Mealtimes

Liz: Hello and welcome to bread and thread, a podcast about food and domestic history. I'm Liz

Hazel: and I'm Hazel. We are two friends who studied archeology together and love history and talking about history and making things. And we normally start by talking about the things that we have been making and, or baking recently. So what have you been up to?.

Liz: So mostly obtaining things for my next big making, I have got the oil for the sunlight soap. I'm going to make that this weekend

Hazel: Cool

Liz: Which means when this goes up, I should be able to post a picture of the sunlight soap, which is just going to look like a plain bar of soap. But we'll know.

Hazel: I’m imagining it just glowing with sunlight

Liz: Maybe I'll take a picture of it outside. But I, I have also, this is probably a thing that most people already know and I'm just a fool. Um, but I've discovered the condensed milk tastes almost exactly like white chocolate. So we made a white chocolate and raspberry ice cream without having to work with white chocolate, which is an evil substance that does not do what it's told.

(crosstalk)

Liz: Sorry

Hazel: Sorry. As we established in the chocolate episode, it is not in fact chocolate.

Liz: It is deceitful and also ill mannered. But it turns out if you want to make white chocolate ice cream, you can just use condensed milk instead, and it tastes like white chocolate.

Hazel: Okay. That's a revelation.

Liz: So we made raspberry and white chocolate ice cream. We made a raspberry compote and then made just plain ice cream, but with condensed milk in it and swirled it together. And then it was raspberry and white chocolate ice cream.

Hazel: Oh my gosh, that sounds delicious and you're making me jealous of having an ice cream.

Liz: Oh, this was actually a no churn one.

Hazel: Oh, okay. Even better

Liz:I will try and remember to send you the recipe after we finished recording

Hazel: Yes please!

Liz: I can’t put it up as a patron recipe because I stole it from Good Housekeeping

Hazel: We can’t plagiarize Good Housekeeping.

Liz: But I will put up an ice cream recipe as this month's Patreon recipe available to $5 over or above patrons.

Hazel: That’s a nice slug in there.

Liz: Yeah, that has been my making. How about you?

Hazel: So I have been venturing into embroidery, which is something I have done before, but just very simple things, really, I've done just some split stitch line-art type stuff, and, you know, your average, how to keep your kid busy by giving them little embroidery instructions and making some flowers.

Liz: Glad that you clarified simple as in the technique rather than the project. Cause you did embroider a tree of life on my wedding dress.

Hazel: Oh, I did.

Liz: And celtic knots and things

Hazel: Yes. I forgot about that. But that was actually, it was only two stitches. It was split stage and second stage, both of which are really simple once you know how.

Liz: Well it was very pretty

Hazel: Yeah, I was, I was quite pleased with that, and that was only one color as well, so that was fairly easy. But what I am doing now is an embroidered portrait of my grandma for her 90th birthday.

Liz: That's cute.

Hazel: Yeah. So it's hopefully going to be very cute, but also because it's such a significant present, or, you know, emotionally significant, I'm just really scared of working on it cause I want it to come out good. So, I have a picture of her when she was a student nurse in the fifties and she's wearing one of those really neat white uniforms with the little hat. So I put that into just a free graphic design program, it's called Gravit Designer, and I just traced over it to make a vector image of just kind of a line arts, just sort of

Liz: Yeah

Hazel: Simplifying it as much as I could. And then I used that, printed that off and used it as a pattern, but I am embroidering it in full color. So, I'm…yeah, I haven't really had to do this scale of choosing colors and trying to make it look realistic before. So, and I have to think about stitch direction and like, it's just, it's a bit nail biting, but I'm enjoying it. I'm learning a lot.

Liz: It does sound fun, if slightly weird, to presumably at some point be stood in front of a wall of embroidery floss and going “which one looks like my grandmother's skin”. Yeah. I do also now own a copy of Terese de Dilmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework, which I found in a secondhand bookshop the other day, and that is very exciting. And it has instructions for needle painting in it, which is like realistic long and short stitch embroidery, which is what I'm trying to do. So that's handy and good find.

Liz: Yeah.

Hazel: And it has a dedication in the front that it was given to somebody named Evelyn in 1935. And I love it.

Liz: That's really lovely.

