Hey, this is Christopher Kimball. You know, many folks have asked if they could travel to the same places we do while visiting the same cooks, the same restaurants, the same markets. Well, now you can.

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Hi, this is Christopher Kimball. Thanks for downloading this week's podcast. You can go to our website, 177milkstreet.com, for our recipes, culinary ideas from around the world, or our latest cookbooks. Now here's this week's show.

This is Most You Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. David Fairchild was a government botanist who traveled the world in the early 20th century in search of new foods, including mangoes, dates, avocados, quinoa, and kale. I chat with his biographer, Daniel Stone, author of the food explorer, the true adventures of a globe-trodding botanist.

He was, you know, shot at with bows and arrows. He outran diseases. He caught typhoid fever at one point. So, you know, he was constantly outrunning threats, but also finding ways to flatter and respect people in other countries and cultures to the point where they would share their botanical knowledge and share their prized foods and plants with him.

Before we hear from Stone, I chat with food historian Ray Amy about her new book, Starring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin.

Ray, how are you? I'm fine, Chris. How are you? I'm in a great mood because Benjamin Franklin is one of my favorite historical figures, at least on the American scene. But your book really makes me think that I didn't know him very well. And so here's my first question. Here's a guy who promotes frugality, right? He was a vegetarian briefly at age 16. When he worked in a printing press, he got his colleagues to abandon beer and bread for breakfast.

And then he ends up many years later as an ambassador of France living on an estate, having seven course dinners, a large collection of wine. He suffers from gout and retires and a 5,700 square foot home. So he went from frugality, but did he really end up with frugality? I mean, it seems like he changed over the years.

That's an interesting perspective. And I kind of think you're right. I think he there's an anecdote that he told about his wife, Deborah, which sort of encapsulates that experience that you just expressed.

When they were young and struggling in their printing shop, she went out and bought him a china bowl and a silver spoon to eat his morning porridge with.

And he, in his telling of the story, was just a gasp that she had spent their money on these things that they really didn't need that were rich men's goods.

And she said, no, I think you deserve to have this. And then he sort of allows us how more silver in china came into the household as their marriage survived.

But as far as his mansion at the end of his life in Philadelphia, he also had a position in society at that point, at a position in the nation's identity that he did need to promote.

And so he, when he returned from France, he added on to the mansion that he had begun years before because he felt he needed to entertain.

So you found a bunch of menus of things that Franklin would actually eat or other people at that time. Pickles, I guess, were extremely important as was vinegar.

And there was a quote in your book, squeamish stomachs cannot eat without pickles. In other words, pickles were considered to be an antidote to the heavy meat they were eating. Is that right?

That's how I interpret that as well. You know, if you have fresh food and you want to keep it, you know, the best way to do it, if you're dealing with vegetables and meats, you know, which is a whole other kind of pickling process, of course, is to pickle it too.

Not only cut through the meats, but also to sharpen the appetite.

Peace pudding, when I grew up, makes the sound like I grew up in the 1820s, but peace pudding hot, peace pudding cold, peace pudding in the pot nine days.

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