Stuff You Missed in History ClassHolly and Tracy talk about sewing machines in their lives. Tracy talks about how she thought hangover research would be easy, but it turned out to be quite challenging.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.
Wilson.
We talked about Helen Blanchard and sewing this week. Yeah, she made my little heart happy. And also while I was researching this, I got super nostalgic about sewing things over the years. One of the things I wanted to mention, because we talked about it somewhat in the show, was searchers.
And like, we didn't.
Specify in this in the course of the show, but like she uses the term overlock sometimes when she's referring to a zigzag stitch because it overlocks the edge of the fabric. But today an overlock machine is a searcher, right. But it made me wistful for when the idea of having a surger in your home was a brand new concept. And the first home model of searger was the Babylock EF two five, and that came out in nineteen sixty eight, which is before I was born.
But I remember.
So distinctly when I was about nine or ten, and I had really started in earnest to read my mother's copies of threads magazine, and there was an ad in the back of one of them for a babylock searger, just the description of how it would sow your seam and trim away the excess fabrics simultaneously. To me, a stitching kid sounded about as thrilling and drool and inducing, as like if an ad for ice cream Sundays. I was just like, we need this, we need to buy that, and my mom was just like, no. To be clear, they were very expensive at that point. Yeah, like now you can get a pretty good overlock for home use for a couple hundred bucks, but at the time you were looking at probably over one thousand dollars in the nineteen seventy so late. It was a lot of money. But I wanted one so bad. I mean I harangued my parents. They did eventually get one, but not until I was a fully grown adult, right, because here is why I got a searger. Okay, my mom got a surger when I was a teenager, so I used hers. But then when I got to college, I sewed in the costume shop at the theater there at school because my work study job was there in the costume shop, which was great. But then when I graduated from college and I got my first job job. There was a little problem, which was that I did not have job.
Job closed. Oh sure, and I was poor as dirt.
So for the first two weeks that I worked as a receptionist in a hair salon, every night when I got home from work, I would sew my outfit for the next day. Wow. And then that's how I built up my professional wardrobe. And my parents were like, I don't remember if it fell around my birthday or a Christmas or something, but they got me a surger kind of as all of that was happening, because they were just like, oh, dear Lord, because I needed clothes. Yeah. I had that surger for exactly how long do you think? Forty years?
Thirty?
Okay, because last year it made me a lot of clothes. And last year, early in the year, I just did a thing that I think was mathematically impossible. You would have been if I had gotten it when I was a teenager thirteen.
I turned it on.
It had been you know, declining, I knew, and I turned it on and I hit the pedal and instead of stitches coming out, smoke came out. Oh no, And I was like, this is a thirty year old searcher. No one's gonna want to fix this. Like the one of the needle hooks was a little bit bent.
I was just like, go with god. Search. Yeah.
The sewing machine that I have is probably about that old. At least it has to be a little older than that. My mom had a singer, one of those like metal bodied, very sturdy singers, which is what I learned to sew on. And at the time she was doing a lot of sewing and a lot of crafts, and she got an Elma Nice, which had little cartridges that could do all kinds of little fancy stitches. Yeah, And so she gave me the singer and she worked on the Elna. And then as I got to the age of like moving out on my own, she wasn't really sewing anymore, and so we traded sewing machines so that she had the singer and that she or my dad would use to do stuff like so my brother's boy Scout patches on, and then I had this Elena. I still have the Elna and it still does get some use, like it needs a tune up at this point and the figuring out of like where can I take an Elna that's thirty five years old to get it tuned up. Is its own thing, and at this point it is mostly being used to like repair things like Patrick Sew's patches onto things that he wears at the game conventions that he works at and stuff. So it's not getting a ton of use. But it does still work and can do a number of fancy stitches. I say fancy, and that they are just not straight line chained wages, the kinds of things that Blanchard was working on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I still love sewing. I still sew quite a bit, not as much as I used to lately just because I've been too busy. But I have a situation brewing in the sewing room which is like I need to start working through the fabric because we're reaching like a hoarding level of giant towers of fabric.
Oh shab yeah, me, don't work on.
Also, I'm using my platform for personal benefit. Maybe in thinking about those old Dreads magazines and my mother's various stitching magazines, I had a flashback to what has become a little bit of a white whale for me. One year, in one of those magazines, I thought it was threads, but I'm not confident so any of my stitchers in the crowd. You know a lot about old sewing magazines. There was probably around nineteen eighty or eighty one a how to thing one year at Christmas that was two tiny plush koalas and their entire Christmas wardrobe and their little tiny Duffel bags you could put their wardrobes in. And I was discussed with it, and I would love to find a copy of it again. I have searched and searched and have not found it. YEA, if you happen to be that one person who's like, oh, I know what that is, give me a yill, because that would be amazing. I could talk about sewing forever.
Yeah.
