Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Neapolitan Ice Cream

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Neapolitan ice cream is secretly incredibly fascinating.NOTE: there's a past episode of SIF about ice cream in general. You don't need to hear it to enjoy this. Also you'll give yourself a fun double feature if you do listen to it: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/secretly-incredibly-fascinating-ice-cream/Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Neapolitan ice cream, known for being chocolate, famous for vanilla strawberry. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Neapolitan ice cream is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Neapolitan ice cream?

I always thought it was really pretty to look at not actually my favorite ice cream to eat. visually speaking, I like the scooping style where you get all of them. Like you go sort of perpendicular to the flavor lines. Cool. Yeah. But as a fussy child, I would just pretty much primarily focus on the chocolate and vanilla and skip over that strawberry because I didn't really like strawberry ice cream. I was kind of the same.

And I especially just really love chocolate and vanilla together. And then strawberries a little more in the fruit zone. to me? Yeah, I do really love strawberry sorbet. And like as an adult, like I appreciate, I love strawberry flavor and I love strawberry sorbet. Strawberry ice cream has to be like really, really good for me to like it. Because if it's just kind of like a, if it's just sort of a breath of strawberry over ordinary vanilla, I'm like, why? A breath. I don't need this. I don't like it. I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, like this vanilla ice cream bumped into a strawberry on the street briefly and said, excuse me. Right. Exactly. It's just a worse. It's just a worse vanilla. So I don't much like

I would say grocery store Neapolitan I don't really love. And I would just exclusively focus on the vanilla chocolate sort of stuff. But strawberry when it has been sort of distilled into a like flavor sometimes is not good, in my opinion. That makes sense. Totally to me. And I think especially in the United States, maybe I have a lot of situations where a fruit flavor, there will be the real version and the artificial version and they're separate. Like I like both with banana.

The really weird artificial banana is delicious to me in a completely different way from fresh banana. I know you don't like bananas, so you can't relate. But like that's- Hate them both. In the U.S., I feel like we like to generate a second artificial version of real fruit. Right. And then that's its own thing.

And so you usually get the artificial strawberry feeling with Neapalitan. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the best is like sorbet, but you have actual chunks of real strawberry in there. It's so good. Yeah, and Neapalitan in the U.S. is very chunk-free, I feel. Like, not only is it three separate fields of the flavors, but there's a completely smooth uniform. or nothing going on texture.

Very much so. There's not the little like vanilla flex or anything and there's not like chocolate chips or something. It's just total uniformity. That's when you know it's good vanilla is when it's got the flex in it. And Neapolitan has never heard of it. They're like, what's that? It's white flavor.

That's all. Yeah. What about you, Alex? Do you have like a scooping style for it? How do you mess around with Neapolitan? Yeah, like the crossway perpendicular. like you said. And we would get rectangular brick-shaped cartons of store brand ice cream.

And so it's in the three separate fields. Right, right. The zones. Exactly. And then there's also like large plastic buckets that I've seen where they were already swirled together. And those are good. I just only ever had that at like friends houses because we always had the just same Dominics.

I don't know why I'm bringing up Dominics. It's a grocery store in Chicago. the same like rectangular bricks of whatever flavor of ice cream including neapalitan i think we probably had both i remember i do remember those big plastic buckets i can't really recall yeah i think we must have gotten some of those with the neapolitan ice cream in it it was always just not my favorite of the bucket like for me when the bucket was full of like rocky road then we were then we were in business but yeah man I kind of forgot about those big plastic buckets of ice cream just like gratuitous yeah it would be like a birthday party thing yeah or a friend whose family had like a

large freezer that's what they would do right right like you have two children and they love ice cream and you're just like I don't want to have to go to the grocery store every five days which is I think where my mom was at yes so yeah so yeah It's a unique ice cream where everyone in the public and all children are expected to at least kind of like it, you know? Because other flavors, it's either completely plain or it's like interesting, like Rocky Road with all sorts of mix-ins. But Neapolitan, it's like, there's three separate fields of the three standard flavors. So like, if you can't get into this, that's your fault. That's weird about you.

Right. And shout out to Blue Crab. I'm a Discord for this suggestion at every end away in the polls. and two pieces of good news about a past SIF about ice cream in general. Me and Katie made an episode all about just ice cream in general. So good news, you don't need to have heard that to enjoy this. And also good news, if you do go back and listen to that, this makes like a really wonderful part too if you want to stack them.

Yeah, if you want to stack those ice creams. But we've done ice cream and we've done vanilla and we've done chocolate as siffs. We haven't done strawberry. That would be fun. Yeah. But you're all set with this as a standalone. And it turns out there's so much here just with Neapolitan ice cream specifically. Yeah, I'm excited.

I've been, Alex sent me a bunch of gifts of Neapolitan ice cream in factories. And that's been my whole day watching those on a loop. So relaxing. And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called Got Some Numbers. and some statistics I'll write them down, down, down, down, down. So fascinating, we'll make a podcast

to spread them round, round, round, round, round. I don't even have my video on it. I'm still bopping around to Alex's singing. Yeah, our videos off for internet connection reasons, and I feel like we're both just secretly bopping. Secretly bopping. Because that name was submitted by action. populated on the Discord. Thank you. Action Populated. We have a new name for this every week.

Please make a Massillion wagon best possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And the first very simple number we've kind of already said is three. And especially the United States, Canada, elsewhere, Neapolitan ice cream is three flavors. It is vanilla and chocolate and strawberry in one package. And it usually is in a specific order, right? Or do they often mix them around? Excellent question. This is heavily debated on Reddit, but the consensus seems to be vanilla in the center of the three. Huh. And if folks have never seen it, it's like three different stripes, right?

So the kind of indistinguishable, which is on each end, but people usually seem to think vanilla goes in the middle. I was going to say, but then like is strawberry on the left or the right? and then I started to realize, what a fool, what a foolish question that is when you come to a 3D object that can be rotated. I had that experience privately when I was prepping because I was like, oh, you could just turn it. Depending on which side the label is put on, it implies a certain order. Somebody out there has a strong opinion about which side chocolate is on. Someone's deciding which side is meant to be read first. And there's also a tip on this from The Simpsons.

