Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Samuel Johnson’s Puffs of Affection, 1928

Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928
Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928

For something a little different this Valentine’s Day, why not make a little “Puff of Affection”, as apparently loved by the eminent eighteenth-century dictionary-compiler, Samuel Johnson. Or Robbie Coltrane, as he is forever in my mind’s eye.

I’d give one to Hugh Laurie, especially in the Prince Regent get-up. A puff of affection, that is.

As Johnson has it – it’s a little cake (“A kind of delicate bread”) for a Valentine (“a sweetheart, chosen on Valentine’s day”) to have for pudding (“1. a kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs. 2. The gut of an animal. 3. A bowel stuffed with certain mixtures of meal and other ingredients.”)

“Puffs of Affection”

It is recorded that Samuel Johnson was very fond of these puffs. He refers to them as having been first made in honour of St Valentine, but that in his calendar the saint’s day came often.
Make a batter with 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 pint milk, then add a beaten egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, the same of grated lemon rind, and a tiny pinch of salt. Butter some small moulds, pour a little of the mixture into each, just half filling them, and bake in a slow oven for 30 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle liberally with sugar, and serve hot.
Similar puffs are often served with syrup, and make quite a good stand-by pudding.

There’s a couple of odd things about the recipe. Firstly – flour, milk and eggs, flavoured with lemon, sugar and syrup. It’s pretty much a low-flour pancake, which seems a bit strange to have as a tradition merely a week after Shrove Tuesday. Secondly – one tablespoon of flour? I was interested to see how this would hold together with so little flour, and…well, it didn’t.

Not so much a Puff of Affection as a floppy slop. And no-one wants that on Valentine’s Day.

A Flop of Affection
A Flop of Affection

I tried again, upping the flour to that of my normal pancake recipe, 125g of flour with all the other ingredients kept the same.

Sugared and syruped Puffs of Affection
Sugared and syruped Puffs of Affection

These were much better in that they at least kept their shape, and they tasted, unsurprisingly, of fat pancake. But one of the charms of a pancake is its delicate thinness, and the fresh memory of a stack of them a week ago means this pales a bit in comparison. To be honest, I’d recommend a Valentine’s breakfast of a savoury bacon and cheese pancake instead.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Women

Mothers, Its Your Fault, 1921

As the proud owner of a six year old boy, I’ve recently been inducted in the world of the nit. In one evening I went from never having even seen a head louse in my life, to being a rather immediate expert in them. Judging by other parents comments, and the sheer volume of head lice adverts around at the moment, there may be something of an epidemic of the little blighters around at the minute. I’m going to blame the strange, mild, wet and windy weather we’ve been having, if that has anything to do with these things. It’s also my go-to reason as to why I’ve had non-stop colds for the past three months.

It inspired me to have a quick look through the archives for advice on head lice in days gone by. I quickly found out that It Was My Fault. Apparently alongside Jerry Hall’s advice that a woman be “a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom,” a woman should also be wielding a nitty-gritty comb and a bar of foul-smelling Derbac soap in the bathroom too.

Gloucestershire Echo, 16th June 1921
Gloucestershire Echo, 16th June 1921

Derbac is still available, fighting the good fight against those pesky lice.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Women

My Horrible Hands, 1939

Hand-shaming here in 1939 by Hinds Honey and Almond hand cream.

Daily Herald, 1st March 1939
Daily Herald, 1st March 1939

“I try to hide my horrible hands,” says a woman whose hands are dried out from the washing and housework at home. To be fair, washing laundry by hand is absolutely brutal on the skin.  It’s so bad that “No-one ever dances with me twice – I’m sure it’s my horrible hands that keep men away.”

A spot of Hinds Cream later, and she has “Honeymoon Hands”, whatever they are – does it mean hands as soft as the women who have managed to get married? Or have her new improved hands resulted in an immediate proposal?

Apparently Hinds is still a popular brand of hand cream in Mexico and Argentina, and now owned by GlaxoSmithKline. I don’t know if they still sell the Honey and Almond variety, though – analysis in 1917 by the American Medical Association showed that there was no honey in the formula at all, but that clearly hadn’t prevented them marketing it as such for at least the next 20 years.

