that, he turns to Flickr, where he has mastered the unsubtle art of hype. Droege has shared thousands of photos from the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, mostly portraits of specimens posed against inky black backgrounds. This makes the insects’ features easy to observe and document, but it also looks badass, evoking glamorous portraits of rough-and-tumble rockstars, or a still life of luxury handbags in a glossy magazine. Each photo is accompanied by tidbits of information about the subject’s appearance and habits—as well as, often, a bit of bucolic verse by Emily Dickinson and an old-school emoji that looks a little like a bee’s head. Nearly 800 of Droege’s favorite shots are compiled in an album he calls “Eye Candy.”
Even when the images and captions are playful, they’re all in service of science—or describing its limits. Take the case of a little male bee from the genus Mourectotelles. “What an attractive bee,” Droege writes in the caption. “Unfortunately, that is about all we can say about this species, other than it is found in the western temperate regions of South America” (this individual hails from Argentina, specifically). Since the insect hasn’t yet been sorted into a specific species, Droege has dubbed him “Bee cute furry face.” This name, and other goofy ones like it, are internal placeholders for Droege and his colleagues, but used “sometimes as a way to indicate the essence of the species we are portraying,” he says. “It is mostly an accident that anyone runs into our hidden nomenclature.”
If someone does fall for those charms, it could pay off. As one might expect, research has found that the more likable a species seems, the more enthusiastic people are about conserving it. Overall, people seem to feel pretty okay about bees, according to a 2017 study in PLOS One. For that work, German researchers surveyed 499 students and 153 beekeepers, and found that both novices and fans were on board with protecting bees—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know much about them. In another 2017 study, ecologists from Utah State University found that even people who wanted to preserve bee habitats, curb pesticide use, and shore up colonies against collapse were ultimately a little clueless about the insects. "In our recent survey, 99 percent of our respondents said bees are critical or important, yet only 14 percent were able to guess within 1,000, the actual number of bee species in the United States," said lead author Joseph Wilson, a Utah State biologist, in a news release. "Most people estimated around 50 species of bees, while the correct number is about 4,000 known species."
The glamour shots “reached an audience who would never read any of my papers,” Droege explains, and the photos attest to the dazzling diversity of bees—tiny, fuzzy, wide, long-nosed, emerald, aubergine. The photos have flitted across the internet, even landing on the r/woahdude subreddit, a home for images and audio "that make a sober person feel stoned, or stoned person trip harder." The pictures are the hook, and once readers are snared, the captions remind us that bees and other familiar pollinators are just the tip of the biodiversity iceberg.
Laurence Packer, a melittologist (that is, a bee expert) at York University in Toronto who collected that “Bee cute furry face” specimen, points out that experts also struggle to keep them straight. When he gives identification quizzes to students and professors, he often finds that even people who have been working in the field for years are fooled by other insects that look like bees, and bees that look like other insects. “There are 20,355 described bee species, and nobody on the planet can recognize all of them, for fairly obvious reasons,” Packer says. There are way too many for a single brain to recall—and they’ll surely be joined by more bees that will be documented in the future.
Packer travels the world collecting species, and makes frequent jaunts to Argentina and Chile. (Droege occasionally tags along.) Sometimes, a region will be remote enough that Packer is fairly confident that nearly any species he finds will be unrecorded in the scientific literature. He collected some while driving down a mountain in the Atacama Desert, for example, in what he calls a “spectacularly weird” setting where a few patches of flowers gave way to a sea of sand, and a bunch of long, long-tongued, pale bees swarmed. Sometimes he’s not sure whether something has already been recorded until he compares the specimen against identification keys or performs DNA analysis. Packer’s lab has already found 200 or so species, and has another 150 manuscripts in the pipeline.
There’s plenty of academic work left to be done: Packer suspects that there are several thousand species that have yet to be collected and described. “Just in [Mourectotelles] alone exists dozens of graduate degrees, waiting for someone to explore this group’s life history,” Droege writes on Flickr. Public relations campaigns like Droege’s could help spark curiosity about them, and a willingness to pitch in to help them where they’re struggling. “If you don’t know something,” Packer says, “you can’t like it.”
“Bees have no voice,” Droege says. “I am glad to partially speak for them.”
Polish political prisoners played a song called “The Most Beautiful Time of Life" for the SS.
At Auschwitz, when prisoners went to work, a band played. The rhythm of the music was meant to encourage a rhythm to their labor. The musicians were prisoners themselves, and along with physical labor, they had other musical duties. They would play, sometimes, during executions or during inspections. And on Sundays the band would play for the pleasure of the SS, in front of the house of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss.
These songs were often light fare—in 1943, for instance, the band played a popular fox trot, named, incredibly, “The Most Beautiful Time of Life.” Last summer, Patricia Hall, a professor of music theory at the University of Michigan, found the arrangement in the archive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. And this week, an ensemble at the university will perform the piece, reviving the haunting and chilling sound of one of the Nazi’s most infamous concentration camps.
Hall has long been dedicated to archival research, and when she got wind that these arrangements might exist, she traveled to Poland to try to find them. There are few records of concentration camp bands, though many had one.
The manuscript was written out by hand, by three different musicians. This was a song about falling in love in the month of May, by a German composer, and the Auschwitz musicians created a version for the instruments they had available. This version calls for nine violins, a viola, a trombone, two clarinets, and a tuba.
Hall was able to identify two of the musicians who worked on the manuscript. They inscribed their prisoner numbers on the documents as a signature of sorts. One, Antoni Gargul, was a violinist and a Polish soldier; the other, Maksymilian Pilat, was a conservatory-trained bassoonist. Both survived the war, and Hall believes the third musician may have as well.
The bands were made up mostly of Polish musicians, held prisoner for their political beliefs; Jewish prisoners weren’t allowed in concentration camp bands—a privilege, relatively speaking—until the end of the war. Musicians at University of Michigan have also made a recording of the arrangement—“We’re hearing as close as possible how it sounded in Auschwitz in 1943,” Hall says. The music is beautiful, but disturbing to imagine as the backdrop to the daily life in Auschwitz.
