FACTORALY - E1 CUCUMBERS

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Who would have thought so much could be said about something as simple as a cucumber? This week, Simon and Bruce get under the skin of this underrated vegetable and discover it's more versatile than you would ever have thought possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

so how are we going to do this well i guess we need we need an intro yes i've got i've got i've got a pad and a piece of paper so i should should write some notes. But in the meantime, we've still got my... Your ramshackle kazoo intro. I quite liked it, actually. I thought that was quite neat. It was very, very us. Factorily. Welcome to...

Factorily. My name's Bruce Fielding. And my name's Simon Wells. And we are nerds. Well, specifically, fact nerds. We are indeed. We get our buzz out of winning pub quizzes. Yeah.

I actually had a conversation with somebody on the canal the other day, and they said, Bruce, where's Aruba? And I went, okay, so Aruba is one of the ABC islands at the south end of the Caribbean. It's very close to Venezuela. It's very popular with americans and lots of cruise ships stop there i've been i've been wikipedia thank you very much we we are both that annoying person who sits in a pub and just apropos of nothing goes did you know

yada yada yada or worse or worse someone who goes actually i think you'll find you'll find yes we should have t-shirts printed up with i think you'll find it's actually latin so every week we're going to talk about something um and find some useful interesting facts about whatever it is that's the subject of the week. Yep, some of it will be themed, some of it will be tied around what's going on in the world at the time, events, occasions, seasons perhaps. Other times it will just be random, useless, hey Bruce, let's have a chat about X, whatever X might be. I think that X is going to be definitely the factor that

makes this more interesting. The X factor. Well, yes, we both trained under him, so we can't really get away from it. Welcome! I can't do a Peter Dixon voice. I can sort of do a Peter Dixon. Live from London!

It's pretty good. Thank you so much. So our astute listeners may have observed that we have a thing about voices, don't we? We're interested in vocal stuff. We are. And that is because we're both professional voiceover artists. That's right.

I am one of those people whose voice you never hear. You used to hear back in the 50s and 60s, and you don't really hear anymore. You're not old enough for that to be true, surely. No but but even though i'm not the voices i was i was trained in the 60s darling oh marvelous marvelous i was trained much more recently than that so uh yes the chances of having heard my voice in the 60s are um negligible actually thinking about it my voice would have having heard my voice in the 60s are negligible. Actually, thinking about it, my voice would have been heard just about in the 60s, late 60s, early 70s. I was on a holiday in Luxembourg.

And my mum and her then husband were sort of doing the touristy things in Luxembourg. And it was one evening I couldn't really sleep. And I just thought, do you know what? I'm going to go for a walk. I was quite young. And I just started walking around Luxembourg. And I came across this building that said on the outside, Radio Luxembourg. Nice. And I thought, I'll just ring the doorbell.

So I rang the doorbell. And this person answered. And they said, how can I help you? I said, oh, I'm an English tourist. I'm here. I just thought as I was in Luxembourg, I'd come and visit Radio Luxembourg because I listen to it all the time at home. You know, it fades in and out. And it's a brilliant radio station.

I love the music. And they said, oh, would you like to come and meet one of the DJs? And I went, sure. Yes. So I went up into a recording studio area and um when a when a record was on they showed me into where the dj was playing the records and this guy said hello i'm kid jensen how do you do and i said hello i'm bruce fielding and he said oh i understand you're a tourist and i went yeah, I'm just here on holidays. Would you like to be on the radio?

