Martin Fone's Blog, page 104

Twiggy, The Capones, And Date Labels On Foodstuffs

On January 17, 1920, America embarked upon what Herbert Hoover described as “a great social and economic experiment” with the implementation of the National Prohibition Act which outlawed the manufacture, sale, or transportation of “intoxicating liquor”. The thirteen-year experiment ended in failure, defeated by the insuppressible demand for alcohol amongst the public and inefficiency and corruption within the law enforcement agencies, which allowed violent gangsters to supply alcohol, often of dubious quality, at great profit.

Chief amongst them was Al Capone, who built up a business worth $60m based on the manufacture and transportation of alcohol with side lines in gambling and prostitution. His gang ruthlessly protected and expanded his business, earning him and his brother, Ralph, the sobriquets of public enemy numbers one and three respectively. The passing of the 21st Amendment in February 1933, ratified on December 5th, ending prohibition was a severe blow to Capone’s business empire.

With a transportation network and bottling facilities, he turned his attention to a product that everyone consumed, and which offered a bigger mark-up than alcohol, milk. That milk in the Chicago was supplied by a union-controlled farm, Meadowmoor Dairies, was but a minor inconvenience. Capone sent his boys round, kidnapped the Union President, ransomed him for $50,000, and when the money was paid, used it to buy the farm.

According to Deirdre Capone, in her book Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story From Inside His Family (2010), it was her grandfather, Ralph rather than Al, as popularly supposed, who lobbied the dairy industry to beef up its health and safety standards, after a friend’s child had become seriously ill from drinking out-of-date milk. His efforts to put labels on milk bottles with expiry dates earned Ralph the nickname of “Bottles”. It was not an altogether altruistic exercise as the Capones had extensive bottle labelling facilities. Whilst there is no independent evidence to substantiate the claims, shortly after the Capones involved themselves in the milk industry, date labels became mandatory in Illinois.

Date labels on foodstuffs first appeared in Britain behind the scenes, in the storerooms of Marks and Spencer, in the 1950s as a means of improving control over stock levels and, ironically, to reduce wastage. In 1973 the store’s executives brought them out from the back of the store on to the shelves, calling them sell-by dates and, in an advertising blitz, informing their customers that “the sell-by date means that St Michael foods are fresh”. There was even a television advert featuring the model, Twiggy.

Other supermarkets soon followed suit, as the Marks and Spencer experience showed that shoppers found reassurance in purchasing foodstuffs with a sell-by date. By the 1980s the scope of dating food was expanded to encompass best before and use-by dates, which, far from being helpful and reassuring, sowed the seeds of confusion in the mind of shoppers, especially as Britons became more adventurous in the type and range of foods they bought.

Now the tide has turned once more, and the practice of date labelling foods is rapidly approaching its expiry date. Dates will continue to be shown on highly perishable foodstuffs, for food safety and public health reasons, but for the rest we will be reliant upon our senses and the sniff test. Granny knew best all along.

Head-Lice Comb Of The Week

The development of writing is one of humankind’s greatest achievements, allowing the spread of ideas and wonderful literature, a process accelerated by the invention of the printing press. In idle moments I wonder what was the first set of thoughts that were put down in writing. Was it some lofty philosophical thought, the plot line for a blockbuster novel, or a shopping list?

Perhaps unsurprisingly but disappointingly nonetheless, it is likely to have been something akin to the latter, if a finding made by a team of archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is anything to go by. Unearthed at the Tel Lachish archaeological site in 2016 what was thought to have been a dirty old bone was left in the archives until it was recently given a more thorough investigation.

What it turned out to be was a double-sided comb with six widely spaced teeth on one side – all broken – and 14 narrower ones on the other. It was a head-lice comb, made of imported ivory and measuring just 1.4 inches by one. The teeth were used to detangle hair and remove tiny lice and eggs from the scalp.

If the user did not know what to do with the comb, written on it is the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, developed by the ancient Canaanites, whose letters are the origin of our modern-day Latin letters. The sentence reads “may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard”. And that’s it.

A couple of conclusions obviously spring to mind. The first is that this is an object of the rich and powerful who clearly were not immune to nits. The second is that whoever wrote the sentence almost certainly had written before and had an expectation that the recipient could read.

The search is still very much on for the very first sentence.

Sign Of The Week (13)

It was inevitable, I suppose.

Almost equidistant between Inverness, fifty-three miles to the east, and Aberdeen to the west, is to be found the hamlet of Cock Bridge, a hamlet in the Cairngorms National Park and situated on a stretch of the A939 designated as the most beautiful stretch of road in Scotland. However, the stretch of road is also notorious as it is one of the first to be blocked by snow in the winter as it runs over high ground between Tomintoul and Cock Bridge.

