The Curiosity Counter

A 1911 grocery stocked a great deal more than groceries. Set out here are ten of the strangest things found on the encyclopedia’s sixteen hundred shelves — every one reported by Artemas Ward in perfect commercial seriousness, and every one linking to its entry.

The crankiest entry in the book

Between HUCKLEBERRIES and HUMIDOR sits HUMBUGS — not a candy, but a warning: “The trade is perpetually annoyed by humbugs,” growls the encyclopedia, before denouncing every scheme “for mixing goods so as to cheat the buyer.”

Read HUMBUGS →

Pickled unicorn

The grocer of 1911 could stock unicorn: MARTYNIA, or Unicorn Plant, a vegetable whose long-hooked pods were “pickled in the same way as cucumbers.”

Read MARTYNIA →

Muskrat, by any other name

The muskrat entry ends with a sentence to reread slowly: a considerable number were marketed in the larger cities “under their own name and various other appellations.” What appellations, the book does not say. It does supply the stewing instructions.

Read MUSKRAT →

The meat counter was a zoo

Alongside beef and mutton, the encyclopedia gravely catalogues OPOSSUM, RACCOON, SQUIRREL and their preparation — game the general store handled as routinely as bacon.

Start at POSSUM →

The skeleton in your bath

SPONGES, the book explains, are not sea-plants but “the skeletons of a low-type animal” — left in pens to decay before sale, and, cut open while alive, resembling “a much perforated piece of beef liver.” Sold two aisles from the food.

Read SPONGES →

Twenty million reasons to cook your pork

The entry on TRICHINAE is the book at its most bracing: parasites barely visible to the eye, of which “twenty millions or more have been estimated as existing in one diseased person.” The remedy, then as now: cook it through.

Read TRICHINAE →

The vicar who banned summer oysters

Why no oysters in months without an R? The book traces the entire taboo to one country vicar, a Dr. Butler, in 1599 — and objects that “he can hardly be considered an authority sufficiently weighty to bind the human race for all time to come!”

Read OYSTERS →

The dark arts of the tea trade

An 1874 eyewitness account preserved in the TEA entry describes leaves brought to a uniform shade “by shaking the bags with a few spoonsful of lamp black,” jasmine blossoms strewn over dead tea “white as a spring grave,” and tea stems ground fine under the sandals of two dancing workmen.

Read TEA →

Holy Ghost wine

Among the Rhine wines is Steinwein, also sold as Heiligengeistwein — “Holy Ghost wine,” after the vineyards of the Hospital of the Holy Ghost at Würzburg. Some private vintages, the book notes, were a century old — recorked every ten years so the cork would not rot.

Read RHINE WINES →

The delicacy case

BRAINS “should be bright in color and firm,” advises the encyclopedia, which stocks them alongside CALF’S BRAINS (“a meat delicacy in great popular demand”) and TRIPE — everyday counter goods in 1911, exotica today.

Read BRAINS →

The full forty, ranked

The counter above tells ten of these at length. Here is the whole stock — forty oddities from Ward’s 1911 encyclopedia, ordered by how good they are, each one linking to the entry it came from.