Early seasons of The Simpsons, they depict Neapaliton with vanilla in the middle in this seemingly standard arrangement. And we have a fun Simpsons number here, which is 813 days. 813 days is the amount of time between two different jokes about Neapolitan ice cream and how the Simpsons eat it. Seems like a pretty good rate. Oh, bringing it up once every two years and change? Every 113 days you do a Neapolitan ice cream joke on The Simpsons. Yeah, they, in January 1992, in the third season of the Simpsons, an episode called Radio Bart depicted Homer Simpson going through the freezer.

And he's looking for chocolate ice cream, but all he can find is several cartons of Neapaliton missing just the chocolate. Oh, it's so relatable. Yes. And he shouts to Marge that they need to buy more chocolate ice cream. And in the other room, she just says she'll do it. Wait, does he shout that they need to buy more chocolate ice cream or that they need more Neapolitan ice cream?

Chocolate ice cream. Like, we're out of chocolate ice cream. I see. Okay, okay. Because like, all right, because I think it'd be funnier if he was like, we got to buy more Neapolitan ice cream, given the wastefulness. And there's sort of that implication. And then in a wild callback, two years and change later, March 1994 in the fifth season,

in an episode called Bart Gets an Elephant. They depict Bart Simpson, the son, eating ice cream out of a carton at the kitchen table. And it's just a sight gag, but he's eating only the chocolate section of a Neapolitan carton. Right. And so two seasons later, they revealed that that's why all the chocolate is missing and, like, kind of changed why Homer is confused, you know, because his son is doing this without him noticing. It's interesting. Right, right. Man, that Bart Simpson, he sure is.

a horrible, horrible little demon child. Right. Imagine growing up with him and the culture, you would be bent into some sort of strange demon as an adult, you know? Right. I think we should ban them. He said cowabunga. That's probably dangerous.

That's probably means drugs. And the next number here is at least two. Katie mentioned I sent her gifs of neapalotin being made. I found at least two ways of our range. the flavors into Neapolitan ice cream containers. We'll link jiffs of both of them. I could watch them all day, Alex. It's really fun.

One of them is you produce each ice cream flavor in separate batches and then shape those into solid blocks and then stack the blocks in kind of a loaf. And then the triple loaf you slice into each container. Right. So they have like a square, like a container-shaped rectangular nozzle. Yeah. And they have stacked somehow, the three flavors are ready.

So it comes out of the nozzle already with the stack. And someone takes like a carton and just sort of like puts it up to the nozzle. It fills the carton. And then they scrape it backwards. They continually do that. The physical action is almost like you're milking a magical cow or something. Yes. Like you're just under it and it comes out that way and you package it.

Like in cartoons where you have a cow and you can get chocolate milk and strawberry milk from their udders. Strawberry milk is another thing I don't mess around with. That's too weird. I like it. But it is, it's in the artificial zone. Yeah. Well, you're wrong, but that's fine. I respect you being wrong.

And then another method here that we will also link for separating Neapolitan is just you have three tubes, which are, extruding each flavor at a not quite solid texture, and it just squirts and extrudes all three into the container at the same time. Yeah. And so they arrive together in the container, and you just have it kind of timed and measured out where they will fill the container neatly. It feels a little filthy watching that one. I'm not going to lie.

It's like it feels like I shouldn't. I feel like a voyeur looking at all these ice creams getting squirted out of these three nozzles. So what would it be called? Only flavors or something? Yeah. Only flam. The dessert app.

So yeah, that's just the two ways I can find. There's probably other ways. But it seems like one reason Neapalitan has really thrived in, especially the modern day, is that large-scale industrial food manufacturing means any big ice cream company is making these three basic flavors, and so you can just put them together in another part of the building. Like, sure. Easy. Yeah.

Yeah. And the next number, we're going to go way back in history. The number is the 800s BC. BC before cream. It is before ice cream, so that's fun. Yeah. 800s BC is the estimated date when the poet Homer did his first readings of the Odyssey. Oh.

which started as an oral tradition. They wrote it down later. But The Odyssey, the famous thing that will be like a movie soon and stuff, you know. Where Odysseus goes out, kills a bunch of monsters, comes home, kills a bunch of people, you know. Yeah, Penelope's suitors are eating all of his Neapalitan ice cream. He's like, what are you doing? Yeah, exactly. Why are you only leaving the strawberry?

Slaughters them. And the Odyssey became ancient Greece. his main touchstone for the concept of a mythological siren. Oh, yeah. A singing beautiful woman who lures sailors into the sea. Pretty much mermaids. Those ladies. I love the different depictions of them.

Sometimes it's like a pretty lady with boobies and like a fish tail, sort of like a mermaid. Sometimes it's like a lady with boobs, but on top of a whole bird. Like just kind of a bird body, like almost like a dota. bird, but then it's got like the bust of a woman with head, neck, and boobs. So I've seen a lot of different depictions of sirens that are varying levels of appealingness. Like if I was a sailor, I don't know if I would be fooled by like a bird with boobies. And I know this seems unrelated to Neapalitan ice cream, but let's talk about why it's called Neapolitan. Yeah, let's do it.

800s BC, nearly 3,000 years ago, Homer, he probably borrowed from other contemporaries, but at least partly coins the Siren concept. And then several decades later, the 700s BC, Greek colonists sail to the western coast of what's now Italy and found a village. A lot of folks don't know that, like, the Greeks also settled little cities all over the coast of the Mediterranean, from Turkey to Italy to other places. Yeah, there was Greeks there before the Romans came in, and they're like, Greeks, we love all your stuff, but we are taking over. Exact same gods, slightly different names.

That's the deal. We love it. We're keeping your statues and your rugs, but we are in charge now. Yeah, and in this, like, pre-Roman Republic time, Greek colonists on the western coast of Italy, they make a village, and after a little time, they settle on a name for it of Partenope. I see. So not Neples yet. Exactly. We're getting to Naples. And they name it because in the Odyssey, one of the sirens is named Partenope. I see. Okay.

And she tries and fails to seduce Odysseus with her voice. Should have had more boobs. Exactly. As many as possible. That's the trick. And the way both the Odyssey and then other people writing fan fiction off of it, basically, the way they build this out is that after Partenope fails to seduce Odysseus, she is so sad and heartbroken that she can. her body down from a height and dies. Oh, no. And then these Greek colonists imagine that her body washes through the Mediterranean into the Gulf that they've put their village in in Italy.

