Category Archives: food

by Joel | 25 September 2025 · 6:41 pm

Weekend in Łódź (alliterative)

Poland’s large branch of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) held its annual convention in Łódź last weekend. So we took a local train up through the countryside to get there before noon on Friday. Our return trip after the conference ended on Sunday had to be routed through Warsaw because of heavier weekend ridership. We didn’t have reserved seats on the final leg to Kielce, but managed to find seats for the whole trip, which arrived about a half-hour late. That long train had started in Vilnius and would end in Krakow.

Łódź became an industrial powerhouse during the early 1800s, with many textile mills employing thousands of German and Jewish immigrants. The largest plant, Manufaktura, just across from our hotel, was founded by Izrael Poznański, whose family built a palace adjacent to it that now serves as the city’s history museum. The huge brick buildings of Manufaktura have been nicely restored and repurposed into a major market and entertainment district, while some of the older brick buildings nearby have been abandoned. (The Łódź ghetto was the second largest in Poland during World War II, and the last to be liquidated because it was so productive.) I spent a day exploring and taking photographs around Manufaktura and the city museum there while my wife attended the conference.

On Saturday, I explored the major pedestrian mall, Piotrkowska Street, which runs north-south, starting above Liberty Square (Plac Wolności), with its Tadeusz Kościuszko Monument, where a band was playing when I first passed. On my way back, I heard a preacher shouting loudly in English, with each utterance translated into Polish (somewhat less loudly). Signage showed that the city was that weekend celebrating Kocham Łódź (I Love Łódź) Festiwal Nadziei (Festival of Hope).

On Sunday, I explored the University of Łódź area near Fabryczna, where the huge central train and bus station is located. We had time between the conference and our train departure to enjoy a traditional meal at Imber Restaurant off Piotrkowska. The rustic Zalewajka soup and Łódź-style pickled herring on sour cream were wonderful.

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by Joel | 16 August 2025 · 1:22 am

Packet Ships with Livestock

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 146-147:

The scene aboard the Washington Irving is dramatically brought to life in Some Famous Sailing Ships, written in 1928 by Richard C McKay, grandson of the boat-builder:

One cannot help admiring the daring that impelled Enoch Train to start his celebrated line of sailing packets and to commission Donald McKay to build them expressly for the trans-Atlantic passenger, freight and mail service. He had to contend not only with the keen rivalry of the New York packet lines, but the Lords of the Admiralty (in London) had charge of the Royal mails and sometime previously had contracted for the conveyance of these with Mr Samuel Cunard.

He then brought into existence buildings required to house the live-stock for supplying the cabin table, the most important being the cow house where, after a short run ashore on the marshes at the end of each voyage, a well-seasoned animal of the snug-made Alderney breed, chewed the cud in sweet content.

An animal farm might be a practical option aboard one of Cunard’s early steamships, which could proceed with reasonably level decks, but keeping livestock aboard a sailing ship was a tricky business.
However, as Enoch Train was forced to compete with Cunard’s steamships, live animals were kept aboard his packet ships to supplement supplies. As McKay points out:

Preserved milk was unknown in those times; and the officers of a passenger ship would rather have gone to sea without a doctor, to say nothing of a parson, than without a cow and some nanny-goats. The ship’s cow and her health was always a most important matter and it is related that on one occasion, after a long spell of very bad weather, one of these creatures fell off in her supply of milk and was brought around again by a liberal supply of nourishing stout, wisely prescribed for her by the ship’s doctor.

Pigs always proved a thriving stock on a ship farm. Next to the pig, goats were the most useful stock. These animals soon made themselves at home on shipboard; they had good sea legs and were blessed with an appetite that nothing in the way of tough fibre was too much for, from an armful of shavings to an old newspaper or logbook. It was not, however, always practical to turn in sheep to feed with pigs at sea, for the last-named animals were apt to develop a taste for a good live leg of mutton after a few weeks afloat.

Truly in those days a ship was more like a small bit of the world afloat than it is now. One can imagine the noisy confusion that must have reigned aboard one of these packets on sailing day. Ducks, geese and poultry in general always sympathised with excitement near them while pigs and even sheep, thrown together for the first time, had a noisy way of their own. At intervals, even the old cow bemoaned her lot in life.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, food, migration, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 13 August 2025 · 3:03 am

U.S. Aid for Ireland, 1847

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 54-56:

No fewer than 5,000 crossings are estimated to have carried the million Irish Famine emigrants westwards over the Atlantic. Yet a single passage in the opposite direction has achieved great significance historically. This was the voyage of the Jamestown, a well-armed man-of-war and one of only six sloops in the American navy, transformed overnight into a merchant vessel on a mission of mercy.