Making a cokentryce calls for needle, thread, and a lot of meat.
Built in the 16th century, Hampton Court Palace is the largest surviving palace of the time. Notable for being able to fit the entire royal court of its owner, Henry VIII, it's also a mix of two styles (Tudor and Baroque), a legacy of a partial renovation. But its main kitchen, once the largest in Tudor England, was left unremodeled. In these frozen-in-time rooms, a team of historian-cooks still turns out food fit for royalty, including a roasted mythical beast, the cokentryce.
While the cokentryce never existed, many Europeans once believed it was a real animal. According to Historic Kitchens manager Richard Fitch, "it has the body of a rooster and the back of a pig." The cokentryce was said to be a relative of the scaly, deadly basilisk, so some depictions included a snake's tail. From a 15th-century perspective, Fitch says, "These animals truly exist. They might not exist in their country, but they exist somewhere in the world." Medieval European writers and artists described and sketched many a cokentryce, and the beast is even mentioned several times in the King James version of the Bible as a venomous creature.
Their nonexistence didn't stop people from trying to eat them. Multiple recipes from the period describe how to make your very own cokentryce. Cooks who wanted to present a mythical creature on their lord's table sewed together pigs and chickens. With clever stitches, careful roasting, and disguising garnishes, medieval and perhaps even Tudor cooks created surprisingly realistic cokentryces, which they presented with the intent to awe.
At least, that's what Fitch thinks. His Historic Kitchens team made nine cokentryces last month, appropriately on the week before Halloween. It was their latest foray in years of making mythical roasts from 15th-century medieval recipes, and their guiding principle is realism: The cokentryce should look as if it walked and breathed before being butchered. The team succeeded—guests walking through the Hampton Court Palace kitchen asked about the unfamiliar animal roasting on the spit.
To Fitch, these reactions reflect the purpose of the original cokentryce. For rulers, they demonstrated power, even at dinner. In many sources, cokentryces are described as a meat for royalty. "You are quite literally providing fiction for people," says Fitch. "You're providing a myth that people can consume." The time and artistry needed to create a cokentryce also displayed wealth and social status.
Since the Historic Kitchens team uses traditional techniques to demonstrate vintage cuisine, their cokentryces called for just as much effort, if not more. Fitch relates years of trial and error: The team first made cokentryces more than 20 years ago. Many historical recipes provide limited explanation, and the team strives to interpret them as accurately as possible.
Still, certain allowances for modernity had to be made. Fitch and his team made their cokentryces with turkeys, not chickens. Royal chefs used the large, meaty capon: a castrated rooster. But while the castration results in a larger, fatter bird, the practice is considered inhumane under modern British law. Plus, Fitch notes, modern rearing practices mean many chickens have weak bones and thin skin, making them bad material for a meat sculpture.
With a turkey and a suckling pig from the local butcher, the assembly of a cokentryce can begin. Typically, Fitch says, the cooks divide the pig and the turkey into two parts, a front and hindquarters. The division is done carefully. The two halves need to be of similar dimension, with plenty of skin left over for sewing the sections together with a blanket stitch: the front of the pig to the bird, or vice-versa. The two halves of the cokentryce are connected with a metal wire in the spinal columns of both animals (this also makes them more pose-able). Then, the cooks stuff the cokentryce with bread, and arrange it on the spit carefully: Once it's roasted, it can't be re-posed. Once paper is tied to the appendages of the cokentryce to keep them from burning, someone must laboriously turn the spit until it's fully cooked.
But there's one final step that really ups the realism factor. Just before it's taken off the spit, the cokentryce is covered in colorful batter. Whether red, green, or gold, the batter creates a skin-like tone and disguises the stitching. Finally, the cokentryces are decorated with care. The team gave one dual-headed cokentryce feathery wings, while they posed another with an adversary: a weasel made of beef, since weasels were supposedly the cokentryce's natural enemy.
Throughout the process, visitors to Hampton Court Palace watched the team work. "They are asked to look at the different ways that people viewed animals in the past," Fitch says. When The Atlantic reported on the Hampton Court Palace cokentryce in 2013, it resulted in protests that the practice was gruesome. Fitch puts that down to the cokentryce retaining its head, unlike a chicken cutlet or pork chop. “When it's got a head and face on, it's very difficult to disconnect the thought process of eating a piece of chicken from eating an animal,” he says.
But Fitch notes that there's always an element of surprise to their cooking demonstrations, no matter what is prepared. "The fact that we have costumed staff who are cooking real food using real ingredients in front of people is still a shock."
While families today might argue about whether to top their sweet potatoes with marshmallows or serve green beans with a mushroom-soup membrane, colonial cooks had different expectations for their Thanksgiving recipes. For one, pies were not just dessert. Meaty-yet-sweet mince pies, which descended from medieval European pies, held a special place at the Thanksgiving table. And one key ingredient of these indulgent pastries is long-forgotten: cow tongue.
Not until the 18th century did references to early Thanksgiving dishes make their way into the historical record, but most mention mince pie as a standard part of the feast. Pie, as a classic British food, made its way to colonial tables via the settlers. In Europe, the dish had long been a source of both sustenance and entertainment: Pie crusts, which were once called coffyns, were sturdy enough to double as containers and could hold fillings both cooked and living (such as the ever popular "four and twenty blackbirds" pie).
One of the most popular pastry coffyn fillings, however, was, mincemeat: a combination of finely chopped and cooked meat, sweeter ingredients such as apples, currants, and raisins, alcohol such as brandy, and beef fat (suet). Part of mincemeat’s popularity came from its function as a useful way to repurpose leftover or unused ingredients, from vegetables to meat scraps, such as offal or organ meats. Cooks could prepare the pies in advance, and after a hearty mincemeat dinner or breakfast (mince meat could be eaten any time of day), farmers could carry their leftovers into the field.