Hazel: So that is me. Oh, by the way, if you're a new listener, we have an episode on Terese de Dilmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework which is like a very significant volume. And yeah, if you're interested in that, go back and listen to it.

Liz: If you give me a second, I can go back and tell you what episode number it is. That is episode 25 from January, 2021.

Hazel: Episode 25.

Liz: If you want to learn about the books that Hazel bought

Hazel: And it's also available for free online

Liz: About a legitimate embroidery influencer

Hazel: Yeah, she had shops under her name open in various European capitals. And this book was in print until the 1850s, like from the 1980s. It's very interesting.

Liz: Go listen, and then come back to this one. What is this one?

Hazle: Today, I'm going to talk about mealtimes, the times that we ea, what meals we eat when and why that is. So, yeah, this is kind of brought about by, at the moment I work a job where I work over, like what most people would consider lunchtime, and so my eating pattern at the moment is a bit weird. I eat my lunch at about 11:00 AM and then I have a snack when I get back home later. So that got me thinking like, oh, I wonder what time people eat at different places in the world. And then, so this is going to be the history of mealtimes.

Liz: Yeah, the different places it's going to be interesting, cause I…so I vaguely remember I did a weird thing when I was doing my A level Spanish where we went and worked in Spain for a week. Except everything was closed at the time that I normally have my tea, so we ended up eating at like 8 PM. And it was awful.

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Tea of course me in the evening meal, which has many names.

Hazel: So that's kind of an infamous one

Liz: I don't know if you're covering that one, but…

Hazel: Absolutely. We will once and for all settle the “is your evening meal dinner or tea?” debate

Liz: Well, I know it's not supper because supper is when you have a smaller meal later in the evening.

Hazel: Yeah, we agree on that

Liz: I will fight you on this.

Hazel: No, no, no. I agree with you on that one. Iit's just the dinner tea lunch thing

Liz: Yeah supper is elevenses but late, it's dark elevenses

Hazel: It's evening second breakfast. So the, yeah, the Spanish, evening meal being really late is quite an infamous one. I had a Spanish housemate when I was living in Manchester as well, who would eat dinner really late, and if we would go on nights out together, she would be like, “oh yeah, we'll go out after dinner”, except dinnerwas at like nine or 10 o'clock, and then I'd just be like, “I'm ready to go out”. And she was just like, “no, we don't go out until like 1:00 AM. What do you mean?”

Liz: How can you do that?

Hazel: I was very sleepy. I could not see that.

Liz: Yeah. Like I'm a very early person. I wake up at like 7:00 AM and I go to bed at 10 ,hat's my day.

Hazel: Aww

Liz: Maybe 11, if I'm watching a long film.

Hazel: I am a bit more of a night owl, but I just couldn't. Her friends would just do this like a couple of nights a week and then just go to work the next day, and I was just like “how can you do this?” Yeah.

Liz: But then I guess they also have siestas, don’t they, so you catch up on the sleep a little bit.

Hazel: Yeah, apparently lunch is like a bit more of a thing and like you have longer for your lunchtime. Anyway

Liz: I'm sorry,. I'm getting ahead of you.

Hazel: I'm going to go kind of back in the day here. Apparently having a mealtime, like everyone eating together, is a product of the agricultural revolution in the Early Neolithic. So with the rise of farming becoming a thing, people started having to arrange their day around a regular routine of farming tasks and you're living like in the same place, so you start having to arrange your eating around them.

Liz: I guess before that makes sense, because I assume before then you'd just sort of eat when you have food.

Hazel: Yeah, the general consensus is that our hunter gatherer ancestors just ate like whenever they wanted to and whenever there was food. And this is supported by a lot of anthropological evidence of hunter-gatherer peoples around the world, and indigenous peoples who still do that, and yeah, it works, that's kind of how it be before farming. And in fact, apart from big feasting events…so there is evidence in the form of things like big midden heaps, heaps of rubbish that was deposited all at the same time, that tells us that people were gathering at certain times and having a big feast and everyone eating at once. So that kind of ties in with the whole, “when you have food”. So if there's a particular abundance of a certain food, you might as well have a feast and make use of it. So, in fact, an interesting offshoot of that is that the paleolithic diet or the “paleo diet” actually isn't

Liz: Oh!