The winter months of 1846 right through to the following spring were bitterly cold, with unusually heavy snowfalls, and the full extent of the suffering in Ireland, especially during the early months of 1847, was never fully or widely appreciated around the world, especially in England where the plight of the Irish achieved neither recognition nor sympathy. The greatest help came from the United States: the recent emigrant arrivals carried the news with them and each one had a personal story which bore testimony to the hopeless situation in every corner of their homeland. Months before the first of the coffin ships sailed, a wave of relief organizations and meetings broke across America. Ships from Newark, Philadelphia and New York sailed before the spring arrived for Cork, Londonderry and Limerick, carrying some clothing but mostly food.

The Quakers Society of Friends were the first large-scale organizers of relief for Ireland, and when the American Vice-President chaired a huge public meeting in Washington on February 9th, they urged that every city, town and village should hold a meeting so that a large national contribution might be raised and forwarded with all practicable dispatch to the scenes of the suffering. Just before that meeting, the government in London announced they would pay the freight charges on all donations of foodstuffs to Ireland.

Washington matched this by stating that no tolls would be charged on roads or canals for goods on their way to Ireland, and several independent railway companies promised to carry suitably labelled packages for free. Cash came in from all sides, including a noteworthy contribution of US $170 dollars from the Choctaw Indian Tribe. Suddenly, available shipping for the eastern crossing of the Atlantic became scarce, and another crowded February meeting, this time in Boston, heard that Congress had been petitioned that one of the ships of war now lying in Boston Harbour, be released to sail for Ireland freighted with provisions.

Reaction in the capital was swift. We need to remember that at this time America was heavily engaged in war against Mexico. Congress voted on March 8th that the USS Jamestown in Boston and the USS Macedonian in New York be released from service, their armaments removed and assigned to the Irish Relief Committee in each city who would arrange for a civilian captain and crew to sail these ships to Ireland with relief supplies.

Three weeks later, the Jamestown set sail. The sloop, which was 157 feet long, 1,000 tons and normally carried 22 guns, was now commanded by Captain Robert Bennet Forbes, a well-known Bostonian. By May 16th he was back home, fully a month before the Macedonian, a frigate of 1,700 tons with 44 guns and buffeted by all sorts of political problems, could leave New York.

Loading had begun in Boston on St Patrick’s Day; the Labourers’ Aid Society composed almost entirely of native Irishmen, stowed all the cargo without drawing pay. If the departure of the Jamestown was seen as such a triumph in America, imagine how she was greeted as she dropped anchor after a voyage of only 15 days in the harbour of Cove, close to Cork City.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, disease, food, labor, Mexico, migration, military, nationalism, U.S.

by Joel | 12 August 2025 · 6:07 am

Coffin Ships of 1847

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 41-44:

The potato crop had failed again, so it was not surprising that the direct shipping trade picked up dramatically, and 1847 lives in the memory as the worst year of the Famine, the year of the coffin ships. Thousands of passengers who suffered in these few months were not willing emigrants, they had not voluntarily given up their homes to seek a better life. They were the evicted tenants of wealthy landlords, sent out of Ireland aboard ageing ships on cheaper fares, the victims of landlord clearance.

This was really a phenomenon particular to the Canadian sailings and various estimates of the number of deaths have been voiced over the years. They can only be estimates, as so many died unreported on board ship and by no means all the burials on land could be recorded. In 1847 the emigration to Canada swelled enormously for several reasons. Considerably more than 100,000 set out for the Canadian ports, as compared with 43,000 in 1846, and began arriving as early in the spring as the melting ice would allow. The death toll was similarly out of all proportion: the most conservative estimates show that around 30,000 were struck down with typhus. One third of passengers managed to survive but there were at least 20,000 deaths, over 5,000 at sea, and 8,000 in Quebec and 7,000 in Montreal.

…

Typhus is a fever, one of the most contagious diseases in existence, and the conditions endured in almost every facet of the emigrants’ lives, in the weeks and days leading up to departure, on the ocean, detained on board awaiting inspection and then in the quarantine centres, were ideal for its survival and propagation. Workhouses, lodging houses, ship’s holds without any form of sanitation, hospital wards and tents were perfect, and the typhus spread like wildfire. In 1847 it was called ship fever but before then it was known as hospital fever, gaol fever or camp fever. The microorganism is carried in the faeces of body lice and fleas which dries into a fine dust. The dust can be absorbed through the eyes or by being inhaled, and even people who were fit, healthy and clean, and not living in overcrowded conditions, went down with typhus.