So I said, sure. Oh, my goodness. So I had a quick chat to Kid Jensen on Radio Luxembourg. Good grief. So my voice will have been heard over the airways many, many years ago, but actually not until more recently than that have I actually decided to do this for a living. Excellent. So I started much more recently than you uh i've been

doing this for just coming up to three years now um after after a long and illustrious career as a postman beforehand it's not the most natural divergence but there you go um so yes that's that's us we do we do voices we sit behind microphones and we do voices all day long talking to ourselves in a little padded booth that's exactly how i describe what we do voices all day long, talking to ourselves in a little padded booth. That's exactly how I describe what we do. And now we're doing exactly the same thing, but we're actually talking to each other about random facts. And we hope that some of you, at least one of you, will be listening and enjoying the

random facts about which we speak. Yes. It's probably my cousin, Gary. Hello, Gary. Welcome to the show, Gary. we speak. Yes. It's probably my cousin, Gary. Hello, Gary. Welcome to the show, Gary. Welcome, dear listener. When we say welcome, dear listener, we really mean...

Yes, singular. So, Bruce, what is the topic of conversation which we have chosen for this week's show? So we decided at random to pick a thing. And the thing that we decided to pick at random was a cucumber. Indeed. And I didn't think there'd be, honestly, that much to know or say about cucumbers. I was quite surprised at how much.

I thought this research will be over in seconds. Days later, there's actually quite a lot to know about cucumbers, isn't there? Yes. I mean, we'll be going through the various properties of a cucumber and how cucumbers have been used over the years. Okay. So tell me from your research, where did cucumbers come from? So cucumbers originally were discovered around 4,000 odd years ago, somewhere between the Bay of Bengal and the Himalayan mountains. And they have been used by all different sorts of societies over the years. They were used by

the ancient Romans. They've been used throughout Europe, Asia, America, everywhere pretty much now has some form of cucumber or other in its diet. The cucumber grows, I found out so many interesting things. I always thought that cucumber plants grew up vertically and cucumbers hung off them. That's just the way that us humans have worked them out. That's just the way we cultivate them and the way we grow them for maximum efficiency. But naturally, the cucumber plant grows horizontally on the ground. It's kind of a tendrally creeping plant. And the cucumbers come out of all of these little tendrils and grow horizontally along the ground. So a bit like a strawberry, really.

If I knew how a strawberry grew, I could agree with that. Is that how strawberries grow? It is. Strawberries grow along the ground and on bushes and tendrils, which is interesting because cucumbers are actually a fruit. Yes, they are. They're related to the melon. So you could actually mix a fruit salad with tomatoes and cucumber i wonder at what point does it become a salad there's a a great phrase i heard

a while back that says um intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit wisdom is knowing that you shouldn't put it in a fruit salad exactly so i think the same applies for cucumbers and you mentioned there the the cucumber family so uh the cucumber is part of the curcurbits family which includes cucumbers courgettes, squash, marrow, watermelon, and cucumbers. So all those other things are also fruits. Yeah. What's the technical definition of a fruit over a vegetable, Bruce? I don't actually know. I think it's got something to do with seeds and a fleshy coating.

So technically anything with seeds in the middle and a fleshy coating. So technically anything with seeds in the middle and a fleshy coating, like a tomato or a cucumber or a melon, or even things like oranges. Yes, apples. Seeds in the middle, fleshy coating. They've all got that. But, I mean, it's a lot easier, I think, to spot fruit from vegetables as it is to spot nuts from things that aren't nuts. Legumes and pulses. Legumes and things that aren't nuts. Oh, droops, I think.

Is it droops? I've heard that, yeah. I just heard that term recently for the first time, droops. What are you eating? Just some droops. Good for you. But they're, I mean, a bit like nuts and fruits, they're very good for you, cucumbers. I mean, they're full of vitamins and minerals and they're good for allergies.

Apparently, they reduce facial swelling. And importantly, if you suffer with halitosis, they're quite useful to reduce bad breath. Really? Apparently. How do you go about applying them? I think you just stick a whole cucumber in your mouth, which means you have to breathe through your nose. Which is why you suddenly have good breath, because you're not breathing on anyone. Exactly. Perfect.