Yeah, I like to have found a village based on like a dead siren washing up on the shore. It's very that British show Broad Church or like a CSI thing or one of those Netflix shows where wealthy New England people are sad and Nicole Kidman's in it, you know, any of these. beach murder things. Yeah. We're calling this city lady murder town. And then the next step here is the village of Partenope happens to thrive because of that gulf and harbor. One source this week is a history book. It's called The Pursuit of Italy. It is by historian Sir David Gilmore. And he says that there's a surprising thing across the history of the Italian peninsula where it has tons of coastline but only a few great natural harbors until people build them out.

And I've learned from settlers of Catan that you really need harbors, because otherwise there's nothing you can do with your sheep. Pretty much. And so a few places that had them are Venice and Genoa and then this village of Partanipe. You know, that plays a role in Venice being this huge maritime republic and Genoa being the birthplace of Columbus and Caboto and a bunch of sailors. Also, if folks are brand new to Siff, Katie lives in Turin. I do. And so I hope I don't sound like I'm Italy explaining the whole episode, but Italy will come up a lot.

It's mostly Naples. I enjoy it. I've been to Naples, but I certainly don't know everything about it. I'm also not Italian, so I'm just here. And so the village of Partennape thrives kind of more than the initial colonists expected. And basically the story is they said, our village, the way we slapped it together initially, is just like not built to grow the way we need to right away because we're in one of the best harbors in all of the West Coast. And so in the 600s BC, the Greeks in Partenope build a whole new city next to the village.

and they spend almost no time thinking of a new name for their new city. They just call it the Greek words for new city, which are Neapolis. Neapolis. And so that's why across some other language interpolations, it's called Naples. That's the entire reason the ice cream is called Neapolitan. Yeah. Greek colonists built a tiny village on a great harbor and then said, this village isn't going to work.

We need a whole new city. Right. And Italians call it Napoli. Yeah. And then in the Neapolitan dialect, it was Napule. Like, it's a few different names. But they're all vaguely the same thing. And we've anglicized it to Naples in English.

Also, fun, fun fact. The dialects in Italy are wild. I can understand Italian decently well. I can't understand the Naples accent very well. And they also have dialect. So like, and there's Italians who struggle who are, you know, born in Italy, particularly if they're born in northern Italy. And they can't, like, they struggle to understand someone from Naples at times, right? If they have a really strong accent or they're using the local dialect, it's, it's almost like, like in these places like Naples, Sicily, there are areas where when they're incorporating a lot of the local dialect, it's almost like a different language.

So it's, yeah, yeah. that's so fitting with this topic it'll come up a lot that naples until recently and even now was sort of considered the main city of southern italy rome is considered central maybe but then northern italy and sicily and sardinia are all kind of separate places and considered naples to be a little bit alien until pretty recently yeah i mean like and there was outright sort of looking down upon it too because there is an economic divide where southern italy in general historically like maybe not historically historically historically like when it was separate countries and having the ports and stuff was really important but like

there's less wealth in southern Italy compared to the north so there's definitely some tensions there sometimes although now there's so much immigration from the south to the north and like there's so many people that are from the south who live in cities in the north now that I think it's maybe starting to change a little more. Especially if people are getting more on board with each other. That's great. Yeah. It's very good.

Yeah. And I also am curious how many listeners are surprised to learn that Neapolitan refers to Naples. Because I think especially in the U.S., that's not a totally known thing in general. But it's named after this city. And I think of it as southern Italy, but it's not that far south of Rome and north of a lot of the foot part of the peninsula. Yeah. Yeah, it's still considered southern Italy, especially the Garstern weather. But, yeah, it's pretty close to Rome, actually. It's not too far. And amazingly, this location and harbor of Naples ends up looming large in the history of ice cream. A couple quick numbers from the past episode about ice cream in general. We think humans started making frozen treats about 6,000 years ago, but it was mostly lords or kings.

kings who could send servants to gather snow and ice from the weather, and then combine that with fruit or honey and just make something sweet. Right. The other old number to pull is the 1600s A.D. about 400 years ago, that's when we think people started making the first dairy-based frozen desserts in a consistent way. That's longer ago than I would have imagined. Yeah, and it's still often dependent on wealth because the move would be harvesting ice and then packing it in straw or sand or something.

Right, right. And then a whole building to store that. So it's expensive. Yeah, like, because you'd need sort of like a cool underground cellar where they would store the ice so it wouldn't melt. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of labor and logistics. And so it was still mostly for the rich.

But the amazing thing here is that began in Italy and specifically Naples. Wow. It's the ice cream city in many ways, Naples. I did not know that. See, I'm learning, Alex. Don't feel bad about Italy explaining to me. One source here is a feature for the Paris Review by Edward White, who's also a BBC history correspondent. He said that the first written-down recipe for modern-style ice cream where there's a lot of dairy involved was from a Neapolitan cookbook.

It was called The Modern Steward. It was written by a chef named Antonio Latini. and Latini had worked and trained in France, and also at his time being in Naples, Naples was controlled by a Spanish noble house and part of a vast Spanish empire. And so his book combined the ingredients and traditions of France and Spain and Southern Italy, and also at least one version was in the Neapolitan dialect. So that spread all sorts of ideas across Europe and also tied them to Naples and made it more of a food capital. Do we know what the recipe was?

It was basically just typical ice cream to us. Like you bother to work in dairy when you're churning it. And it's not a sorbet where it's just ice and fruit or sugar. Right. Was it flavored with anything or was it just like cream and sugar and using ice to kind of churn it? It was basically filled in the blank for the flavor. I see. Okay.

Because like we talked about on that vanilla episode or that chocolate episode, that stuff was not necessarily easy to get. But by the 1600s, it was starting to be around. So you could get it. But you could also pretty easily, like, mix in fruit, right? Because you, like, you have the base of the cream and the sugar, and then you kind of mix in berries or fruit. So you could still make a flavor with that.

