QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  In 2001, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook declared that: ‘Chicken tikka masala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.’

  One in seven curries sold in the UK are CTMs – 23 million portions each year. Many of the schools and charities in the city of Sylhet in Bangladesh are funded by profits from the British chicken tikka masala boom.

  There are now 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, turning over in excess of £2 billion and employing 70,000 workers.

  JO Can I just say … I had a curry once on the Isle of Man, where I was doing a gig. It was served with a cup of tea and some bread and butter. Which I think is fantastic, don’t you?

  Is French toast from France?

  Yes and no. Dipping bread in eggs and frying it is a pretty universal solution to making stale bread go further.

  The French certainly had a medieval version called tostees dorees, ‘golden toast’, and this later became pain perdu, ‘lost bread’, a name that has been enthusiastically adopted for the de luxe versions served in Cajun cooking.

  The earliest recorded recipe for the dish occurs in the work of the Roman cook Apicius in the first century AD. In his book The Art of Cooking, he writes, rather casually, that it’s just ‘another sweet dish’: ‘Break fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces. Soak them in milk, fry in oil, cover in honey and serve.’

  There are references in early French documents to this recipe as pain à la Romaine, ‘Roman bread’. So, that makes it Italian Toast. As ever, it depends where you are at the time, as there are records of German Toast, Spanish Toast, American Toast and even Nun’s Toast being used.

  ‘French toast’ is first recorded in English in 1660 when it appears in The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May. In the same year, Gervase Markham’s influential The English Huswife has a rich and spicy version of ‘pamperdy’ (pain perdu), so, as far as the English were concerned, French toast was French, in those days at least.

  However, the dish was also sometimes referred to as ‘Poor Knights of Windsor’. This finds its counterpart in the German (arme Ritter), Danish (arme riddere), Swedish (fattiga riddare) and Finnish (köyhät ritarit) versions – all of which mean ‘poor knights’.

  One theory offered in explanation is that the most expensive part of a medieval banquet was dessert – spices and nuts were costly imports. Although titled, not all knights were rich, so a dish of fried eggy-bread served with jam or honey would have fulfilled the requirements of etiquette without breaking the bank.

  STEPHEN I leave you with this mysterious quatrain from Stephen Wright, the Nostradamus de nos jours. ‘I went to a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time. So I ordered French toast: during the Renaissance.’ Good night.

  Who invented champagne?

  Not the French.

  It may come as surprise – even an outrage – to them but champagne is an English invention.

  As anyone who has made their own ginger beer knows, fermentation naturally produces bubbles. The problem has always been controlling it.

  The English developed a taste for fizzy wine in the sixteenth century, importing barrels of green, flat wine from Champagne and adding sugar and molasses to start it fermenting. They also developed the strong coal-fired glass bottles and corks to contain it.

  As the records of the Royal Society show, what is now called méthode champenoise was first written down in England in 1662. The French added finesse and marketing flair but it wasn’t until 1876 that they perfected the modern dry or brut style (and even then it was for export to England).

  The UK is France’s largest customer for champagne. In 2004, 34 million bottles were consumed in Britain. This is almost a third of the entire export market – twice as much as the USA, three times as much as the Germans and twenty times as much as the Spanish.

  The Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon (1638–1715) did not invent champagne: in fact he spent most of his time trying to remove the bubbles.

  His famous exclamation: ‘Come quickly, I am drinking the stars’, was devised for an advertisement in the late nineteenth century. Pérignon’s real legacy to champagne was in the skilful blending of grape varieties from different vineyards and the use of a wire or hempen cage for the cork.

  A legal loophole uniquely allows Americans to call their sparkling wines champagne. The Treaty of Madrid (1891) decreed that only the Champagne region may use that name. This was reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) but the US signed a separate peace agreement with Germany.

  When prohibition was lifted, American wine-merchants took advantage of this loophole, freely selling their own ‘Champagne’, much to the annoyance of the French.

  The saucer-like coupe from which champagne is sometimes drunk is not based on a mould of Marie Antoinette’s breast. It was first manufactured in 1663 (in England), well before her reign. No alternative English topless model has yet been suggested.

  Where was the guillotine invented?

  Halifax in Yorkshire.

  The Halifax Gibbet consisted of two fifteen-foot wooden uprights between which hung an iron axe mounted on a lead-filled cross-beam controlled by a rope and pulley. Official records show at least fifty-three people were executed using it between 1286 and 1650.

  Medieval Halifax made its fortune from the cloth trade. Large quantities of expensive cloth were left outside the mills to dry on frames. Theft was a serious problem and the town’s merchants needed an efficient deterrent.

  This, and a similar, later, Scottish device called the Maiden, may well have inspired the French to borrow the idea and come up with their own name.

  Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin was a humane, mild-mannered doctor who disliked public executions. In 1789, he put to the National Assembly an ambitious plan to reform the French penal system and make it more humane. He proposed a standardised mechanical method of execution which didn’t discriminate against the poor (who were messily hanged), as opposed to the rich (who were relatively cleanly beheaded).