It’s funny how this is pretty much the same basic premise as that of Fairy Liquid, which cut out the need to use hand cream (supposedly, although not actually in reality, in my experience) with their “Hands that do dishes can feel as soft as your face with mild green Fairy Liquid.” At least it didn’t go on about your horrible hands though, and it assumed the woman was already married. Hooray!

Categories
1900-1949 Marriage Advice Women

Judge’s Advice to Wives and Husbands, 1925

What would you imagine a Judge’s marital advice, which takes the topic of women’s emancipation into consideration, in 1925, to consist of?

Probably much the same as I imagined when I found this article and read the headline. And yet, all credit to Judge Joseph Sabath, his advice is far ahead of its time. In fact, it’s probably a bit too forward-thinking for a few judges even now.

Dundee Courier, 5th January 1925
Dundee Courier, 5th January 1925

 

Judge’s Advice to Wives and Husbands

The increase in divorce is viewed as a sign of progress by Judge Joseph Sabath, of Chicago, who has presided over the hearing of 10,000 divorce cases, but who refuses to grant a legal separation unless all efforts at conciliation have failed.

“The large number of divorces is rather a manifestation of progress than of retrogression,” he declares.

“It is one of the natural incidents attending the emancipation of womanhood. The wife no longer is a chattel, but a free human being, living and acting on terms of equality with her husband.

“It is natural and right that she should seek relief by dissolution when the equal partnership becomes impossible.”

Judge Sabath’s advice to husbands draws from his experience in the Divorce Courts, is as follows:-

“Make your wife a real partner, and discuss business problems with her. Give her your confidence. Avoid the interference of relatives. Supply your wife with enough money to maintain the household without skimping. Have children or adopt some. Work together, play together, and grow up together.”

His advice to wives is this:-

“Assert enough independence to make your husband notice it. Do not be afraid to soil your hands. Make your husband assume more responsibility for the home life than merely financing it.

“Never flirt even to tease your husband, he wants to be the one man in your life more than anything else, and to flirt is to stir a fire that may consume both of you.”

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipe – Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits

Last year my mum revealed that she had what I’d always wished my family had – an old family recipe book belonging to my great-grandma, who I called “Nan”.

I’m an avid recipe scrapbooker, pasting cuttings and print-outs of interesting-looking recipes into a succession of notebooks. The best of those recipes, the ones that work and I will make for my family over and over, I write down in my ultimate notebook, which is a copy of River Song’s Diary from Doctor Who. I started doing this years ago in order to start my own family recipe book for my children. With my daughter’s allergies, the focus has changed a bit, and now I’m trying to find vegan baking recipes that we all can enjoy, seeing as it’s strangely very hard to find shop-bought baked goods that are both dairy and egg-free. Especially as those are two of the most common allergies for children.

I’m slightly baffled as to why me and my brothers, all of us interested in food and cooking, were never aware of the recipe book before, but that fact that this thin green exercise book exists at all is a cause for joy. There are no dates in it, but I think it’s from when my grandma was a teenager, as some of what looks like her school-era writing is in it, which would make it from the 1920s-30s.

I’m planning to work my way through making a selection of the recipes, and I started here, with “Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits”. I don’t know who Sarah was, but she evidently made biscuits which were good enough for my Nan to seek out the recipe. Also, as a bonus, there’s no dairy in them, the fat being made up of lard. In order to make them suitable for my daughter I included egg replacer instead of the egg, and soya milk to mix with the bicarbonate of soda. And I ended up using Trex vegetable fat instead of the lard too, but it’s a similar thing.

Old family recipe book
Old family recipe book

 

This is the recipe:

Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits

Ingredients:

  • 14 1/2oz flour
  • 4oz lard
  • 5oz syrup
  • 8oz sugar
  • 2 tspns ginger
  • 1/2 tspn bicarbonate of soda
  • 1 egg

Method:

  1. Rub lard into dry ingredients, with a little salt.
  2. Add warmed syrup warmed and the soda dissolved in a little milk.
  3. Add egg, well beaten.
  4. Mix all well together, roll out.
  5. Next day cut with an egg cup and bake in a hot oven.

 

Gingerbread biscuits
Gingerbread biscuits

When I mixed the dough I didn’t roll it out, instead I kept it in a lump and put it in the fridge overnight. The next day I divided it into walnut-sized balls and flattened them with a fork rather than cut them with an eggcup. The biscuits spread and won’t keep their shape in any case. When you take them out of the oven they are soft, so wait a minute before moving them onto a wire tray to cool.