A lot cheaper than, like, chocolate or vanilla for sure. Because those were, like, fancy Meso-American products still, to some extent. And so, yeah. Yeah, like today, that's maybe not true. like maybe fruit, fresh fruit ice cream is probably more expensive because chocolate and vanilla are so widely available and cheap. That's right, yeah. And so Latini and a few other people who wrote down dairy-based frozen dessert recipes

that set the stage for an ice cream culture. And within a century of that, people like Thomas Jefferson are visiting the French royal court and discovering vanilla ice cream, bringing that to the U.S., and either way, again, it's still pretty upper-class stuff. It really takes until the 1800s for ice cream to start to democratize a little bit. How did it democratize to just people have more access to ice? Yeah, yeah, better access to ice, a more common icebox culture, because it was really only the 1900s that we had electricity-based freezing and refrigeration. Apparently by around the 1830s, people in the United States associate ice cream with landmarks of the summer, like the 4th of July.

Yeah, yeah. Because like probably cold transport was, like once that became more widely available, like trains and stuff being able to transport ice, seems like that would have helped a lot with distributing ice cream. Yeah, and the one other surprise is that when I read about this, I'm just so surprised that ice would stay cold in stuff like straw. Like, that just works better than you would think. And today we just think everything has to be.

electrified appliance, but they could kind of make that work, packing it in straw and other stuff. Especially if you had like a lot of the ice all together in straw because the straw insulates it and then the other ice lowers the temperature. It creates sort of like a bubble of cold. Yeah. Yeah, it was very ingenious. Yeah. Also part of the democratization is just people going into the business of this where like it's their entire day all day and then they just sell to enough customers to make it work. Yes. Yeah, all this connection between ice cream, Naples, the United States, it gets us

into mega takeaway number one. Neapolitan ice cream is a late 1800s American invention based on a regional Italian gelato cake. That's really interesting. A lot of what we consider to be Italian foods started in the U.S., often by Italian immigrants, and it's very heavily southern Italy because that's where most of the immigrants came from to the U.S. looking for better economic opportunities. Yeah.

So some of the stuff that it's like Italian immigrants to the U.S. created in the U.S. then came back to Italy, and now Italians are like, oh, this is very Italian. Now that's like, you know, extremely popular, obviously. That really fits this. The regional Italian gelato cake I mentioned, it's a different dessert called Spamoni. And then Spamoni almost immediately gets sort of repeated and tinkered with by, like you said, southern Italian migrants, especially from Campania, the region around Naples. They really developed democratized ice cream in general in the United States.

And then from there, one variation on that in the United States, which never really makes its way back to Italy. is Neapolitan ice cream? Because Italians just keep eating Spamoni. There's no reason to do this. Yeah, I don't really see Neapolitan ice cream around in stores or in gelatorias. So the grocery store cartons I had, that's sort of the Neapolitan ice cream. This wasn't really a thing in Italy, except for this different thing. Right.

And Spamoni is a little different, though, from Neapolitan in terms of flavors, right? it is and and also key sources for this takeaway one of them is the book a taste of naples the appellant culture cuisine and cooking that's by award-winning food writer marlina spieler and then we're also citing a piece from mental floss by writer jillian regan and three different features for tasting table.com by writers lisa curran matt and stephanie fredman and lily mccalveen because bimoni is a dessert that developed in 1800s naples it mostly took time to develop because they needed to democratize cold treats and frozen treats. Spamone is layers of very light gelato in sort of an ice cream cake. Apparently the name comes from both the Italian word spuma

and the Neapalit and dialect words spamone, which both mean foamy. But it's gelato in kind of a lighter way and then solid layers of the different flavors. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like a layer cake made out of ice cream. Yeah. And apparently it's common to have at least three layers of different flavors, but up to five. And the five most common flavor options for Spamoni are cherry, chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, or almond. Pistachio and gelata is super, super popular in common in Italy, and it's very good. Yeah, the one time I've been to Italy and I got to hang out with Katie.

it for a bit, which was great. But I visited Rome, and we would get gelato a lot. And eventually, I was just only getting the pistachio. It was amazing. It's so incredible. Like, if you don't, and if you don't, I never liked pistachio ice cream in the U.S. Doesn't matter. You should, if you were in Italy, you should try it because it's different.

It's very different. It's like, because I feel like in the U.S., it's often kind of like a breath of pistachio with like maybe whole pistachios thrown in. And that's who want, I like pistachios, but I don't necessarily want a whole, whole freaking pistachio. interrupting my ice cream experience. But in Italy, it's usually pistachio pieces are very fine, sort of crumbled. And the flavor is just really strongly pistachio in a way.

That's very nice. I agree. Yeah. It's different and better. It's almost like that strawberry difference we talked about. Yes. Yeah. And if folks are trying to keep an eagle eye out for the Neapolit and ice cream stuff,

those five Spamoni flavors, two of them are chocolate and vanilla. And then also cherry is red, sort of like strawberry is red. Yeah, or pinkish red, yeah. Right, pinkish, yeah. So you can see some of the roots there. But again, it's like a very light kind of gelato and another major feature of Spamone is mix-ins. It usually came featuring cherries in the cherry layer or pistachio in the pistachio layer, chocolate chips in any of it.

And apparently it was often made in sort of a almost fruit cake. mindset where whichever fruits and nuts are in the house or the building, the maker would just throw that in. Right. So a feature is mix-ins. It's not like it's just an extra Ben and Jerry's topping if you want it. Right, right. So it's like that is kind of like part of the dessert.

It's like, all right, we got these sorts of things. So let's have this in ice cream. Yeah, yeah. And so that's very distinct from Neapolitan ice cream. And then also, again, Naples was a very distinct place. and the area around this huge city, it became really its own country for a lot of Italian history. When Antonio Latini was writing a cookbook, it was part of a vast Spanish empire. At other times, it was part of France or Austria or a Sicilian kingdom.

