Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.
My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.
Agreed. Truly nailing a specific style of pizza can be tricky, but overall it’s not hard to make really good pizza. It seems like so many places just don’t even try. Dishonorable mention to Texas, who otherwise produces really good food.
If there is a demand for a forensic capability, there’s someone willing to sell it to a police department (and a jury).
The real reason behind all the gelatin salad abominations is that after gelatin was first discovered/isolated, it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.
Isolating gelatin requires long cook times (which require lots of fuel) at ideally fairly low temperatures. Then there needs to be some level of filtration to make it as flavorless as possible, and then dehydration to sheets or a powder.
Finally, to actually make one of these “salads”, you need refrigeration.
Production of gelatin was industrialized to make it much cheaper, and refrigerators became normal household appliances. You went from gelatin being only really used in “fine dining” to something you could do at home. In the same era, pineapple went from being a fruit that only the rich could get to something anyone could, so it went through a similar explosion of popularity.
The alternative funny answer is that the company that sold gelatin, Knox, was run by a husband and wife, and all the crazy stuff didn’t start until the husband died, so either he was holding her back, or once she lost her husband, she thought everyone else should, too.
I think full modern-strength liquor is relatively new-ish (500-1000 years). I’m just thinking back to the meme of the wikipedia article on the “timeline of Irish inventions” that has the invention of whiskey and then a gap of 300 years before they invented anything else.
“Fortified” means that liquor is added which acts as a preservative and it also stops further fermentation so you can have more sugar left in the wine. Oftentimes, herbs are added, too, which also acts a preservative.
In beer, IPAs are similar in that greater amounts of hops were added so it could survive the trip to India with less chance of spoiling.
I’ve made wine (and a lot of beer). It’s not hard, and people have been doing it for ages, but creating a good, consistent product does rely on chemistry/biology knowledge that they wouldn’t have had back then.
I suspect that a lot of the mystique around wine (like the idea that terroir is magic) is just down to the fact that a few hundred years ago, most wine/beer was trash, and the only stuff we’d consider “good” by modern standards is just down to luck that a batch didn’t get infected with the wrong yeast/bacteria, or exposed to too much oxygen, or a style that is meant to be drunk young (vinho verde) or oxidized (sherry).
There’s probably good reason that much of the wine that was aged/transported long distance a couple hundred years ago was fortified (Madeira, Port, sherry, vermouth, etc.).
Millenia of selective breeding have changed grapes, too. Without knowing for certain, my guess would be that on average, the sugar concentration in the raw grape juice would be roughly the same as now, but relying on wild yeasts or polycultures would not ferment as completely, so the final product would have lower ABV and higher sugar.
In beer, the actual grain and malting technology has greatly changed over time. 150 years ago, German immigrants to America couldn’t brew the lighter styles they were used to because American grain was much higher in protein so they had to dilute it with corn/rice. Older grain had a higher propensity for certain defects, too. Basically you had more inconsistency back in the day, and also just some things that were different.
This sort of thing happens all the time, and it’s usually subject to some level of debate. Just look at the ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa. Some say there is one species with multiple subspecies, some say they are just different varieties, some say that they are different species, or some are and some arent, etc.
Ah, yeah, forgot that was another one I’ve done. It seems like I’ve taken apart most of my household appliances at this point.