  Most of the proposals were rejected out of hand, but the notion of an efficient killing engine stuck. Guillotin’s recommendation was picked up and refined by Dr Antoine Louis, the Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons. It was he, not Guillotin, who produced the first working device with its characteristic diagonal blade in 1792. It was even called, briefly, a Louison or Louisette, after its sponsor.

  But somehow, Guillotin’s name became attached to it and, despite the best efforts of his family, there it has stubbornly remained. Contrary to popular folklore, Guillotin was not killed by his eponymous machine; he died in 1814 from an infected carbuncle on his shoulder.

  The guillotine became the first ‘democratic’ method of execution and was adopted throughout France. In its first ten years, historians estimate 15,000 people were decapitated. Only Nazi Germany has used it to execute more, with an estimated 40,000 criminals being guillotined between 1938 and 1945.

  The last French person to be guillotined was a Tunisian immigrant called Hamida Djandoubi, for the rape and murder of a young girl in 1977. The death penalty was finally abolished in France in 1981.

  It is impossible to test accurately how long a severed head remains conscious, if at all. The best estimate is between five and thirteen seconds.

  JOHN SESSIONS It was maintained by contemporary witnesses that a lot of the heads were quite sentient.

  STEPHEN Yeah. They twitched.

  ALAN They’re going, ‘You bastards!’

  Where was ‘La Marseillaise’ written?

  The French National anthem was not written in (or about) Marseilles but in Strasbourg (which is half German). Far from being inspired by the Revolution, the words were written by a Royalist who (though he himself was French) dedicated it to a German and lifted the music from an Italian. It was originally called ‘Battle Hymn for the Army of the Rhine’ (the longest river in Germany).

  La Marseillais
e was commissioned as a marching song to inspire the French army. Claude Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836) was an amateur composer and artillery officer. At a lavish banquet thrown to mark France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg asked de Lisle: ‘Monsieur, write for us a song that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland.’ After drinking a little too much champagne, de Lisle returned to his quarters, where he fell asleep at his harpsichord, to wake (he claimed) with both the words and music of La Marseillaise fully formed.

  The music, at least, was certainly fully formed. The tune had been written eight years earlier. Its composer was the Italian virtuoso violinist, Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), another staunch Royalist, who worked as court musician to Marie Antoinette.

  Whether the tune was deliberately stolen or unconsciously borrowed, de Lisle dedicated it to the Bavarian-born Count Nikolaus Graf von Luckner, the commander of the French Army on the Rhine and yet another Royalist. Both Luckner and de Lisle were arrested shortly afterwards during the Terror. Luckner was guillotined, but de Lisle, despite having written several anti-Revolutionary songs, was released. (He was, after all, the revered author of La Marseillaise.) He later published his memoirs (which no one bought) and died penniless in 1836.

  The song, however, was a big hit and would inspire the French troops to their first great victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Valmy five months later.

  The rousing sentiments were easily appropriated to the Revolutionary cause, and hand-written copies of the song passed rapidly through the army. Particularly popular among volunteers from Marseilles, they carried their copies to Paris, where they sang it on their arrival at the Tuileries Palace on 10 August. A legend was born. On Bastille Day, 1795, ‘The Marseilles Song’ was adopted as the Republic’s national anthem.

  Perhaps because of its dodgy provenance, Napoleon always disliked it and had it banned. In fact, it was banned and unbanned several times, with the official version only being written into the constitution almost a century after it had been written, in 1887

  Hector Berlioz produced the definitive orchestral version in 1830 and in 1882 Tchaikovsky used it as a theme in his 1812 Overture (though this was an anachronism: it was banned in the year 1812).

  How many prisoners were freed by the storming of the Bastille?

  Seven.

  In France, 14 July, Bastille Day, is a national holiday and a glorious national symbol, equivalent to 4 July in the USA.

  From the rousing paintings of the scene, you might think hundreds of proud revolutionaries flooded into the streets waving tricolours. In fact, only just over half a dozen people were being held at the time of the siege.

  The Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789. Shortly afterwards ghoulish engravings of prisoners languishing in chains next to skeletons went on sale in the streets of Paris, forming the popular impression of the conditions there ever since.

  The thirteenth-century fortress had been a jail for centuries; by the time of Louis XVI it mainly housed people arrested on the orders of the king or his ministers for offences like conspiracy and subversion. Distinguished former inmates included Voltaire, who wrote Oedipus there in 1718.

  The seven prisoners in residence that day were: four forgers, the Comte de Solanges (inside for ‘a sexual misdemeanour’) and two lunatics (one of whom was an English or Irish man named Major Whyte who sported a waist-length beard and thought he was Julius Caesar).

  One hundred lives were lost in the attack, including that of the governor, whose head was carried through Paris on a pike.

  The prison guard were a contingent of invalides – soldiers invalided out of regular service – and conditions were fairly comfortable for most inmates, with relaxed visiting hours and furnished lodgings.