Avoiding typhus was difficult indeed, and some emigrants contracted the disease at home before they travelled. In the first half of the year 300,000 Irish were crammed on to tiny vessels to reach Liverpool, where they slept as many as 20 to a room in boarding houses while awaiting passage, and there is no doubt that the fever started to spread in that environment. Residents of Liverpool suffered too, and in May alone, 1,500 cases were reported; the local landlords were as much to blame as the recently arrived Irish who then had to spend weeks at sea, jammed together in a ship’s hold, on their way to Canada.

The body lice which spread the fever are easily dealt with today by fumigation but the disease was a killer 150 years ago, with the surrounding problems. Doctors, nurses and priests in Canada, working in the quarantine hospitals and immigration sheds, died trying to save the lives of their new patients.

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by Joel | 11 August 2025 · 5:53 am

Irish Famine Destinations

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 30-36:

The Irish arriving on America’s eastern seaboard usually settled in lodgings close to the port, especially in New York where a staggering average of 300 were disembarking daily, every day for six years: on some days more than 1,000 would arrive on a single tide. As we know, this was the favoured destination of the Irish exodus, which immediately raised its status to that of the busiest port in the world. Whether their original intention had been to move on to other cities or out on to the plains and lush farmlands, to head for the frontier or to join the Gold Rush, the majority of the Irish emigrants stayed right there, in New York.

…

The exodus to Canada was different: the vast majority moved on. Though many thousands sailed to the colony known as British North America, their true destination was the United States. Canada was cold, sparsely inhabited, and many of its people spoke only French. Job prospects were poor, and worse still, to remain there meant a continued existence under the hated British flag. Boston had only a tenth of New York’s direct traffic but its Irish population was swollen by the masses coming from Canada.

Many had sworn an oath to settle north of the border, in return for a cheaper Atlantic passage to Halifax or Saint John, and, if they were sailing into Quebec, a free place on a barge to carry them up the St Lawrence River to Montreal. English politicians and civil servants were anxious to populate the country and subsidized fares as low as £2 (US $11), were made available. Many thousands of families were not given a say in the matter. Canada was the destination for destitute tenants on the huge estates in Ireland, cleared by their landlords, who paid the fares and chartered the ships, and the passage to Canada was far more economical than to the United States.

Once they landed, however, a great many emigrants went south. If they had a little money they took the lake steamers, small coasters and schooners, or whatever means of transport was available. If not, they walked across the border. For six months of the year the larger Canadian ports and the St Lawrence seaway were ice-bound and closed but even in the warmer half of the year, the great majority of Ireland’s Famine emigrants an – estimated 200,000 – merely used those ports as staging posts.

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by Joel | 10 August 2025 · 6:13 am

Voyage of the Perseverence, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

…

The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

…

In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

…

The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

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by Joel | 9 August 2025 · 1:56 pm

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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by Joel | 10 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age….

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, disease, economics, food, Germany, migration, Netherlands, Poland

by Joel | 5 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland’s Italian Queen

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 145-146:

Much of this spread of Western ideas, art, and architectural styles took place during the reign of the last two Jagiellonian monarchs. The first of these was Zygmunt I (1506–1548). Although not the youngest of Kazimierz Jagiellończyk’s sons (Fryderyk, the cardinal, was younger than he was), Zygmunt was the youngest sibling to ascend to the throne. It is somewhat paradoxical, thus, that he is referred to as Zygmunt the Old—a sobriquet that reflected the longevity of his rule as well as his life, not to mention the fact that his son and heir was his namesake. Whereas his predecessor (and elder brother Alexander) took as his bride the daughter of a Muscovite grand duke, Zygmunt first turned his sights southward and married a Transylvanian Zapolya. (This, after all, was the brother who had hoped to rule nearby Moldavia.) This did not mean, however, that the king was embroiled in the battle with the Ottomans. Rather, he made peace with these fearsome neighbors, thus putting an end to any sort of Jagiellonian imperial overstretch in the south. After his first wife died, the nearly fifty-year-old Zygmunt was persuaded to look westward for a bride. Bona Sforza of Milan became queen of Poland in 1518.