But on Thanksgiving, mincemeat tongue pie was far from a frugal affair, and represented a particularly indulgent treat. The first American cookbook, American Cookery, published in 1796, includes three mince pie recipes. One recipe hints that cow feet and tongue (referred to as “neet”) were among the most prized ingredients for holiday feasting. The recipe also called for a third pound of sugar, a quarter pound of butter, a pint of wine, and a pound of raisins, and later recipes included apples, brandy, lemon, and “corn meat.” These pies were so decadent that the Mother of Thanksgiving herself, Josefa Hale, wrote, “They are considered indispensable; but I may be allowed to hope that during the remainder of the year, this rich, expensive, and exceedingly unhealthy diet will be used very sparingly by all who wish to enjoy sound sleep or pleasant dreams.” She goes on to decree that they should never be served to children.
How could an organ meat be considered integral to a festive Thanksgiving pie, and so rich and tasty that it tested Puritan sensibilities? According to food scholar Bruce Craig, author of A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America, fresh tongue (as opposed to pickled tongue, as it was often eaten) offered a rich fattiness to mince pies. Similar to cow feet, tongue is rich in collagen and, when cooked for a long time, creates a tender and gelatinous structure and an unctuous, mouth-coating texture. Combined with sugar, alcohol, and dried fruits, the hefty pie was a true bounty.
But with all that flavor, “neet’s tongue” and “neet’s feet” eventually disappeared from the Thanksgiving table. According to Craig, it’s possible that children started distancing themselves from old tastes and traditions. As wealth increased, “muscle meats” also became more popular, until the “meat” in mince meat was merely a vestige.
Sweet mince pies hung around for a few more decades: A 1903 Heinz advertisement reads “Mince Pies for Thanksgiving Time” and boasts that “a single trial will convince you of its superiority.” But by the 1950s, Americans prepared more JELL-O salad than jellied meat for Thanksgiving. Today, both dishes seem quaint, and have been banished from many turkey-topped tables. But as with most trends, perhaps by next Thanksgiving, a morsel of minced tongue will make its comeback to the holiday menu.
Turns out early cave art wasn’t just depictions of animals and other terrestrial scenes. The truth is much more symbolic, and much more starry.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh have published new findings that suggest Prehistoric cave dwellers had quite a sophisticated knowledge of the skies. The artwork studied, from caves in Turkey, France, Spain, and Germany, shows a consistent set of symbols (a key, if you will) that reveals how ancient peoples tracked astronomical events. Much like the animal-based shapes of our constellations and astrological zodiac signs, these drawings also illustrate a correlation between animals and the placement of the stars at a specific time.
Dr. Martin Sweatman, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the paper, helped lead the team that studied these examples of Paleolithic and Neolithic art to decode their carefully chosen symbols. They chemically dated the paints used, and employed the software “Stellarium” to calculate the position of constellations at the relevant solstices and equinoxes. Upon matching the radioactive carbon dates of the art with the results from the software, Sweatman says the team found “an extraordinary level of agreement.” Essentially, these precise cave artworks, used as a method of record-keeping, reveal a deep understanding of astronomy from a people previously thought of as primitive. Their knowledge of the skies suggests a similar knowledge of the seas, which likely aided in navigation and, by the transitive property, prehistoric human migration.
Last year, Sweatman and a colleague decoded the artwork at Gobekli Tepe, an ancient Turkish archaeology site thought to be from roughly 11,000 B.C. Based on the insights into astronomy observed there, Sweatman realized that it must have existed much earlier than 11,000 B.C. From there, Sweatman extended his work across other locations, and began working with Alistair Coombs (the co-author of this paper) to decode other paintings “like solving a crossword,” he says.
In the Dordogne region of France, the relatively well-known Lascaux Shaft Scene features a dying man with a horse, bison, bird, rhinoceros, and geometric shapes surrounding him. Though this Upper Paleolithic mural was once interpreted as an abstracted narrative about life and death, this paper now suggests that it commemorates a comet strike that occurred around 15,200 B.C. Sweatman says that this scene “describes a major damaging event from the direction of Capricornus. It is likely this refers to a collision with cometary debris from the Taurid meteor stream.” These findings support the theory of “coherent catastrophism,” which, according to Sweatman, “describes how a giant comet became trapped in the inner solar system many thousands of years ago, creating a stream of debris that we collide with every few thousand years.” This is significant since this debris remains in our orbit, albeit irregularly.
The first observance of constellations is widely credited to the Babylonians around 4,000 years ago, and the discovery of the “precession of the equinoxes” (a phenomenon that describes how constellations’ correspondence with equinoxes and solstices changes ever so slightly over time) is generally credited to Hipparchus of ancient Greece, in the 2nd century BC. But Sweatman and Coombs’ findings challenge those accepted “truths.” “We have shown the same constellations, and precession, were known over 35,000 years earlier,” he says. Because of this, humans from this time must have been relatively intelligent. “Our work shows they also had a scientific mind—they could observe nature and predict how the stars change over time. This shows they are hardly any different intellectually to us today.”
The shared method of record-keeping across different places, peoples, and eras shows a shared human understanding of the astral world. Though there are likely minor variations, Sweatman presumes that “their art and astronomy was all connected with an ancient mythology … so this was probably a central part of their lives—perhaps it is how they understood nature.” Based on the consistency of results found across different ancient artworks, these generally accepted codes of astronomy-based time-keeping were almost certainly not limited to western Europe and Turkey.
Modern astronomy supports the hypothesis that these ancient peoples tracked the passage of time by recording the slowly shifting positions of the stars. Though we still use the same constellations, Sweatman says that most of the symbols have changed over the last 40,000 years. “Some have swapped positions: for example, the bull has moved from Capricornus to Taurus, and the Lion has moved from Cancer to Leo.” So, the astrological animal symbols we use to describe and locate objects in the sky today come from a long history of scientifically accurate cave art.
