Tasty to My Palate

[00:00] Oh, Coalson, I'm in the movie for an undegoogable.
[00:06] Do you have any questions that you need answered this week?
[00:08] Oh, we do an undegoogables.
[00:17] That was the play of Super Excited.
[00:20] I told us we had to.
[00:22] He said we signed up for it.
[00:27] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:32] This week, this one's from Kyle.
[00:37] My lovely fiancé, who I think I can safely say is our longest and biggest fan who doesn't listen to the show.
[00:46] I don't know. I think Catherine may give her a run for her money.
[00:51] But she does love the undegoogables.
[00:55] You know, it's really the basketball part of the show that she doesn't enjoy.
[01:00] So her question this week is, where does the phrase, take with a grain of salt, come from?
[01:11] This is opium again.
[01:17] Potentially.
[01:19] So take with a grain of salt. The meaning is, don't take it too seriously, right?
[01:26] Yeah, be skeptical.
[01:29] And maybe this is a window inside my mind, although probably the last 300 some odd shows is a sad look inside my mind.
[01:41] But I always thought that it was a tactile thing.
[01:47] I felt like rubbing a grain of salt would be sort of annoying.
[01:52] And so if you got something good, there would be some sort of annoyance with it. I don't I don't know.
[01:57] So I actually thought of as an actual grain of salt. Interesting. Yeah.
[02:03] You know, I was thinking of it more in the food perspective.
[02:08] Salt is a flavor enhancer, right? Mm hmm. So I guess it's a little bit counterintuitive.
[02:13] So something bland, you would need some salt with it. Right.
[02:17] But my understanding of a single grain of salt wouldn't actually add a lot. So it's really not that valuable.
[02:26] Yeah. Why just a single grain instead of like take with a teaspoon of salt or a truckload?
[02:35] So that means we can narrow out its American origins. Right. Yeah.
[02:40] Yeah. A whole shot of salt shaker of salt. Yeah. Yeah.
[02:44] Take with a salt shaker. I was wondering, didn't salt used to be a form of currency?
[02:50] Like people paid for things in salt. And so maybe if you gave a grain of salt along with something, it was like a pittance basically.
[02:59] I assume everything in a trade based economy was tradable. I didn't know we actually had a currency with salt, though.
[03:06] Well, salt is something that had high value in many places because it could preserve food.
[03:13] If you were in a barter. Yeah. If you were in a barter society.
[03:16] So I'm taking something and I also get a grain of salt with it.
[03:22] Was that like a tip at a restaurant? Just here's your grain of salt, kid. Good job. Right. Nice work. Yeah. Yeah.
[03:35] It's kind of like the 10 percent tip. Here's your grain of salt. So maybe it just maybe just means that, yeah,
[03:43] this is the idea that we're giving you. But we're also giving you a little bit of money.
[03:46] A little bit of money. So it might not be 100 percent. Oh, OK. OK. Sure.
[03:51] Should we give you this thing? But it's broken. So or, you know, we see value in it. So we're giving you a little something with it.
[03:59] We're giving you the idea and a little bit of money. It's, you know, early campaign finance.
[04:04] So, you know, it's good. I like it's sweetening the deal wheels in swinging the deal with with salt.
[04:12] So, yeah, making it more salty, not really sweetening it. Well, but your salt actually has something.
[04:27] So maybe here is maybe down this line that so something, you know, like you said, Jason, it's a flavor enhancer.
[04:36] It's not the flavor itself. So the salt part of it would be, you know, something that's maybe not totally real.
[04:46] So if you took it with a grain of salt, you could say, hey, this is maybe been exaggerated a little bit.
[04:51] Make it taste better than normal. Then nothing that it actually is.
[04:56] So so maybe it's almost like you've you it already had a grain of salt in it. Right. Yeah. I see.
[05:04] Oh, I see. Like so the flavor already. It was like somebody had already spun it. Right.
[05:09] If if it was taken with the grain of salt, like you ate. So, yes, the sugar in the with the medicine, I get it.
[05:17] So if you were if you were eating something unpalatable, would a grain of salt make it better?
[05:25] Well, no, but it was something that you weren't, you know, already an idea, for instance, that you weren't already in line with.
[05:33] Right. OK. OK. It doesn't make that idea wrong any more than, you know, maybe you don't like cod, but cod with a little bit of salt.
[05:41] And I don't know. Is that a thing? Yeah. Salted cod is definitely a thing. It's cod. No, this is good. OK.
[05:50] But is it this it doesn't feel like it's that actual then this is sort of more philosophical. Right.
[06:02] Like we're not like this. We're not. Are we taking something with it like with salt?
[06:07] Like, I mean, is there are we taking something that tastes bad and eating it with salt and that turned into a very literal origin?
[06:14] Yeah. Does that turning into the the philosophical idea that it's, you know, that it now is.
[06:23] Well, I think this came from like, I don't know, was salt hard to come by in like Greek or is this only in like the Middle East where salt is hard to come by?
[06:36] That's a good question. I feel like salt must have been hard to come by in a lot of those classical civilizations. Right.
