The Interesting History of Some of Our Expressions & Customs
Memories of our culture are retained in our maxims

In the Middle Ages, long before the era of a fast food restaurant on every corner, kitchen protocols and eating habits were quite different. Families kept large, iron pots on their fire. During the day, foods would be tossed into the pot, along with water as necessary and available. Most of what was put in the pot was vegetable matter, including grass, tree parts, and flowers. Much of the matter really needed to be cooked for a while to make it soft enough to eat and digest. At dinner, food was ladled from the big pot onto people's plates. Rarely was everything removed from the pot at the dinner meal. The fire was allowed to go down, and the pot was swung from directly over it. In the morning, the fire was raised, the pot was put back over the fire and the process began again. Needless to say, some of the food in the pot could become quite old before being eaten. And from this comes the familiar rhyme "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old." Though I'm sure it could have been twenty days old, nine makes for a better rhyme.

On the very rare occasions when a family in the Middle Ages could acquire meat, it was most often pork. This was quite a status symbol, and the meat (bacon) was hung out to "show off." It became a sign of success and wealth when a man could "bring home the bacon." When special company came by, they would cut a very tiny piece of the slab off and sit with their friends and "chew the fat."

If you were well to do in the Middle Ages, you might even own some dinner plates – usually plates made of pewter, which at the time had a high lead content in its alloy. Acid foods would eat away at the pewter and release toxic lead, thereby poisoning people. As anybody who cans vegetables will tell you, tomatoes are very acidic – cans of tomatoes used to explode on grocery store shelves as late as the 1950's – before modern processing and can lining. In any event, tomatoes took the fall and were considered to be poisonous until the 1800's.

Even with today's modern kitchens and foodstuffs, the cooking of bread is considered somewhat of an art form. When it had to be cooked over a fire, the bottom burned, the middle tended to be a bit doughy, and the top was nicely cooked and browned. When company came to dinner, and bread was served, the company got the "upper crust," the best of the bread.

Cups often had lead in them, such as pewter cups. These were used to drink alcoholic beverages of the times including whiskey and malts. Sometimes the lead and alcohol would create a semi-toxic mix that would put the drinker into an almost comatose condition. People would often think they were dead since they did not move about, and their body functions may have slowed. After a couple of non-dead people got buried, the protocol became to put the person on a table and watch them for a few days. The idea being to wait and see if they were dead, or if the would wake up. From this comes the term and custom of holding a "wake." Everyone is waiting for the person to 'wake' up.

As we’ve seen, sometimes the living were, sadly, buried. This was made inescapably clear in England where they would sometimes have to dig coffins up to make room for new coffins. In fact, it is documented that as many as 1:25 people were buried alive then. Finding this intolerable, people would have a string tied to their wrist, run through a tiny hole in the coffin top, and up a bell on the gravesite. The idea being, if someone woke up in their coffin, they would move their wrist and ring the bell. That person, it was said, was "saved by the bell." Oh yes, and one more – the person hired to sit all night and listen for the bells to possibly ring was said to be working the "graveyard shift."

We still say that the "sun comes up in the east," when in fact, the sun does not come up at all. The earth turns, and then we here on earth can see the sun based on which side we are on – to the sun, or away from it.

Lastly, the expression "watch your Ps and Qs" comes from European taverns where men used to order ale in pints and quarts. A tab was run by marking under a sign for "P" and "Q." When the bartender thought the person might be getting too drunk, or might not be able to pay his bill, he'd tell them to "watch your Ps and Qs!"

Now that you've read this, don't you just feel "sharp as a tack" and "smart as a whip?"

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