[An apple scoop carved from a sheep’s tibia, European, 19^th century. Science Museum]

These tools may look rough, but in the right hands they could be surprisingly precise. A British country magazine from 1958 contains this account of a man describing how his mother used hers: With a scoop in one hand, and an apple in the other, she would carve away the fruit’s flesh until nothing was left but a hollow skin, which would “crumple in the hand like paper.”

Yes, these were apple scoops, and their purpose was quite practical: In the days before widely accessible dentures, they allowed the elderly and toothless to enjoy fresh apples without straining their remaining teeth.

The scoops date as far back as the 1600s, and were used through the early 1900s…For this reason, dentures were not usually an option for the working class. Apple scoops, in contrast, were crafted from the most accessible of materials: sheep bones. And they could be easily made at home. John Clare, the quintessential poet of the English rural life, describes shepherds whittling away at sheep bones while waiting out a storm.

…For rural people, these bone scoops were part of an apple-centric way of life. Henry Bull’s The Herefordshire Pomona⁠, an 1876 encyclopedia of English apples, presents a world in which apples mark each step of the yearly festive calendar, from the blessing of the new apples on St. James Day, to wassailing in the apple orchard on Twelfth Night, with no shortage of stops in between: On St. Simon and St. Jude’s Day, young women tossed apple shavings over their shoulders in hopes that the peels would land in the shape of their future husband’s first initial. Halloween meant snap-apple, a game played by constructing a kind of chandelier with an apple on one end and a lit candle on the other. Once you set it swinging, the objective was to grab a bite without being burned. Perhaps the most appetizing tradition was “lamb’s wool”, a dish made by steaming apples on a string above a pot of hot ale until they melt into a cloud of white froth—a good solution for any apple-lover lacking both teeth and sheep-bone scoops.

Yet in the few decades between Clare’s poem and Bull’s encyclopedia, apple scoops began to vanish. As Bull wistfully recalls, “Some 50 or 60 years ago, apple-scoops were in general use, and were even placed on the dessert table with a dish of apples, as crackers are with nuts… but the fashion has changed, and it is rare now to meet with one of the old bone scoops, and still more rare to see any person scooping an apple in the old-fashioned way.”

Teas I have drunk, with reviews and future purchases; focused primarily on oolongs and greens. Plus experiments on water.

Electric kettles are faster, but I was curious how much faster my electric kettle heated water to high or boiling temperatures than does my stove-top kettle. So I collected some data and compared them directly, trying out a number of statistical methods (principally: nonparametric & parametric tests of difference, linear & beta regression models, and a Bayesian measurement error model). My electric kettle is faster than the stove-top kettle (the difference is both statistically-significant p≪0.01 & the posterior probability of difference is P ≈ 1), and the modeling suggests time to boil is largely predictable from a combination of volume, end-temperature, and kettle type.