They've got folic acid and vitamin C and potassium and all sorts of good stuff in it. Yeah. and potassium and all sorts of good stuff in it yeah um and also the the properties of the of a cucumber you've sort of mentioned the different vitamins and minerals and things that are in it um the the phytochemicals whatever a phytochemical is in cucumbers it kills certain types of bacteria and the watery content of the cucumber, they're about 95% water. And this is why people go around putting slices of cucumber on their eyes and the cooling properties of that that helps your skin, which is apparently where the phrase cool as a cucumber comes from because they are genuinely quite cool items

and have properties to cool the blood and to cool the human body. That's where that phrase comes from. Yeah, that hadn't actually occurred to me but you're quite right i know they're good for sunburn if you if you if you overdo overdo it on the first day um to get lots of slices or actually sort of like a pulp pulp up a cucumber and stick cucumber pulp on the red bits right it is it does actually ease the sunburn. And speaking of overdoing it on the first day, cucumbers have enough vitamin B and electrolytes in them to help with having overdone it slightly in the alcoholic sense. Eating a few slices of cucumber at the end of a session can help you to wake up with less of a headache. Is that just to do with the water content, do you think? Or is that actually to do with the a few slices of cucumber at the end of a session can help you to wake up with less of a headache.

Is that just to do with the water content, do you think? Or is that actually to do with the stuff that's inside? I think it's the stuff that's inside. So the vitamins, electrolytes, you know, when you've had a bit of a session, you may not know. We may be a group of complete teetotallers here. But there's a particular supplement you could take at the end of a heavy night and the electrolytes in that replenish what was lost in your system from drinking too much alcohol and those same elements exist in the cucumber yeah there's all sorts of useful things that you can do with the cucumber one of the most fascinating things i find found interesting is that you can actually erase ink okay if if you rub cucumber skin over over byro

you can actually rub the rub the ink off the paper with it with the cucumber skin that's brilliant so you've had a really late session you're a little bit hung over your son burnt and you've written something on your head in biro or your friends have your friends have quite probably yeah the cure for all of those in one is a cucumber yep so there we go we're now going to see an influx of people heading to the pub armed with cucumbers just in case so where do cucumbers come from these days do you know well it depends on where you are in the world as to where you get your cucumbers from.

The number one producer of cucumbers in the world today is China. China produces almost 73 million tonnes. Not 73 million cucumbers, 73 million tonnes of cucumbers every year. How many cucumbers are there in a tonne i'd like to guess more than five oh definitely more than five put a couple of zeros behind that i should think that's a lot of cucumbers it's a lot of cucumbers and and they are way ahead of any other producers the next biggest producer is turkey and they produce only 2 million tons so 73 million tons is way out in the lead um the uk is number 47 in the list of international cucumber producers we we produce a meager 58 000 tons of cucumbers each year here in the uk

wow that still sounds like quite a lot for a for our population unless there are lots of people into into coup d'etat do you know which part of the uk produces the most cucumbers i would imagine it would have to be somewhere down south because the the weather but i don't know and probably not kent so probably west because kent's because kent's very dry i imagine you need a lot of water for cucumbers okay that was a lot more analytics than i put into it i just asked google apparently it's in the lee valley and the lee valley sort of borders hertfordshire london a few other places um and the lee valley is known as the Cucumber Capital of Britain. By whom is it known as the Cucumber Capital of Britain?

Probably the people who work in the Lee Valley. I've certainly never called it that. I found out some information about these people in the Lee Valley who grow cucumbers, and they're part of a consortium called the lee valley growers association which consists of about 80 individual growers in this in this area uh covering 450 acres of greenhouses and they employ about two two and a half thousand workers every year to cultivate the the cucumbers that are grown in this area isn't that a lot yeah i was surprised by that um and uh they've they've been going for you know quite quite some

time happily producing the the bulk of this country's cucumbers due to various economic pressures that we're all you know feeling the pinch of a little bit at the moment they're having to cut back so about a fifth of those growers are currently considering selling off their cucumber growing land for property development will they be building buildings that look like the gherkin oh i do hope so if you if you don't know by the way the gherkin is a is a building in london that looks a bit like a gherkin. Yes, it does. Sort of. Sort of. Not really.