In England, posh men and members-only establishments, such as London’s famed Gentlemen’s Clubs Boodle’s and Brooks’s, have gone hand-in-hand for centuries. Even the concept of the ‘club’ is said to find its roots in Britain, and despite the BBCreferring to them as “much lampooned bastion[s] of privilege and tradition,” their popularity has surged in recent years. What would I know though? As a not-so-well-connected woman, it’s unlikely I’d ever get a foot in the door.
But Gentlemen’s Clubs actually owe their existence to chocolate. Or, more specifically, to the rowdy chocolate houses of the 17th- and 18th-century Europe.
A sense of these establishments can be glimpsed from the 18th-century painting series “A Rake’s Progress,” which depicts White’s, the most debauched chocolate house of the bunch. A man kneels on the floor, wig in hand, in despair after losing his fortune, while a fellow gambler haggles with a moneylender. Behind him, a fight is breaking out, and most fail to notice a dangerous fire starting to smolder. Such is life in the 18th century chocolate house. Jonathan Swift famously described the establishment—which was established in 1693 by Francesco Bianco, an Italian who went by Frances White—as “the bane of the English nobility.” Others considered it “the most fashionable hell in London.” (That fire wasn’t fictional. White’s burned to a crisp in 1733.)
White’s may have been one of London’s most infamous chocolate houses, but it was not the first. Most historians cite one run by a Frenchman on Queen’s Head Alley just off Bishopsgate, although Dr. Matt Green notes in his book London: A Travel Guide Through Time that “someone called John Dawkins, living near the Vine Tavern in Holborn, was offering chocolate ‘at reasonable rates’ as early as 1652.”
Meanwhile, London was in the throes of a uniquely tumultuous political period. While Dawkins was dishing out drinking chocolate, two political parties were vying for both power and popular opinion. There were “the Tories, who were ‘divine right’ royalists, and the Whigs, who were generally anti-Stuart,” write the Coes in The True History of Chocolate. (The Stuart dynasty dominated the English monarchy throughout the 17th century.) As such, chocolate houses began to shake off their humble beginnings and “reasonable rates,” instead developing into hangouts for the hobnobbing politicians and social climbers who had the means to foot the bill for luxurious (and correspondingly costly) chocolate. In fact, Charles II so feared chocolate houses’ political plotting, idle chitchat, and, eventually, rampant gambling that he tried to ban them in 1675.
He failed spectacularly, and by the late-17th century, notes Green, London’s aristocratic St. James’s neighborhood was awash with a “cluster of super-elite, self-styled chocolate houses,” including White’s, The Cocoa Tree, and Ozinda’s.
Chocolate may be commonplace today, but at the time, it served as the ideal catalyst for those soon-to-be dens of debauchery. After all, it was an new, exotic drink from the Americas, having arrived in Europe in the 16th century and oozed its way across the continent. It landed in London some 100 years later, shortly after another equally mysterious drink: coffee. In addition to novelty, the popularity of both was bolstered by pseudo-scientific marketing ploys. Coffee became synonymous with sophistication (although it was later decried by people ranging from women’s groups to papal advisers as heathenish and an abomination), and coffee houses became popular places for people of various social standings to discuss business, politics, and science. Meanwhile, notes Green, chocolate, as the more expensive, exclusive substance, was imbued with “powerful and infallible” aphrodisiacal properties. Samuel Pepys, the famed diarist and member of parliament, even hailed it as a hangover cure. Movers and shakers clamored to get their hands on it, even in the early days, when the chocolate was likely bitter or sour.
But just as the chocolate houses themselves became more decadent over time, so did the chocolate. By the 18th century, sugar was very much present in the formerly bitter beverage; egg yolk emulsifiers were added too, to take the edge off the unsightly white cocoa butter content of the chocolate (or, as Sarah Moss writes in Chocolate: A Global History, “perhaps, given the egg yolks, custard”). As Sophie Jewett, owner of The Cocoa House and Works in York, England, tells me, serving up bitter chocolate in the lavish, purpose-built chocolate houses of the 18th century seems incongruent. “In those places, [chocolate] would have been at its most opulent. If somebody could afford cocoa, they could afford sugar.” After all, chocolate was “the beverage of the aristocracy,” according to Bertram Gordon in Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage.
Chocolate, and all it came to symbolize, may have drawn the initial crowds, but it was the chocolate house culture which kept them coming back. The regulars “weren’t going to exclusive chocolate houses to drink chocolate,” Jewett says. “They were going to hang out with other people who could afford chocolate.”
Oh, and gamble. They were definitely going to gamble. What Green refers to as the “legendary White’s betting book,” which dutifully listed every triviality bickered over and bet upon by members, can appear, at first glance, to be satire. Bets were placed on whether a man dragged in off the street would live or die (die); on whether a man could live 12 hours underwater (no); and on which raindrop would reach the bottom of a windowpane first (who cares). Most extravagantly, £180,000 was dropped on the roll of a die, an astronomical figure both at the time and today.
Once industrialisation made chocolate a foodstuff for the masses in the late-18th century, chocolate houses fell out of fashion. However, the most extravagant endured. White’s is now the oldest Gentlemen's Club in London , a private establishment whose members list reads like a who’s who of English aristocracy. (Prince Charles, naturally, held his bachelor party there.) White’s also has the dubious honor of maintaining a strict and controversial no-girls-allowed policy. Unless you’re the Queen of England, that is. (She’s been allowed in twice to date.) Meanwhile, The Cocoa Tree, which Lord Byron once frequented and which was found to have a secret tunnel leading towards Piccadilly, is now the RAC (Royal Automobile Club) headquarters.
Chocolate houses may be a thing of the past, but their opulent, elitist legacy lives on in London.
The Maharaja of Nawanagar opened his summer palace to displaced children.
When he was only six years old, Feliks Scazighino and most of his family were deported from Poland to a Siberian gulag. They remained there for almost two years. Like many refugees, when he was finally released from his imprisonment, he had nowhere to go. That is, until a Maharaja from India opened his doors to Scazighino and nearly a thousand Polish children.
