Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards

She was the first woman to graduate from a scientific institute in the United States. She was the first female student and received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She met her husband, Robert Richards at MIT.  Ellen Richards was also the first woman to be elected to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers.

In addition, she was a leading figure in the study of nutrition and hygiene. Ecology was a word coined by her. Ellen was an instructor in the laboratory of sanitary chemistry at the Lawrence Experiment Station. She also became the first president of the American Home Economics Association in 1908. In 2011, she was listed as #8 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT. Ellen was born in 1842 and died in 1911.

Bacon Barter

They have finally done it.  Driving across country with no money and no credit cards. Josh Sankey is freeloading his way across the US armed with nothing more than a truckload of bacon.

Oscar Mayer supplied enough bricks of Butcher Thick Cut Bacon fill his refrigerated truck.

Sankey is literally hauling a trailer full of 3,000 pounds of bacon from New York to L.A., going coast to coast with zero cash, cards, or checks. He is relying only on the goodness of Americans and the goodness of bacon. He offers bacon to finagle whatever he wants from whomever he wants and so far it's working.

Sankey kicked off the cross-country adventure at the Jets' opener, crashing the tailgate party with a red wagon load of bacon. His goal was to get tickets to the game by trading bacon. He stacked his odds with Camille Burford, host of The Movie Show. They scored two seats. He went on to Maryland, and is now through Charleston. I imagine when he needs a snack, he just throws a few rashers on the engine block to heat them up.

Doughnut Crumbs

No one really knows when donuts were invented or who invented them. One theory suggests they were introduced into North America by Dutch settlers, who were responsible for popularizing other American desserts, including cookies, cream pie, and cobbler. Another theory is the English brought the recipes over when they settled in the US.


Doughnut is the more traditional spelling, and still dominates outside the US. Doughnut and the shortened form donut are both pervasive in American English.


Donuts were originally made as a long twist of dough. It was also common in England for doughnuts to be made in a ball shape and injected with jam after they were cooked. Both methods of cooking involved no human intervention as the balls and twists turn over when the underside is cooked.


Hansen Gregory, an American, claimed to have invented the ring donut in 1847 when he was traveling on a steam boat. He was not satisfied with the texture of the center of the donut so he pressed a hole in the center with the ship’s tin pepper box. Excuse me, I feel the need to graze on a glazed.
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Bloginalia

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Happy Friday

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

My circumstances always cause me to have a Happy Friday!

Hansel and Gretel

In the widely known version of Hansel and Gretel, we read of two little children who become lost in the forest, eventually finding their way to a gingerbread house which belongs to a wicked witch. The children end up enslaved for a time as the witch prepares them for eating. They figure their way out and throw the witch in a fire and escape.

In an earlier French version of this tale (called The Lost Children), instead of a witch we have a devil. Now the wicked old devil is tricked by the children (in much the same way as Hansel and Gretel) but he works it out and puts together a sawhorse to put one of the children on to bleed (that isn’t an error – he really does). The children pretend not to know how to get on the sawhorse so the devil’s wife demonstrates. While she is lying down the kids slash her throat and escape.

Sliced Bread Fact

Hansel and Gretel remind me of breadcrumbs and here is a crumb about sliced bread. Claude R. Wickard, the head of the War Foods Administration as well as the Secretary of Agriculture, got the idea to ban pre-sliced bread in America, which he did on January 18, 1943.

He said it was about conservation of resources, such as to conserve wax paper and secondary goals of conserving wheat and steel.

However, there was no shortage of wax paper at the time the ban was put in place. He also thought that by banning pre-sliced bread, the amount of bread consumed would go down and reduce the demand for flour and wheat, and thus, decrease prices of those products while increasing stockpiles of wheat. However, at the time of the ban, the US had already stockpiled over 1 billion bushels of wheat, which would be enough to meet the United States’ needs for about two years, even if no new wheat was harvested.

After a severe consumer backlash, the ban was rescinded three months later on March 8, 1943. Upon rescinding the ban, Wickard stated, “Our experience with the order, however, leads us to believe that the savings are not as much as we expected…”

Automatic Bread Slicer

As long as we are talking of bread slicing, The world’s first automatic bread slicer was invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder in Davenport, Iowa. He first built a prototype of his bread slicer in 1912. Unfortunately, his blueprints and machine were destroyed in a fire in 1917. It took him until 1927 to re-build the machine and produce a model ready to use in an actual bakery.

The first pre-sliced loaf of bread using his machine, was sold on July 7, 1928. A friend of Rohwedders installed a bread slicing machine  at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. Sliced bread sales skyrocketed.

Pre-sliced bread became a national hit thanks to Wonder Bread, then owned by Continental Baking, who began commercially producing the pre-sliced bread in 1930 using a modified version of Rohwedder’s machine. Crumb is a term bakers use to define the part of bread inside the crust. Unrelated, Jackie Gleason called his drinking buddies crumb bums.

The Weeping Woman

The picture below was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1937. The model used for this painting is Dora Maar. She was a French photographer, poet and painter. She was also Picasso’s mistress, from 1936 until 1944. They were introduced when she was 29 and Picasso was 54.

In the course of their relationship, Picasso said, “Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman… and it’s important, because women are suffering machines”. Picasso also referred to Dora as his “private muse.” She spent her last years alone, in a house near Paris that Picasso had given her.