And I had a lot of times an independent kingdom of Naples or Duchy of Naples. And my favorite weird stat there is from David Gilmore's book, he has trade stats for Naples from 1855. Hmm. And in 1855, Naples is its own country, and it's just five years from Giocepe Garibaldi's

army forcing it to join a unified Italy. Everybody loves that Garibaldi and is making us all be friends. Yeah, he's a fun guy. And just five years before that, according to David Gilmore, a full

85%, 8.5%, 85 of Naples trade exports went to Britain and France and Austria. Only 3% went to a country called the Papal States in Italy. Another few percentage points to the other parts of the rest of the Italian peninsula. Like if you only observe Naples money, you would not know it's in Italy at all. It would just be kind of this different country doing other stuff. It's interesting because I think like Naples really shape people's view of all of Italy later on. Yeah, yeah. People think the Napoli accent is the Italian accent. It really isn't. It's a, it's a Naples accent. Like the ending everything is sort of like in an upward lilt, dropping certain vowels. That's all like very Naples centric. And then you listen to accents from Rome or Milan or, you know, here in turn. It's all very different. That's so cool. And yeah, as part of Naples just doing its own trade and its own thing, it had its.

own what people call a dialect, I find, because it's similar to the Italian language, but also distinct. And the pop culture touchstone for that is Elena Ferranti's novels, where the characters will constantly talk about either speaking Italian or speaking dialect. And that is confusing if you just see Italy as a monolith in the 2020s. And it's interesting to read, like not only that book, but other books, Italian books I've read, where it's like kids being frustrated. by having to learn Italian, when they already know, like, Sicilian or, you know, whatever their regional dialect is. Reading about unification, too, it's weird to see the name, the kingdom of the two Sicilies, which is Sicily and Sardinia. And then you're like, why would that be separate at all?

And then it's also, like, a lot of the foundations of an Italian country. Like, people in the peninsula were probably like, why are these islands taking us over? This is stupid. Right. Yeah. Like Katie said, a lot of the people who left Italy for the United States were from the south. And going all the way back to these ancient Greeks, there's still an excellent port in Naples. And so it was a convenient place to sail west and go to North America. Also, before and after unification, Naples had not been very rich. There was a lot of poverty. It was one of the densest cities in Europe. There were frequent eruptions from Mount Vesuvius, which never stopped erupting. after it buried Pompeii. Yeah, it still does it occasionally, like little ones.

For all these reasons, a lot of Neapolitan's left. And when they got to North America, they arrived and said, how do I make some money? A lot of them were from one of the oldest traditions of ice cream making in the world. So they set up small ice cream businesses. When they arrive in East Coast U.S. cities, they say, I'm willing to do physical labor and I don't have much capital. So what they start making is hand-carried carts filled with ice by hands.

The first ice cream trucks, basically, carts of little frozen desserts. Apparently also by making it a cart, you didn't have to obey the regulations or pay the taxes of a brick-and-water business. And so people could just start a business because they knew how to make ice cream. Right. And then if they're like, hey, where's your license? You just Scooby-Doo run away. Right. The doors in the hallway are the doors on Broadway in Manhattan or something, but everybody's going back and forth. Yeah.

That's the thing where you like jump in the air and your legs kind of wheel for a while until you actually run away with your little cart. A scoob. A scoob. Very Italian shaggy. Yeah. Yeah. And then also this was happening before ice cream cones. So they were promoting ice cream as a handheld street food. If folks remember the past ice cream sift, we talk about either the night. 1904, World's Fair in St. Louis, or a 1903 patent from an Italian immigrant being the source of ice cream cones. This is decades earlier, so they're either selling ice cream wrapped in a piece of paper or sandwiched in thin cookies, like the first ice cream sandwiches. Cookies. That sounds so good.

Yeah, and like there are so many Italian bakeries in the East Coast of the U.S. that still make tiny cookies that are amazing. And so that skill combined with ice cream, they made ice cream sandwiches a thing. Incredible. Yeah. And then also a lot of these Neapolitan people, they were coming over in the time of Spamone developing. They were also some of the first ice cream sellers in general. So a few things collide in the United States.

You get Neapolitan people who are doing various flavors of ice cream and say, what if I do like a handheld condensed down version of spamone? Does that kind of work as an ice cream style? Spamoni is usually sliced from blocks of a big loaf, so they sliced loaves of some stacked ice cream flavors. And then, like, a lot of English-speaking other ethnicities of Americans, they kind of lose track of the roots of this and the origins of this. And they start to say, yeah, like, layered ice cream is Neapolitan.

Okay, cool. Immigration patterns just completely shapes our view of the world, which is, you know, something to remember that has been happening for a very long time and we love it. And we benefit from it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Apparently, as early as the 1860s, U.S. newspapers described something called Neapalitan ice cream because the vendors are Neapalitan and it seems like it also took a little time for Americans to start to decide specifically layers of different flavors was Neapalitin. Before that they might just call ice cream that you hold Neapalitin or like ice cream in general Neapolitan. Oh, I see. Okay. So it's a more like general term because most of the ice cream vendors were Neapolitan. Yeah, yeah. It was like a general fun ice cream word. And then also the other U.S. influences the flavor choices because pistachios were extremely hard to get in mid-1800s America.

There's a passive about pistachios if you want to hear about why. So they kind of drop that elements of the Spamoni options. Also, for some reason, it was easier to get strawberries than cherries for the most part. And so Americans and Neapolitan immigrants, they start to move it from the various spamone options to drop pistachio, feature both vanilla and chocolate, and then also switch from cherry to strawberry. And so just kind of based on flavor preferences of Americans in ice cream, You go from the spamoni options to what's now the three in Neapalit and ice cream. Right. And like what was available, which is actually very spomone, right?

Because we were talking about it. It's like you put the mixins of what is available to you. So going with tradition. Exactly. And then the one other very American thing is I almost want to call it just making it more processed. Like no mixins. And then maybe a century later people like Ben and Jerry's start to lean into mixins or like cold stone creamery or something, but Americans of especially the turn of the century really

boil it down to three very simple ice cream flavors in a bar. Yeah. I mean, is that just because of preference for uniformity? Or is that because mix-ins would be harder to do or preserve or have like a consistent presentation? All the above, yeah. Okay. Yeah, and especially that like mid-1900's American thing. Everything is space age and produced down to simple things, yeah. I feel like, I feel like, you know, astronaut ice cream is often presented as looking sort of like Neapolitan. Our last takeaway is all about astronaut ice cream.

Wow. Because, yeah, that's the dominant flavor. I didn't, I didn't cheat. It's true. I always just surprise Katie. And so we'll get into that in the second half. But yeah, Neapolitan ice cream is both rooted in a Neapalitan spamone and also completely separate. Like Americans decided this three flavors in one carton is a thing.

And so if you go to Naples or if you read a cookbook of Neapalitan food like I did, you don't find this anywhere. You just find Spamoni and then pizza past other stuff. If you do, you're probably in a tourist trap. Like if you're finding like a Napoliton. ice cream and stuff. Yeah. That would be a fun grift to like set up a ice cream store in Naples, tricking American tourists into buying the authentic Neapalot and ice cream.