The hamlet gets its name from the bridge which runs over the river Cock, but for some the amusement value of its road sign is irresistible. It is regularly stolen – the last incident was in the summer – and as you approach the village now, you are greeted by two poles standing forlornly in the ground. Neighbouring villages of Lost, Backside, and Brokenwind are also reporting similar problems.

In an attempt to solve the problem once and for all, Aberdeenshire Council are looking at using signage with what they claim to be “robust tamper-proof fixings”. With Council budgets so stretched, they could do without this additional and unnecessary expense.

Let’s hope the new signage will work and future intrepid visitors will be content with a photograph they can share on social media.

The Case Of William Smith

A review of The Case of William Smith by Patricia Wentworth

Originally published in 1948 The Case of William Smith is the thirteenth in Wentworth’s Miss Silver series and treats as its central premise a theme which must have resonated with her contemporary readers, a man who has returned from the Second World War after having been interned in a concentration camp without a recollection of who he is and of his past. On release from hospital he was given an identity tag with the name of William Smith, although on his return from home, his cursory investigations into his alleged background lead him to think he might not be who he was told he was.

Back in Blighty and on civvy street William takes a job in a toyshop where he uses his carving skills acquired in the camp to good effect, making wooden animals and birds that delight the local children. The other major protagonist in the story is Katherine Evesley whose trust fund is slow in making its regular payments, forcing her to take a job, naturally at the toyshop where she and William hit it off and get married.    

However, there is a darker subplot which emerges when William visits Evesley’s who are managing Katherine’s trust fund to interest them in funding the expansion of the toy animal business. He is granted an interview after office hours with the secretary, Mavis Jones, who seems aghast to see him. There are a series of curious incidents involving people being pushed in front of buses, one leading to a fatality, and William suffers a couple of attacks, one of which is witnessed by Frank Abbott of the Yard who vaguely recognises him from a party pre-war but cannot place him. Katherine confides to Abbott her concerns about William’s safety and on his recommendation engages Miss Silver to investigate.

It does not take a genius to realise that there is something about William’s past that threatens others and Miss Silver, in her inimitable fashion and to the world-weary disdain of Inspector Lamb, sets out to discover what it is. Tangled family relationship and financial shenanigans are at the centre of plot against William, and it emerges that Katherine knows more, especially about William’s previous identity, than she has let on. The eminence grise is uncovered in a dramatic finale which ratchets up the final body count and, naturally, there is a happy and romantic ending.

What might jar on the modern reader is the less than sympathetic handling of mental health issues. Consigning someone to an institution, sadly, was often the way that people with erratic behavioural traits were dealt with and Wentworth does not allow her characters to show any compassion for and willingness to understand what the underlying problems are.

Wentworth’s books are a tad formulaic and boilerplate and there is little complexity to the plot or, really, any surprise in what is behind the conspiracy against William. However, she more than makes up for any deficiencies in the puzzle by her ability to tell a story with verve and humour, keeping the reader engaged with a style that is economic rather than florid and which drives the story forward. It is pure entertainment and a lovely way o spend a few hours as the night draws in.

Kirkjuvagr Orkney Gin

It is hard to mistake where Kirkjuvagr Origin Hand Crafted Orkney Gin comes from, it wears its Orcadian origins with pride. Stephen and Aly Kemp founded the distillery in the archipelago’s largest town, Kirkwall, in February 2016 with the aim of creating a high-quality brand that was reflective of them and the island that they came from. What is now Origin gin, originally, just plain Orkney gin, was launched in August of that year and over time they have added others to their range including the intriguing storm-strength Arkh-Angeli, one to be sampled another time, Aurora, a winter-spiced gin, and an Old Tom featuring raspberries and honey, Beyla.

Establishing a foothold in the crowded market spawned by the ginaissance is a challenge and picking a brand name that is almost unpronounceable to the leaden-tongued Sassenach does not seem the smartest of moves. However, Kirkjuvagr is a name steeped in history, one given a thousand or so years ago to the town of Kirkwall by the Vikings. Pronounced kirk-u-vaar, it means church in the bay, the landmark that seafarers looked for as they were battling the stormy seas looking for a safe haven.

Orcadian iconography adorns the bottle. Stamped into the glass of the bottle at label level and adorning the wooden cap at the top is the Vegvisir, a mythical Norse compass, the use of which was said to guarantee that the traveller would find a way home. The Vegvisir is an invitation for Orcadians wherever they are to enjoy a taste of home and for the rest of us to sample the best of the islands.