“I was with my mother, my brother, our nanny, my grandparents, and an aunt,” Scazighino recalls. “I remember our life in Siberia, all our illnesses and deprivations and hunger. When we got out of Russia and reached Tehran, we looked like skeletons. We all had to be deloused, our hair had to be shaved off, and our clothes burned.”
For Scazighino, now in his 80s and living in Canada, it is hard to share the story of his childhood. He is from Kresy, which was in the eastern part of Poland. Kresy was invaded by the Soviet Union in September 1939, just days after the German occupation of Poland’s western territories that triggered World War II. The Soviet atrocities in eastern Poland included mass arrests and massacres, expropriation of land and businesses, and the displacement and enslavement of the civilian population.
“Of the estimated two million Polish civilians deported to Arctic Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, in the terrible railway convoys of 1939-40, at least one half were dead within a year of their arrest,” writes the historian Norman Davies in Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. When the Soviets joined the Allied powers in 1941, many of the deportees were released, but because of the ongoing war, there was no homeland to which they could return.
And so release was just the beginning of a long and extraordinary journey. Many of the men joined the Polish Army, while the women and children were evacuated to Iran and eventually given asylum in countries as far away as Kenya, New Zealand, Mexico, and India.
“I was about eight and my brother, Roger, was six-and-a-half years old when we reached Bombay,” says Scazighino. Their mother had to stay back in Tehran, which had been their first stop upon release. “After about three months in Bombay, we went by train to Jamnagar, to the camp prepared by the Maharaja of Nawanagar.”
It was in India, where Scazighino spent 18 months, that he went to school for the first time and could finally reclaim some part of his lost childhood. “We met the Maharaja only a couple of times,” he says. “I do not remember him well, but I remember going to his swimming pool where the older boys taught me how to swim by throwing me into the pool.”
In 1942, India was under British rule and going through a volatile nationalist struggle, which would culminate with independence in 1947. Maharaja Digvijaysinhji, also known as “Jam Saheb,” who served on the British Empire’s Imperial War Cabinet, was the ruler of Nawanagar, a princely state (a state governed by a native Indian ruler) in British India. When the British decided to accept Polish refugees into India, the Maharaja offered to host them in his state. A settlement was built for refugee children in Balachadi, on the coast of western India, at the site of his summer palace.
“For my sister, it was the first time in her life that she had some stability and a sense of ‘home,’” says Danuta Urbikas, a writer who lives in Chicago. Urbikas, who was not a refugee herself, has explored the story of her mother and half-sister in My Sister’s Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia.
“After having gone through the horrors of deportation from Poland and enslavement in a Siberian labor camp, the terrible journey to escape through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan into Iran, enduring diseases of all sorts, starvation, witnessing hundreds of people dying, India was a blessing!” she says over email. Urbikas’s mother was a nurse with the Red Cross. They lived in India for five years, two of which they spent at the Maharaja’s estate in Jamnagar and the rest in Bombay.
It is estimated that, nearly 5,000 Polish refugees from Soviet camps lived in India between 1942 and 1948, although researchers have not been able to establish the exact numbers. Multiple transit camps were set up in different locations in India for refugees who were crossing over from Iran to other places. The Maharaja’s gesture was followed by a second and larger settlement for older Polish refugees, organized in 1943. The latter camp was set up in Valivade, in what was then the princely state of Kolhapur and what is today the state of Maharashtra.
The Maharaja already had an abiding interest in Poland, an outgrowth of his father’s friendship with the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski, whom he remembered meeting in Geneva as a child. In an interview to the weekly magazine Poland, Jam Saheb explained why he had offered to provide shelter: “I am trying to do whatever I can to save the children; as they must regain their health and strength after these dreadful trials, so that in the future they will be able to cope with the tasks that await them in a liberated Poland.”
The settlement at Balachadi was exclusively for children. According to Wiesław Stypuła, who was one of the child refugees, many of the children were orphans. Others only had one parent. Some parents had gone missing, while others had joined the Polish army, which was being assembled in the Soviet Union. “Please tell the children that they are no longer orphans because I am their father,” Stypuła quotes the Maharaja telling one of the organizers of the camp.
Far from the ravages of the war, life in Balachadi, as described by Stypuła and other survivors, was warm and cheerful. Every effort was made to create a home away from home. The children were provided with housing and education. A school and a hospital were built. They were free to use Jam Saheb’s gardens, squash courts, and pool. The preservation of Polish culture and tradition was greatly prioritized and a Polish flag was raised at the site. Scouting and church, institutions that were integral to Polish life, were built in the “Little Poland” that sprung up in India, writes Anuradha Bhattacharjee, an academic and researcher in her book, The Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India. (The refugees referred to the settlement camps in India as a “Little Poland,” a term that caught on with those who have documented the story.)
Bhattacharjee says that what the Maharaja did was an example of the ancient and popular Sanskrit philosophy of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (“the world is one family”). “India was not the richest country, nor was it a neighboring country,” Bhattacharjee says, “and yet a quirk of events led to seemingly unrelated people getting together and finding a humanitarian solution.”
Princess Hershad Kumari and Prince Shatrusalyasinhji, the biological children of Jam Saheb, were the same age as the children at the camp. Though they were not available to comment for this story, they have shared their memories, in a documentary and elsewhere, of growing up alongside the Polish children, of playing with them, celebrating Indian festivals and Christmas, and gifting them Indian costumes.
Eighty-two-year-old Sukhdevsinhji Jadeja, Jam Saheb’s nephew who also grew up in Jamnagar, remembers his time at his uncle’s property well. “My uncle did not just accommodate [the refugees], he adopted them,” Jadeja says. “I remember having football matches with the boys from Balachadi. As we grew up, the story was passed down in our family as a good deed that we all took great pride in.”
As World War II drew to a close, the question of repatriation of the refugees was foremost at both Balachadi and Valivade. While some did return to communist Poland, many did not. Those who opted for another path started a long journey towards the U.K., the U.S., and Canada.