The verdict – they do indeed taste like gingerbread, and when freshly made are a delicious combination of crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. After a day they will have hardened a lot, and develop the classic crunchy texture of the gingernut biscuit. Which is nice, but not quite so delectable as the fresh version. They didn’t last long in my house, so thank you Nan!

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

No More Drunkenness, 1909

This is a kind of anti-Rohypnol advert from 1909. It’s a product that you surreptitiously slip into the unaware’s drink in order to sober them up.

“No More Drunkenness” is promised with “the Great Coza Powder”, which has “the marvellous effect of producing a repugnance to alcohol in any shape or form.”

Hull Daily Mail, 14th January 1909
Hull Daily Mail, 14th January 1909

The USP for this product is that the user isn’t aware that they’ve taken it. It’s for other concerned members of the drunkard’s family for administer in “coffee, tea, milk, beer, water, liqueurs or solid food, without the partaker’s knowledge”. 

The troublesome imbiber suddenly doesn’t fancy a drink anymore as the powder “does its work so silently and surely that wife, sister, or daughter can administer it to the intemperate without his knowledge and without his learning what has effected his reformation.”

I’m not sure exactly how it works – you can get a free sample sent out to you, so it’s obviously not a one shot deal. Maybe you have to take it every day.

Annoying as the drunkard is, I suppose it’s not technically moral behaviour to secretly slip them some Coza Powder. Or it wouldn’t be if this remedy wasn’t pure quackery, and easily made in your kitchen right now. One of my favourite publications, The British Medical Journal’s “The Composition of Certain Secret Remedies” of 1909, the very same year as this advert, was a take down of the old Victorian and Edwardian pharmaceutical industry with analyses of all those “never fail” medications. It dismisses Coza by its findings that all it consists of is ordinary bicarbonate of soda, cumin and cinnamon.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

Arsenic-Free Beer, 1901

I came across this advert for Dundee Beer in an old newspaper – it grabbed my attention by its proud declaration that it had been found to be free of arsenic. Hooray! Hang on, though, isn’t that pretty much the least you can expect from a pint; for it to be, by and large, arsenic-free? Either this is the most desperate advertising campaign in history, or there was a bigger story behind it.

Dundee Evening Post, 15th January 1901
Dundee Evening Post, 15th January 1901

I looked further and found out a story I’d never been aware of – an spate of poisonings in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and other places in the North-West in 1900, apparently caused by drinking beer which contained arsenic. At first, the true nature of the illness wasn’t apparent, as the victims were assumed to be suffering from some kind of alcohol poisoning caused by the sheer volume of alcohol drunk. However, the symptoms weren’t quite the same and many moderate drinkers were also affected, and eventually a doctor came up with the implausible idea that the beer they had drunk had poisoned them, not by alcohol, but by arsenic.

Testing confirmed that the glucose and sugars which had been supplied by Liverpool company Bostock, and used as a cheaper substitute for malted barley in the brewing process, had become contaminated with arsenious acid. The sugars had been made using sulphuric acid to strip the sugar from the cane, but instead of being made from pure sulphur, it had been made from pyrites or iron sulphide for cost reasons. The pyrites were, it turned out, the source of the arsenic, and this sub-par sulphuric acid had been sold to Bostock by their supplier Nicholson.

A Royal Commission was set up in 1901 to investigate and thousands of gallons of beer were thrown away, into the sewers – 267,000 gallons of them in Liverpool. In the end it was concluded that around 6000 people had been affected by the poison, 115 of which had died from it. Although due to the initial confusion as to the cause of the outbreak, it was hard to determine actual figures.

A very thorough and interesting account of the epidemic can be found on this Brewery History site.

There was a worry that jams and syrups also produced by Bostock were contaminated with the poisoned sugars.

Leeds Times, 15th December 1900
Leeds Times, 15th December 1900

“The Coroner remarked it was for the police to take action if they could prove that anyone was to blame.”