The bottle itself is cylindrical with a narrow shoulder, short neck and wooden cap with cork stopper. It uses a pale blue glass which, with a repeating wave pattern embossed into the lower half of the bottle’s glass, gives a sense of the seafaring traditions of the islanders and that nothing ever changes.

On the neck of the bottle in Runic script is the word Afl which means strong, a statement of the brand’s strong connection to the Orcadian historic and cultural traditions, a message emphasised by the embossed slogan “Unmistakeably Orcadian” on the lip of the neck. The stopper has to be removed to see the latter and, frankly, the drinker is more concerned in not spilling a drop of the spirit than reading the bottle at that pride. Nevertheless, a lot of thought and pride has gone into what is a subtle and understated show of Orcadian pride.

The label, a pale duck-egg green in colour, is a thin band running at the start of the lower quarter of the bottle. For such a small label it is quite informative, telling me that this is their “elder spirit, created to honour our Viking ancestry. Its unique blend of locally grown botanicals includes a variety of angelica brought to Orkney by ancient Norse seafarers”.

As well as the locally grown angelica, the distillery’s association with the Agronomy Institute of the University of the Highlands and Islands ensures that they receive a plentiful supply of intriguing botanicals including calamondin aka Philippine lime, meadowsweet, aronia aka chokeberries, Ramanas Rose, Burnet Rose, and Borage. They use two 200l direct fired copper stills and a bere barley base spirit. The result is bottled on-site with a final ABV of 43%. My bottle, bought in the southernmost part of the United Kingdom at the headquarters of Drinkfinder UK, is from Batch number 63.

On the nose there is a welcome mix of piney juniper, citrus and a heady salinity. In the glass it louches upon the addition of a tonic and in the mouth, it is warm and floral with a base of juniper, spice, and rather bright and zesty citrus. The aftertaste is long and smooth, spicy with an added layer of salinity to remind you of a sea breeze. It is an impressively smooth and complex gin, another that wears the littoral origin of its botanicals with pride, and if you like herbaceous gins with a hint of juniper and spice, then look it up.

Until the next time, cheers!

Crook O’Lune

A review of Crook O’Lune by ECR Lorac

What a wonderful book this is, the 38th in Lorac’s Robert Macdonald series, originally published in 1953 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. It is less of a crime mystery and more of a love letter to the beautiful countryside around the river Lune in north Lancashire. Lorac’s title is well chosen and nuanced, referencing the name of the river’s bend, a shepherd’s crook which has an instrumental part to play in the mystery, and the criminal whom Macgonald is hunting, a subtlety which is lost in the book’s alternative title of Shepherd’s Crook.

Chief Inspector Macdonald of the Yard is up in the Lune valley on vacation, scouting for a farm to which to spend his soon to be well-earned retirement, but, inevitably, the presence of an eminent detective means that there is a crime to solve turning it into a busman’s holiday. There is a welcome return for Giles and Kate Hoggett, whom we encountered in Lorac’s 1946 novel, The Theft of the Iron Pigs aka Murderer’s Mistake. Although Scottish by birth, there is a sense that Macdonald is returning to a place he loves and where the locals respect him, albeit in a typically restrained and dour way.

Lorac chooses to open her story in a low key, investing time to paint her glorious word pictures of the area and its stunning, if stark, scenery, to introduce the principal characters and to explain a rather complex web of ancient agreements which are at the heart of the mystery. Aikengill has recently fallen into the hands of a northern industrialist, Gilbert Woolfall, following the death of his uncle, Thomas, who had conducted some research into the family history and has uncovered a 17th century arrangement that created a fund, to be administered by trustees, to fund a church and a school in the area.

Woolfall, who is undecided whether to live in the house or sell it, discovers there are a number of people keen to buy it, including the farmer who rents Woolfalls’ land, and a young couple keen to get married. The local rector, a Mr Tupper, an unpleasant individual, voices his concern to Gilbert that Thomas’ will has omitted the endowment to the church, an omission that seems justified from Thomas’ research, but one that rankles. To complete the set-up there is a housekeeper at Aikengill who is about to leave Woolfall’s employment but is hesitating to take the final step.

There is death, murder, and rum goings on but there is a rustic, almost pastoral, edge to it all. What piques Macdonald’s interest when he gets there are the stories of sheep rustling. There is a fire at Aikengill in which Woolfall’s papers are destroyed but, tragically, the housekeeper, who stayed unexpectedly overnight there after Tupper had impatiently refused to wait for her and give her a lift, is found asphyxiated in her room. A stranger, who might have been implicated in the sheep stealing is spotted in the neighbourhood and then on a dramatic evening he is found injured on the fells, having been tripped by a shepherd’s crook while Rutter is lured to an assignation and his study is ransacked. Finally, the old shepherd, Tegg, is murdered confronting the culprit.