  The painter Jean Fragonard’s sketch of visiting day in 1785 shows fashionable ladies promenading around the courtyard with the prisoners, who were given a generous spending allowance, plenty of tobacco and alcohol, and were allowed to keep pets.

  Jean François Marmontel, an inmate from 1759 to 1760, wrote: ‘The wine was not excellent, but was passable. No dessert: it was necessary to be deprived of something. On the whole I found that one dined very well in prison.’

  Louis XVI’s diary for the day of the storming of the Bastille reads ‘Rien’.

  He was referring to the bag in that day’s hunt.

  ALAN It was stormed on July 12.

  STEPHEN The 14th, but close. Two days out.

  ALAN You say two days out, but I’d have stormed it two days early; I’d have been on my own.

  Who said, ‘Let them eat cake’?

  Wrong again. It wasn’t her.

  You probably remember the history lesson as if it were yesterday. It’s 1789 and the French Revolution is under way. The poor of Paris are rioting because they have no bread and the Queen, Marie Antoinette – callously indifferent, trying to be funny or just plain stupid – comes up with the fatuous suggestion that they eat cake instead.

  The first problem is that it wasn’t cake, it was brioche (the original French is Qu’ils mangent de la brioche). According to Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, ‘Eighteenth-century brioche was only lightly enriched (by modest quantities of butter and eggs) and not very far removed from a good white loaf of bread.’ So, the remark might have been an attempt at kindness: ‘If they want bread, give them some of the good stuff.’

  Except Marie Antoinette didn’t say it. The line had been in use in print as an illustration of aristocratic decadence since at least 1760. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed he’d first heard it as early as 1740.

  Lady Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette’s most recent biographer, attributes the remark to the Queen Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, but there is a host of other grand eighteenth-century ladies who might have said it. It’s also entirely possible it was made up for propaganda purposes.

  There is another story that suggests Marie Antoinette introduced croissants to France from her native Vienna. This seems highly unlikely, as the earliest French reference to a croissant isn’t until 1853.

  Interestingly, wandering Austrian pastry chefs did introduce the flaky pastry to Denmark at about this time, the eponymous ‘Danish’ pastries being known there as wienerbrød (‘Vienna bread’).

  In Vienna, they are called Kopenhagener.

  How well do you know the Swiss?

  a) They eat swiss rolls

  b) They eat dogs

  c) They invented the cuckoo clock

  d) They have no army

  Swiss rolls are not Swiss: nobody knows why they are called ‘Swiss’ in Britain. The Swiss equivalents are called either Biscuitrolle or gâteau roulé; the Spanish call them brazo de gitano, or ‘gypsies’ arms’ and the Americans call them jelly rolls (jelly being American for ‘jam’).

  Despite Orson Welles’s famous soliloquy in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (1949), the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany in 1738.

  The Swiss are responsible for several more modern and useful contributions to modern life including rayon, cellophane, Velcro, milk chocolate and the Swiss Army knife.

  The Swiss are neutral but they are not pacifists. Every Swiss man aged between twenty and forty is in the Swiss national militia and keeps a rifle at home. If the Swiss had to fight a war, their ‘Army’ would be 500,000 strong. During the Second World War, the Swiss air force nonchalantly shot down both German and Allied aircraft.

  That leaves us with dog-eating. The sensible, law-abiding Swiss are the only Europeans who eat dog meat.

  No one knows how many dogs end up salted, smoked or made into sausages in remote Alpine villages, but it certainly happens. Cats, too. Their defence: it’s a reasonable way to recycle a much-loved pet and it’s good for you. After eating the tastiest parts of the dog, the rest is made into lard and used to cure coughs.

  STEPHEN A few years later, the French invented a Swiss Army knife.

  JOHN SESSIONS With a
little white flag on it.

  What does a St Bernard carry round its neck?

  St Bernards have never, ever carried brandy barrels.

  The dog’s mission is entirely teetotal – apart from anything else giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake – but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them.

  Before they were trained as mountain rescue dogs, they were used by the monks at the hospice in the Great St Bernard Pass – the Alpine route that links Switzerland to Italy – to carry food, as their large size and docile temperament made them good pack animals.

  The brandy barrel was the idea of a young English artist named Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73), who was much favoured by Queen Victoria. He was a renowned painter of landscapes and animals, best known for his painting The Monarch of the Glen and for sculpting the lions around the base of Nelson’s Column.

  In 1831, he painted a scene called Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller featuring two St Bernards, one of them carrying a miniature brandy barrel around its neck, which he added ‘for interest’. St Bernards have been saddled with the association ever since. Landseer is also credited with popularising the name St Bernard (rather than Alpine Mastiff) for the breed.

  Originally, St Bernards were known as Barry hounds, a corruption of the German Bären, meaning ‘bears’. One of the first lifesavers was known as ‘Barry the Great’, who rescued forty people between 1800 and 1814 but was unfortunately killed by the forty-first, who mistook him for a wolf.