Hazel: Yeah, like the idea that prehistoric peoples were eating just like low carb, high protein, basically just meat is not a thing. Um, that's not real. In fact…

Liz: They’re hunter gatherers! Not just hunters!

Hazel: It's just that the evidence for the things they were eating that is not meat is less easy to find and you have to involve zooarcheology to find it. But that's your thing. So we should do an episode on the real paleo diet.

Liz: Oh, that would be fun. I wonder if we could get an archeologist on for that?

Hazel: Yeah, that would be cool. Okay. So, we have people actually having meals together. And for a lot of history it was the custom to have your main meal in the middle of the day, or at least closer to around noon. So if you are, if you're a rural laborer, if you're working in the fields, and this is before artificial light as well, so you're going to be rising with the dawn. Breakfast is a bit of a debatable one, some people ate breakfast and some people didn't, but it seems to be the case that if you're a labourer, you're going to be eating breakfast, because you need that. So you're rising with the dawn and you're having a small breakfast, um, and you're going out to work in the fields. And so by noon, you've already worked about six hours, you're going to be hungry. And that's when

Liz: Makes sense

Hazel: Yeah. That's when people would be coming back to have their main meal. And so that was your dinner. So where the whole dinner becoming an evening meal thing comes from is that as the industrial revolution happened and people started moving into the towns and going to work in factories. You could only take with you for your lunch break…you might not get a big lunch break, and you could only take what you could carry with you to work, so people started having a lighter meal in the middle of the day, at dinner time and then the actual main meals, so the dinner, got pushed back to when they got back from work. So I mean, if you've got a couple and the wife's also working, then she's not going to be able to make dinner until she gets back either.

Liz: So you're telling me that if early factories had had decent canteens, we might have still had lunch as the big main meal?

Hazel: Possibly so, and in fact, in a lot of rural areas, basically as far as I can make out, every rural area around the world, having your main meal in the middle of the day remains the custom right up until the 20th century, and in a lot of places it's still the custom, because that's just, that's how it fits in with your working pattern, and especially if you live close to where you work. So if you're working on the family farm, you can easily come back in for dinner at midday.

Liz: I mean, I guess it does make sense, you're having your big load of calories in the middle of doing a lot of hard physical stuff and just sort of topping up at the start and end.

Hazel: Yeah. So then supper would be the later meal that you would have. And obviously nobody likes going to bed on a full stomach and people would be going to bed quite early before artificial light. So that's why supper

Liz: ‘Cause what you gonna to do when it gets dark, just hang around with a candle?

Hazel: Yeah, and people obviously are going to be getting up early as well. Especially, for most of the year, people are going to bed really early, so you want to get your meal in before it gets dark. Now the exception to that is if you're a super rich

Liz: Obviously

Hazel: and then you can basically do what you want. Yeah.

Liz: You don't need a big calorie injection at a certain point.

Hazel: Yeah. So this is where we get luncheon.

Liz: Oh

Hazel: Yeah. Now, I was talking to my parents earlier and they kind of backed me up on this, that luncheon was kind of a posh thing for a lot of history.

Liz: I mean, if you're going to call it luncheon.

Hazel: Well, yeah, definitely.

Liz: But to be honest, the word mostly reminds me of spam because spam is luncheon meat.

Hazel: Oh, that's true. I think that is the main place I see it nowadays.

Liz: All the rich people sat around their houses eating spam

Hazel: So, if you are a laborer, you’d be getting up at the crack of dawn, heading out to your fields or your work. If you were a rich person, you did not have to do that, so you would not be getting up as early. And so your dinner gets pushed back a bit, and then also your breakfast. So that meant that originally, in the 18th century, you still had this…there would be one big meal and it would be earlier on. And so, you know, people might be, the fancy people might be getting up about 9 or 10AM, or even later, and doing their stuff, breaking their fast, and then having their dinner kind of early afternoon. But as time went on, people started having their main meal later and later. And the people who actually did have to get up fairly early, which was mainly the ladies, who still had to do stuff like organizing the children and the household, and they kind of started going, “Hey, we're kind of hungry”

Liz: Understandable.

Hazel: “It's kind of a long time from breakfast until dinner. We're going to have another meal, a light meal in between.” And that's luncheon. And originally that was a ladies thing for ladies and would be dainty stuff.