The resolution of the mystery ties in the sheep rustling with the financial arrangements in the Woolfall settlement. While the culprit is not difficult to spot and Lorac sprinkles enough clues in her narrative for the attentive reader to deduce the motivation, there are enough red herrings and misdirections to make it an entertaining and enthralling read. What makes the book for me is Lorac’s lyric style, her oneness with the environment, her appreciation of a people whose life is hard but one attuned to nature and who fight to protect what is theirs. It is a homage for an England that was fast disappearing in her time and one that we neglect at our peril.

The Case Of The Green Felt Hat

A review of The Case of the Green Felt Hat by Christopher Bush

The twentieth in Bush’s Ludovic Travers series, The Case of the Green Felt Hat was originally published in 1939 and has now been reissued by the indefatigable Dean Street Press. It opens with a bit of a shock. The previously ascetic Ludovic Travers, who had become smitten by dancer, Bernice Haire, in The Case of The Leaning Man, has only gone and made an honest woman of her. The couple have arrived in the quiet village of Edensthorpe as part of their honeymoon celebrations. However, as amateur sleuths attract murder like magnets metal it soon becomes a bit of a busman’s holiday. Bernice, who seems to be in awe of her husband, does not mind a bit as it gives her the opportunity to get involved and spend her time on the golf course.     

George Wharton of the Yard, The General, is also on holiday and he too pops up in the village at the invitation of the Chief Constable and like the vehicles they drive demonstrates that no sooner does one busman’s holiday appear than another one comes almost immediately. Wharton’s role, though, is more minor than in other Bush stories I have read.

The murder victim is a man called Brewse, a disgraced financier who defrauded a lot of people out of their life savings. Upon release from chokey and seeking a rural retreat, he chose to buy a house in Edensthorpe. Unfortunately, many of the bigwigs in the village were victims of his scam and once his presence is known, a group, corralled by the acting secretary of the golf club, Mr Guff-Wimble, organise themselves to evict Brewse from the village.

Several days later Brewse’s body is found, with his feet sticking out of a manure heap. He had been shot at close range and the post mortem suggests that he was killed at around 3.45pm. However, one witness claims to have seen Brewse some way off at around that time and he was wearing a green felt hat. No hat, felt or otherwise, was found near the body. The investigations reveal that he was not murdered at the spot where his body was hidden, but that sometime after the murder, probably between 8 and 9 in the evening, the body was moved to its eventual resting place.

What it means is that although there is a limited pool of suspects, Guff-White’s gang and those, like the Vicar’s son, Bob Quench, whose prospects were blighted by Brewse’s financial shenanigans, there are two sets of alibis for each to investigate. At first glance all the main suspects have cast-iron alibis and those whose alibis are shakier seem unlikely to have been involved in a spot of murder and body shifting. As is often the case, almost anyone and everyone seems to have been on the move during the relevant times. Wharton doubts whether losing money some time ago was a big enough motive to commit murder, presaging a deeper and more compelling motive behind the case.

There is a lot of golf in this book, although the reader needs to have no knowledge of the game, but the club forms the social hub for the village. A certain prowess on the fairway, the topography of the course, the perils of taking too literal a view of being in the company of someone, and Travers’ ear for regional accents leads him on a hunt that eventually reveals that there is a darker secret that might provide a motive strong enough to do away with Brewse.

It is handy that Travers’ sister-in-law, Joy, is a famous diseuse and impersonator. Incredibly, she too pops in to visit the honeymooning couple – the concept of a honeymoon was remarkably different from that we have nowadays – and a little stratagem the couple cook up may have been a little premature in its execution but precipitates the resolution of the mystery. The final fate of the culprit is nuanced rather than explicit as the honeymooning couple travel off to the next stage of their celebrations.

In an age when hat wearing was de rigueur, the fashion for felt hats instead of bowlers was causing some controversy amongst purists. Brewse wore a green one as part of his disguise and its discovery helped Travers piece together some of the mechanics of the murder. Whilst not as complex as some of Bush’s plots, Travers takes a more active part in the investigation than in some books, motivated to assist his friend, the Chief Constable, whose first murder this was.

Bush has constructed an enjoyable and entertaining tale with enough twists and turns to satisfy all but the most demanding of readers.

