The Birth of Actuarial Science and Life Insurance, Pt. 1

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So insurance is part
of daily life for most people. You use it to

(00:21):
help you manage financial laws, at least theoretically. You pay
an insurance company for a policy. If something bad happens,
that policy pays you out again. All of this theoretically
and ideally one can hope that right policy will pay
out right. The insurance company, in broad terms, makes money
by pooling that money of its policyholders that it collects.

(00:43):
It creates an investment portfolio, and then they use that
to make money. Both sides of this arrangement are trying
to manage their risk throughout, which brings us to actuarial science,
which is of course all about calculating risk, risk of injury, illness, death,
risk of life, market shifts, and financial outcomes. And I

(01:03):
find actuary science fascinating, although sometimes slightly depressing, because it
kind of takes all of the rich tapestry of life
and boils it down to numbers and tables and formulas.
But our reality is so deeply shaped by these things.
So it got me thinking recently, where did these practices start?
Because it's the beginning of the year. A lot of
people's insurance. If you're like covered by group insurance with

(01:26):
your work, sometimes those change at the beginning of the year,
or your policy just changes, even if it's like with
the same company. And I just have been thinking lately
about it sounds so simple, like, wow, who does all
the math on this? Yeah? Right, But somebody has to

(01:46):
do all the math on that. So we're talking about
actuary science and insurance and where these things kind of
got their start in the sense that we know them today,
and just as a level set, we're doing a two parter,
but it's still just raising the surface of all of this.
If you start looking for information on actuarial science history

(02:06):
or insurance history, you will realize they are about two
kajillion papers written every year about it's that's the real number.
I just made up, two kajillion. So we're trying to
like just kind of touch on an idea of how
we got to the point that we're at today, and

(02:26):
we'll talk about some of the more interesting jumps forward
as well as some stumbling blocks to this whole thing.
That is so much of a part of our lives.
And before we even get started, we have a brief
note about vocabulary because the words assurance ass you are
a NCEE and insurance I N s U are a

(02:48):
ncee both come up in this episode. A lot of
times these are used interchangeably. I like people use the
word insurance for both of these a lot of the time.
But there are differences, Yeah, there are differences between these two. Primarily,
assurance deals with something that is definitely going to happen,
like death. We're all eventually going to face that moment,

(03:15):
except nandor. Insurance, on the other hand, deals with things
that might happen, like a car crash or flood damage.
So insurance also covers a term, and that's why you
have to renew your policy, say once a year or
every six months or at some other interval. The generalized

(03:37):
usage of these words has made this distinction really fuzzy,
like in the case of whole life insurance. Because whole
life insurance includes a cash savings element that the policyholder
can use before their death, it is called insurance even
though there is also a payout portion of the policy
that happens when the inevitable end of the policyholder's life arrives,

(04:02):
so that might be considered assurance with an A if
the policy weren't set at a specific term, And in
casual conversation today, most people would probably use the word insurance,
as I said, even when talking about things that are
technically assurance. So we wanted to just level set a
little bit because most of the policies and organizations that

(04:23):
we're talking about today are really focused on what we
would probably called life insurance, but in the historical record
they are called assurance with an A. Yes, and some
of that is we'll talk about assurance societies and how
those are a little bit different. But London is generally

(04:43):
recognized as the place where life insurance was born, and
from there it spread throughout the globe via trade. But
even before there was insurance or actuary tables, there were
bills of mortality and these were weekly reports issued by
parish clerks in London that list, most did the numbers
of deaths in a given perish and their causes, and

(05:04):
this practice began in the sixteenth century as a way
to track disease. In sixteen sixty five, John Bell Clerk
to the company of parish clerks compiled a book titled
London's Remembrancer, or a True accompt of every particular week's
Christenings and mortality in all the years of pestilence, within
the cognizance of the Bills of Mortality, being eighteen years

(05:26):
taken out of the Register of the Company of Parish
Clerks of London, and together with several observations on the
said years and some of their precedent and subsequent years,
published for general satisfaction and for prevention of false papers.
And in this he wrote about the Bills of Mortality quote,
the Bill of Mortality is a very great use and necessity,

(05:47):
and therefore not to be slighted, since it so much
conduceth to the health of the city and preservation of
the members thereof, in that it giveth the general notice
of the plague and a particular act of the places
which are therewith infected, to the end such places may
be shunned and avoided. So the years of the publications