Liz: Fellas?

Hazel: And in fact, apparently, the infamous Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, later George the Fourth, was well-known for lunching with ladies, and that was considered part of his scandalousness.

Liz: I mean, I guess it does combine as two big vices of women and food.

Hazel: Yeah, indeed. All in one convenient package. Luncheon, extremely scandalous

Liz: I’m gonna think about that every time I sit down to a cheap egg and cress

Hazel: And in fact, later on that was also the invention of tea as well, as in tea time, about 4 or 5 o’clock

Liz: I have heard this story

Hazel: Yeah, so that being, as mealtimes got more standardized, but then evening meals still being quite late on occasion. I mean, especially if you were like at court and the monarch, for some reason, wasn't hungry yet, and then everyone would have to wait until they wanted to eat because you can't eat before the monarch.

Liz: I guess when you, once you've got the more standard meals, but you're still getting up late, it's like three hours between breakfast and lunch. And then

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Anywhere from like six to nine hours before you get to eat again.

Hazel: Yeah. So, I mean, especially if you're like a sort of upper middle, upper class person, and you’re going out to dinner in other people's houses a lot, that's generally served fairly late. So again, the ladies are getting hungry. Um, and then tea time

Liz: I like how it’s just the ladies, the men are like, “no, it's manly to suffer”

Hazel: Well, I think also it was more acceptable for a man to go out and buy snacks.

Liz: Just go to the club.

Hazel: Yeah, exactly. Just drop into the club for one of those new fangled sandwiches.

Liz: I've heard of these. We definitely haven't been eating those for the entirety of the time we've had bread.

Hazel: Of course. Yeah. So that's how tea ended up being something that consists of, you know, dainty little sandwiches with crusts cut off and little cakes and that sort of thing. Although interestingly, tea time didn't really catch on in other places. So apparently in the 19th century and early 20th century five o'clock tea time was just everyone in Britain. If you could, you did five o'clock tea time.

Liz: So I may be reading ahead, but how does dinner become tea time in the north and then stay dinner in the south? Yeah, so I think, again, that's kind of more to do with class and occupation than necessarily like geographics, but I, I think it's just a case of like the fancier terms for it catching on more in the south than in the north, because even down here, rural people were still eating then they meal at midday, or in the afternoon right up until the 20th century. So I was reading a book called Early to Rise by Bob Copper the other day, who was a really well known figure in Sussex folk song, and it's about his life growing up in the 1900s, and he describes…in a small village on the South Downs in rural Sussex. And he describes his mother making dinner in the afternoon, so like making this big meal in the afternoon. Um, and then even though the father was out at work, the family would still have their dinner in the afternoon, save some for Dad, and then when he got home later, it would be heated up for him and then everyone else would just have supper. So, yeah, I think it's just certain language catching on in the South more than it did in the North, and it might have something to do as well, I think with the sort of industrial centers in the north, so yeah.

Liz: So that's the other way round because, what I've encountered at least, is you get sort of the North, especially working class North and Scotland, calling the evening meal tea, and then Southerners and posh people calling it dinner.

Hazel: Yeah. Well I got bit confused with the lunchtime meal there as well, so, okay. Let me get this straight. So tea is either…okay. Tea or dinner is the evening meal, and then the afternoon meal is either lunch or dinner.

Liz: Yeah, I think it's a similar split of like we, by way, I guess I just mean like…t’north, I've always had breakfast, lunch and tea, but then there's also people who have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or breakfast dinner and supper.

Hazel: Yeah. And I've also had breakfast, dinner and tea. Yeah, I think it's just a thing of certain things, uh, you know, remain the case in certain areas, and then depending on where your family's from, that's what you say.

Liz: If anyone listening to this has English as a second language, good luck.

Hazel: Yeah. So, the kind of exception to this is Sunday lunch or Sunday dinners, being the traditional main meal at lunchtime.

Liz: See that one makes sense to me, because my assumption, obviously I might be wrong and you're the one that's done the research for this episode, but my assumption has always been traditionally you would have been at a really long church service.

Hazle: Uh, yes, but also

Liz: I’ve been told of older relatives, putting a joint on, at a low temperature then going out to church and then coming back and it's done, and then you have the big meal.