Gloucestershire Echo, 26th December 1900
Gloucestershire Echo, 26th December 1900

Bostock took Nicholson to court for damages of £300,000 for not supplying them with what they thought was pure sulphuric acid made from brimstone, which had been their previous arrangement. Nicholson had changed to the cheaper pyrite version, without Bostock’s knowledge. They said that Bostock had not told them what they used the acid for, and could have supplied the pure version had they known it was for consumption. Nicholson claimed the difference in colour in the pyrite acid should have alerted Bostock to the change. The judgement was made against Nicholson, but with the recognition that Bostock was also negligent. Nicholson was ordered to recompense the actual costs of the acid and sugar, but no damages on top.

It was later claimed that malt and hops could also be a source of arsenic themselves, although in smaller quantities. “While it may be possible to produce beers absolutely “arsenic free”, the majority, when brewed mainly or entirely from malt and hops, will contain minute traces, which will, however, be below the amount likely to produce any harmful effects.”

An order was produced by the Treasury prohibiting the use of glucose or sugar containing arsenic in the production of beer.

Aberdeen Journal, 23rd October 1901
Aberdeen Journal, 23rd October 1901

It took a while for the problem to finally go away. Arsenic was detected in beer in Wolverhampton in 1914.

Nottingham Evening Post, 15th January 1914
Nottingham Evening Post, 15th January 1914

Even in 1950, a claim was made by a consumer that they had been the victim of arsenic poisoning in their beer. Although whether this was true or not is another matter. The report sounds very sceptical, and put it in the same bracket as another customer who complained of buying “a loaf containing a seagull”. Must have been a big loaf.

Western Evening News, 12th October 1950
Western Evening News, 12th October 1950

Another worry about the consumption of arsenic in 1952, with the inclusion of potassium bromate in flour, which has an arsenic content. Inclusion of potassium bromate in food is now banned in many countries, although not the USA.

Dundee Courier, 3rd October 1952
Dundee Courier, 3rd October 1952

A revised report for the recommended arsenic limits in food was made in 1955. “…Evidence led to the view that water and milk should not normally contain arsenic but in any case should not contain more than .1 parts per million.”

Aberdeen Evening Express, 9th March 1955
Aberdeen Evening Express, 9th March 1955

Having never worried about my accidental arsenic consumption up until now, I decided to look into the situation today. It turns out that rice absorbs arsenic pretty well during the growing process and the Food Standards Agency is working on recommended limits right now. Apparently cooking rice in a coffee percolator is the answer – according to this anyway.

Also – brussels sprouts are pretty good at absorbing natural arsenic from the soil, so that’s a good enough reason for to me avoid the blighters.

Oh, and it’s still in beer, by the way – beers and wines are made clearer through filtering using diatomaceous earth, which contains arsenic. Unfiltered beers and wines are the way to go….

Categories
1900-1949 Pharmaceuticals

Mummy Dust, 1904

At a gig in Manchester recently, watching my new favourite band, Ghost, singing their song “Mummy Dust”, I started thinking about looking up powdered mummies on the British Newspaper Archive. The Archive starts mid-18th century and I thought vaguely that maybe the use of ground-up mummies as a gruesome kind of medicine had persisted into Victorian times.

Not that “Mummy Dust” is actually about mummies, I think it’s about the evils of money. Here’s Papa Emeritus III singing the song live, and really reminding me of another Papa, the League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou. Is that Reece Shearsmith under the mask?

It turns out the Victorians were almost as fascinated and disbelieving at the existence of mummy medicine as we are, and they describe the bizarre sources of medicine from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries with delight. As well they might, as they sound indistinguishable from your classic witches brew, eye of newt, and all that.

In 1868, the imminent Pharmacy Act gave newspapers the chance to review these strange medicines of the past, this was the kind of quackery the Act was intended to guard against. A beautiful line, this – “Ancient Egyptians who could never agree with their wives, were expected, when pulverised and taken in preserves, to agree with the wives of other people. The living, to lengthen their own lives, made medicine of the dead.”

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4th September 1868
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4th September 1868

This piece from 1897 describes strange Elizabethan medicines as including “crabs’ eyes, dried spiders, powdered mummy, wolfs’ liver, [and] dried toads.”

Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 28th February 1897
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 28th February 1897

And here’s mention of “spider pills” for jaundice – a live spider covered in butter and rolled into a ball, then swallowed. As well as newborn puppies, tiger flesh, and viper broth to improve the eyesight. For careless women, try the herb Solomon’s seal, good for clearing up the bruises caused by “women’s wilfulness in tumbling upon their hasty husbands’ fists.” And of course, the powdered mummy, too popular for its own good – “so great was the demand that more mummies were supplied than ever came out of Egypt.”

Cheltenham Chroncicle, 17th May 1913
Cheltenham Chroncicle, 17th May 1913

The ancient mummies of Egypt were held in high regard, at least in terms of the almost magical effect they might imbue. Not in high enough regard that they weren’t disrespectfully ground to dust to be used by apothecaries and necked, cannibalistically, by the wealthy. Demand was so high that over time new mummies were made, from criminals or other unclaimed bodies, to keep the supply up.

The Sportsman, 14th December 1870
The Sportsman, 14th December 1870

They were also held in high regard as a potent source of manure. Trade in mummified cats for this purpose seemed profitable. This correspondent is shocked that ancient cat dust reached a price of £5 17s 6d per ton. “Only think of it! The dust of Julius Caeser himself would not be worth anything like that money.”

Taunton Courier, 19th February 1890.
Taunton Courier, 19th February 1890.

And with all this dust flying around, it was even suggested (although hardly taken seriously) that the scourge of influenza was caused by all these dead Egyptians.

Aberdeen Evening Express, 1st February 1892
Aberdeen Evening Express, 1st February 1892

And yet, despite marvelling at the strangeness of mummy medicine, the Victorians were still using powdered mummy themselves in an even odder way than the manure trade. It was almost hidden in plain sight. I came across this little article on paint manufacturers in 1904, and disbelieved it immediately. Surely it couldn’t really be the case that “…almost every manufacturer of pigments has a mummy department”?  That mummies were ground up, mixed with poppy oil and sold as “a beautiful brown” paint?

London Daily News, 24th February 1904
London Daily News, 24th February 1904

But, strangely, it was true. When I say “hidden in plain sight”, I mean that it wasn’t an obvious secret – in fact, the name of this pigment was actually “Mummy Brown”. A bit of a giveaway, you might think. But, much like you don’t expect a tube of “Burnt Sienna” oil paint to contain fragments of a spontaneously human combusted Sienna Miller, not many people seemed to realise that “Mummy Brown” wasn’t just a descriptor of a burnished, dusty, earthy sepia paint. The London Daily News certainly saw the information as “startling” in 1904, and Mummy Brown had been used for around 400 years and already graced the paintings of many of the Pre-Raphaelites by then.

Mummy Brown was reported a few times in the papers, but generally always as a new, strange titbit of curiosity.

Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18th September 1891
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18th September 1891

The paint was first made in the 16th century, at the same time that powdered mummy became popular as a medicine. Along with the mummy dust, it originally contained white pitch and myrrh and was a popular pigment for some time as its transparency made it versatile. It was often used for flesh tones. It wasn’t just human mummies that made up Mummy Brown, there were an awful lot of mummified cats in the plundered tombs of Egypt, and they were ground up too.

I found this mention from 1893 – apparently many of those who even knew that the paint was made from mummies had thought that they weren’t of the human variety. “From the mummies of ancient Egypt is manufactured a paint called “mummy brown”, and although it was alleged for some time that the mummies employed for this purpose were those of birds and beasts, an osteologist who interested himself in the subject found in some of the “raw stuff” imported from Egypt, certain bones which were undoubtedly human.

Dover Express, 8th December 1893
Dover Express, 8th December 1893

Apparently over the course of the 19th century the exact nature of the paint became better known to artists, and so it became less used as a result, although evidently the message hadn’t reached everyone. There’s a great story about the time that the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones found out just what Mummy Brown was. The artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema had been invited to lunch with the Burne-Jones family, the party including a young Rudyard Kipling, a nephew of Burne-Jones. Talking shop, the two artists were discussing the paints they used. Alma-Tadema told Burne-Jones of an invitation he’d had from a paint-maker to see a mummy before it was ground down for use in his Mummy Brown paint. Burne-Jones couldn’t believe that the paint was really made from the dead – he used that shade and had thought it referred only to the colour. Once convinced it was true, he rushed to his studio, grabbed his tube of Mummy Brown, dug a hole in the ground, buried it and gave it a funeral, there and then.