(06:09):
of these they were not unbroken, but they were issued
into the mid nineteenth century by some of the parishes.
But though these were counts, they didn't really analyze the
information in any kind of way, and things like ages
and sex weren't usually included. Additionally, they came under a
lot of criticism due to how they were collected and

(06:30):
how the data was collected. This job normally fell to
elderly ladies who were willing to help out the parish clerks,
and while Bell defended this practice due to the fact
that the women were selected by men of good judgment,
there's some layers of bias here, but this does mean
that they're just There wasn't really a strict methodology in

(06:53):
place for how this data was gathered, so the numbers
cannot be counted on to be accurate. Yeah, it's kind
of like if someone told Tracy and I both like, hey,
go through your neighborhood and get account of how many
people died this year. The odds are really good. We
would approach that a little bit differently. And so even

(07:14):
though you may have these like two numbers or even
numbers with notations that you combine, they don't necessarily refer
to the same things. So it's a little bit tricky.
You could have a whole group of competent, detail oriented
people not doing the thing the same way, right, and
one of the earliest steps in the development of actuarial

(07:37):
science is from what to me was a somewhat surprising source.
That's a man more associated with astronomy, and that is
Sir Edmund Halle. Halle has come up on the show before,
so we're not going to rehash all of his details,
but in brief, he was born on November eighth, sixteen
fifty six, and he was still a child when Charles
the Second granted the charter that established the Royal Society,

(07:59):
So he grew up in kind of an interesting time Scientifically,
he attended Queen's College and he was encouraged into astronomy
through astronomer Royal John Flamsteed. Hallie published his Star Catalog
in sixteen seventy eight and was elected into the Royal
Society that same year. He famously identified the cycle of
a comet that would eventually bear his name. Within the Society,

(08:23):
he became close friends with Robert Hook and Christopher Wren,
and he also began his association with Isaac Newton. He
later edited Principia for Newton. The work, though, that makes
him Germaine to today's topic is his Population Table, which
was published in sixteen ninety three. This table was made
using data from the city of Breslau, Germany. Today that's

(08:46):
in Poland, in the city now known as Vortslav, And
it's a little more than three hundred and fifty kilometers
or two hundred and twenty miles west of Warsaw. This
table is sometimes called a life table. It's sometimes called
a death table. I feel like modern scientists and researchers
have all agreed that it really should just be called
a population table. It gathered together the simple information based

(09:10):
on parish records of how many people were alive at
each age. Hallie gives specific numbers of people for ages
one to eighty four, and then for people eighty five
to one hundred years old. He kind of lumps them
in as one group in a summary column, and that
groups all of the population of the city by seven,
So you'll have the group that is ages one to seven,

(09:31):
eight to fourteen, fifteen to twenty one, et cetera. And
this basic table shows exactly what you would think. As
the number related to age advances, the number of people
surviving at that age goes down. So while the Breslau
record shows one thousand infants under the age of one.
It shows a total of one hundred seven people living

(09:54):
that year between the ages of eighty five and one
hundred altogether, and the total samples the population was thirty
four thousand. So if you're wondering why a London based
mathematician and astronomer was using data from a German city, uh,
it's because they were a lot more mediculous with the
record keeping than most other European cities were. Additionally, this

(10:18):
is a place with low rates of immigration and immigration,
so it was a good model of population over time
for this one particular group. Part of that degree of
isolation came from the fact that Breslau had a primarily
Lutheran population at a time when it was under the
rule of the Habsburg monarchy, which was Catholic, So it

(10:40):
makes sense that the community there just it kept mostly
to itself. We're going to pause here for a quick
sponsor break, and when we're back we'll talk about the
ways that Hallie thought that his table could be used.

(11:01):
So Hallie's table, as we described it may sound pretty basic,
but Hallie used this data to make some important determinations.
For one, he noticed that the numbers of births and
deaths were pretty comparable in each year that he looked at,
which ranged from sixteen eighty seven to sixteen ninety one.
He also showed various ways that such a table could

(11:22):
be useful in the paper that he wrote to accompany it,
in the Royal Society's publication Philosophical Transactions. He noted that
if you subdivide the population information by gender, you can
assess how many men might be available to fight in
military conflicts, taking into account their age, although he just
divided by two to estimate the number of men versus women. Again,

(11:45):
this sounds pretty simplistic and it is. But a paper
on Halle's tables by James E. Sieka, which I hope
I'm pronouncing correctly, published in the Journal of Legal Economics
in two thousand and eight, noted that Halle came up
with the number of zero point two six as the
proportion of the Breslau population that could potentially serve in
the military, and that if you use that same calculation