Hazle: Well, yeah, I think that's the reason for it being a roast is because that's easy to do, um, when you're going to be going out for a few hours. But also, that remained the kind of thing of Sunday was the day off for most working people. And so that would keep the custom of having your main meal in the middle of the day, cause you didn’t have to move it. So apparently that's why it's still in the afternoon. So apparently a lot of these older customs of eating persisted in the US when they had started changing in the UK. So stuff like having your main meal in the middle of the day and eating lighter in the evening, and not having such a big breakfast, apparently that remained the customer when, in Britain, it was changing. But then also in continental Europe, it seems to be the case that, especially in places like the Mediterranean, where it's a warmer climate and the afternoon is quite hot and people are taking a break anyway, the custom of having a larger main meal in the afternoon is still around.

Liz: That makes sense. If it's kind of, “I don't have the energy to do anything else”

Hazel: Yeah.

Liz: “I’m gonna sit here and eat my pasta”

Hazel: “And then go to sleep for a bit”.

Liz: I mean, that's, that's the dream isn’t it?

Hazel: That is the dream, absolutely. That is also the case in other places of the world, especially places that have a warm climates. When I was living in Vietnam, the midday nap was just, everyone had a midday nap and it was the best. So yeah, that's…it seems to be that when you, what time you eat develops a lot in response to what climate you live in, what your occupation is, whether or not you're working close to home, what the availability of food is around where you’re working. So a lot of people, if you've got time for lunch, like you might have in a warmer climate, then you can, maybe if you're not going back home, you can pop out to a street stall or something. Or even to a restaurant, have something there that's a bit more of a meal.

Liz: You're just reminding me of a former coworker who was French and was appalled by the idea of having lunch at your desk and would go out to at the very least a Starbucks, if not somewhere nicer, every lunchtime, even though she only had like half an hour, she was like, no, “I'm going to go and have a proper lunch.”

Hazel: It’s a break, dammit! Yeah. So it's a thing with schools as well. So we're used to schools in the UK finishing at about three o'clock in the afternoon. But in a lot of places in continental Europe, they start pretty early and then finish about like one o'clock or 1:30. So the kids don't have a lunch break. They have a snack break and then just go home for lunch. So that kind of implies that whoever's taking care of them also has time to like pick them up and then have lunch at home and then maybe go back. But, yeah, French kids until recently didn't have school on Wednesdays.

Liz: That's interesting.

Hazel: I don't know if that's just like primary or something. Anyway.

Liz: Fun facts

Hazel: So, another thing that can have an effect on what time you eat as well is the time of year and, you know, whatever religious festival might be happening at that time. So for example in Islamic cultures, the festival of Ramadan, sets out when you eat. So of course you're fasting during the daytime, the daylight hours. So everyone eats before the sun comes up and then after the sun goes down, and likewise in Europe, the Catholic church governed a lot of what people ate. And this leads me Collop Monday

Liz: Excuse me?

Hazel: Which is the day before Shrove Tuesday, or as we know it in the UK pancake day. Collop Monday.

Liz: How are you spelling that?

Hazel: C O double L O P.

Liz: Okay.

Hazel: And I believe a collop is like offal

Liz: I mean,  I always have time for offal.

Hazel: So this is taking us back to breakfast and the origins of the full English breakfast. So apparently…which would have been the mid day meal back in the middle ages. So it sort of becomes breakfast at the point when larger breakfast starting to become a thing. So yeah, Collop Monday was the day before Shrove Tuesday or pancake day. So during lent for 40 days, you're fasting from meat. And so Collop Monday was the day when you would be using up all your meat before the period of lent and for a lot of people, this meant pork because a lot of people would be keeping pigs. And so that's apparently how the full English breakfast of sausages and bacon started because bacon and eggs were actually quite a common food, even for the lower classes. Like a lot of people kept pigs and chickens. So bacon and eggs was something that you might not have all year round, but certainly in season you would have it. So, yeah, that's kind of a brief history of what people are eating at what time. It is kind of being shaken up today due to, well, for one thing, us having artificial light, but then also modern working patterns. So from what I've been able to find out, most people around the world, if you live in a city, now eat three meals a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But a lot of people in rural areas still have the main meal in the middle of the day, and that seems to be the same, pretty much around the world. Although in some places like there's still a lot more serious about lunch, like apparently in Mexico and South America, lunch is a big deal, and can have several courses, which sounds great.