I do know that somebody, a guy called David Thomas, who lived in the UK, he might even have lived in the, what was it, Cucumber? The Cucumber Capital. The Cucumber Capital. Or London Salad Bowl, as some others call it. in the in what was it cucumber uh the cucumber capital the cucumber capital or london salad bowl as some others call it well he may david thomas may well have lived there he actually grew the world's heaviest cucumber which weighed in at um believe it or not 12.9 kilos goodness me that's 23 pounds. That's 23 and a half pounds, practically. That's a heck of a cucumber, isn't it?

It is one heck of a cucumber. And he displayed it in 2015 at the Malvern Autumn Show in Worcestershire. Wow. He also, by the way, this chap also holds the record for the heaviest parsnip. Okay. What was the weight of his cucumber again it was 12.9 kilos wow 23 pounds so i've i've found um a guinness world record for the biggest cucumber ever grown but it's not as heavy uh this was a gentleman called sebastianki from Southampton. Only last year, he grew a cucumber that was three foot eight inches long. Wow.

Which for the young'uns out there is 1.12 meters. But it wasn't as heavy. It was only seven and a half kilos. But still, imagine looking at a three and a half foot cucumber. My word. Imagine trying to bake a roll that's long enough to actually slice it sideways yeah sadly it didn't mention the girth no but i would imagine quite quite chunky absolutely i don't imagine very tasty though so i think all of these things

that are grown for visual effect generally don't tend to be the tastiest of them yeah it might be a bit too watery of course the most the most famous sandwich is is the cucumber sandwich yes and it has to be has to be white bread naturally to be uh a lot of slathered in butter i would say yeah and the the butter has to be at the sort of temperature where it's not quite tearing the white bread up but it's actually very nearly it's just barely spreadable yes and of course the big thing about cucumber sandwiches is you have to cut them into triangles naturally and you and you have to you have to take the crusts off it's really important to get the crust because the the crusts the crusts detract from the flavour of the cucumber and also the texture of the cucumber.

Plus, as we all know, crusts from bread give you curly hair. Now, I disagree with the crusts off thing. I feel like I'm getting, you know, 5% less of a sandwich if someone's cut my crusts off and thrown them away. So I would keep the crusts myself. You would you would yeah also gives you something to hold on to slightly compared to just the you know the little little tiny triangle of bread it's a bit squeegee it's a bit delicate

yes exactly it's it's a it's it's a dainty dish it's meant to be dainty you're supposed to hold it with your little finger in the air as you pop each each corner into your mouth gosh that's so english isn't it it's also very important to salt a cucumber sandwich really because cucumbers unless you're using very salty butter because you do need that salt to bring out the flavor of the vegetables i don't know if you cook spinach but if you if you cook spinach with butter that the butter activates all of the goodness in the spinach. Oh, really? And it's a similar thing with cucumber sandwiches. The butter activates the goodness in the cucumber.

Right. There are about 50 different kinds of cucumbers. Are there really? A lot of them are made into pickles. Right. And pickling is about four and a half thousand years old. And there's a story that Saladin, the great Muslim conqueror and hero of the Crusades, depending on which side you were on, he credited pickles for his vigor and health.

Wow. The history of pickles is quite interesting. I don't know if you found out much about pickles. At the moment, my brain is trying to make a joke about salad in with pickles. I can't quite get it. If anyone can think of a decent joke about pickles and salad

that incorporates the word salad in, please leave it in the comments thank you absolutely well i mean you know one of the most famous um pickle salesman was a guy called uh amerigo vespucci right who uh discovered america right that guy yeah that guy america vespucci i mean chris christopher columbus originally went went looking for india but uh vespucci was a pickle salesman who um would provide pickled goods including vegetables and meats to sailors at ports around europe that's fantastic and he just accidentally stumbled across america whilst he was out selling his pickles looking to expand the market for pickles and now ironically i think uh i think i read about 60 of americans will pick their pickles out of a particularly well-known brand of hamburger yes there was actually some research um conducted by in oxford university by a professor charles spence okay um and he he discovered that