(12:07):
with the population of the US when that two thousand
and eight paper was written, the number doesn't come out
all that different. It's zero point two four. Because Halle
was mathematically establishing some pretty basic truths about the makeup
of human population groups. His table has remained relevant in
some uses into the twenty first century. Halle also calculated

(12:27):
survival odds at various ages of life, as well as
chances of survival past certain ages, and then he makes
the important note that he suggests that life insurance could
be regulated based on these statistics. In nineteen forty four,
statistician Irwin Ferrin called Halle's table quote the first real

(12:49):
step in the art of life measurement. There had been
another simpler table recorded before Halle's. This was compiled by
statistician John Grant in sixteen oh six. Writing about Grant's
table in nineteen thirty eight, statistician and epidemiologist Major Greenwood
summarized its existence and lack of detail in the Royal

(13:09):
Society Journal of the History of Science, as follows quote
in the first edition of Grant's famous Natural and Political Observations,
mentioned in a following index, and made upon the Bills
of Mortality, Grant included a short table reporting to give
the survivors of one hundred quick conceptions at the end
of six sixteen, twenty six, thirty six, forty six, fifty six,

(13:32):
sixty six seventy six and eighty six years. The bills
of mortality in Grant's time did not record the ages
at death, and he reached the second industry at in
his table, that is sixty four survivors at the age
of six, by a rough classification of the named causes
of death into those which wholly affected children thrush, convulsion, rickets,

(13:56):
et cetera, and those which he thought about half small
swinepos et cetera. Affected children below the age of six.
The remaining figures are conjectural. Some statisticians hold that Grant
had discovered the principle that, under certain conditions, a survivorship
table could be computed from a summation of deaths and

(14:16):
age groups. Others believe that the table is a mere guess,
and not even Grant's, but a contribution to his book
from his friend William Petty. There is no doubt that
as an instrument of computation, the table is of little value.
So while Grant was onto the idea of measuring mortality,

(14:37):
he wasn't really rigorous enough about the data to create
something that had the kind of longevity that Hallie's table did.
Hallie's table has been studied and analyzed and written about
for centuries, including reconstruction of the methods that researchers believe
he used to compile it. It never seems to stop
fascinating statisticians, in part because Halle manipulated some of the

(15:01):
numbers in ways that were intended to smooth out the
data for easier consumption by non mathematicians and also just
make it all work a little better. So this included
things like rounding numbers. Since he was using an average
of data collected from a five year period, there would
be times where the average would come out to include decimals,

(15:22):
and you can't have zero point five of a person,
so Halle rounded out. In twenty ten, David R. Bellhouse
noted in his paper A New Look at Halle's Lifetable
that this need to round may explain why Halle grouped
people in seven year increments, because the numbers just worked
out best that way. But those roundings and the logic
of the groupings isn't included in Halle's writings. He hasn't

(15:46):
really notated why he did things or when he did them,
so the granularity of the data is lost unless someone
goes back to the letters from Breslau, which included the
population data which some people have done. Life insurance was
already in play well before Hallie made this table. In
eighteen eighty four, Carnelius Walford, who was an actuary and

(16:09):
historian of the field, wrote a paper on the history
of life assurance in the UK, and that paper's opening
summarizes the evolution of the field to the time of
his writing, and it lays out the phases that assurance
had been through in its development. Quote. Life assurance is
the compound growth, first of our commercial necessities, aided largely

(16:31):
by a love of speculation, and later of our progressive civilization.
For the former, rough and ready means of estimation were
resorted to. For the latter, a long and elaborate course
of progressive investigation was needed. The development of the business
has extended over some three or four centuries, perhaps more.
It has passed through three distinct phases. One the experimental period,

(16:55):
two the speculative or transitional period, three the period of
scientific exactitude. These periods, of course more or less overlap
each other, but they each possess very marked distinctions. So
there is a little bit of speculation about types of
insurance or assurance that could or could not be considered
life insurance, going all the way back to ancient Greece

(17:17):
and Babylon, although such things are mentioned in writing. Ever
since money entered into the human timeline, people have sought
ways to deal with the problem of that money running out,
specifically when a family breadwinner passed. This issue was sometimes
addressed as a public responsibility through things like charitable funds
that were intended to be dispersed to the bereft right,