Scazighino’s personal odyssey after leaving India is typical of the sorts of arduous journeys the refugees had to make. With his brother, he left India for Tehran to be with his mother. After waiting for six months in Tehran, Scazighino’s mother and her sons went through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to Palestine, where his mother fell ill for three months. Once she recovered, they traveled on to Port Said, where they boarded a ship to Glasgow and finally London. In London, they reunited with Scazighino’s father. His father had been posted as a reservist to Romania, and went from there to France. After the Fall of France, he traveled through North Africa and eventually to London, where he worked for Polish Radio. And that’s where the family reunited.
“If I had stayed in Poland and there was no war, I would have been a spoilt little rich boy,” Scazighino says. “Instead I was a poor immigrant in a world not too friendly to poor immigrants.”
While the world was in turmoil in the aftermath of the war, India was going through its own turbulent times. The country had gained independence from colonial rule and a way of life was disappearing forever as the princely states were merged into one country. The story of wartime refugees and the generosity of princes slowly started fading as India was grappling with the challenges of nation-building. But the refugees carried the story in their hearts to different parts of the world.
Decades later, Jam Saheb is considered a Polish hero. He was posthumously awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, one of the highest honors in Poland. In the heart of Warsaw lies the Square of the Good Maharaja (Skwer Dobrego Maharadzy), a cozy space with trees and benches in the central district. Not very far from it is one of Warsaw’s foremost private schools, the Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji High School. In 1999, 10 years after the end of communist rule, the Bednarska High School chose the Good Maharaja to be its patron. It was the fulfillment of a promise made long ago. General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of Polish Government in Exile, had asked the Maharaja, “How can we thank you for your generosity?” The Maharaja replied, “You could name a school after me when Poland has become a free country again."
“The Maharaja set an extraordinary example of generosity and acceptance. This story is our inspiration,” says Barto Pielak, vice principal of Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji High School. The school emulates the Maharaja’s example, by accepting children of political refugees and migrants in difficult economic or social situations. “Each year more and more people learn about the attitude shown by our patron Jam Saheb, which is specifically significant while Europe struggles with the issue of massive migration.”
This story of hope would have likely been buried, were it not for the tireless work of the refugees themselves to keep it alive. Both Scazighino and Urbikas shared their testimony over email after I found them online through a group of Polish survivors called Kresy-Siberia, with members scattered all over the world. The individuals who moved to the U.K. formed an Association for Poles in India and meet every two years for a reunion. Through the decades, they have organized regular trips to India. A few years ago, some of the Maharaja’s “children” visited Balachadi and installed a plaque at the site where a school was constructed after the settlement was dismantled.
In September 2018, to mark the centenary of Polish independence in November, the Embassy of Poland in India brought some of the survivors to Balachadi for a commemorative event. Relations between India and Poland are still defined by this wartime story. Adam Burakowski, Ambassador of Poland to India said, “We are very grateful to the Maharaja for offering a safe sanctuary and somehow preserving the childhood of these children.”
In the current global context of the backlash against migration, this story of displaced Polish civilians finding a home in a remote but hospitable land is worth retelling.
Education for women and emerging nationhood, illustrated with care and charm.
The first "schoolgirl map" that caught historian Susan Schulten’s attention was made in 1823 by Frances Henshaw, a student at one of the best schools for girls in the young United States. The map came from Henshaw's Book of Penmanship, which included details about geography and astronomy—comets, meridians, horizons, polar circles, and climate zones. The young woman's drawing encompassed 19 states, copied from Carey's American Pocket Atlas, from 1805, and Arrowsmith and Lewis' Atlas, from 1812.
Schulten studies 19th-century American cartography at the University of Denver, and she was excited to find a map so charming and pretty, with a connection to the history of education for women. The more she started looking for maps like it, the more she found, until she had collected around 150 maps made by American schoolchildren in the early 1800s. “I started looking at them because I was captivated,” she says. “They jump at you ... someone put so much time into this.”
And soon she realized that these weren’t just lovely images. “I realized there were some patterns,” she says. “Once I started seeing patterns, I realized that this was a hidden part of American education that you wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for the maps.”
Before this time in American history, any education that girls received happened at home, through lessons from their families or, for the most well-off, with private tutors. But in the decades after the American Revolution, educators opened hundreds of small academies for young women. Each school had a curriculum tailored for girls, focused on subjects considered appropriate at the time. Geography was a safe subject, and one popular exercise had girls tracing or drawing maps.
The maps that Schulten was finding weren’t practical tools, though. Many lacked indications of scale, for instance. Instead, they showed off the mapmaker’s artistic skill and were opportunities to practice penmanship. The names of cities, rivers, and states, for example, might all be done in different lettering styles. Some students took up the task of making detailed maps—which could be tedious and downright boring—as exercises in mental discipline. Some of the most influential educators at the time, including Emma Willard, a pioneer in education for women and another subject of Schulten’s work, saw maps as powerful tools to aid memorization and analysis.
One of the more fascinating aspects of these maps—made mostly by young women, but occasionally by young men—is how they reflect a growing sense of American identity. Often students created maps of the entire globe or of their home states, but after the War of 1812, which the United States saw as a victory, there was a spike in maps of the country, Schulten found.
Thinking of the disparate states as a political whole—the United States of America—was novel so early in the nation's history. “For me the really powerful thing is that, after the Revolution, you have to cultivate an American identity. There’s nothing natural about it,” Schulten says. “It has to be learned. This fits in that sense. Even from a relatively young age, of 12 or 13, you can have people think about the larger political body that they’re part of.”
The female academies had proliferated quickly, but their teachers had no standard curriculum to draw on. Young women took the lessons they’d learned in school, traveled to a new place, and started passing it on. Because the maps often are linked to a certain school, it’s possible to see, when enough are collected together, how the practice of mapmaking spread.
