What I want to know is who DISCOVERED that beaver anal secretions and calves fourth stomachs made things useful in food prep? Neither sounds like anything that would happen by accident, like letting the dough rise.
Brave was he who first ate an oyster...................
I’ll lick that beaver till the sun go down.
Anal secretions the husband can clean up.
With the calf stomach, I could see it being used as a container for milk, and the curdling properties being discovered accidentally.
I don’t even want to think about the beaver secretions.
Cheese is considered the first processed food. Theory goes that milk stored in a goat or sheep stomach, used as a liquid pouch, solidified. Early humans liked the taste, and figured out how to make it on purposed. Dried and salted, it would keep longer than milk too.
The ancient equivalent of scientists experimented with any and all natural substances, looking for uses. Gum was made from tree resins, et cetera.
With limited resources, and nothing synthetic, they were accustomed to testing all aspects of a plant or animal for use.
Ammbergris, from Sperm Whales, used in expensive perfumes, nearly made them extinct from wholesale whaling. Although cosmetics was certainly a use, many famously valuable substances had other, more important uses.
The Bible speaks of Myrhh, Frankincense, and other spices, because they were used like money; that use arose from their having tangible, medicinal uses. (Boswellia, used for inflammation, is Frankincense.) It was not just because they smell nice.
Gold, silver, and copper are precious/semi-precious because they have exceptional properties of conductivity and ductility. It was not just because they are pretty.
Generic, symbolic money has removed us from the immediacy of nature.
The point is: Someone long ago tested these things, to find out their properties and uses.
Totally fascinating how these bizarre things come about. I believe beaver anal glands are/were used in perfume too.
Maybe they used to use cow stomach to store milk or yogurt and accidentally made cheese...
Some Indian or French fur trapper may have discovered the beaver’s secret when starving one winter made him desperate enough to eat from his gutpile. The meat from the animal is very good, like beef. Maybe a trapper found out while trying to get a piece of tail.
I know muskrat oil smells like orangepeel but have never been desperate enough to do anything with the glands.