(17:39):
so think things like widow's funds or even poorhouses or
orphans funds, But those were obviously less than ideal and
often stigmatized. But people who provided for their families eventually
started to want to take a more proactive approach to
ensuring that their responsibilities were taken care of, even after
they had gone those with the means to accrue savings,

(18:02):
they could easily just leave that to their loved ones.
But for people who didn't have a lot of extra money,
or had some but not what they felt like was enough,
that wasn't really feasible. So various deals have been made
throughout history to try to set up some sort of
safety net. So we're talking primarily about life insurance today,
but of course, in a lot of cases insurance was

(18:24):
not about people's lives but the loss of goods. These
arrangements originated primarily in maritime scenarios where the risk of
losing cargo was high. There are references to arrangements that
might be considered maritime insurance, going all the way back
to Babylon's Code Haimarabi. The oldest insurance policy on goods

(18:45):
that we know of was made in thirteen fifty and
was financed by a man named Leonardo Cataneo to cover
a shipment of wheat that was traveling from Tunis to Sicily.
Cadineo would pay out if the goods were lost at sea,
but that if they made to port as planned, he
would be repaid the value with interest. So he was
basically getting paid to assume the risk of losing money,

(19:09):
and that arrangement was like a lot at the time,
made between individuals. There weren't any assurance societies or insurance companies.
Yet there've also been insurance arrangements that were made to
cover the loss of enslaved people by their enslavers, although
those arrangements were more about recovering the value of humans
who were perceived as property rather than lives, so they

(19:32):
aren't generally classified as life insurance. Marine insurance on cargo
was pretty common by the fifteen hundreds, but life insurance
is a little harder to establish because there are just
a lot more variables. So the Walford paper that we
mentioned a moment ago makes the case that the experimental
phase of life assurance, which we don't really have a

(19:52):
lot of primary sources for, would have tied into the
marine industries, just as insurance on cargo had. Walford explains,
would make assurance deals quote against death or captivity during
the prosecution of their voyage, in ensuring merchants against captivity
by pirates, for in early times merchants accompanied their maritime ventures.

(20:14):
The mode of undertaking these risks was by individual underwriters
taking certain defined portions thereof at so much percent premium.
There were also types of insurance that benefited not a
person's next of kin should they die at sea, but
their creditors. Sometimes those were taken out by the creditor.
On the flip side of that, sometimes travelers lent money

(20:37):
that they would not need on their travels to people
at their point of origin. And that money would be
collected with interest when they returned, but then if they
didn't return, those loans became sort of a payout. The
first life insurance policy that's normally cited as such was
a term life insurance policy taken out to cover the

(20:59):
life of Willie Gibbons on June eighteenth, fifteen eighty three.
So he paid a small sum, reportedly thirty pounds on
a policy that would pay four hundred pounds if he
died within twelve months of issue. Gibbons's age at the
time the policy was issued is not known, but he
died on May twenty ninth, fifteen eighty four. The underwriters,

(21:22):
who were a group of businessmen who thought they would
win what was essentially a bet, tried to argue that
a month is twenty eight days, and then, using that calculation,
Gibbons had lived for twelve months. That argument did not
fly in court, and the group was ordered to pay.
The business community got a little trepidacious about life insurance

(21:44):
for a bit after this. Yeah, there were still deals
being made, but it had this gone the way that
those underwriters wanted, there probably would have been a bigger
explosion in life insurance earlier on the first line of
that policy contract on William Gibbons, had read Richard Martin,
Citizen and aldermen of London, doth make assurance and causeth

(22:06):
himself to be assured upon the natural life of William Gibbons, Citizen,
Insulter of London. Four and during the space of twelve
months next ensuing after the underwriting hereof by the assurers,
hereafter subscribed fully to be complete and ended. If you're
wondering where the idea came from for a one year
term for the policy on William Gibbons, it was from

(22:28):
the rules set forth by the Office of Assurances at
the Royal Exchange in London. That office was established in
fifteen seventy five as a place where people could engage
in what were called public assurances, meaning that the agreements
were made there on the premises and paperwork was filed
so that if there were any arguments about how the

(22:49):
business went, it could be legally contested. And the office's
regulation stated that you could only insure a person's life
for one year at a time, and part of the
reasoning was that up to that point, mutual contribution societies
which anyone could pay into and have some sort of
payout to their next of kin when they died. Were
operating in a really precarious manner where all members, no

(23:11):
matter how old or young, were being admitted under the
same agreements. So if a lot of elderly people joined
one year, it meant that there was a greater likelihood
that the funds would significantly be depleted in the following years,
and there was not a guarantee that members who joined
when they were younger would benefit from their longer membership.
This was part of what is considered the speculative or

