“In the last analysis, a pickle is a cucumber with experience”*…
In an excerpt from their book, The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles, Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder explore the evolution of fermentation across the ages…
Pickling vegetables began in Mesopotamia around 2400 BCE, where brining cucumbers addressed the challenge of preserving food in a hot climate. Brine, a mixture of water and salt, proved effective at inhibiting spoilage while enhancing the flavor of food. This innovation quickly spread to neighboring civilizations, embedding itself in the culinary practices of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
Cleopatra, one of Egypt’s most iconic figures, believed that pickles contributed to her legendary beauty. This association between pickles and vitality reflected a broader cultural fascination with preserved foods. Julius Caesar ensured that his soldiers carried pickles on their campaigns, claiming that the preserved vegetables fortified their strength and stamina. This notion of pickles as both nourishment and tonic was echoed by Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who praised their medicinal properties.
The culinary sophistication of ancient Rome brought pickling into sharper focus. The Roman cookbook attributed to the Roman merchant and epicure Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, included numerous references to preserved vegetables, particularly olives and cucumbers. Apicius wrote of the importance of balance in brining, using spices like dill, mustard seed, and coriander seed to create complex flavors that complemented meals. The ability to elevate simple ingredients through preservation became a hallmark of Roman gastronomy, showcasing pickling as both art and science.
The spread of pickling innovations along trade routes like the Silk Road and the Spice Route highlights its significance in cultural exchange. Roman traders, for example, likely encountered Asian pickling techniques through the Silk Road’s bustling networks of goods and ideas. Spices such as cinnamon, peppercorns, and cumin—integral to pickling recipes—traveled vast distances, linking the culinary practices of the Mediterranean, India, and China.
In Asia, pickling developed independently but with striking parallels. Chinese records from the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE) mention fermented vegetables, including pickled radishes and cabbages, which were essential for sustenance during harsh winters. Similarly, Indian achar evolved as a culinary treasure, incorporating local spices like turmeric, fenugreek, and mustard to enhance preservation and flavor. Japanese pickling methods, such as nukazuke (fermentation in rice bran), emphasized minimalism and balance, reflecting the cultural values of harmony and simplicity.
The maritime trade routes of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean allowed pickling traditions to travel across vast regions, influencing cuisines from the Malay Archipelago to the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian Ocean trade ensured that spices like cloves and nutmeg became integral to pickling recipes worldwide, enriching their flavor profiles and preserving their cultural legacies.
Pickling’s role extended beyond culinary practices, becoming intertwined with religious and cultural rituals. In Jewish tradition, the Talmud makes numerous references to pickled vegetables, particularly turnips, which symbolize abundance and endurance. Pickled foods often accompanied bread during blessings, emphasizing their role as both sustenance and spiritual connection.
Their transformation through pickling—turning a simple, earthy root into a tangy, vibrant dish—was often seen as a metaphor for renewal and the endurance of the Jewish people through adversity. During the springtime Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the triumph of the Jewish people over oppression in ancient Persia, the giving of food gifts (mishloach manot) occasionally included pickled vegetables, reflecting the value of sharing preserved foods that sustained communities through lean times. And colorful Yiddish sayings like er drayt sich arum vie a forts in roosl (he wanders around like a fart in a pickle barrel) highlight the humorous associations with pickling, eating, and bodily functions.
Hindu culture imbued pickles with sacred meaning. The balance of flavors in achar—salty, sour, sweet, and spicy—was seen as a reflection of life’s harmony. Pickles were often prepared as offerings during religious festivals, symbolizing prosperity and the nurturing of the human spirit.
Christian monastic traditions adopted pickling during the Middle Ages as a way to sustain communities through long fasting periods. Pickled fish and vegetables became essential components of monastic diets, reflecting the intersection of faith, practicality, and culinary ingenuity.
In Islamic cultures, pickles played a central role in Ramadan feasts, their tangy flavors providing refreshment after a day of fasting. Preserved lemons, a staple in Moroccan cuisine, became symbolic of hospitality and were often served to honored guests. Ancient Chinese rituals also celebrated the cultural significance of pickling, with fermented vegetables used in ancestor worship as symbols of continuity and filial piety.
Trade routes such as the Silk Road and those across the Sahara were pivotal in spreading pickling techniques and ingredients across diverse cultures. These routes facilitated the exchange of goods like salt and vinegar, essential to pickling, along with the culinary knowledge that transformed them into staples of global cuisine…
Read on for medieval and early modern innovations, pickling evolution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, industrialization and the modern culinary renaissance, and pickles in pop culture: “A Brief and Essential History of the Most Important Food Ever Invented: The Pickle,” from @lithub.com.web.brid.gy.
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As we break out the brine, we might spare a thought for a man who put fermentation to a different kind of use, André Tchelistcheff; he died on this date in 1994. An oenologist, he was a pivotal figure in the revitalization of the California wine industry following Prohibition (1919-33) and used his (French) training in viticulture and wine-making to define the style of California’s best wines, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, and to pioneer such techniques as the cold fermentation (now widely used in producing white and rose wines) and the use of American oak barrels for aging. He also developed frost-prevention techniques and helped curb vine disease in Napa Valley. In addition to managing Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa for 35 years, Tchelistcheff operated a private wine laboratory in St. Helena for 15 years. He also assembled a fabled library of wine literature.
