What’s life without a little mystery? There’s one less rolling around after historians finally identified a donated mystery machine that had been in storage for years.
The main pieces of the machine are about a century old and any staff who may have known more about the undocumented device were no longer around to ask. The historical society finally posted pictures and asked for any insights, which eventually led to solving the mystery.
The machine is in all likelihood a beaten biscuit maker, which was a type of dense baked good popular in the American south. Making them called for a long and labor-intensive process of pounding and working the dough, and the society says this machine was likely created by a fellow trying to help his aunt streamline her business, offloading the labor of working the dough to a machine.
The machine had no branding of any sort and lacked any identifying marks. Its purpose was doubtlessly obvious at the time, but no records remained and quite possibly none existed in the first place. Sound familiar? Perhaps someday our own undocumented projects and prototypes will mystify people. It’s certainly happened in the case of mysterious Roman dodecahedrons, which remain a head-scratching mystery.
Similar machines were used up until late 1980s for processing pine cones.
If you ask why, the answer is “To feed the squirrels.”
Anyone remember the TV show “The Liars Club”, 3 celebrities would posit a function fr some antique device and contestants had to guess who was telling the truth. I think it had another guy from Hogan’s Heroes.
Larry Hovis is the guy from Hogan’s Heroes who was on The Liar’s club a lot.
I call BS. I know the link to the Wikipedia article claims “beaten biscuit” is a Southern staple, but I’ve never heard of such a food. I’m nearly 60, born and raised in the South as well as ancestors on both sides. Never heard anything about “beaten biscuits.” The biscuits I know are kneaded briefly and with soft wheat flour. And I’ve never come across a “beaten biscuit” description or mention in any literature by Southern authors. Possibly someone can make a case they existed to the end of the 19th century, but, again, never heard my parents or grandparents (or great grandmother) mention this dubious food.
And why would you want to eat hardtack on dry land, and you’re not even starving to death? Seems masochistic
Same and I’ve lived all over the South, so it’s not just one area that missed out on them. They no longer exist and haven’t for over a hundred years, so that “are” needs to be a “were”.
Beaten biscuits are mentioned in one of the Nero Wolfe novels, written by Rex Stout. Wolfe is an overweight private detective who is also a gourmet. I think it was “Too Many Cooks” and was written around 1940. However, that’s the only time I’ve heard of it.
Respectfully, living in a place and having ancestry somewhere isn’t really definitive expertise to make this claim. A background in culinary history, or perhaps history of the south might be good starts.
Then you’ve never seen the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” or read the book of the same name. The movie shows beaten biscuits being made.
You’ve also never read “Fannie Flagg’s Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook,” which gives you a recipe and instructions for making beaten biscuits.
I lived in Berea Kentucky for a number of years and have several cookbooks with beaten biscuits in them. As per the Country Living Country mornings cookbook “These hard biscuits described as being somewhere between biscuits and hockey pucks in texture, are real southern cooking. Old recipes called for beating the dough with the back of an axe or mallet for 20-30 minutes.”
Holy moly a fellow Berean!
It’s apparently a Maryland thing.
It’s an Albany expression.
Hmmm. Steamed Beaten Biscuits!
With chocolate chips or?
After being beaten they would no longer be chocolate “chips”, but chocolate molecules, and after beating, the dough would be too hard to insert the chips.
It was explained to me once that beaten biscuits were a way of making a tender biscuit by breaking down the gluten strands in the dough and getting it to “air up” so it would puff when cooked and not be tough and leathery.
It was the sort of thing you did when the options at the time for leaven was yeast, hartshorn and “saleratus”. Harsthorn supposedly put off ammonia when cooked so it was best used in thin dry dough pastries, and salaratus was a 19th century thing.
the technical term for the allamagoosa up top is a “biscuit brake”
If I build a custom something for myself, I don’t need instructions. If you’re using it with permission, I gave you verbal instructions. If you’re using it without permission, I hope you injure yourself and break it.
And do not forget to use a magnet to find the lost bolts.
You don’t need a magnet.
The bolts are big enough that you’d notice them in the dough when you roll the dough flat. At the latest, you’d notice when you go to cut the biscuits from the rolled dough.
