An eye for miscellany

Did you know that an ostrich egg is as big as 24 hen eggs? That the highest grade of whole leaf Pekoe tea is Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe (SFTGFOP, for short)? That at the 16th century table, you didn’t “carve” a sturgeon, you “tranched” it, while you “reared” a goose and “splatted” a pike? (On the other hand, you “undertranched” a porpoise.)

Anybody with Google enough and time can put together a trivia book, but that doesn’t mean anybody else will buy it. Ben Schott, though, has the knack -- “Schott’s Original Miscellany” (2003) sold well enough to inspire a parody, “Shite’s Unoriginal Miscellany.”

Now he’s back with “Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany” (Bloomsbury, 2004: $14.95), delicious enough to appeal to anybody who ever needs to be tickled in a dull moment.

A miscellany is not something you want to sit down and read through. Its charm is that it’s a magpie’s nest of this and that, so you can pick it up anywhere, anytime, and find yourself diverted.

And if it includes things you’ve read before -- such as Robert Burns’ “Address to the Haggis,” the Scoville scale for measuring chile hotness and the fact that some people are allergic to fava beans -- well, you sort of expect that. It’s a miscellany, after all.

The measure of a good miscellany is that it includes trivia you wouldn’t have thought you’d find interesting.

Take the conventional meaning of a formal dinner invitation in Victorian England. “At 6 o’clock” meant dinner was served at 7 and “6 o’clock precisely” meant 6:30. If they really expected you to be there at 6 on the dot, they’d say, “No later than 6 p.m.”

Toblerone’s peaks

That’s a true glimpse of life in another time. The equivalent in our own day would probably be the distinctions some people make between “vegetarian,” “totally vegetarian” and “no animal products.”

And so it goes. I found myself oddly interested to know the number of peaks in Toblerone bars of different lengths, the diagram of who’s who in Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” what goes on Domino’s pizzas in various countries (in Japan, squid; in France, creme fraiche; in England, tuna and corn) and how to tap out “Check, please” in Morse code.

Did you know that the original vocalist on the “Chiquita Banana” jingle was Patti Clayton?

That the bars in Westminster Palace are exempt from the British liquor licensing laws? There are six bars in the building, and they stay open as long as the House of Commons is sitting. I see only two are open to journalists, which doesn’t seem nearly enough.

The point is, you or I could probably find any of this out for ourselves, if it occurred to us to ask the questions. A true miscellanist is somebody who asks them.

Schott is English and his book has a certain Anglocentric focus. He uses “cilantro” as a synonym for coriander, while in this country it means coriander leaves. He’s clearly an R-dropper, because he spells Hebrew words ending in “ah” as “ar” (“Baruch atar adonai elohenu,” indeed).

In England, cigars are traditionally part of a meal, so there’s cigar trivia among the food trivia, and Schott’s list of hangover cures lacks the all-American prairie oyster.

On the other hand, England has about a thousand years more history than we have, so it has lots more trivia.

Did you know that the Royal Welch Fusiliers are excused from toasting the Queen (except on St. David’s Day)?

That mashing your strawberries with a fork when you’re having strawberries and cream is a Cambridge custom, though now also followed at Oxford?

The ideal miscellanist would avoid commonplace errors, but Schott makes a few.

* “Saffron” does not come from an Arabic word meaning yellow, one tipoff being that “yellow” (safra) and “saffron” (za’faran) begin with different letters in Arabic.

* When Voltaire quipped, “The first month of marriage is the honeymoon, the second is the absinthe moon,” he was referring to the proverbial bitterness of the wormwood plant (absinthe, in French), not to the liqueur named absinthe, which was not invented until 14 years after he died.

* Marie-Antoinette did not say, “Let them eat cake.” She said, “Let them eat brioche,” and she wasn’t the first to say it -- it was a favorite bon mot in the French court.

Still, for a trivia book, this is a trivial proportion of errors.