Liz: That does sound great.

Hazel: Yeah. And then you have just more of a supper in the evening, so like an evening meal, isn't really a thing. But it seems to be in a lot of places that the main meal is eaten just whenever people get back from work. So that varies anywhere from four till seven around the world. Yeah, so that is the meals

Liz: Cool, that…I did not know. It was so complex.

Hazel: Apparently it turns out that, um, when you eat your main meal is actually a product of like, A lot of different social and political factors

Liz: Can’t believe industrialization robbed as of the several hour long lunch break

Hazel: It’s the damn agricultural revolution. I'm telling you everything went wrong when we started farming, just what happened to eating whenever you're hungry

Liz: That is a hot take

Hazel: That is a hot take

Liz: Farming destroyed intuitive eating is now the take

Hazel: That is a hot take, which apparently is being taken up by, some like nutritional recommendations now, which I don't know much about, because I did read a little bit about it, but it was…the article was basically on a website that was like, there were absolutely no sources and the jist of what they were saying just seem to be like, “well, our ancestors didn't eat three meals a day, so why should you?” And I was kind of like, “Hmm, you haven't really given any reasons for why this is better.” So.

Liz: Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, I can see where you're coming from, but I need you to come a little bit further.

Hazel: Yeah. Like I, well, they seem to work for our ancestors and it seems to work for a lot of cultures today still, but, I want to know why it's better. What do we have for the local larder today? Liz: I am going to talk about the national dish of Thailand and how it became the national dish of Thailand.

Hazle: Okay.

Liz: Have you had pad Thai?

Hazle: I have had pad Thai. It is delicious. I have heard that is actually not a particularly old or traditional dish, but I have no idea why. So tell me about pad Thai.

Liz: So I mean, how old is as a dish really depends on how you count it.

Hazel: Okay.

Liz: Because when you come down to it, it's rice noodles in a certain sauce that definitely already existed. But it was formalized as pad Thai in the sort of late thirties, early forties, which was a time when Thailand was going through a big period of nationalism and building a concept of national identity, because it was a very sort of blended culture. And then I have listened to videos on how to pronounce this, but I might still get it wrong. Plaek Phibunsongkhram, often known in the west as just, um, Phiblun, was the prime minister and dictator of Thailand from 38, right up until pretty much the end of the second world war. So basically he was inspired by Mussolini, which is always a good start to a sentence.

Hazel: Yeah. That tells us things aren't going to go great

Liz: To start the Thai cultural revolution, which changed the country's name from Siam to Thailand, promoted the use of the Thai language and the concept of a national identity, rather than identifying with the different ethnic groups within Thailand, and issued these 12 cultural mandates, one of which was about using Thai products and Thai food, which included the promotion of pad Thai, as a kind of, “this is our national food now, rice noodles and spicy tamarind sauces is what we eat here.”

Hazel: Okay. I was kind of like, that doesn't sound too bad, you know, until the, this is what we eat thing, you know, promoting local products and stuff

Liz: Well promoting local products

Hazel: Is generally nice

Liz: Because you don't want people to identify with other countries and are especially very, very anti-China

Hazel: Yeah. Until you get to the part about “we’re going to tell you what these local products are, that you should be using” it...that’s not so good

Liz: Yeah. It's a very quick move from “we should have a national identity” to nationalism. But apparently it was especially these noodles because people ate a lot of rice, unsurprisingly for the region, but due to the Second World War and flooding, there was a shortage of rice in very early forties, so Phibul's government promoted the consumption of noodles instead because it used less rice per serving. And it was sort of a push of…it's almost the Thai equivalent of digging for victory, “we’re going to eat the rice noodles instead of the rice. And it's going to help us win the war and it's going to bring us all together”.

Hazel: Oh. Did it?

Liz: Um, he was ousted, but then he came back

Hazel: Okay

Liz: So unclear. Hmm. Um, but I mean, when he came back he did face several very large coup attempts and was overthrown and exiled. So overall, I don't think it worked for him, but I mean, Thai is now a coherent cultural identity, which it sounds like it was less before. How much of that is him and how much was just general geopolitics? I do not know enough about Asian politics to comment, but it doesn't sound like pad Thai was a big factor. But it is now considered the national dish and in a CNN poll in 2011, it was rated the fifth most delicious food in the world. Hazel: Ooh, I thinkthat's pretty good for your national dish.