“It shows a network of young women becoming teachers,” says Schulten. “For me, it was like a window onto a past that was otherwise unseen.” The maps are also unusual artifacts in that they reveal part of history that’s not documented elsewhere. “I had never had that experience," she says. “Part of what blew me away is that here’s an instance where a map isn’t just illustration of something we know. It’s showing something new.” The maps are evidence of a system of pedagogy that wasn't recorded in other ways—how women shaped and traded knowledge, while passing along new notions of nationhood.
Many of the schools were open for just a few years—even just a few months—before closing their doors, but they were part of a movement in which less-wealthy women began to gain access to education. “They were schools that have otherwise disappeared from historical memory,” says Schulten. But the maps that students made are documents of their existence, the emerging identity of a young country, and a nascent transformation in the lives of women.
The orders were to destroy the evidence. The cipher machines held secret, valuable messages, so when a Nazi encampment was on the verge of being seized, troops were instructed to dispose of their aptly named Enigma machines so that there was no code left to crack.
Time permitting, they would “open the machine, rip out the rotors, rip out the cables, bash in the machine with the butt of their rifle, and then throw it in the fire,” says Cassandra Hatton, a senior specialist at Sotheby’s who focuses on books, manuscripts, and the history of science. Soldiers using similar devices at sea would pitch them overboard. Rusted-out, moldering ciphers have been found on the floor of the Atlantic, Hatton says.
But there wasn’t always time to so thoroughly dismantle the devices. Sometimes, troops stowed the contraptions where they thought the Allies wouldn’t look. Tucked away in attics or barns, some of them survived. One still-functional Three-Rotor Enigma I Cipher Machine has made its way to Sotheby’s, where it will go under the hammer on November 30.
This three-wheeler would have been used by the German Heer (army) or the Luftwaffe (air force), Hatton says—naval machines eventually had four rotors. Because these machines were conceived to be covert, it’s hard to say exactly how many were in circulation, Hatton adds, or precisely when and where each was used. Judging by the serial number on this one, though, it was manufactured in 1944 by the Olympia Büromaschinenwerke company, an outfit better known for typewriters, for Heimsoeth und Rinke.
Until Alan Turning and his collaborators at Bletchley Park devised the bombe, an instrument to decipher the code, crackerjack sleuths were crunching possible combinations by hand. Since the Nazis reset the codes nearly every day, the teams started from scratch each morning. Decoding them was a tall order, because the permutations were complex: Each rotor had 26 possible positions, and no letter was encoded to itself. Writers would type their message on a keyboard, and the rotors would lock the dispatch in place.
The messages were insulated against prying eyes and loose lips, too, with the information decentralized for maximal secrecy. “One person would have been doing the encryption, another would have written down the scrambled message, and another would send it via Morse code,” Hatton explains. “The person sending it via Morse code would have no idea what the original message was.” In general, dispatches probably had to do with locations and movements of troops, and the timing of attacks.
Relatively few of these machines remain, and many of those that do, Hatton says, are shells of their more-secret selves—a chassis, for instance, stripped of its cables, or retrofitted with reproductions. (Even if these look fairly convincing, they often lack the stamped designs or patina that an original would carry.) “Parts would break, cables would rip,” Hatton says. “To find one that has the components, that’s really rare.” The auctioneers expect this one to fetch at least $180,000. If you're looking to keep your diary really, truly private, it might be priceless.
In late October 1323, on the eve of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude and in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a heist went awry. According to the coroner’s report, a Frenchman known as John de Chartres had just supped with his accomplices, William of Woodford and his wife Johanna, at their Milk Street residence. They crept over to Bread Street and broke into the home they had targeted, and systematically looted it as planned. But then William noticed that “John was then filled with remorse.” Unable to risk a rat, William politely asked John to light a fire in the kitchen. As John knelt over the flames William hit him with an ax, and then attempted to burn the evidence—namely, John.
This is one of 142 tales of medieval mayhem and murder that you didn’t know you needed. They're all now at your fingertips thanks to an interactive map of London that launched today, courtesy of the University of Cambridge’s Violence Research Centre. The map, designed by the director of the center, Manuel Eisner, pinpoints the spots (or close approximations) where murders occurred in the first half of the 14th century, and allows users to filter homicides by the victim’s gender, type of crime scene, year, weapon, and location. The data come from coroners’ reports issued between 1300 and 1340.
Jumping around the map is like flipping through a medieval penny dreadful, each click providing a new tale of murder and misery: bloody revenge over a stolen tunic, a fishmonger stabbed by his mistress, and even a man killed by a chaplain, after being found “sitting with” the chaplain’s lover. But Eisner has also compiled some handy statistics to provide a sense of the big picture: 76.8 percent of murders were committed between the hours of 5 and 10 pm, 52.8 percent of them took place in public streets or squares, 56.3 percent involved knives long or short, and 31 percent of them went down on Sundays. This is most likely, explains the Violence Research Centre, because people had extra time to drink and play games on Sundays—both of which can be engines of interpersonal conflict. It’s also worth noting that six murders took place in taverns—the same number as in religious buildings. Brothels only logged two. There was just one murder by projectile, when a servant indiscriminately fired an arrow into a quarreling crowd and killed a skinner named Simon de la Fermorie.
In all, London’s annual homicide rate during this period is about 15 to 20 times higher than what the researchers would expect of an equally populated city in today’s United Kingdom. It’s an interesting comparison, but, as the center notes, fairly misleading. We have more advanced means of killing, but also much more advanced emergency care, and how those balance out is anyone's guess.
What is clear is that some of London’s most mundane spots have seen an awful lot of death. Thanks to maps such as Eisner’s and Historic UK’s plague pit map (showing where the bodies were buried after an outbreak of plague in the 1660s killed 100,000 residents), you can always know where you stand—though you might not want to.
It was part of an “enduring rivalry” between African-American and French cooking in the White House.
In 2011, the New York Times memorialized the late French chef René Verdon as having “revolutionized” White House cuisine. As an Executive Chef during the Kennedy Administration, Verdon “took full advantage of his platform, elevating standards at the White House overnight and contributing in no small part to the shimmering atmosphere of Camelot," William Grimes writes in the obituary.