That'd be a fun grift. Yeah. No, that would be great. That'd be great. The usual grift is just that they, ice cream places where the ice cream is piled really high and is really colorful. And usually that's lower quality ice cream because it's like it's piled so high, both to look appealing, but they also add in, they aerate it a lot.

It's very light and fluffy, but it's not, if you're looking for actual good quality ice cream, it's usually not a mountain. It's usually flat in the tubs because of how it's made. And Katie warned me about that when I was in Rome. I really benefited. It was great. I did. I did.

I had relatively pale and amazing pistachio gelato. Yes. Yeah, it's not bright green. It's usually not bright green. It's like either sort of an unappealing dull green. or more pale, like more of a white color. That's right. You don't want to be reminded of the Seattle Seahawks football team.

Or do you? I don't know. Folks, that's a mega takeaway on tons of numbers and stats. We're going to come back with two more Neapolitan takeaways. We're back and we have two more takeaways about Neapalitan. I also just like that as I was putting this together, we ended up with three takeaways total because that's very three flavor. It's fun.

Yeah. Which one's the vanilla one and which one is the strawberry one? So we've decided chocolate is first. I see. Right. I see. But as mentioned before the break, takeaway number two. The gift shop Neapolitan novelty.

called astronaut ice cream has never been eaten in space. Never ever. That's kind of a relief. I would feel really bad for our astronauts if that's really what they were given as a nice treat. Yeah, I didn't say. I find that stuff revolting, but it's freeze-dried ice cream. I think most people do. I think that's kind of the point of it is that it's really disgusting and then everyone has to try it and then go like, Yeah, that was disgusting. Yeah, and it is made from inventors who sawed apart a carton of American Neapolitan ice cream from a grocery store. It turns out astronauts have an easier time eating regular ice cream in microgravity. That works a lot better.

That makes sense. I mean, like they drink fluids. I don't know why ice cream would be a problem. Yes, the fluid element helps. In case folks don't know, it's a very standard United States thing for our museums of any kind of air in space and astronauts to sell a freeze-dried package of typically Neapolitan flavor ice cream. I learned about it from a cartoon called Two Stupid Dogs. I don't know if anyone remembers that one. I do not know it.

And it was like they really wanted the ice cream. so they like run onto a spaceship where they see this ice cream being transported and they become astronaut dogs on accident because because all they're motivated by is the ice cream and then when they finally try the freeze dried ice cream they're so disappointed because it's disgusting um so that's that makes sense i learned i was able to not be disappointed by it because i learned from that cartoon but yeah it's everywhere i think i went to the Air and Space Museum in D.C., and, like, it's like the ubiquitous thing. They have the freeze-dried ice cream.

They also had, like, the little spacesuits for kids, those kinds of things. It's all in the same section. Yes. Yeah, and it's always called astronaut ice cream. And the one thing I do like about it is that the choice of Neapolitan flavor, I feel like that lets you really experience what freeze-dried ice cream is like, because the three flavors let you kind of separate out what's flavor and what's freeze-dry. You know? Right. Right.

So that's cool. Yeah. But it's the other dominant form of this flavor. And it's never been to space. It's truly a myth. So-called astronaut ice cream, here's how it was developed in the late 1970s, which is after all of the moon landings. In the late 1970s. That's the time to do something goofy like this. Yeah, for sure. Right. That too. Disco's happening. What do you do? Disco, yeah.

Museums recruited a company called American Outdoor Products. That company specialized in freeze-dried food for backpackers on Earth. And they were requested by an air and space museum to come up with a freeze-dried ice cream that could be branded astronaut ice cream. I see. Yeah, I've done backpacking. I've done the freeze-dried food. Let me tell you, do not recommend. Not great.

For me, personally, backpacking is so energy-intensive and the food is so not good. It's just like, I want to maximize the nutrition I'm getting from it so that the flavor, the flavor will be endured. I don't really care what it is. I'll just endure it for the nutrition. Anyways, that's kind of a, we should do a beef jerky episode. Oh, we should, yeah. Yeah. Because I've had bison turkey once.

I want to learn more about it. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I've also had bison jerky. It's really good. And these freeze dry people were really good at freeze drying a lot of foods. So according to company owner. Ron Smith, the entire process was someone went to a grocery store. They bought one of the half-gallon rectangles of Neapolitan ice cream. They sought it apart with a band saw, like in a

tool shop or wood shop, and then Freeze tried that. That was it. It was not difficult to make this. The most authentic element of astronaut ice cream is that during the Apollo missions, NASA contracted with the Whirlpool Corporation, who mostly make washers and dryers and stuff. Yeah, it's weird. They contracted with them to try freeze-drying some foods and see what happens. Sure. Why not? Allegedly in 1968, they tried freeze-drying some vanilla ice cream. There's, like, log-y sources that say maybe some of the Apollo 7 astronauts.

Apollo 7 is a few missions before the moon landings. Maybe those astronauts tried it on Earth. But we don't think it was taken to space. No, because it's nasty. Yeah, yeah. And then before he passed away in 2023, there was an interview with astronaut Walt Cunningham, who was on the crew of Apollo 7. And he was asked about freeze-dried ice cream and said, quote, we never had that stuff. Yeah.

It seems to have never been to space, only ever been a gift shop novelty ever. Because also it just seems like there's a lot more dessert-type things that would be. fine in space, like chocolate bars? I don't know. Like, that seems... Oh, yeah. That already seems pretty dense and easy to travel and you don't really have to do anything to it. But where would the United States find a chocolate bar company? We don't have any of those. And the other amazing thing that I wish I knew, like gift shops are lying about this, basically. Regular ice cream does better in space than the freeze-dried kind, and astronauts eat it. Space is very cold.

So for the astronauts to stay alive, you have to actively use energy to heat them. So if you want a part of the ship that's cold, it seems pretty easy. You just don't heat that part of the ship. Yes. And like theoretically we could devote more spaceship and space station's room and square footage to freezers and ice cream. Yeah. But either way, the regular ice cream, we've been bringing that up consistently to the international space station since 2006.

