From "This Traditional Yogurt Recipe’s Secret Ingredient Has 6 Legs/Scientists recreated a formula involving ants and milk that is used in Bulgarian villages to yield yogurt with an herbaceous flavor" (NYT).
"They determined that the ants contributed several types of acids and enzymes that worked together to coagulate the milk. These include formic acid, which the ants produce as a defense mechanism, as well as strains of lactic and acetic acids produced by bacteria living in the ants’ guts. And once the ants start the yogurt culture, more yogurt can be created by adding additional milk — no need for more insects."
I like the part where they buried the container in the ant hill. I don't think that figured into the scientific explanation. It made me think of folk remedies that have burying something as a step. For example, speaking of grandmothers, my grandmother said you could cure a wart by cutting open a potato, rubbing it on the wart, then burying the potato. Maybe there was some curative chemical in the potato — akin to the formic acid in the ants — but the burying must be imagined magic.
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২৩টি মন্তব্য:
Was it a round hill ? In Tennessee ?
That comment should probably have been under the "Poetry" article.
Daisy Moses, Jed Clampett's mother-in-law, was big on burying stuff as part of a medical cure.
Charlene Darling buried an owl's beak and chicken hawk feathers to divorce Dud Wash, much to Sheriff Andy Taylor's dismay.
60s TV - a source of cultural learning.
I grew up in a neighborhood with many Italian families. It was in a rust belt city at a time when selling houses was hard. What to do if you really needed to sell the house? The Italian grandmothers advised burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard, upside down and facing the house. Once the house sold, retrieve the statue and display it in your new house as thanks.
Probably US government scientists.
Looking forward to seeing this in the stores soon!
Robins won't eat ants.
🐜 Well, I'm standing here looking at you
What do I see? I'm looking straight through
It's so true… when you're young… that you find…
taste’s on the tip of your tongue
So drop the four wood ants and do us all a favor
That yogurt's lost its taste so try another flavor
Ant yogurt, ant yogurt, ant yogurt, ant yogurt
Well, I'm standing here, what do I see?
Chobani threatening me?
It's so true… when you're young… that you find…
taste’s on the tip of your tongue
So add the four wood ants and do us all a favor
That yogurt’s lost its taste so try another flavor
Ant yogurt, ant yogurt, ant yogurt, ant yogurt 🐜
h/t Adam Ant
Ants will eat robins… DEAD robins…
I was thinking of something tangentially related back when the Tylenol thing hit: the ancient nun who taught me Latin used to hold forth at times on other subjects. One thing she told us was never to take aspirin with Coke because we might fall into a coma and die - she had known a child, when she was a younger (and everybody took aspirin for everything), who had done so.
And then we learned about Reye's syndrome.
So it wasn't the Coke, it was the aspirin and the timing. But there was in fact a hazard there.
This reminds me of Balut. It’s a Filipino dish of fertilized eggs buried in the ground for a week or so, then boiled. It’s an acquired taste.
Althouse writes, "...my grandmother said you could cure a wart by cutting open a potato, rubbing it on the wart, then burying the potato."
When I was a freshman, I had a wart on the pad of my left thumb that had first appeared two or three years before. Our family physician was reluctant to do anything about the wart, saying that, given time, it would disappear. I, however, was obsessed with it, as adolescents are wont to do.
Since I was now living on the university campus and provided with a limited degree of insured healthcare, I decided to consult a doctor working at the campus infirmary. I asked about liquid nitrogen treatment, but the doctor demurred, explaining that LN could permanently damage the nerves in my thumb, as could any form of surgical procedure. I agreed that it was an unacceptable risk given the harmlessness of my condition. Then I was given some strange counsel. The physician advised me to buy a can of chicken soup and spoon out a small amount of the yellow fat that accumulates at the top of the can and apply it to the gauze pad of a regular Band-Aid dressing, then to apply the dressing to the wart. He said to follow this procedure for several weeks. Though privately skeptical, the doctor seemed entirely sincere. I followed his advice, and it worked! After only a week of treating my wart with chicken fat, the lesion literally rolled off my thumb like it was a lump of congealed paint, leaving no trace of it behind. I returned to the infirmary to thank the doctor for his advice; however, I learned that the medical staff were local professionals who worked in rotation, and that the physician had returned to private practice. I never met him again, nor have I ever found any documentation about his chicken fat wart cure, even among folklore.
Warts caused by HPV can be like that. They can develop rapidly, persist for years, and disappear suddenly. I'm quite certain now the chicken fat thing was a placebo, a clever reading of my psychological state. I needed positive advice other than patience. That schmaltz-y rigamarole was just the prescription required. It gave me a magical ritual to perform while time worked its miracle, like any other placebo.
"Robins won't eat ants."
But human idiots will. A fraternity at my university held an ant-eating contest. The contestants were supplied with a prodigious quantity of dead ants somehow killed without chemicals, freezing probably. The one who ate the most in 30 minutes got the prize. That turned out to be a fellow who drenched his ants in catsup to cover the obnoxious taste of formic acid. I imagine there was much puking later on.
What culture has the potato-burying tradition? Scots-Irish? German? Delaware-ian?
My Midwestern, northern European-sourced culture does not have that tradition that I am aware of.
Q: Schmaltzy? Lol.
Those timid Bulgarians. In Macedonia, we add 6 red wood ants, and a couple of black wood ants to fully embrace the herbaceousness.
I'm kidding. I've never made yogurt, but am intrigued by how this technique was discovered.
While it's conceivable that an industrious Bulgarian experimented with the yogurt recipe by adding different insects to the mix, it's likely that some unhygienic slob discovered ants swimming around in the yogurt, and covered it up by inventing the word herbaceous.
Just to add to the medical manual of madness. My baby sister got ring worm as a child. Dad mixed gunpowder from a shotgun shell and mixed it with vinegar. Applied it to the "ring" and a couple of days later.... cured. (Just to be sure you might buy a dead black cat and swing it around over your head at midnight. Dad didn't mention that, I did. But you can't be too safe.)
The ranchers of the future will have massive herds of ants and sell grass-fed Angus and Wagyu ant to discerning consumers.
You bury the potato so it doesn't get eaten.
I spoke to a woman doing pedicures who recommended rubbing your skin with a potato during bathing. She did it herself and her skin was lovely.
Better ants in your yogurt, then ants in your pants. I wonder who figured out the magice number was 6. "why does my yogurt taste so anty? Did you put 9 ants in the jar"?
In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, two wart remedies are presented: "Spunkwater," or rainwater collected in a stump, and the Dead Cat method. Grok can detail these for you, or you can read the pertinent chapter of the novel.
Am I wrong in remembering Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn mentioning the potato method but burying it in a stump? I would think a rotten stump would be best. It might have been in the Tom Sawyer book, but nevertheless written by Twain.
Burying may be folklore but could be a makeshift incubator. Ants and all animals are exothermic, plus the dry plant material of the nest is a good insulator.
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