Grimes also references a peculiar incident: a 1965 fight between Verdon and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson over a dish of cold garbanzo bean puree. The dish scandalized the chef so intensely that he left his post in protest. “The fall of France came abruptly,” Grimes writes. But the Johnsons wanted to be frugal, and they had different tastes. On his way out in 1965, Verdon said he didn’t want to “lose his reputation” by cooking “lousy” frozen foods in the White House.
Yet the cold bean puree standoff had larger implications. In Grimes's words, it represented a transition from “shimmering” Camelot cuisine to “simpler” fare under the Johnsons. And these deep-seated disagreements weren't really about the food, but instead what the President’s table should represent to the world.
In 1961, incoming First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy interviewed Verdon to fill the newly designated role of Executive Chef at the White House. Facilitated in part by the American public’s interest in Jackie, who was a fashionable Francophile, Verdon fit an emerging trend: Americans’ interest in all things haute.
Previously, the habits and values of the Second World War’s rationing and austerity had lingered in America. But as time passed, and travel to Europe became cheaper and easier, with flights replacing boat passages, Americans were ready to embrace Europe, especially its food and sophisticated side. This sentiment pervades the introduction of Julia Child’s 1961 edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The Kennedys "had a talented French chef named René Verdon, and one read frequently about their spectacular dinners,” she wrote. “Americans [were also] beginning to go to Europe almost by droves … and serving [European] meals at home was becoming a matter of pride.”
The young, bright Kennedys embodied these trends, and the public’s fascination with Jacqueline spilled over into her culinary habits. Verdon’s state-luncheon debut for the British Prime Minister was even splashed across the front page of the New York Times. That day, Verdon served trout cooked in Chablis, a roast fillet of beef au jus, artichoke bottoms, and a dessert called désir d’avril (April Desire), comprised of a raspberry and chocolate-filled meringue shell.
But on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. That same day, Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. He also became René Verdon’s boss. From the start, the Texan and the Frenchman did not see eye to eye, and both small details and significant decisions about White House cuisine fueled their squabbles.
Among their most bitter feuds was a war on whether to stock fresh or frozen vegetables. Early in his presidency, the frugal-minded Johnson hired a “food coordinator” to implement cost-cutting measures in the White House kitchen, and the coordinator recommended frozen vegetables as an easy ingredient swap. Verdon, a French native schooled in its culinary practice of letting the freshest and most seasonal produce dictate the meal, protested. Johnson and Verdon also disagreed over appropriate menu items for state dinners. Verdon loathed the Texas-inspired menus of spare ribs, chili con queso, and hamburgers preferred by the Johnsons. And then, of course, there was the cold bean puree. Even biographies of Lady Bird Johnson reference the deep gulf between the Johnsons and Verdon on food and thrift.
Within two years, Verdon was out, replaced by Zephyr Wright, the Johnson’s family cook of 21 years. Wright was an intuitive and exceptionally talented African American cook who specialized in making virtuosic soul food. As Johnson's brother Sam once wrote, her food “made you wish you had two stomachs.” Wright began cooking for the Johnsons in 1942, to fund her college education. She continued on with the family even after earning her degree, and she served as their personal chef until LBJ left office in 1969.
In many ways, this tetrad was no bigger than the people directly involved in it. Yet the feud also illustrates what author and soul food scholar Adrian Miller characterizes as an “enduring rivalry” between African-American and French cooking in the presidential residence.
The earliest chefs in the White House, well before a term like “Executive Chef” was bandied there, were the presidents’ slaves. Later, in the wake of the Civil War, many free African Americans made their way to Washington, D.C., where cooking was a respectable, well-paying job that did not require formal education. As Miller makes clear in his book The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas, the story of the Presidential kitchen isn’t just incomplete by failing to acknowledge the role and impact of African American chefs. Its history doesn’t exist without recognizing their central and long-lasting presence in it.
Zephyr Wright’s legacy is among the longest-lasting in the White House Kitchen. Unlike Verdon, Wright’s debut didn’t make the front page of the New York Times. Julia Child never mentioned Wright’s influence. And perfectly cooked spare ribs weren’t considered the vanguard of American cuisine. But the American public was still interested.
In a 1963 interview with Time, Lady Bird Johnson spoke fondly of Zephyr and her “[expertise] at spoon bread, homemade ice cream, and monumental Sunday breakfasts of deer sausage, home-cured bacon, popovers, grits, scrambled eggs, homemade peach preserves, and coffee.” Wright’s Pedernales River Chili is probably her most famous “family recipe” crafted for the Johnsons. (Rather than beef, LBJ preferred his chili with venison.) Named after LBJ’s Hill Country Ranch, Wright’s chili con carne became famous enough that Lady Bird had it printed on recipe cards that she mailed to the many Americans who wrote to her requesting it.
Yet Wright’s most important public-facing work was of a different nature, one focused on the pressing civil rights abuses faced by African Americans. A government official from the 1960s remembered attending an awkward lunch at the Johnsons’ house before he became president. When Johnson directed Wright to drive with her husband to Austin, Texas, she told him no: “When [we] drive to Texas and I have to go to the bathroom, like Lady Bird or the girls, I am not allowed to go to the bathroom. I have to find a bush and squat. When it comes time to eat, we can't go into restaurants. We have to eat out of a brown bag. And at night, Sammy sleeps in the front of the car with the steering wheel around his neck, while I sleep in the back. We are not going to do it again." In response, Johnson walked right out of the room.
Several years later, on July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. He gave the pen he used to sign it to Zephyr Wright, telling her she “[deserved] it more than anyone else.” Many believe that Wright explained the realities of racism to him, and, as Miller notes, Johnson used examples of the racism Wright faced when pressing for the bill. She used her proximity to the powerful family to make her experience of inequality legible and human. As the woman in charge of their table, she had that ability.