i think it's 51 this this might have been the uk but i think it's a general sort of global thing which is burger lovers actually choose to remove pickles from their burgers the main reason cited uh for this was uh the taste of the pickles which is 23 about the quarter of them the texture about 16 and one which was i've never tried them but i don't like the idea of pickles that's that's a valid reason i guess so how about you bruce are you a leave the pickles in or take the pickles oh i'm definitely a leave the pickles in i that i was reading about this research and they were saying that actually there there are good culinary reasons why you should leave the pickle in because it uh the the the vinegarness of sort of like counteracts the the fat in in the burger so you've got the

right so you've got the the acid versus the alkali thing happening you've also got the the crunch of a pickle versus the sort of the the squid the squidge of a burger so it adds texture so it adds flavor texture um and um offsets that that that fatty taste in your mouth so technically there's actually a very good reason why you should leave the pickle in in your burger now gherkins let's talk about gherkins um gherkins aren't actually a thing are they i i was always under the assumption that a gherkin or a dill or you know whatever you want to call it was a a vegetable or a fruit as we now know in its own right but it's not is it they are just pickled small cucumbers aren't they as as i said i think that there are there are an awful lot of um there are 50 different kinds of cucumber so that's crazy the um the the salad cucumber that's right the big one with the noble knobbly bit on the end um is quite different from the from a gherkin or cornichon sort of

type of of cucumber uh which is also different to like the dill pickle that like the that kind of burger pickle and they're all different and there are some which are lower in water content the pickled ones generally tend to be the ones that are lower in water content because if you if you try and pickle a salad cucumber it just goes all mushy and horrible i know because i've tried have you really talk us talk us through that process how did that work uh i had some pickling vinegar and some gherkins and uh and i thought well i've run out gherkins i've still got lots of pickling vinegar left uh Let's try it with a cucumber. It didn't work.

Okay. Is there just too much water content in a cucumber? I think that's probably the reason why. Right. I love a wally with my fish and chips. A what now? A wally. I don't know what you call them elsewhere in in the uk but basically a pickle gherkin with your with your fish and chips you can have mushy

peas you can have yes gravy you can have a slice of bread and butter exactly and a wally and a wally is that a regional term i don't know i've always called them wallies i imagine that it is now that's interesting because i i used to work with a chap who who was determined that they were called wallies and we went around looking this up one day and it's it's quite a northern term so people around uh sort of the the midlands up in in this country at least refer to them as wallies but i've now officially met more people from the south who call them wallies than people from the north who call them wallies so maybe that dialect is is shifting from one end of the country to the other that's that's possible i guess i i i

actually like them so much that i that i saw on amazon that there was a small tin of pickled cucumbers available to be delivered to my home. So I thought I would order this small tin. It turned out to be a tin about the size of a small dustbin. The suggestions from my friends were basically to go to some ward in a hospital full of pregnant women and just give them away for free. Because apparently it's one of those things that pregnant women crave oh i see i was trying to work out what the connection there was so pregnant women crave crave pickle kirkens yeah so i understand i wonder if there's some kind of innate property that is good for a growing baby well i think there's a thing isn't there where sort of mothers instinctively know what the fetus needs most of.

And, you know, things like eating coal. Things like that were one of the more famous ones. I was just thinking, we were talking about salad in earlier. There were lots of other famous people who liked pickles. Such as? Well, Alexander the Great. Okay. Apparently, he made gherkins part of his troops' rations.

Right. Cleopatra reckoned that pickles were one of the secrets of her beauty. Ah. And Caesar and Bonaparte, they seem to think that, I mean, much like Saladin, they seem to think that pickled gherkins gave their soldiers strength. And I think Bonaparte offered a reward of 12,000 francs, which is a lot of money, to anyone who could help improve the storage of pickles. Okay. So he obviously thought quite a lot about pickles. That's fantastic.