(23:34):
transitional period of insurance. There just wasn't enough scientific data
to really assess the situation and make value judgments on
the way that benefits were being managed. That one year
limit meant that one or both parties could reconsider the
agreement and its value and risks regularly, even though they
didn't really have the math in place yet. In just

(23:55):
a moment, we will talk about the way literal dice
rolls played into all of this, but first we will
pause for a sponsor break. Several things happened in the
gap between the Gibbons Policy and the Hallie Table that

(24:17):
started to form a more coherent picture of how insurance
could actually work as a business that was a little
less like a gamble. For one thing, public sanitation improved,
which in turn improved health and life expectancy. The Bills
of Mortality started to be seen as a data point
for predictability models, although there still weren't any formulas in

(24:37):
use to really plug that data into. It's more like
just pattern recognition. Definitely more of a ViBe's and forecasting
situation at this point. But then a big step forward
came once again from a surprising source. A number of
mathematicians interested not in life insurance but in games started
to develop the laws of probability. As men like Blaise

(25:01):
Pascal and Pierre de far Matt and many others started
to consider ways to predict the likelihoods of outcomes in
dice rolls. They were also advancing the mathematics that the
data points held in documents like the Bills of Mortality
could be used in This is the start of the
phase that Walford called the period of scientific exactitude. Just

(25:23):
two years before Hallie's table was published, an early instance
of insurance fraud was tried in the London Court of Chancery,
and in that case, a man named Thornborough had taken
out a year long policy on a man named Edward Harwell,
and Thornborough's insurance broker had collected subscriptions to underwrite that policy,

(25:43):
with a testimonial from one of Edward Harwell's neighbors that
he was in good health. Harwell died not long after
the policy was issued, and the court found that Thornborough
had taken out the policy on a man he knew
was in poor health, and that he had no real
connection to Harwill, and that he had duped the subscribers
into giving up their money. And it was found to

(26:05):
have not been the first time that Thornborough had mounted
such a scheme. Remember this story. Will reference it briefly
in Part two. In a way more than one hundred
years after the death of Gibbons and the subsequent payout,
Hallie was offering the business community a way forward that
would give them a better method to determine the risks
and potential benefits of issuing a policy. And he was

(26:29):
working at a time when insurance law, while it had
been around for more than a century in England, was
still in its infancy. For example, several years after Halle's
Table came out, there was a lawsuit that established very
specific rules regarding wording in insurance contracts and what they meant.
In this case, the playwright Sir Robert Howard had died

(26:50):
on September third, sixteen ninety eight, at one a m.
The time is important to the case. You have probably
seen a portrait of Sir Robert Howard. Flemish painter Anthony
van Dyke made a a well known portrait of him.
Howard had taken out an insurance policy on September third,
sixteen ninety seven, exactly one year before his death, and

(27:14):
that policy had a term of one year. The underwriters
claimed that the policy had expired when Howard died, making
the case that after midnight on the evening of September second,
the contract was done, so a one a m. September
the third death was not covered in the one hundred
pound policy. This led to a pretty fascinating judgment by

(27:35):
the court. The phrase quote from the day of the
date in the contract, it ruled meant that though it
was signed on September third, it didn't go into effect
until midnight, starting coverage on September fourth. If the policy
had used the language from the date, it would, according
to the Court, have meant that the coverage began on

(27:56):
the day the contract was signed, and that would have
ended at midnight on September second. Additionally, the establishment of
timing specifics included a note from the court the days
could not be argued fractionally, so the time of the
day that he died did not matter. Hallie's table was
in regular use less than a decade after he prepared it.

(28:16):
The Society of Assurance for Widows and Orphans was formed
in sixteen ninety nine. The idea was that its members,
of which there could be two thousand at most, would
each pay five shillings whenever a member died, and that
would mean that the bereft would receive five hundred pounds
if everyone paid their portion. And the interest of transparency,

(28:37):
the society kept its books publicly. There was one register
for the list of members and one that included a
list of their family members who would receive benefits. Claims
were paid out after they were approved by a group
of thirteen trustees who were members who were elected to
that committee on a yearly basis. When someone died, the
society had to be notified immediately so that one of

(28:59):
its members could view the body and confirm the death.
Membership was contingent on certification of the subscriber's age and
that he had an affidavit from a qualified person that
he had quote not known not any known distemper upon him,
and that he was in a very good state of health.
A person could be denied membership if the trustees thought