The Shelf-Life Of Foodstuffs

One of the weirdest moments in the weirdest of years was a battle royal between a 60p Iceberg lettuce bought from Tesco and a beleaguered British Prime Minister, sparked off by an article in The Economist on October 11th, calling Liz Truss “the iceberg lady” and claiming she had “the shelf-life of a lettuce”. Never ones to let an opportunity slip, The Daily Star rigged up a webcam on the lettuce to see whether it would outlast the Premier. Seven days later, albeit slightly wilted, the lettuce had seen her off and, in the process, had become an internet sensation.

Cruel or amusing as the stunt was, it cleverly drew the nation’s attention to its attitudes to the longevity of foodstuffs, a matter of increasing importance as households grapple with the soaring cost of living. According to the government-backed Waste Resources Action Group (WRAP), British households throw away about 4.5 billion tonnes of edible food a year, 70% of the nation’s edible food waste and enough to fill ninety Royal Albert Halls or make an additional 10.5 billion meals. Potatoes, followed by bread and milk, are the most wasted.

As well as costing £13.8 billion a year or the equivalent of £470 per household, there is an environmental cost. Edible food waste in landfill sites degrades over time, releasing methane gas into the atmosphere which, as it traps heat within the atmosphere, is twenty-five times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Although a concerted effort has been made to reduce the size of the edible food waste problem since the nadir of 2015, the numbers are still eye-watering.  

A contributory factor to the problem is the practice of dating foods either by way of a best before or a use-by date, the subtle differences of which are not always appreciated by the consumer. The best before date, the Food Safety Agency’s website[1] points out, relates to quality, the point up to which it will be at its best, but it will still be safe to eat after that date. The use-by date, however, relates to the safety of the food which should not be cooked or consumed after midnight of the date displayed.

Critics of food dating point out that they are set by manufacturers, are, unsurprisingly conservative, and unnecessary as there is a legal obligation under the Food safety Act 1990, as amended by the General Food Regulations 2004, not to sell food that is not “of the nature, substance, or quality demanded” by the consumer. Large supermarkets are already abandoning the use of best before dates, a move likely to be accelerated by WRAP’s three-point plan, launched in February 2022, to reduce household waste and plastic packaging[2]. If adopted, they claim, it will save fourteen million shopping baskets full of food waste and 1,110 truckloads of plastic.

It was only after the mass adoption of refrigeration and the disconnect between food sources and their point of sale that concerns about the freshness and foodstuffs emerged. Until then, eating was simpler, using foods that were either seasonally available or which had been cured or preserved. Even after the great diaspora from the countryside to the towns, consumers, invariably housewives, would buy what was needed each day.

The quality of food on offer was determined by the senses, a visual check to see whether there was mould on bread or a sniff test to determine whether milk or dairy products had gone off. However, many fell foul of unscrupulous traders or were too poor to afford anything other than substandard food. Not for nothing were sausages colloquially called bags o’mystery in the 19th century as no one was quite sure what was in them, and sailors often had to dine on bow wow mutton, meat so bad that it could well have been dog.

[1] https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/best-before-and-use-by-dates

[2] https://wrap.org.uk/resources/report/reducing-household-food-waste-and-plastic-packaging

Treatment Of The Week

With health budgets under considerable pressure and waiting lists growing daily, the National Health Service needs to pioneer innovation and look to unconventional sources for assistance. How about using maggots?

Some Health Trusts are pioneering the reintroduction of larval debridement therapy, a treatment that was used to good effect in the military hospitals during the First World War. Maggots, the larvae of the green-bottle fly, have been specially bred in a laboratory using eggs that have been treated to remove bacteria. They have an appetite for dead and infected tissue, leaving healthy tissues alone. They also help fight infection by releasing substances that kill bacteria and stimulate the healing process.

The process is fairly simple. The maggots are placed on the wound and covered with gauze, under a firm dressing, which keeps them on the wound and out of sight. After a few days, the dressing is cut away and the maggots are removed. You could probably use them to fish with. Proponents of the treatment say that the healing process is faster and the wound cleaner than it would be using conventional surgical techniques.      

Patients with gangrene and other skin wounds, you have been warned!

Word Of The Year

Unsurprisingly, the state of the country is such that omnishambles just does not cut it. According to lexicographers at Collins Dictionary, we have been living in such a state of permanent crisis that a new word “permacrisis” has had to be coined. It is their word of the year for 2022.

Among the other words which have made the cut are “Partygate”, a reference to the celebrations held in 10, Downing Street while the country was in lockdown and the Prime Minister was too intent in maintaining the permacrisis not to hear any extraneous noise. Then there is “quiet quitting”, a trend to seek a better work-life balance and only work contractual hours, which the Government will be helpfully extending as they cut away EU regulations.

My favourite, though, is splooting, a term that describes the behaviour of an animal that lies stretched out in an attempt to cool down. At least climate change is adding to the colour of our language.