Liz: Yeah. I mean, especially a quiz compiled on the other side of the…list compiled on the other side of the world.

Hazel: Yeah.

Liz: Would you like to know the top five most delicious foods>

Hazel: I would

Liz: While I've got the list open?

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Interestingly, they're all Asian

Hazel: Doesn't surprise me.

Liz: I mean, it doesn't surprise me in the Asian food is delicious.

Hazel: Ok

Liz: It surprises me in that it was a CNN poll. Okay. Um, so yeah, five is pad Thai, four is tom yan goong, which is another Thai dish

Hazel: Yeah, also Thai right?

Liz: Three is sushi, which, I dunno, that feels like a pretty vague

Hazel: Hmm. Yeah. Like I don't, it depends what we’re talking about here

Liz: Stuff with rice, in a Japanese way. Two is Nasi Goreng, which is delicious, is an Indonesian, chicken and egg and prawn and rice thing.

Hazel: Yeah. I've never had it, but it sounded good.

Liz: It is gorgeous. And number one, I do agree with this being one of the most delicious foods actually, is rendang, which is

Hazel: That’s also

Liz: An Indonesian stew with coconut milk. Making me hungry, this list is making me hungry

Hazel: Oh man, coconut milk based stews, like one of the absolute best foods. I’m super hungry now

Liz: I have a goal to make everything on this list.

Hazel: I can't imagine fish and chips would score very highly on that list.

Liz: Possibly not

Hazel: It’s delicious in a different way.

Liz: I haven't read through the whole list. So you never know.

Hazel:I feel like fish and chips is like a, it's not the flavors that are the delicious part. Like it's the crunch and the crispiness of the chip and like, it's just the “it's cold and I'm eating a crunchy hot potatoes.”

Liz: I mean, who doesn't like a crunchy hot potato

Hazel: Indeed.

Liz: So yeah, that is pad Thai, a surprisingly nationalist dish.

Hazle: Yeah, I didn't expect that. I thought it would be the case where it was like, this is more of a fusion food and people in the West have just decided that this is the dish that represents Thailand, you know, sort of like chicken tikka masala. Um, but yeah, I didn't realize that it was actually like an internal effort to make it the national dish.

Liz: Sorry, I'm looking at this list now. Um, Number 37 is crisps.

Hazel: Again, which crisps? Because

Liz: Just crisps. All crisps

Hazel: Every crisp except prawn cocktail.

Liz: Oh, I like prawn cocktail, but only when it's skips or monster munch. I don't like prawn cocktail good crisps, if that makes sense

Hazle:  I think my favorite crisp might be the industrial chemical pickled onion flavor of pickled onion monster munch

Liz: Fish and chips is number 21

Hazle: Oh, okay. That's not bad.

Liz: That's not bad. It sits between pho and egg tart, which is like an egg custard tart.

Hazel: Okay.

Liz: I'll accept this.

Hazel: I'm just…I'm having a weird image of fish and chips next to pho, like one of those is,,,I mean, they're both delicious, but one of those is very greasy and heavy and the other one is, like delicious fragrant freshness

Liz: Maybe you have the pho as a starter

Hazel: That's not a meal combination that I had considered.

Liz: No, I realized, as I said, that's no good.

Hazel: No,

Liz: So, if you want to suggest an episode or a local order, you can email us at breadandthreadpodcast@gmail.com.

Hazel: Sorryy I was yawning. You can also find us on Twitter at breadandthread, and on YouTube as well under the same name.

Liz: And on tumblr, we are a triple threat.

Hazel: We have all the socials except Tik TOK

Liz: ever Tik TOK.

Hazel: No

Liz: We also have a Patrion if you want access, like I said, to recipes, to a discord server where we chat about things that we've made and cooked and talk about the episodes. Or at $10 or above, if you want your own bonus episode on anything you want, that is patron.com/breadandthread. I think that's everything. I think that's everything.

Hazel: We have a lot of things now, but that it.

Liz: We do. So thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.