“The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb.”*…
As the Iran War continues to unfold, there is understandably a great deal of concern about energy prices (and the prices of things that depend on energy). We might forget that the Middle East is also crucial to the world’s fertilizer supply– though not for long, as farmers (along with everyone else in the food chain, all the way down to all of us eaters) are beginning to feel the pain.
But, as Diana Kruzman reports, even as fertilizer trade concerns are growing, a revolutionary sourcing alternative has emerged– one that could make a huge positive difference if it proves out at scale…
The world has an almost insatiable demand for nitrogen. Crops need it to grow, but although it makes up 78 percent of our atmosphere, plants can’t just pull it in from the air the way they do with oxygen. Instead, they rely on bacteria in the soil to convert it into nitrate, a form they can use; in the case of agriculture, think of fertilizer spread by humans. Leaving aside organic options like cow manure, most farmers use ammonia produced mainly from natural gas using a technique called the Haber-Bosch process, which was invented in 1909. [See also here.]
Haber-Bosch is expensive and energy-intensive, responsible for up to two percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also spurred a global nitrogen pollution crisis; as much as two-thirds of nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops is never used, and the excess escapes into the soil, air, and water, raising the cancer risk in nearby communities and contributing to climate change.
Researchers have been trying to find an alternative way to get nitrogen to plants for decades — turning to everything from microbes to human urine. But so far, these scientific advancements haven’t translated into much practical change for farmers, who for the most part still rely on ammonia (which, granted, is getting greener, but is increasingly vulnerable to global price shocks).
That could soon change with the growth in popularity of a new technology known as plasma activated water, or PAW. Around the U.S., scientists and startups are experimenting with this high-tech solution, which uses electricity to pull nitrogen from the air, mix it with water, and create fertilizer straight on the farm. The concept, on the surface, seems suspiciously rosy — on-demand nitrogen, in a form plants can use, at just the cost of electricity (and the initial price of the machine used to make it). But early adopters have told Offrange that it genuinely works…
… PAW uses electricity to transform air into plasma — the fourth state of matter (besides gases, solids, and liquids), which typically forms at high temperatures. When the plasma comes into contact with water, it encourages chemical reactions that form nitrates — the type of nitrogen that plants need. Though this process was actually invented in 1903, even before Haber-Bosch, it required so much energy that it never achieved widespread use.
But in recent years, those energy needs have gone down thanks to the development of “cold plasma” technology, which operates at less than 60 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also used for medical sterilization and food safety, and over the last decade researchers have worked to develop new ways to apply it for agricultural production…
More at: “Pulling Nitrogen From the Air” from @dkruzman.bsky.social.
* Nikola Tesla (who, around 1900, imagined and experimented with something like the Birkeland–Eyde-based plasma process described above)
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As we count on creativity, we might send healthy birthday greetings to a man who explained one of the central ways in which we depend on the food that we eat, William Cumming Rose; he was born on this date in 1887. A biochemist, he researched amino acids, discovered threonine, and established the importance of the nine essential amino acids in human nutrition (that’s to say, the amino acids that our bodies cannot synthesize and that we must consume in our food). He received the National Medal of Science in 1966.
“Memento mori”*…
Via Matt Muir and his wonderful newsletter, Web Curios…
Do YOU want to feel INCREDIBLY OLD? I mean, I imagine you already feel incredibly old, what with, well, your age, and the terrifying pace of everything, and the fact that nothing makes sense, but if you would like to feel EVEN OLDER then you will ‘enjoy’ this site which presents a whole load of ‘XX was closer to WWII than Y’-type facts to help you realise quite how much time has passed since you’ve been alive and how transient and ephemeral your existence in fact is. You can even plug in your birthday to get personalised horrordata…
Try it for yourself at: “Another day closer to the end.” No extra points for guessing that the example illustrated in the pic above was generated with your (very old) correspondent’s birthday.
On the other hand?: “Your future self has good news: you’re doing pretty well.”
* Latin phrase: “remember that you will die”
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As we muse on mutability and mortality, we might note that this is Good Friday… and that in 1983, British scholars Colin Humphreys and W.G. Waddington used NASA research into historical eclipse to place the Crucifixion on this date in 33 CE.
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
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As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”*…
Readers sometimes ask me where I find the items featured in (Roughly) Daily. The answer is that they are sifted out of the reading (politely put, “broad”; less politely put, “undisciplined”) that I do on a relatively continuous basis. I’m going to take today– April Fools Day– to spotlight the source of an occasional post, but of very regular enlightment and entertainment: Today in Tabs, from Rusty Foster.
Following, a lift of a single section of a recent issue…
Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge [see here]. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It’s Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?
Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk’s Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”
There’s so very much more where that came from: Today in Tabs, from @rusty.todayintabs.com— one the subscriptions for which I’m happiest to pay.
For the history of today’s distinction, see : “How Did April Fools’ Day Get Started?” (source of the image above)
* Shakespeare (Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene II)
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As we smirk, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that Britain’s premiere documentary public affairs television show, the BBC’s Panorama, aired a segment, reported by host Richard Dimbleby, featuring a family in Ticino, Switzerland picking spaghetti from a “spaghetti tree.” About 8 million people were tuned in. The next day, hundreds of people called the BBC to ask if spaghetti trees were real and how to grow them. The BBC told callers to put some spaghetti in a can of tomato sauce and “hope for the best.”
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