Comments by "E Dennis" (@edennis8578) on "Townsends" channel.

  1.  @junbh2  The recipe was probably for two or three people. And yet, you would be amazed at how much people ate when all labor was manual labor. My husband's family has photos from the 1920s of the family at the dinner table on the farm; heaped high with food, including several pies and cakes. And they were all skinny. Fast forward three generations and off the farm, and my mil was still trying to lay a table like that, but even with twice as many people we couldn't eat a third of it and everybody was fat.
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  2. ​ @lijohnyoutube101 When I was an assistant editor for a history journal, we published an article on how life expectancy changed at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In Belgium, the life expectancy dropped from 27 years to 17 years when people moved into town. So, when you complain about not surviving modern life, think about having a life expectancy where, at best, you'll probably not survive to 30.
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  3. ​​​ @lijohnyoutube101 Here's another example. Barbara Hanawalt scoured the coroner's rolls of medieval England and found that the average marriage only lasted ten years because one spouse would be dead by then. In other words, if you lived long enough to marry, you had a 50/50 chance of dying before the age of 30-35. You would have six children, only half of whom would live to adulthood. That was the life of an average couple. I've seen theories that "many" people would have lived to be 70 or 80, but they don't explain what they mean by the word "many." One out of a thousand? One out of a hundred? Imo probably not, except in rare times of unusually good harvests and absence of epidemics.
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  4. I think the remark "kinda plain" was the cue to bring on the jam.
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  5. I was taught to cook them on high heat in cooking class when I was in high school. If you add just a touch of water to the eggs before whisking, they come out fluffy and soft even on high heat.
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