Maybe all the troops just ate a load of pickled gherkins and then sort of went into battle and breathed really hard at the enemy and they just collapsed or possibly they just they just threw gherkins at the at the enemy the enemy went what the hell in 2013 in the sri chinmoy center in new york York somebody called Ashrita Furman managed to cut 27 cucumbers using a sword with his mouth. What? So basically

he had a sword in his mouth and just cut 27 cucumbers with a sword held in his mouth. I think I'd be happier doing that than holding the cucumber in my mouth and have someone cut it with a sword. I know somebody who's chainsawed apples out of her mouth. Really?

Yes. Well, she had somebody with a chainsaw and she was holding the apples in her mouth while this chap was chainsawing them out of her mouth. Yeah. Well, it's good to have a hobby, I suppose. I suppose. It's lockdown. What else are you going to do? Now, we've had a bit of a cucumber crisis here in the

uk recently have you have you observed this i i have that there's all sorts of um fruit and veg that we're not getting at the moment now as far as i understand it we we get quite a lot in this country we get quite a lot of our salad vegetables from both Spain and Portugal, including cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, lettuces, that sort of thing. And of late, there's been a bit of a drought problem in those two areas, which has sort of stunted the production of those items. So if you go into any supermarket in the UK over the last couple of months we've really struggled to get hold of cucumbers and and tomatoes and that sort of thing which then begs the question how many of those products are we getting from spain and portugal when we have these

these lee valley growers right on our doorstep tons and tons yes exactly unless they're exporting theirs to somewhere else it could be kind of a bit like the fish market, isn't it? We're an island that's absolutely surrounded by ocean and fish, but we sell all of our fish to other countries and we get most of our fish from other countries. Global economies. Global economies. Global Economies. Did you know that drinking pickle juice can help relieve a cramp 37% faster than drinking water? No, I didn't.

So if you have a leg cramp, you're laying in bed and suddenly you go, all the cords in your legs start to go. Just have by side of the bed apart from your glass of water have a glass of pickle juice when you say pickle juice do you mean like a a jar of pickled gherkins without the gherkins yes so it's it's the vinegar it's the juice of the cucumbers themselves and all the other stuff that goes into it and all the yes the salt and all the other bits and pieces wow that's fascinating i wonder if the the relief of not having cramp anymore is offset by the heartburn having just guzzled a whole load of pickle juice or or the or the reaction of the person that's beside you in bed going what the hell are you doing you're doing fantastic i might have to try that have we exhausted the the uh i i think so i think i am out of cucumber related trivia i do i do have one more which is in 2014 um the german authorities found a drug i mean germans

obviously very big on on pickles and they found a drug hall worth about 56 and a half million dollars about 50 million euros um like drugs smuggled inside pickle cucumber jars on their way to iran from germany so basically they were smuggling drugs in in pickle jars is that is that sort of to mask the smell? Because they used to smuggle drugs in coffee grounds, didn't they? To put the dogs off the scent. Yeah, well, I think that pickled cucumbers would definitely put... I'm not sure whether there was actually pickled cucumbers in the jars as well as the drugs.

But there were definitely drugs in pickle jars. Yeah, no, I think that might have a detrimental effect on the quality of the drug might if it's if it's actually sitting in a jar of brine well this has been fun it's been great i've enjoyed that uh let's hope that our our listener has also enjoyed it all right gary hey gary please do send us any any comments any suggestions any advice any topics you'd like us to waffle on about yes please that's that's always a good thing we thought that cucumbers would be extremely dull yeah so if you can think of something incredibly dull and we'll try and find some interesting and useful facts about it well there you go then

you have been listening to fact orally with Bruce Fielding and Simon Wells. Thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to do all those things you're supposed to do with podcasts. Yes. Clicking, liking, subscribing, sharing. All those things. All of those things. And we'll be back next week with another dull...

Dill. Another dull item that we'll find something interesting to say about. Excellent. Looking forward to that then. Okay. Thanks very much. thanks for listening bye bye bye now