[06:47] Because I think it had it was highly valued. Right. Right. And maybe even in Europe later on, it was also highly valued for the same reasons, because there's not.
[06:59] Because I thought there was salt was in the for the weren't the salt mines like in northern Africa or something like that.
[07:09] And I hadn't figured I know now you could just go to McDonald's and they give it to you for a little packet.
[07:18] Yeah. Or you can just ask your server before you taste the food for salt. You can do that. Sorry.
[07:28] Not better. No. No. Apparently, I work too much. Yeah. No, I'm with you. I'm with you on that one.
[07:35] Taste your food first. And then ask for salt. And then season it. Right.
[07:42] OK, so what's our timeline then? You guys you guys are thinking ancient world. I was thinking more like, you know, Europe, like you guys are thinking Greek and Roman.
[07:53] And now where did we come up with the idea that we could just get salt out of the ocean? Was that recently or did they always have that?
[08:01] Well, I mean, we can't just let dry out water. That's what I'm saying. Just dry out water. Right.
[08:10] Right. So I mean, that was my question. When were they doing that? Well, near the coast, they've been doing that for a while.
[08:18] But it's time consuming and hard. Right. So in a desert, which was kind of my idea where the Middle East might have more traction here.
[08:25] They're not near an ocean. Therefore, salt's hard to come by. So I was trying to infer timeline based on civilization, based on geography.
[08:34] Seems less like my idea. Italy and more like, you know, it seems more like Persia in the seventh century or something.
[08:44] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. I mean, I'm an empire situation. I get behind that seventh century Persia.
[08:53] It was up to me. I just gave it to you right now. I think. Why? Why is it only anything in under Googleables? Harper is never right.
[09:04] Well, humans make no sense. Is there is there a reason why it's just a grain? Is that again, because of its expensive quality?
[09:12] I mean, why can't I just be take with salt? You shouldn't. You shouldn't have. This is why I thought it was a tactile thing, right?
[09:19] Maybe because it's just one little grain. That's all you get. You can rub that in there.
[09:25] It's like putting a dog for rabies wound that conveys that it's not that the the idea itself is not worth anything, right?
[09:36] OK, because it's only so you're saying one grain of salt that or the other. Take that with a grain of salt because it's already not worth a lot.
[09:45] Right. OK. Maybe I don't know. All right. What do we got here? Let's see if we can look this up.
[09:52] I'm seeing some planning the elder. What else? It's always planning the elder. It's for Shakespeare. It's apparently the same as the hair of the dog.
[10:00] It's an antidote to poison. So you're supposed to take salt with poisonous. Roman General Pompey believed he can make himself immune to poison by ingesting small amounts of various poisons.
[10:19] He took this treatment with a grain of salt to help him swallow the poison. In this version, the salt is not the antidote. He was merely to assist in the swallowing of the poison.
[10:31] That is not a place that we would have gotten to given like a thousand hours. Great.
[10:42] The phrases said with a pinch of salt in British and with a grain of salt. In American English.
[10:52] So I was wrong on everything. Just so you know. Just to be clear. So yeah. Pliny the elder translated an ancient antidote for poison with the words to be taken fasting plus a grain of salt.
[11:13] That makes sense, though, because it's always something crappy that you have to take. So it's a recipe. We were almost getting there with sugar to help the medicine go down.
[11:22] Basically it's salt to fix the poison. It's kind of the same thing.
[11:28] The more metaphorical meaning that incorrect information might be made easier to accept by taking it with a grain of salt did not become widely used until much later in the 17th century.
[11:44] For example, in 1647, John Trapp said of his own writing, this is to be taken with a grain of salt.
[11:52] Hey, that was kind of the Google level. It was. Yeah. So here's my my my thinking was that salt was used as a currency.
[12:05] And that's because the word salary comes from the Latin word for salt. Sure. But the reason for this is unknown. A persistent modern claim that the Roman legions were sometimes paid in salt is baseless.
[12:21] Actually, Coalson and I had a professor at Macalester who did who wrote a book about the history of currency, which is awesome. And you should check it out.
[12:38] Maybe we can all interested in that subject.
[12:41] Totally.
[12:43] Just real briefly, I want to give you the actual plan is actual recipe. Take three parts. Do not do this. Take two dried walnuts, two figs and 20 leaves of rue.
[12:59] Pound them all together and the addition of a grain of salt.
[13:04] If a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons.
[13:10] No, it's not true.
[13:13] Tried it.
[13:16] What's rude? You guys know that.
[13:19] Yeah, butter and flour.
[13:23] Oh, no, no, no, I mean, that's whatever is a creole.
[13:29] I don't know what he is.
[13:31] And also, it's wrong about where the salt mines were. It seems like the historical seat of salt production was in Solnitsata, which is located in present day Bulgaria.
[13:50] Have you ever been to salt mines? Those are cool.
[13:56] And there's a bunch of salt mines in Poland, too.
[13:59] This week, I'm drinking Oedipus IPA from Gilgamesh Brewing Company.
[14:10] Gilgamesh.
[14:12] And it is tasty to my palate.
[14:15] There might even be salt in here. I don't know.
[14:18] Take it with a grain of salt, Harper.