I think that our era is generating so much data and documentation, that any future historians will be happy to have some mysteries every now and then. :)
Oh all that is going to be gone in like 40 years max. Carve it on a rock if you really want it to last
everything I take care of or try to preserve seems to have a half-life of about 6 weeks as soon as I hand over responsibility :-/
You don’t get items from Amazon that often I take it. Plenty of mysteries available there.
True, I definitely try to avoid supporting the American Olidorks.
Should be a contest to build the most mysterious and enticing gadget with zero documentation and a very difficult to discern purpose. Then throw it in an old barn or garage or put it on ebay afterwards. That would be a fun one
Or find a site with a bunch of guys who like making things and a low sense of humor and organize as large of a distribution of them as you can to leave the archaeologists really scratching their heads as to why something can be so common and there be nothing mentioned about it anywhere.
Needs a 555
See Bonk Business Inc. Example of their product line:
https://www.bonkbusinessinc.com/raba-hiff
Mk VII** Turboencabulator.
Next week Handtool Rescue will post qa video of one he’s been restoring, complete with patent references, full instruction manual and even baked biscuits. …
I’ll admit to throwing random bolts into shipping crates. Knowing the install crew would be sleep deprived and running on Coffee, Mountain Dew and Dominoes pizza at the point they would find the odd bits.
Has anyone actually pulled a few bolts or parts and analyzed the crud underneath or in the holes? Any sort of mold or other growth? Look inside the motor for stray matter.
Any scaring, discolorations or scratches, dents that show signs of tray or pot or scraping for cleanup?
Yeah, we used to do that in our workshop, we’d wait for someone to wander away from the laptop, server, printer or whatever else they’d stripped down and drop a random bolt, spring, clip or other bit of loose hardware we had into the pot of removed bits.
Do you have a job at the IKEA factory? It seems that whatever cabinet/table/chair I buy there always has some parts leftover when I’m finished.
Well, better too many, than not enough.
That’s really odd, I don’t think I’ve ever had leftover bts from IKEA furniture, are you sure you’re reading all the pages of the instructions?
RTFI? Heresy I say
When I was restoring my first 2CV and my garage was full of all the parts, my brother said: “I’d like to throw in some extra screws just to make your head scratch when you have reassembled your car and there are bolts missing!”
My answer: “I have a box for extra bolts and I would throw them in with no extra thoughts on where they could have been!”
Benchy Boats will confuse the future archeologists so much. They appear within a decade all around the globe in various colors and sizes. The little boats are made with a very low quality method compared to other plastic objects found in same strata.
Is it a weird fertility cult involving boats that don’t even float??
Venus figurines actually look like that because those paleolithic clay extruders tended to be clumpy.
I don’t think it will be that confusing, as while a vast number of benchy will be printed and likely survive they don’t make up the bulk of 3d printed objects, so many other things would survive all clearly made with the same processes. And with so many clearly practical examples and the like I suspect it becomes rather clearer how little value they really hold, and with the construction method being so very obvious I suggest that they are in effect the ‘apprentice’ model or one of them becomes relatively apparent.
Could be wrong though, as who knows what will actually survive into the future.
I pity anyone who comes along to my home after I pass and starts pushing buttons or flipping switches.
The Roman dodecahedrons are knitting tools.
Perhaps. It doesn’t make sense to say it with certainty
mmmhhmm !biscuits! or bisquetes how they are called here , so jammy! You can eat one or two early in the morning with a good cup of coffee. delicious.
“Your Undocumented Project May Also Baffle People Someday”
Not my problem.
im just a dog chasing cars, i dont know what i would do if i ever caught one. so when somone asks what my projects are for, the answer is usually not a lot, considering most of them never got to the functional stage. the ones that did got unceremoniously thrown into a box and forgotten about.
Steady on there! My old next door neighbour makes a good living figuring out how things work and documenting them. Typically there’s a machine on a factory floor and some old guy named Joe presses a big red button on the machine at 4PM every day and nobody knows why; it’s what he’s always done. So let’s spare a thought for the professional documentation wonk!