#Food of the World

[angrenwen]

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[angrenwen]

"links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

*Please note that I researched brewsters in particular, and didn’t have time to read up on other influences to the wicked witch myth. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that certain elements of the witch stereotype were also rooted in anti-semitism. (Such as the long, crooked noses or the stories of witches eating children.) I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn about accusations of witchcraft being used to vilify and attack Jewish communities. Again, I only looked at the female brewster’s influence, but I’m happy to reblog any good additions if someone wants to research it."

The Beer Witch Post

(or how the stereotypical Wicked Witch is based in part on female brewsters*) 

Some background:

Women have been brewing beer for nearly 10 thousand years! 

That’s right! Beer is traditionally a woman’s drink, in that it was invented, produced, and drunk by women (and children) for all of recorded history. (src)

Beer only recently became associated with men (around the time it was commercialized of course!)  How did this happen?

Like many things, it involved the Church and a Witch Hunt.

(Note: this post is about a western stereotype; the action takes place in Europe.) Around the 11th cent., the Church realized that brewing alcohol was a great way for monasteries to generate revenue. At the time, brewing was the domain of Germanic tribal woman, and was important bc:

there was a huge demand for ale, due to its cheapness and the lack of potable water in most households

it allowed women to generate their own income at home.

That first part smelled like profit to the Church. That second part meant female independence, which they didn’t like at all. The solution was to get women out of brewing, and monasteries in. What better way than a witch hunt?

Of course, to have a good witch hunt, first you have to invent a witch.

Inventing the Wicked Witch

As female brewsters were pushed out of their fields (being denied licenses and guild membership), the Church set up shop. Monasteries & nunneries were sort of the perfect place to manufacture, what with their land & resources & free labor. Women were still the main brewers in many communities, but this would change over the centuries as the Church waged a War of Defamation against alewives & brewesses. 

The association between woman and sin has always been an easy argument to make, biblically. As women, alewives were ridiculously easy to defame. The rhetoric went something along the lines of:

women created sin

women are sinful

women use beer to spread their sinful ways & take money from men

Alewives, who ran alehouses, were cast as treacherous, deceitful women who cheated men by luring them into playgrounds for the devil, ruled by the sins of gluttony and lust.  

Alewives in hell became a popular Church-spread trope:  

“The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned.“ (src)

Thus, female brewers became easy target to associate with the devil, and with witchcraft. 

Whether or not brewsters were outright accused of consorting with the devil, the implication was there. And later, so was the imagery.

The Church’s centuries-long smear campaign worked too, helped by the fact that as brewing became more lucrative, more men entered the field, and were happy to help push women out. By the 17th century, the (European) brewing industry was male dominated, for the first time in human history. 

Witchcraft & Brewing: Symbology

The lifestyles, clothing, and tools of real women brewers were taken and used as iconography for witchcraft. 

Many of the props associated with the stereotypical Wicked Witch were just common objects alewives used to denote the brewing trade.

CALUDRONS & CATS: The image of a woman standing over a boiling cauldron once had a very different connotation: ale brewing. Cats, of course, were kept around to protect the grain supply.

BROOMSTICKS: these symbols of domestic trade were used as advertisements. A broom or ALESTAKE hung outside a home or alehouse was an easy-to-recognize sign that ale was available to buy. (Keep in mind that before literacy was common, most signs would be symbolic, not written.)

THOSE BIG, DISTINCTIVE HATS: This was a marketing thing too! Wearing a large hat to stand out in the market crowd was a symbol of a brewster with wares to sell. (src)

An Alewife, in her innocent witchy attire. Simple advertising like these allowed women to sell brews that they were already often making for their families at home.

The more you know! A shoutout to all those ladies brewing throughout history, from priestesses to alewives to homemakers alike. For thousands of years, generation after generation of families were fed & watered & kept healthy by women brewing at home. Thank you ladies, for your service.

if you enjoy my posts, i have a ko-fi! (this post took about 2 hours to research/write. links below)

Keep reading

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[elliesbelle]

emily gwen, the creator of the sunset lesbian flag that we’ve come to commonly use, still continues to live in poverty.

multi-billion dollar companies have used their design and made profit from it, and yet they have not seen a cent for their creation.

i’ve been friends with emily for years, and i have not once seen them be financially stable the entire time. i’ve seen them homeless, unemployed, starving. right now, they need our help more than ever.

please consider donating to emily’s ko-fi, especially if you’ve used their design to create something and profited from it.