I'm happy for them. I'm glad they have ice cream up there. And it's much safer than the freeze dried kind because the freeze dried kind is crumbly. It's a bunch of crumbs. Yeah. In 1965, an astronaut smuggled

a corned beef sandwich into space and NASA freaked out because the crumbs of the bread could have short-circuited equipment or like killed the crew. It's the Simpsons things where he like accidentally like all the potato chips and then like there's an ant on a potato chip and then uh Ken Brockman thinks that giant ants have taken over uh and sells out earth yeah exactly yeah

yeah I mean that makes sense because like the crumbs probably could get into instruments yes where something that's wet has the molecular adhesion of wetness exactly and according to Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, curator Jennifer Levassur, quote, thanks to surface tension and low gravity, what's in the container of ice cream isn't going to just drop or fly away, end quote. And so we'll link pictures of ISS astronauts eating regular ice cream from cups. It works fine. You can do it. In space, if you got an ice cream cone and you lick too hard and the scoop comes out of the cone, it doesn't fall on the ground. It just floats there? Yeah. So space is safe for disappointable children. Great. Yes. Send children into space.

Children yearn for the space station. And then my other favorite bit is that with the ISS, they send ice cream up on resupply missions that started carrying freezers. But the freezers are full of a lot of fruits and vegetables and a little bit of ice cream. And then what the crew does, on the station is they keep the produce cold, but it doesn't need to stay frozen so they can just leave it, like Katie said, like in a not heated compartment. Great. But the ice cream, they don't devote room to freezing it even though they could. And apparently with each resupply mission, then the crew eats the ice cream pretty fast all at once. Yeah. Because they need to clear freezer space on the resupply ship to send scientific samples back to Earth. Yeah, this is just

clear in space. Yeah. Yeah. So they're all like chowing down on ice cream and getting a brain freeze once in a while. It's great. Yeah. I mean, they could just ask them to stop sending the ice cream, but, you know, that's not going to happen. No, no, no, no, we're Americans. No, no, you don't understand.

We're not going to do that. Everything has been already calculated specifically weighing things and ice cream. We got to just got to eat it. The weight is legitimately part of why. I love that. I mean, I love that astronauts also have that excuse where it's like, I got to finish up the rest of this ice cream carton to make more space in the freezer. Yeah. And so like real ice cream is the astronaut ice cream. And then the gift shop stuff is a myth made by a guy with a bandsaw in the 70s. Right. It's amazing. Yeah. It will never, ever go to space

probably. Yeah. It's really, it really is an interesting thing because like it is, it's got to be popular enough that people keep buying it, but probably just once. Like, there's no, no one is a repeat customer for astronaut ice cream. It's always someone's kid who's like, I really want to try this ice cream. It's like, oh, it's not going to taste very good little Billy. I want to try it anyways. And then little Billy takes like one bite of probably like $8 package of ice cream. It's like, I don't like it.

And I think every purchase of it has been made by a parent who looked at its price tag and looked at a t-shirt that's $40. and said, okay, all right, we'll do this one. We'll do this one. Like, oh, a $200 Lego that is cheaper online? No. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Legos are so expensive. I'm always shocked. Always shocked. Yeah, yeah. And speaking of aesthetics, we have one last takeaway number three. Two different Neapolitan foods have a prominent. and invented connection to the tricolor Italian flag. Yes.

I'm curious about this because I always hear like, oh, yeah, the pizza was made to look like the Italian flag. And I'm a little skeptical of that story, to be honest with you, Alex, because it's very good tasting and usually things that are just, like, the order of the ingredients actually seems pretty practical, not just flag copying. if I was hunting clicks online I would call this a myth and also if I was on scrupulous to me this is more of a Neapolitan pizza like the margarita pizza especially of red sauce white cheese green basil people just enjoy associating it with the Italian flag sure it's to me that's not a myth like if you if you in your head like that connection it's not fake like it's just what you like yeah I imagine it's something like we make this pizza oh it's a It's really good.

These are good flavors. Hey, it also looks like the flag. Awesome. Yeah. And so on the bonus show this week, we'll get deeper on the pizza. And this takeaway, the Neapolitan ice cream. People have kind of invented a myth that it has something to do with the three blocks of color in the Italian flag. It's really just that people like that sort of association and invented it.

But wait, hang on. Because, like, Neapolitan ice cream is not, there's no green. Yeah, and so that's part of why the myth falls apart. Right. But some Americans said that, hey, the way there's those, like, three perfect blocks in the carton is like the tricolor flag of modern Italy. I mean, but so is it like every other, mostly every other European flag. Yeah. And it also turns out that modern Italian flag is pretty derivative of the.

the French flag from the French Revolution. Oh, you better not say that to an Italian. They'll be mad. Yeah, that's derivative of the French flag. They will sit you down and tell you why Italian wine and cheese is a lot better than French Italian wine and cheese for like an hour as punishment. Yeah, I'm sure they'll be furious with me. But here's the deal. So Neapolitans create and enjoy Spamoni.

and one of the most common spamoni combos is cherry and vanilla and pistachio. And that is red, white, and green. So that's just nice. So, like, it's not a myth. Like, if you like that about it, you like it. Great. Yeah. But they made spamoni before, and especially in Naples, long before the Italian tricolor was

going. Right. I mean, it might have been kismet, right? It's like, oh, we already like these flavors. And then maybe sometimes they're arranged. more carefully to be in the actual flag order because like for the ice cream at least right I don't buy that as much with the pizza because again I feel like the order of the ingredients makes sense the cheese is containing the margarita sauce which is kind of pleasantly soaking

into the bread and then the basil on top makes a lot of sense it's just good food of the The coincidence of nature, yeah. Yeah. And at the end of the 1700s, Napoleon borderline imposed the Italian tricolor on northern Italy. Now, Napoleon is interesting because his name sounds like Naples. I was trying to sound smarter than I just did. But Napoleon sounds very similar to the Italian word for Napoleono, which is like someone from Naples. And he personally is a great example of France not being a monolith because he's from the island of Corsica, which is French.

But like as he rose to power, people would mock his Corsican accents and stuff. And so much like Italy, France is not a monolith. and Napoleon from Corsica, which is pretty close to Italy, he really builds his entire power base by being a general who conquers most of Italy for the new French Republic. And then he overthrows that government. And in the process, invents titles to be emperor of France and also king of Italy. Okay, so apparently, I just Google it. Napoleon, the name is sort of a combination of the Italian.