This story, and pretty much anything else you might want to know about Mummy Brown, can be found in this marvellous post – The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.

The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 put mummies and Ancient Egypt back in the spotlight and inspired an array of beautiful Art Deco designs. An interesting question is raised in this article about how much time has to pass before disturbing a grave isn’t an act of desecration. And the paper’s readers are told of Mummy Brown – “Until quite recently Egyptian mummies were actually being ground up by artists’ colourmen and used for making paint called “mummy brown.”

Cornishman, 28th February 1923
Cornishman, 28th February 1923

I’m not sure when Mummy Brown properly ceased to be, when the ashes to ashes, dust to dust and dust to paint finally ended. But it was still sold until the 1920s or 30s by the colour-makers Roberson’s of London. Incredibly, the firm’s managing director confirmed as late as 1964 that they’d finally used up all their mummies. He said, “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint. We sold our last complete mummy some years ago for, I think, £3. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. We certainly can’t get any more.”

Categories
1900-1949

The Motor Hooligan, 1903

Karl Benz invented the motor automobile in 1888, and a mere 15 years later here we have reports complaining about “the motor hooligan“.

In Motor Car Act of 1903 introduced the driving licence and also increased the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, up from the 14 mph decreed in 1896. The licence didn’t involve a test, however, merely a payment of 5 shillings.

There were those who argued that there should be no speed limits at all – I presume that their retention is part of what the article calls the “stringent legislation” needed on account of these nouveau riche, debauched hooligans, soaked in alcohol and tobacco, speeding down the highways.

22nd August 1903, Cheltenham Chronicle
22nd August 1903, Cheltenham Chronicle

The Motor Hooligan

The common type of furious motorist, by whose misdeeds somewhat stringent legislation has been rendered necessary, may probably be regarded as a merely temporary phenomenon, a natural result of the moral and physical decadence which is common in the second generation of the newly rich.

Young men, cursed with more money than they have either the wisdom or the virtue to use well, who have discarded the obsequiousness natural to their station without acquiring either courtesy or consideration for the rights of others, and whose nervous systems, often shaken by debauchery, are saturated with alcohol and tobacco, have been let loose to career along the roads without restraint. Any fate which may befall them will be regarded with much tranquillity by persons of better regulated minds; and society may reasonably be called upon to assist the law in keeping them within the bounds of propriety.

With such we have nothing to do, our object being but to urge the necessity for prudence even in the proper and wholesome use of car-driving. It is only necessary to watch the face of a driver in a busy road in order to realise the amount of strain which is thrown upon him. The tense muscles are a sufficient index of the corresponding tension of the nervous system generally; and no physiologist can doubt that such tension cannot be prudently endured for a long period of time, at least until it has been rendered second nature by experience or even by descent.

There are, of course, many compensations, such as the exhilaration of rapid movement, the abundant supply of fresh air to the lungs, and the pleasure of exerting a new accomplishment. All these things may disguise the effort, and may even render it more easy of performance, but they do not alter the essential conditions of the case – “The Hospital”.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Stale Foot Acid, 1939

It feels like there’s always something new to be body-conscious about. A new zone that hair should be entirely removed from or else some hidden part of the body that now, apparently, should be bleached. Of course, there’s always the accompanying new products marketed to solve our problems before we even knew they were problems.

Well, it was always this way. Just like Skin Constipation tried to become a “thing” in 1937, “Stale Foot Acid” was the new thing to worry about in 1939. It was basically the same thing – clogged pores which could be cured by, well, having a good wash.

Daily Herald, 1st March 1939
Daily Herald, 1st March 1939

 

Here’s the (not-so) science bit – the sweat from your feet, left to become “stale”, turns to acid, blocks up all the pores in your feet and then starts piling up in the muscles, resulting in corns, callouses, stabbing pains, burning and tingling.

“You’ve got to shift that acid or go on suffering!”

So, what can be done to alleviate this dreadful condition? The “modern treatment” is to bathe your foot daily in water with Radox bath salts added. Radox is the best bath salt to use because it “liberates about five times as much oxygen as other bath salts.” Somehow, this “supercharges” the bath water and lets the acid escape through the now unblocked pores. Hooray!

And as a bonus, you now also don’t have people fainting at the vinegary stench when you take your shoes off.