The Milanese princess facilitated the Poles’ embrace of major culinary as well as cultural contributions, provided by her Italian contacts and retinue—from Renaissance architectural ideas through to the introduction of Italian vegetables. Even today, the bouquet garni that goes into soup—comprised of carrots, parsnips, onions, celery root, leeks, parsley—is referred to in Polish as włoszczyzna (meaning “something Italian,” Włochy being the term for Italy). Yet she did much more than that. Brought up in the heady world of Italian politics, Bona not only bore her husband the requisite children (including a son and heir); she also proved tenacious in her efforts to strengthen both her husband’s position within his kingdom and that of the dynasty. Her perceived interference in the politics of Poland-Lithuania, naturally, was not appreciated by the rank-and-file Polish nobility, who thought her husband allied too closely with the state’s powerful magnates. An increasingly vociferous movement for the “Execution of the Laws” (by which they meant the implementation of previously enacted legislation that would benefit the lesser nobility) shows that rank-and-file nobles feared the rise of absolutism in the country.

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Filed under art, democracy, education, food, Hungary, Italy, language, migration, nationalism, Poland

by Joel | 3 June 2025 · 4:39 pm

North Vietnam in 1955

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 797-800:

For Ho and the DRV, the economic problems at year’s end were overwhelming. Most factories in the north were shuttered, and many of the owners had left the country. In Hanoi, foreign journalists reported that scores of restaurants and shops had gone out of business, while in the port city of Haiphong only one of thirty French-owned factories remained open. Fuel for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were idle. Even more pressing, rice production continued to decline, and floods in December along the central coast raised the specter of major famine. The price of the commodity in the markets skyrocketed. And whereas Tonkin had traditionally been able to rely on the more fertile Cochin China for much of its food, now the Saigon government blocked economic exchange between the two zones. In 1955, only emergency rice imports from Burma, financed by the Soviet Union, prevented a recurrence of the disastrous famine of 1945. Nor did it help the economic recovery that many urban professionals and shopkeepers and Catholics—fearing what Communism would bring—fled to the south.

At first, the government moved cautiously as it grappled with these problems. To reassure well-to-do farmers and the urban bourgeoisie, it initially vowed to respect private property and religious freedom. To Sainteny and members of the ICC, it continued to pledge support for the Geneva Accords and a desire to maintain harmonious relations with neighboring countries. But much as in China, where an initial policy of moderation in 1949–50 was followed by much harsher measures, officials in short order adopted more radical approaches.

The centerpiece was an ambitious land reform program first implemented in liberated areas of the north in late 1953 and now expanded to cover the whole of North Vietnam. The aim was to alleviate food shortages (the 1945 famine was still fresh in the mind) and break the power of the large landowners—to bring about, as the regime put it, equality for the greatest number among the rural masses—and over the long term it achieved considerable results in this regard. But the cost was immense. Instead of offering incentives to the people to spur production, doctrinaire officials categorized people in five groups, from “landlord” to “farm worker,” then sent platoons of cadres to arraign the landlords and other “feudal elements” in what were called “agricultural reform tribunals.” In reality, however, the distinction between social categories was not always clear, and many families of modest means saw their land seized. Small landholders were classified as large ones. Panic set in. Fearful of arbitrary indictment, peasants trumped up charges against their neighbors, while others accused their rivals of imaginary crimes. Anyone suspected of having worked for the French was subject to execution as a “traitor.” Others were condemned merely for showing insufficient zeal and ardor for the Viet Minh.

…

Executions became commonplace, though the scale of the killing is still unclear—estimates have run as high as 50,000 victims, but more credible assessments put the figure between 3,000 and 15,000. Thousands more were interned in forced labor camps. Most of the victims were innocent, at least of the stated charges. Ho Chi Minh, it seems, knew about the arbitrary persecution and violence but did little to prevent it. When Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nam, an important landlord and Viet Minh sympathizer, was condemned to death by a people’s tribunal and executed, Ho expressed frustration but did little more. “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower,” he reportedly declared, “and you, you allowed her to be shot!” Later, on February 8, 1955, Ho used the occasion of a conference on the land reform to condemn the use of torture and humiliation: “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric.… It is absolutely forbidden to use physical punishment.”

Some did not get the message, or did and ignored it. The brutal actions continued. In August 1956, Ho Chi Minh issued a public acknowledgment that “errors have been committed,” and he promised that “those who have been wrongly classified as landlords and rich peasants will be correctly reclassified.” Other officials dutifully echoed his admission, disclosing that even loyal Viet Minh veterans had been wrongly tried and executed. Truong Chinh, general secretary of the party and a key proponent of the program, was relieved of his post, as were other senior officials, including the minister of agriculture. The tribunals were ended. These measures helped reduce the tensions but not fully—late in the year in coastal Nghe An province, where Ho was born and raised, farmers in one district openly rioted, requiring the dispatch of government troops to restore order. In Hanoi, meanwhile, intellectuals chafed under what they saw as authoritarian state cultural policies.