Ethiopian warriors carried coffee as a war food: roasted, pulverized beans kneaded with grease and molded into balls — “the only food they carried on short forays.”Read the entry: COFFEE
America’s navel orange industry sprang from one tree. Of three Brazilian seedlings Mrs. Eliza Tibbets planted at Riverside in 1873, two died. The 1880 crop was one box; by 1911 the industry was worth $15–20 million a year — and the surviving tree had been ceremonially transplanted to a hotel courtyard.Read the entry: ORANGES
The Greeks and Romans used butter only as an ointment — and in 1911, apothecaries around the Mediterranean were still selling it that way.Read the entry: BUTTER
Table mustard was invented by an old woman: a Mrs. Clements of Durham, England, first ground and sifted the seed in 1729 — and kept her method secret for years while “Durham Mustard” conquered London.Read the entry: MUSTARD
The “no oysters in months without an R” rule traces to one man — Dr. Butler, an English country vicar, in 1599. The book protests he “can hardly be considered an authority sufficiently weighty to bind the human race for all time to come!”Read the entry: OYSTERS
The London Grocers’ Company (founded 1345) employed official “garblers” with power to enter any store, arrest, try and punish offenders — sometimes locking the guilty in the stocks and burning his corrupt goods under his nose.Read the entry: GROCER
The first patent ever granted by the United States was for soap-making (Samuel Hopkins’s potash process).Read the entry: SOAP
Paris ate about 80 million snails a year through its central markets alone; Vienna ran a special snail market for Lent.Read the entry: SNAILS
Terrapin was fed to enslaved people and apprentices before the Civil War as nearly worthless food. By 1911 it wholesaled at $2.50 to $8 apiece — one of the most expensive delicacies in America.Read the entry: TERRAPIN
The Paradise Nut’s pod builds up gas until its lid blows off with a bang — “which brings all the monkeys in the neighborhood rushing to the feast!” Hence its trade name: the Monkey Pot.Read the entry: PARADISE NUT
Migrating quail crossed the Mediterranean so exhausted they were caught by hand on the beaches — and shipped alive, by the steamer-load, from Alexandria to Marseilles.Read the entry: QUAIL
One pound of attar of roses takes about five million roses; a pound of violet oil, twelve million blossoms. Attar wholesaled at $80–110 a pound.Read the entry: PERFUMERY
Well-ripened cream holds about one billion bacteria per square inch — and without them, butter has no flavor.Read the entry: BACTERIA
A tea-house exposé quoted in the book: tea was shaded to a uniform color with spoonfuls of lamp black, then perfumed by burying it under “avalanches” of jasmine blossoms until the flowers were spent — “life upon death.”Read the entry: TEA
Limburger, per the encyclopedia: “the richest cheese that can be made, but to the uninitiated a malicious and premeditated outrage upon the organ of smell” — an odor that “sticks closer than a brother.”Read the entry: CHEESE
U.S. postal rules, quoted in the book: dead animals are unmailable — “unless stuffed.” Live queen bees, however, are allowed.Read the entry: SAMPLES BY MAIL
A chemist quoted in the book claimed that the flavors of most dishes on an average menu could be counterfeited from coal tar — which also yields saccharin, “300 times sweeter than sugar.”Read the entry: COAL TAR
“Mocha” was a halo word: coffee shipped through the Arabian port of Mocha lent its name “as a panoply for millions of tons that never saw Arabia!” After the Pure Food Law, millions of “Java and Mocha” labels were destroyed.Read the entry: COFFEE
Roquefort sheep were pampered like racehorses: their water whitened with barley flour, their milk “stimulated in every possible way,” and at milking hours “an army of pail-bearing maidens” hurried over the fields, each seeking her favorite ewe.Read the entry: CHEESE
Baby lobsters are cannibals — the government’s “sea nurseries” struggled to keep them from eating each other. In the wild, only 2 lobsters in 10,000 reach maturity.Read the entry: LOBSTER
The dark side of spice: the Dutch and Portuguese held their nutmeg-and-clove monopoly by executing unlicensed exporters and “on more than one occasion by massacring entire native populations.”Read the entry: SPICES
New England rum sold for 1s6d a gallon in 1687 — “practically to-day’s wholesale price,” the book notes, 224 years later.Read the entry: RUM
Cognac is barely drunk in France: in the biggest Cognac houses, 95% of the correspondence was conducted in English.Read the entry: BRANDY
Truffles had defeated science: “the secret of its production has never yet been fully ascertained… attempts to grow them commercially have never proved successful.”Read the entry: TRUFFLES
In ancient Rome, a good-sized red mullet sold for its weight in gold.Read the entry: MULLET
The 1911 encyclopedia introduces Americans to tofu — “a kind of cheese” made from soy beans — and to miso, “Soy Bean Milk.”Read the entry: SOY BEAN
All American rice descends from a single bag of Madagascar “paddy” that a ship’s captain gave a Charleston merchant in 1694.Read the entry: RICE
Peanuts became a commercial crop because of the Civil War: soldiers discovered them as food. Before the war they were grown “almost as curiosities.”Read the entry: PEANUTS
The goat on Bock Beer labels is a 300-year-old pun gone wrong: “Bock” comes from Eimbock (the brewing city of Einbeck), not from the German word for goat.Read the entry: BEER
The Beefsteak Fungus looks like beef tongue, bleeds a reddish juice, tastes like meat, and “yields a rich, brown gravy.”Read the entry: MUSHROOMS
The mushroom paradox: the poor could pick them free but feared them; the rich paid luxury prices. Meanwhile the natives of Tierra del Fuego “live almost exclusively on mushrooms and fish.”Read the entry: MUSHROOMS
“Bacon” once meant all pig meat — any cut, fresh, salted or smoked.Read the entry: PORK
The book defends the prune’s honor — “it seems a pity that cheap humor and poor jokes should be laid so heavily on such excellent, serviceable fruit” — and orders you never to soak prunes overnight.Read the entry: PRUNES
A crab cannery, in the book’s own prose: each crab “with one spasmodic twist, immediately relinquishes all earthly ambitions and dies, that man may profit by his involuntary sacrifice.”Read the entry: CRABS
Henry VIII gave a special reward to the gardener who devised the dish of “Lettuce and Cherries” for the royal table. (Romaine is “Cos” lettuce, after the Greek island.)Read the entry: LETTUCE
Tangerines were nicknamed “kid-glove oranges” — you can eat one without plate or spoon, “as conveniently as candy.”Read the entry: ORANGES
The “Cordon Bleu” was first conferred on a female cook by King Louis XV — at Madame du Barry’s suggestion.Read the entry: CORDON BLEU, "Blue Ribbon"
King Henry I was said to have died of “a surfeit of lampreys.” The book’s verdict: lampreys are merely very hard to digest — and England went right on eating Lamprey Pie.Read the entry: LAMPREY
Chinese tea porters carried tea 25 miles a day over mountain paths, “their only food often a double handful of salt in their girdles.” Brick tea served as currency in Tibet, traded for musk and gold dust.Read the entry: TEA
The encyclopedia has an entry for RAT. Its considered advice: “A good cat is the best remedy.”Read the entry: RAT