Nevoleone, and then, which is sort of like a combination of Naples, Neapolis, and Leone, Lion. So, Lion of Naples? I don't know. But it's like, it like became a name. So Napoleon is not from Naples, but a name that's like, Lion of Naples. It's like became a name somehow, maybe. Yeah, like his background in Corsica had had a significant Italian influence. Yeah, like he was French, but also in that scene and stuff.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And then early in the process of Napoleon conquering northern Italy for the French, he starts setting up puppet governments. And in December 1796, he- Honestly, Alex, I just started thinking of Pinocchio governments. I'm sorry.

An Italian puppet. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So in December 1796, the first few years, duchies that Napoleon conquered, he basically, through like, military control, merges them into a puppet state. And his guys coin a flag for it that's red and white and green and a tricolor. And part of it is that the flag of Milan was red and white. The other part is that this is a French puppet. And they don't want to simply make it the red, white, and blue tricolor of

France green as a way they can vary it instead of blue. Is there any significance to the green other than it's a nice color? Truly just seems to be a nice color. And people later came up with ideas of like, oh, the green represents the beautiful land of Italy or something. But every, I'll, anywhere you go, there's going to be green land, guys. Not Tatooine. Not Hoff. That's, okay.

Well, I didn't realize we were going to space lands with our space ice cream. It's very, very hard to find any green flags in the whole history of Italy, all these different little countries. And Naples especially had flags that tended to be reds and yellows and blues due to the influence of Spain. Italian flags before was a unified country. A lot of them are wild. Like, check out Sicily's flag. It's super weird. Yeah.

Yeah, like when they get taken over by the Sicily's, at one point it was like a white flag with a big golden heraldic. on it and stuff. Like, like, you really don't find green until Napoleon and a puppet government flags. You do still see the regional flags, especially when it comes to soccer. Right. Yeah, like A.C. Milan has a very red and white deal, partly because of that flag. Yeah. Yeah.

And so the Napoleon does also conquer Naples, but the European coalitions overthrow him after a few years. They're not under a flag with any green in it very long. And in the series of further conflicts that creates a unified Italy, Naples is one of the last places to join up. So they've been making Spamoni for decades before Garibaldi's army marches in in 1860. And also, at that time, a lot of the people in the rest of Italy thought Naples had a weird food culture that's different. David Gilmore has an amazing story where as Garibaldi's army becomes confident that they'll be able to make Naples surrender to them, a leader of the movement brags that, quote,

the macaroni are cooked and we will eat them. What? Macaroni was a generic name for pasta, and as recently as 1860, other Italian people thought Neapolitans eat way too much pasta in a bizarre way. Interesting. Like, what were they doing so wrong?

They, partly they would eat it with their hands as a street food. Okay, well. But the other thing is just that, Other grains, especially stuff like polenta, were more of a staple in the rest of Italy. Yes, that's true. And like you mentioned, the pizzas and pastas of Naples become, quote, unquote, Italian food really late in the timeline. Yeah, Palenta is a big thing in the Piamont region, which is where Turin is, like, up in the mountains, if you go for a hike and you go to, like, they're called refugos. They're like little buildings in the mountains where hikers.

or historically travelers can go stay, have some food. Always polenta. Like, it's a huge, huge thing in northern Italy. But I can see why pasta absolutely took first place in terms of preferred food. Yeah, and it was very late-breaking. And the French tricolor flag influenced all of Europe's flags quickly, that that's really a development from the 1800s. But in the meantime, a place like Naples develops Bimoni and making it blocks of red and white and green separately and almost in opposition to what became the Italian tricolor after unification.

Right. And so even the U.S. version of this ice cream where there's three blocks, sort of like a European flag, truly has nothing to do with the symbol of Italy today. It's a coincidence. It's just the layers, because layers are good. It's like layer cake, man. Good stuff. Yeah. It's like a geometry accident more than anything else.

Right. Right. And so that you could have that funny interchange between donkey and Shrek where they're talking about onions having layers and then donkey is like, well, what about a parfait? A parfay has layers, but it's a lot more pleasant than an onion, you know. That does remind me the Italian flag. The red represents the dragon that marries donkey, the green is Shrek. She's, is she red?

I thought she was purple. Hang on. Ah, shoot, you're right. She's purple. I don't know, dragon. I'm looking it up. She's sort of a purpleish red. We're both right.

She's kind of a mauve. Okay. I don't know. Yeah. Depends on the lighting. Sometimes she looks more red. Sometimes she looks more purple. Anyways, they had babies.

I think about it all the time, literally all the time. Like how do, how do their, how does their, how does their, chromosomes line up like what's going on there yeah much like the italian flag it's mysterious and surprising uh and apologies to italians that i said napoleon gave you your flag but he did he like a hundred percent did yeah you had a bunch of different regional flags that had nothing to do with what it is now, and then he put it in there. Excuse me. Thanks, that's the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, Neapolitan ice cream is a late-1800's American invention, drawing on the spimony of immigrants from southern Italy. Takeaway number two, the Neapolitan gift shop novelty called Astronaut Ice Cream has never been eaten in space, and kind of hides the more amazing fact that regular ice cream is edible in space. Takeaway number three, two different Neapolitan foods have a prominent and indebted. invented connection to the tricolor Italian flag. And then a ton of numbers about the history of ice cream, the history of Naples, the mythology of sirens, the Simpsons doing an amazing Neapolitan ice cream joke, and more. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fund.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic continues one of the takeaways and is also a fresh thing. It's fun legends about Neapolitan pizza and the Neapolitan volcano Mount Vesuvius. Visit sifpod.f.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows. and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio.

It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at Maximumfund.org. Key sources this week include an amazing history book called The Pursuit of Italy by Sir David Gilmore. Also wonderful food writing in the book, A Taste of Naples, Neapolitan Culture, Cuisine and Cooking. That's by award-winning food writer, Mark. Lina Speeler. Also leaned heavily on Tastingtable.com, and well-researched food writing there by writers Lisa Curran Matt, and Stephanie Friedman, and Lily McLean. And then more digital resources

from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the well-research blogtidium.com, the videos on Vox.com by Phil Edwards, and more. That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking. the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanabe people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere,

native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 75.

That's about the topic of maize, aka corn. Fun fact there, an architect trick the U.S. Congress into letting him build additional columns to prevent the capital building from falling down by theming the columns with corn designs. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

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