Photograph by Osbornb
Ever wonder who it really is…?
Q: Who is the Thinker in Auguste Rodin’s famous statue?
A: The French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s statue commonly called “The Thinker” (Le penseur) is one of the best-known pieces of art in the world. Yet when Rodin (1840-1917) first cast a small plaster version in 1880, he meant it as a depiction of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (circa 1265-1321) pondering his great allegorical epic “The Divine Comedy” in front of the Gates of Hell. In fact, Rodin named the sculpture “The Poet”. It was an obscure critic, unfamiliar with Dante, who misnamed the masterpiece with the title we use today — The Thinker.
Rodin’s statue is naked because the sculptor wanted a heroic classical figure to represent thought as poetry.
Let us dive into the wonderful world of food and what better way to sit back and enjoy a lunch with fries and ketchup than to ponder about the origins of this popular side dish and condiment. But before you ponder away, let us give you some facts:
Q: If it wasn’t the French, then who invented french fries?
A: The Belgians are crazy about french fries; as a matter of fact, fries are their national dish, and they’ve been eating them with buckets of mussels since the mid-1800s. The French also claim inventing fries, because to “french” any food means to cut it very thin. The problem is that the Belgian claim predates the French technique by about fifty years. Usually this discussion ignores the fact that 40 percent of Belgians speak French, so they can take the credit.
The largest producer of french fries in the world is McCain Foods Limited, a Canadian company in Florenceville, New Brunswick. McCain has thirty potato processing plants on six continents around the
world.
Photography by rick
and on to one of our favourite condiments…
Q: What’s the origin of ketchup?
A: In the 1690s the Chinese mixed together a tasty concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it ke-tsiap. By the early 1700s, the table sauce had made it to Malaysia, where it was discovered by British explorers, and by 1740, it had become an English staple. Fifty years later, North Americans added tomatoes to the Chinese recipe, and ketchup as we now know it had arrived. Tomatoes were considered poisonous for most of the eighteenth century because they’re a close relative to the toxic belladonna and nightshade plants.