[sorrysomethingwentwrong]

Creative Dessert Designs By Chef Matteo Stucchi

[apollos-boyfriend]

lunchly having mold problems is bad enough for their image but giving ro a first-hand account of the mold is possibly the worst possible scenario for them. ro kill

[mysharona1987]

[folklorespring]

If you want to support Ukrainians, DO NOT donate to Red Cross. Can't speak about their work in other countries, but they're useless in Ukraine. The only trustworthy international organisation I can think of is World Central Kitchen.

Donate to World Central Kitchen

And it's even better to donate directly to Ukrainian organisations. Here are a few good legit places:

hospitallers.life - "Hospitallers", Ukrainian paramedics on the frontlines

savelife.in.ua - "Come Back Alive", assistance to the army

prytulafoundation.org - "Prytula Foundation", assistance to the army, humanitarian causes

starenki.com.ua - "Starenki", helping elderly people

everybodycan.com.ua - "Everybody Can", helping disabled children, elders and hospitals

uanimals.org - "UAnimals", saving animals

[excessive-moisture]

yummers

[uh-mxtx]

The presence of Potatoes in MDZS implies that some ballsy cultivator took a flying sword over the pacific to South America and brought them back and I would like to pose the idea that that particular potato loving dumbass was Wei Wuxian’s ancestor

(Edit: AND CHILIES!)

(EDIT 2: also watermelon except thats from africa. For reference, irl it’s Song dynasty for watermelon and Qing dynasty for potatoes and chilies)

[lucabyte]

monologue

[angrenwen]

Greengage jam Bakewell tart (serves 10-12)

For the jam

(creates around twice as much as you need for the tart. Yum)

500g greengages

380g caster sugar

30ml water

Juice from ¼ of a lemon

De-stone the greengages. Pop them in a heavy based milk pan / sauce pan. Add the sugar and the water and place on a low flame. Gently stir so that the sugar dissolves.

Once the sugar has dissolved, turn the heat up and bring the greengages and liquid to the boil. Boil for around fifteen to twenty minutes until the temperature of the ingredients reaches 105C. Stir occasionally just to ensure no sugar is caramelizing / burning on the side, nor the fruit catching on the bottom of the pan.

When the ingredients are at 105C, turn the heat off. Add the lemon juice, decant to a bowl or two sterilised jam jars and allow to cool and set before using.

For the tart shell

You will need a 24cm diameter, 4cm deep loose bottomed tart mould

125g unsalted butter (cubed and cold)

250g plain flour

75g icing sugar

pinch of table salt

2 egg yolks

2 tbspns cold milk

Sieve the flour, salt and icing sugar from a height into a large mixing bowl then add the butter cubes. Rub these ingredients together using the tips of your fingers until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs.

Make a well in the centre. Mix the egg yolks and cold milk in a bowl. Add about half into the well and work into the flour, sugar a butter mixture. Add the rest of the egg mixture gradually. You may not need it all. Pat and push the pastry dough together into a ball. Don’t overwork the pastry, else it’ll be springy, rather than short. Cling film the pastry ball and put it into the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Once chilled, roll the pastry ball out on a cold, floured surface until it’s about 5mm thick and plenty big enough to line your tin. This is really short pastry, so you need to be quick, firm and confident.

Gently roll the pastry backwards over your rolling pin and line the tin. Trim so that you leave only 1cm of pastry beyond the height of the mould. Patch any gaps that you may have with pastry trim. Freeze for at least 15 minutes and pre heat your oven to 180C.

Bake your tart shell blind: lined with grease proof paper and ceramic beans, rice or dried pulses. Cook for 10 mins. Remove the paper and beans/rice/pulse and cook for 5 mins more. Remove from the oven, trim off the overhang with a sharp knife and allow to cool.

For the filling

250g unsalted butter

210g caster sugar

210g ground almonds

40g plain flour

3 eggs

250g greengage jam

Turn the oven down to 150C

Cream the butter and sugar together (ideally using a food mixer – on the lowest setting). Gradually add and incorporate the almonds and then the plain flour. Then add the eggs, one by one, waiting till all the liquid is taken up by the butter and almond mix before adding the next egg.

Spoon the greengage jam over the cool tart shell, making sure there’s even coverage. Then gently drop large spoons of the almond mix on top of the jam (if you just scoop it all out, you may disperse the jam). Prod all of the almond splodges together and even out the top with a palette knife.

Bake the tart in the middle of the 150C oven for 55-60 minutes – until the top is a lovely golden brown and just set. Allow to cool (it will carry on cooking). Either reheat in a very low oven (60C) and serve just warm with crème fraiche, or cold with warm custard.