I feel like there have been big moments in my life that I associate with what I was sewing at the time. Like my senior year of high school. I sewed a lot before that. I made a lot of my clothes for school, but my senior year I just decided I wanted to make all retro and vintage fashions for my school warde that year. And what was probably the one time my mother ever showed me a ton of trust. She gave me her credit card and let me go to the fabric store and just pick out whatever I wanted or needed for that. Oh wow, that's cool. And I did, and I stitched up all that stuff, and I wore a lot of fifties clothes that year. I love it was very weird in nineteen eighty nine. I'm into it though, but it was also coming off of me doing a lot of like very sort of more punk referencing wardrobe. So one, I think my parents were probably happy that. They were like, you want a plaid pinafore?
What is this about?
But what they didn't realize is like those could easily be styled in your direction. Yeah, I had a great time.
I love those.
I still think about those clothes and how much I loved them. Yeah, that's one of the big times. I had a pretty good wardrobe that year. I just sew a lot. Anyway, I told you while I was working on this that I had something funny to tell you. Oh yeah, I wasn't sure if your funny thing was about your episode or about my episode. No, it's about mine, okay, Tracy, Yes, the curse continues.
What is it?
Because right after Blanchard in Notable Women Encyclopedias comes Helen Blovotsky. She jump scaring me every time I opened something that's so funny, didn't even think about it. Was like looking at one of these encyclopedias that I have like a physical copy of, and in.
Bold are the words Hellen Blovotsky.
I was a guy there jumping out so funny I almost dropped the book.
I was like both startled and laughing at the same time. I love it.
It's like, good, I'm ready for a poltergeist experience to happen at my house and it will be Madam Blovotsky walk in.
The door being like, why are you try to shocking me? What is going on?
He to at the top of the stairs. Yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready. I feel like she's the curse of all of my research. Yeah, if she comes up, no matter what I'm looking at, it'll be like some weird licorice made in the eighteen hundreds, and it will be like this was Helen Blelovotski's favorite candy. Like there's no way to mistave her. She keeps arriving.
Anyway. Funny.
That is my curse, which I'm actually fine with. I think she'd be quite interesting if I've ever met her ghost. I'm down with it. Come on, Helen, come on, we canna hang out. Helen and Madame Blelovotsky and I are gonna sew out ghost outfits together. It's gonna be great. Our New Year's Day episode was about hangovers. Yes, indeed, Well, let me tell you. Working on this episode gave me a hangover talk about something I thought was going to be easy that turned out to be ridiculously hard. I did not know going into it that the word hangover to mean the you know, the day after drinking feeling bad, not knowing that that had not been coined until I think nineteen oh four is what we said, nineteen oh four, nineteen oh six, something like that.
Which meant I would not just be able.
To go into historical sources and put the word hangover in there and come up with some kind of, you know, delightful historical treatise on hangovers. I took all of these notes, but then when I went through all the notes, I was like, these notes are a mess. And then as I was trying to make the notes into an episode, I was like, this episode is a mess. And it never felt like it was soup yet if that makes sense in the context of this. And I finally got to a point where I was like, this is the length of an episodsode, and I'm not fully satisfied with where it has arrived, but it's not going to get any better. So it's things about about hangovers in history, which I feel like kind of add up to a fun assortment of stuff. Fun in some context, maybe not in all of them, but not like the unified overview of history that I thought it would be going into it, right, because there isn't one.
No, it's really like the I mean, that's it.
I mean, I think it's delightful, but you are essentially trying to make solid matter out of like clouds.
Yeah, really true.
So there were two different books that I read that is as part of this, and one of them was the one we specifically mentioned, which was The Hangover, A Literary and Cultural History, and the other was one that, like I did not mention because I didn't ultimately end up using any information from it at all, and both of them were less concrete than I would have actually found very helpful. The one that was The Hangover, A Literary and Cultural History was really interesting, but I wound up taking almost no notes from it. I think that was where I where I learned about that. You and I did a dramatic reading from that seventeenth century the Contented Cuckold or a Woman's Advocate, like that is where I first saw reference.
To that was in this book.
But yeah, I was like, wow, this is the multi hundred page book that isn't really approaching the topic in a way.
I'm not saying it's bad in any way.
Again, it was very interesting, but like it wasn't approaching the topic in a way that led to productive research for me doing on this topic. Right. I think part of the problem there, right, is that any book that's kind of ostensibly tackling hangovers really becomes about drinking culture more than science.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is.
Just it's tricky because then you are doing exactly what you know where we landed where it's like, okay, well, so there's this apocryphal thing.
We might know about, yeah, oh hangovers.
And since it really seems like, at least based on everything that I read, that it was kind of in terms of Europe, it was the early modern period by the time people were sort of thinking of this as like a phenomenon that specifically follows drinking.
In a way that it was like it.
