One Cup and the Coffee Houses of Istanbul
A small Iznik coffee cup from around 1600 is the way into the Ottoman coffee house: who went, what they talked about, why the sultan tried to ban it, and how coffee reached Europe.
A Winter in New France, Starting with Snowshoes
0:00 / 1:15
This episode is for members. Sign up free or log in to hear the whole episode.
Show notes
Snowshoes and an estate inventory
When a Montreal fur trader died in 1694, the notary listed everything he owned, down to the snowshoes. Daniel uses that inventory, and a pair of snowshoes of the same type in a museum collection, to reconstruct a winter in New France from the inside.
- Who made the snowshoes and the trade relationship behind them
- Heating a house at minus thirty with wood and nothing else
- Food from the inventory: salt pork, peas, eels and what was missing
- The debts, the credit and why spring mattered
- What the inventory does not say about his wife
The inventory transcription is linked on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Ordinary Centuries. I am Daniel Fortier, I spent ten years as a museum conservator, and I believe you learn more about the past from a worn spoon than from a crown. Each episode we start with one object and work outward to a whole life. Today the object is a pair of snowshoes. In 1694 a fur trader died in Montreal, and the notary listed everything he owned, from his house to his snowshoes. From that list we can rebuild his winter: a house heated with wood alone at minus thirty, meals of salt pork and dried peas and eels, credit from the merchant that had to be repaid in furs by spring, and the Indigenous craftspeople who made the snowshoes and whose names the inventory never gives. We also ask what it leaves out. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
Open as text