The good Dr Guillotin, Franco-Belgian fries and ITM: the true story of the Histle.
A recent independant research casts a totally new light on obscure historical events.
I have to share with this community such an important step forward in whistrionics. Don’t thank me: it was just my duty.
We knew already that Raoul-Ephraïm-Fritz Vanderpomm, starting from Dr Guillotin’s works, devised a miniature multiple guillotine. His aim was to shorten the sufferings of the potatoes, until then slowly boiled to death. This is how the French fry was invented by a Belgian.
Vanderpomm’s recipe did make it to Ireland, but the yawl carrying it was seized by an English patrol on the shore of Bantry. The crew barely managed to burn the document in time, but this didn’t keep the secret from spreading a fews years later.
Unfortunately, being French in a wrong vintage and an even wronger location (1815 Belgium, Wallony, Waterloo), Vanderpomm deceased from the ingestion of various metals, and didn’t have time to reflect on their toxicity.
There, a Scotsguard named Ronald McBurger took from Vanderpomm’s body not only his bearskin hat, but the whole uniform as a souvenir. Back home, he eventually found in a pocket the whole blueprint of the “French” fry machinery.
Since he could see the drawing but not read French (or anything else), he made a few interpretation mistakes. The crual man not only minced the taters live, and fry them, but he would then boil them, bleach them and finally drown them in vinegar to make sure they’re dead.
These reverse-engineered French fries were patriotically nicknamed “Chips” by a local publican who opened the first fast-food joint an sold them for a penny.
Meanwhile…
The Irish who had sought help from the French were punished by the English. These deprived them not only of the authentic French fries or even its soured chips avatar, but from taters generally, so there.
Some Irish sailors saw the Scots and Englishmen sucking on their penny-chips, and confused these with elder woodsticks. To suck the sour elder marrow (vaguely tasting like English malt vinegar on pudding), they took a habit of cutting or biting a few holes to get to the middle. Eventually they found out you could play music with the bare tube. It went named as “Chips o’ Thistle” or “Penny-Thistle”. Remember they were sailors, not botanists.
The Englishmen spotted this and, knowing a colony is no use if it ain’t a market, reproduced the elder tube out of recycled sardines tins, adding a lead plug just to make sure no-one would survive in the long term.
Then, some Irishmen escaped starvation by emigrating to America, taking their top-heavy instruments with them. Given the American way of guillotining words, the Chips o’Thistle was quicly renamed “chistle” than “histle”, to which Webster eventually added his initial to avoid a common confusion between “histler” (histle player) and “hustler” (i.e. busking histler).
Finally, in a compulsive attempt to undisputedly obscure a plain truth, some New World dyslexian scholars renamed the instrument–originally a simple (if miscopied) French guillotined fry–as “Chirp and fiffel” or, alternately, Penny-histle.
Stay tuned: next week, we’ll reveal you the true origin of the Hooligan Pipe, also known as “Julian’s” by the lesser educated.