Was an entity now, not just writing to your sister, to I drank wine last night and now I feel terrible. Anyway, it was an episode that I went into thinking it was going to be easy, and it turned out to be very hard. You accidentally stumbled into a thing in this episode that was on one of my lists that I had thought would be an episode that was easy and turned out to be very hard. Oh yeah, which was I was going to do some years back, the history of Brunchy other than that one article, which is very charming. After that, it just then is like, and then there were restaurants that started offering brunch, and I'm like, well, bless the end of that story.
I buy eggs for nineteen dollars.
Yeah, boy, I do love brunch. I love brunch as well. This made me think of so many things. One I had a sudden flash too, if I'm remembering correctly, not got the book at hand to look it up. PJ or Roorke's Hangover Cure, which may disgusted you.
Probably some of them really do you to me?
I mean this one isn't as disgusting as many other things. I do think it's funny that I will drink a flip without hesitation put the whole egg in my drink. But I don't want the drink in Tabasco sauce or the egg in Tabasco sauce, right, Like, I don't know why if you mixed all of that with brandy, I'd.
Be like, oh, yeah, let's have that, but not just the egg.
But no, his if I'm remember incorrectly, was to dump an entire like one pound package of bacon into a frying pan, cook the bacon, pull out the bacon, and then you kind of poach your eggs in the bacon grease, and then you eat the eggs and bacon, which to me just sounds like a pretty yummy breakfast, although very heavy and not super helpful. But yeah, I don't, I don't. Yeah, I've never had to test it. That does seem a little heavy. There's like the various hangover cures. I didn't put this into the episode, but a lot of it are things that just to me are inherently kind of gross or extremely pungent. So like, I am definitely not into a shot glass that has raw egg and Tabasco sauce and Worcester sure in it, I'm like, no, thanks, that does not sound like that sounds like it's gonna make my situation worse. And while I do really like pickled things and briny things, there are a number of like pickled fish kind of things. Yes, like we talked about with like the German hangover breakfast and some of that like if I wake up in the morning and I am not feeling good, U pickled herring is not gonna make me feel any better, and so there some of them are like is the goal here to make you feel a lot worse and maybe even be sick, and then maybe by comparison you might feel better.
I don't know.
Maybe I don't know. I am one of those jerks that is very lucky that doesn't get hangovers. Well, that is amazing for it. It's unfair, I understand. Sometimes to my husband's complete consternation and almost fear, we're on the rare occasion because I love to drink. I don't like to get drunk right and like, but there have certainly been rare occasions where I have overindulged or I started drinking when I didn't eat and got intoxicated, and he's convinced the next morning is going to be rough. And then I wake up chirpy as a bird, and he's just like, I'm afraid.
Yeah.
I always just chalk it up to hydration, maybe because I always am drinking a lot of beverages, not just my.
Cocktails.
Even if I'm having a long evening of drinking or at a party or something, I usually also am having a soda and more often, even though I hate it, water yeah, et cetera. So that might just be it. I've just been staving it off because I'm so thirsty all the time. I always want many beverages at hand. My experiences are usually like some kind of accidental miscalculation, like, for example, when I first moved to Massachusetts, you could not ship alcohol to Massachusetts, much like now. Well, this is something I think they're wound up being court cases about it, because, as I recall, and this is my memory, so it might not be correct, Massachusetts distilleries and whatnot were allowed to ship out of Massachusetts, but Massachusetts would not allow you to ship into Massachusetts. And this is a matter of interstate commerce, so it wound up in federal court and the ruling was, no, you can't do it that way. Before that changed, though, if I wanted something that could not be gotten locally, I would have to ship it to friends in Connecticut and get it from them. And one time what I specifically wanted was cathead honeysuckle vodka. Yes, not something It's possible that maybe you can get it in New England. Now, it was not something that could be procured in New England at the time, so I had ordered it. My friends who live in Connecticut had we had connected so that I could get it, and we made some some cocktails with it, and then later the same evening another friend started making champagne cocktails with it. And the next morning I woke up and was like, why do I feel bad? And I was like, the amount that I had consumed felt like a normal, responsible amount to me, and I'd also had, you know, the amount of other water and other like I had done the things that I normally do, because I also like, I don't like to feel bad and I don't like to be drunk either, And it took me a minute to be like that other cocktail was made with champagne and vodka. Right, not with like vodka and something not an alcohol. And the worst part of that was it was a day that I needed to get up and get on an airplane and fly to Atlanta for work reasons. And I remember being at the airport and I had gotten through security, and I was like, my head hurts and my body feels bad, and I feel very anxious. And I went to one of the newsstands and I bought one of those little little things of cheerios that comes in a little plastic thing.
I did not get milk.
I just had like dry cheerios and ginger ale, and then I felt somewhat better before I had to get on the airplane. So yeah, yeah, I know what I would do if I gotta hangover.