[starcurtain]

Teyvat's "Most Down Bad" Award Goes to Alhaitham for a Second Year Running

Seeing everyone making fun of Alhaitham for his "stalkerish" tendencies in this event is funny, because I feel like a lot of people missed that "Be literally everywhere Kaveh is" has been Alhaitham's MO from the day Kaveh appeared in the game.

From only grabbing his house keys after Kaveh returned from the desert (he couldn't have had both sets of keys at the end of the Archon Quest unless he went home and got Kaveh's copy) to ditching conversations to get back to his house only after Kaveh came home, to showing up without any warning or explanation in Kaveh's hangout with some ridiculous excuse about hearing his voice through noise-cancelling headphones... Refusing to offer any help in the Temple of Silence story quest other than staying in the library with Kaveh...

Since when does Alhaitham willingly cover anyone else's duties?

But this trend of "Be everywhere Kaveh is" didn't start when they were adults. It was already in place when they were still Akademiya students--and it's a trend that didn't end even when they had their fight.

Even when they weren't speaking, Alhaitham dogged Kaveh's every step through published responses to Kaveh's research articles in academic journals. He insisted on keeping a line of communication between himself and Kaveh open, even if the only way to do that was through very public ideological clashes. Pulling Kaveh's pigtails to get his attention lolol. It's implied that, for at least the few years between their fight and Kaveh moving in, this was the only communication between them--Alhaitham's refusal to allow their connection to entirely fade away. (And the fact that this is revealed in Kaveh's character stories--through his precious journal that records the moments of his life that had the most impact on him--shows just how deeply he values the fact that Alhaitham didn't give up.)

Another relevant side note: Alhaitham never asked Kaveh to give up his half of their house. Knowing half of it belonged to Kaveh, knowing that Kaveh may one day want to reclaim his part of it, knowing that it was listed as theirs, Alhaitham moved into the house and made zero effort to change its ownership. He was completely fine with living in "his and Kaveh's house." The stories suggest it was only months later (or even longer) that Kaveh even noticed he had the house, and he transferred away ownership of his portion without Alhaitham ever asking him (or even seemingly wanting him) to do so.

Please, let that sink in. Alhaitham actively left his grandmother's (presumably comfortable) house to move into "his and Kaveh's house," with no apparent explanation for why, and after doing so, he made no attempt to change that "his and Kaveh's" label. He moved into the house with no promise that Kaveh wouldn't show up on the doorstep the very next day and move in too. It almost feels like another deliberate provocation--I've moved into our house, are you going to come stop me? LBR, if Alhaitham had had his way, Kaveh would have been living there with him from Day 1...

There's also the fact that Kaveh literally can't write on a single message board anywhere in the entire nation of Sumeru without Alhaitham hunting his messages down and responding to them (which absolutely no one else does, by the way).

"NUH-UH!" "UH-HUH." "NUH-UH!"

Alhaitham's own character stories tell us explicitly that one of Alhaitham's defining character traits is "He is never where you need him to be," yet somehow...

Shot, and chaser:

Any time Kaveh is in the slightest bit of need or danger or just wants Alhaitham near, Alhaitham is "coincidentally" exactly where Kaveh needs him to be, whenever Kaveh needs him to be there.

Alhaitham didn't just "happen" to run into Kaveh in Port Ormos, an entirely different city from where he was supposed to be working. He didn't just "happen" to read the same terrible book as Kaveh when we know he otherwise would not waste a moment of his time on poorly-written literature...

He didn't just "happen" to appear when Kaveh was upset and needed a distraction in the House of Daena during Kaveh's hangout. He didn't just "happen" to be sitting around waiting when Kaveh needed answers after the Archon Quest. He didn't just "happen" to find Kaveh's academic publications and every single message board posting and respond to them at length and in public.

Which is exactly what Kaveh's mother told Kaveh he needed.

What level of down bad is "Abusing your powers as an Akademiya employee to keep tabs on your crush's library loans"? Just asking for a friend.

The only person for whom Alhaitham just "happens" to be available is Kaveh, over and over and over again--because he is very deliberately making himself a constant presence in Kaveh's life.

(Like, out of all things, I think people really underestimate the devs deliberately paralleling the romantic relationship between Kaveh's mother and father with Kaveh and Alhaitham's relationship. If you want to point to one thing that says "These two characters are intentionally queer-coded," it doesn't get any more obvious than this.)

Alhaitham, are you not embarrassed to be this transparent??? 🫣

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Who is this sassy lost child?

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[sayruq]