At Home - Bill Bryson [103]
Dinner finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, influenced by Queen Victoria. As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated. Luncheon originally signified a lump or portion (as in “a luncheon of cheese”). In that sense it was first recorded in English in 1580. In 1755, Samuel Johnson was still defining it as a quantity of food—“as much food as one’s hand can hold.” Only slowly over the next century did luncheon come to signify, in refined circles at least, the middle meal of the day.
One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only a small evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk—a sadly appropriate word here—of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn’t do us any good at all. The Ruskins, it turns out, were right.
* The Naval Board also used lime juice rather than lemon juice because it was cheaper, which is why British sailors became known as limeys. Lime juice wasn’t nearly as effective as lemon juice. Incidentally, it was Americans, not Australians, who first applied the term limey to British sailors.
* Mercury especially so. It has been estimated that as little as 1/25 of a teaspoon of mercury could poison a sixty-acre lake. It is fairly amazing that we don’t get poisoned more often. According to one computation, no fewer than twenty thousand chemicals in common use are poisonous to humans if “touched, ingested or inhaled.” Most are twentieth-century creations.
* Sodium chloride is strange stuff because it is made up of two extremely aggressive elements: sodium and chlorine. Sodium and chlorine are the Hell’s Angels of the mineral kingdom. Drop a lump of pure sodium into a bucket of water and it will explode with enough force to kill. Chlorine is even more deadly. It was the active ingredient in the poison gases of the First World War and, as swimmers know, even in very dilute form it makes the eyes sting. Yet put these two aggressive elements together, and what you get is innocuous sodium chloride—common table salt.
* The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.
* Nutmeg is the seed of the tree; mace is part of the flesh that surrounds the seed. Mace was actually the rarer of the two. About a thousand tons of nutmeg were harvested annually, but only about a hundred tons of mace.
* Amerindians got syphilis, too, but suffered less from it, in much the way that Europeans suffered less from measles and mumps.
• CHAPTER IX •
THE CELLAR
I
If you had suggested to anyone in 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, that New York would one day be the greatest city in the world, you would possibly have been marked out as a fool. New York’s prospects in 1783 were not promising. It had housed more Loyalists than any other city, so the war had had an unhappy effect on its standing within the new republic. In 1790, its population was just ten thousand. Philadelphia, Boston, and even Charleston were all busier ports.
The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and