I don't know.
I like that you brought up Furnett. Yeah, you said you had lots of thoughts about Fornette. I do, and it's mostly because nowadays Furnet is like a kind of jokingly referred to as it's one of the things that gets referred to as the bartender's handshake, like that bar staff loves to do shots of Fornett together. Fine, and I don't I don't know if it's because of its connotations as a hangover cure, or if it's just one of those things that it is a very uniquely flavored drink. And Amorrow's in general, right, are a little bitie they have They're not necessarily super palatable to everyone because they are not even though it's technically a liquor, They're not sweet the way you would think of like fruity liquor. They have that herbal bite to them, and so I think some of it is a little bit of a dare factor, right, like, yeah, oh I can do three shots of fur net, no problem. I love this, right, but it just makes me chuckle. Yeah, I keep it on the back bar. I don't use it all that much. Perhaps I should, Yeah, you never know. I was just happy that you wanted to look at the ABC's of uh right. I love old cocktail books. I love them.
Yeah.
I so when I asked you if you had that, because I U there's a lot of stuff you can just find old scans of and I could not find a scan of that when I was looking, and I thought that you might have it, and so the first thing that I looked for, because it's in alphabetical order, I looked under Bee for bloody, and it was there was no thing there, and so then I looked. I was like, maybe it's under Mary Kamma bloody. So I looked under em not there, and I think I found it under Red Mary searching the book for tomato.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those are always weird. It's always funny. One of the things I love about old cocktail books specifically like the ones that are now famous in the cocktail world, right like Jerry Thomas's book that we've talked about on the show before, and like h Harry CRATIXX Savoy Cocktail book. Those are like the heavy hitters, right, Like those are like the godfathers of modern cocktail culture. And it always tickles me now that I have put a cocktail book into the world, which is very, very nerve wracking for me, and I'm like, everybody's gonna think I sting and I don't know what I'm doing. It's always good to go back and look at these and find cocktails that are literally like, I don't know, throw whiskey and cream in a glass and it's like, wait a minute, You're like, you're like the Apex dude, Like some of them are really abysmal. That is an actual drink that's in the Savoy Cocktail Book. I actually came up on an episode criminally recently called a Cowboy, and it's literally two thirds whiskey one third cream. That doesn't sound the least bit delightful to me.
What is that?
Yeah, it also seems like it wouldn't incorporate Well, it sounds gross. Yeah, it sounds icky.
I mean that.
Being said, sometimes those weird simple things will actually be not too bad. But I have made a lot of these older cocktails. Yeah, just to be like, that doesn't have a lot of stuff we'd included in a cocktail today, I wonder what this tastes. Nope, it's not so great or surprisingly good going all over the map. But I'm like, well, I guess if these guys would do throw a whiskey and cream in a glass, I don't have to feel too guilty if somebody doesn't like something. They're not over there doing this, you know, being like, let's infuse a vodka with a tea bag like, which is one of the one of my favorite things to do on the planet. I was also gonna say, for people like me that don't like bloody Mary's because we don't enjoy tomato. I will occasionally. I did it one of our early seasons of Criminalia, but I now occasionally will make it. I do a bloody Mary with beat juice instead of tomato juice. Very different flavor profile. Obviously, it's a good bit sweeter. It doesn't have that like acid note. I quite like it.
Yeah, but if you don't like beats, you're also out of luck.
Yeah, I don't know. I initially did not like the tomato juice aspect, and so the first couple of times that I tried a bloody Mary, I was like, no, no thanks.
And then I had one that was made with like.
Really really fresh, like it might have been made with tomatoes there at the bar lemon or a tomato juice, and I was like, oh, this is actually is a different situation, damn. And so yeah, that's uh. They grew on me in that way. I guess we didn't put a please drink responsibly note at the end of the hangover episode because I felt like it was obvious. We've been talking about feeling terrible and various negative health effects of alcohol, but since this episode has been more about the things we enjoyed drinking.
Yea, yeah, I always drink responsibly.
Yeah. And don't don't drink and drive, don't do that all of that. Don't rub dog hair in a wound. Yeah, don't don't burn a dog hair and think you're gonna prevent Rabi's.
That's definitely it's not how that works. No, it does.
I'll also just say I don't know if the next time that New Year's Day rolls around is a day that we have a podcast episode coming out, if we'll have a fun, contextually relevant episode to do uh, because I Uh, one year we did Day Planners. That was your episode, and I thought that was a masterful stroke of something to do on New Year's Day, and then hangovers turned out to be really difficult. We'll think of something, we may think of something, or there may just be a random thing that has nothing to do with anything. We'll see. It's in the future. Who knows, who knows what will happen in the future. Happy New Year, everybody, whatever's coming your way tomorrow, I hope it is great. We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We'll have something brand new on Monday. And if you haven't, you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