(29:22):
they looked sickly or elderly. Over time, additional limitations were
placed on membership, including age limits. Both Halle's Table and
the Bills of Mortality were used as a foundation of
the Society of Assurances workability. The potential mortality rate and
potential expense for members was explained in their documentation this way,

(29:42):
quote the probable charge of this society may be thus calculated.
The number of people within the limits of the Bills
of Mortality are supposed by some to be two millions,
by others one and a half million, by all to
be at least a million. Out of these there die
about twenty thousand a year, appears by the general Bill
of Mortality et cetera, which is one in fifty. Supposing

(30:05):
the number of people to be one million, Now, if
but one in fifty dies out of the whole number,
including women and children, sickly and infirm people, and such
as are ancient and decrepit, we may reasonably calculate that
not above one in fifty shall die in our society,
which is to consist of such persons as are in health,

(30:26):
and of the different ages above mentioned. And this is
but forty in two thousand, so that the probable charge,
when tis full, will be but ten pounds per annum.
And while tis increasing in proportion to what it has
hitherto done, the advantage must be very great. So that's it.
Everybody gets life assurance. Of course, not not really. At

(30:50):
this point the idea of a payment to a person's
bereaved dependence was still in a pretty early phase. But
that's where we're going to end things for today. On
Wednesday will talk about another assurance society and the person
who's considered the first actuary, and whether or not insurance
is a form of gambling, which is a pretty fun

(31:12):
discussion to have. I have a really fun listener mail. Okay,
this is from our listener Erica, and it's titled Rue
for the Freezer, So you know, I love it. I
have to pull up a little thing on my phone
because I made ready for this. Erica writes, Hi, there

(31:34):
in an episode from like the Summer or Something, Holly
mentioned a cookbook had a recipe for a large batch
of rue that you kept in the freezer and scooped
out as needed, and it came out perfectly every time.
I cannot find the episode so I could see if
the recipe made it to any show notes. Can you
direct me to the instructions? Thank you, Erica, Oh, Erica,
I'm here for you. Because one I love to talk

(31:56):
about food too. This lets me talk about one of
my favorite show topics of all time, Vincent Price Kay
because it was his cookbook that he wrote with his
wife Mary called A Treasury of Great Recipes, which is
a really, really lovely cookbook because it's all of the
recipes that they collected from their favorite restaurants and chefs
and they put together. But they also have a lot

(32:17):
of their good cooking tips. And of course this is
a tip I keep on my phone, so I have
it ready for you. It's a very short entry from
the book, so I'm going to read it. It is
rue for the roo. We let one half cup butter
soften at room temperature. Then mix this to a smooth
paste with one cup flour. The butter absorbs the flour

(32:37):
and we end up with one of the third cup's room.
This we freeze in a small pot or bowl covered
with aluminum foil. When a recipe specifies to stir in
one tablespoon flour mixed to a smooth paste with one
tablespoon butter, we simply stir in one rounded tablespoon of
our frozen room set. Yeah that's great. I will add

(32:59):
this is an also on the subject of freezing things. Yeah,
someone whose name I sadly did not write down set
on our social media that a lot of gaspacho recipes freeze.
Well ah, following my discussion of how delighted I was
that there was gaspacho in the freezer section in Barcelona

(33:19):
grocery stores. So again, it is wintertime. This is not
the season for cold soup for me, but this summer
I am definitely gonna try freezing some gaspacho. Yumo. That
all sounds great? Yeah, uh, that's how you could put
your roo in the freezer. I would recommend for me,
not foil but an air tight container. Yeah, that would

(33:42):
that's what I would do. I usually put mine in
a pyrex with a lid, and I will say this,
everybody's my lid is going to be different. I get
some inflammation from wheat gluten, so I started using coconut
flour in mine. That is the most velvety I've ever made, really,
but it does have a little bit of a different

(34:03):
flavor profile, So keep that in mind. But like for me,
that is the one. Yeah, and you can, like I said,
that's one tiny, tiny piece of a book that is
full of beautiful recipes and really lovely writing and a
lot of good cooking tips. So, like I said, any
anything that can prompt me to talk about Vincent price,

(34:24):
I'm gonna take it. So thank you. If you would
like to write to us with questions about Vincent price
or cooking that we may or may not have an
answer to, or anything, you can do that at History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're also on social media
as Missed in History, and you can find us for
subscription in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to

(34:45):
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.

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