Powder Wars: The Supergrass who Brought Down Britain's Biggest Drug Dealers

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Artillery, whatever the weight, delivered death on an unprecedented scale during the Napoleonic wars. Assemble your Armies Beginning with British Linda Civitello’s Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking covers this and the other battles over baking powder: from getting people to buy it in the first place (they were used to mixing it themselves at home) to alum baking powder companies fighting each other in a brutal price war. But the cream of tartar versus alum debate is the longest-running (and most entertaining) feud detailed in the book. Ill-equipped and half-trained they may have been, but after a few months hard fighting they went on to fight with determination alongside their brothers in the Prussian Line regiments.

In 1856, this need for a viable alternative drove a young chemist Eben Norton Horsford to create and patent the first modern baking powder. Horsford worked at a time when chemistry was only just beginning to be considered a respected field, and ended up creating the first modern chemistry lab in the United States at Harvard University. By boiling down animal bones to extract monocalcium phosphate, Horsford developed an acid compound that could react with baking soda to create those desirable CO2 bubbles. In 1846, the introduction of baking soda, a salt that can react with an acid to create carbon dioxide, made things easier. But baking soda still needed to be mixed with an acid. Since it was cheap and widely available, bakers often used sour milk. This process was unpredictable, since it was hard to control how acidic the sour milk actually was, meaning it was difficult to know how much baking soda to use or how long to bake for.In battle the British usually fought on the defensive, Wellington took great care to shelter his lads out of sight Baking powder is a pretty simple mixture: baking soda (a base), an acid, and a buffering material to keep the two from reacting before use. The buffer is usually cornstarch or flour; the acid can vary. At the time of Ziegler’s extradition hearing in 1903, Royal used cream of tartar, but almost everyone else used the cheaper and more potent sodium aluminum sulfate, or alum. Royal tried for years to besmirch alum’s good name, calling it unnatural and poisonous compared with Royal’s own “natural” recipe. (Cream of tartar is a by-product of the wine-making process and could be marketed as “from the grape.”) Yet consumers still preferred alum baking powders despite their “unnatural” origins. If Royal could get alum baking powders outlawed, then its more expensive cream-of-tartar baking powder would be the only product left on store shelves. It was a drastic measure, but all’s fair in love and war, and this was surely war.

In between those two extremes, there were numerous other types, the six to nine pounders. In most armies, six pounders were used as horse artillery to good effect. Who knew that baking powder has such a complex history, one full of political intrigue, gender wars, health scares, and race relations? In this meticulously researched and entertainingly told book, Linda Civitello chronicles the evolution of home baking in America, along the way highlighting the roles of figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln Steffens in abetting baking powder’s successful rise."--Darra Goldstein, founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture Horsford later had the idea to put the two together in one container. Water activates them, so he mixed them with cornstarch to soak up any excess moisture and prevent them from reacting prematurely. Now, instead of purchasing two separate ingredients at the pharmacy (where chemicals were sold at the time), and having to precisely measure out each one, would-be bakers could grab one container off the grocery store shelf and be ready to go.

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Readers interested in food and business will appreciate this well-researched book. . . . Highly recommended."-- Choice Eventually, the alum baking powder companies won out, and Royal and Rumford were acquired by Clabber Girl, leaving it and Calumet as the reigning American companies on the market. You don't have to look far to see baking powder's continued hegemony today: cooks around the world use it in everything from cupcakes to crepes, muffins to madeleines, danishes to doughnuts. "The fact that you can find it in every major supermarket tells you something about how it's been embraced," Carbone says. The cavalry of the Napoleonic Wars could be grouped into four main categories: heavy, medium (or line), light and lancers. Well written and insightful, Baking Powder Wars is a model of superb scholarship and is essential reading for a wide spectrum of scholars, including those interested in food studies, women's studies, American studies, business, and advertising." -- Journal of American Culture Baking didn't immediately adapt to this new revolution, however, Carbone notes, since most recipes that women and existing cookbooks had were built around the old way of combining an acid with a salt. Baking powder companies worked to change this by releasing their own cookbooks, which served as both marketing and instruction manuals for their products. Some of these cookbooks are held today in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Paul Grimes (born 26 May 1950) is an English former gangster who, from an early age, was active in Liverpool's criminal underworld. He has 38 criminal convictions and was involved in a range of violent and illegal activities. He also set up legal businesses recycling scrap metal and disposing of waste. He was rich, successful and at the top of the gangster hierarchy when his son Jason died of a heroin overdose in 1992, at the age of 21. This tragedy led to Grimes becoming a police informer with the aim of bringing down the drug dealers who he felt had destroyed his son's life. His evidence has led to successful prosecutions against high-profile dealers such as John Haase and Curtis Warren. The information Grimes provided also led to his son Heath being jailed for five years. [1] The lance-armed Landwehrcavalry fought well on the field, comprising some 40% of Blücher’s cavalry at Waterloo – a great excuse to field lots of these brave sons of Prussia on the tabletop! Gangster Paul Grimes was a one-man crimewave with a breathtaking capacity to steal. Any villains who got in his way were made to pay - often with their blood. But when his son died of a drugs overdose, the old-school mobster swore revenge on the new generation of Liverpool-based heroin and cocaine dealers. Against all odds, he turned undercover informant.These exceptional miniatures are oozing character and cast in finest Warlord Resin are a must for any self-respecting (and those not quite so self-respecting) Napoleonic British wargamer.

The well-trained and disciplined Prussian horse during the Hundred Days campaign formed regiments of cuirassiers, dragoons, hussars and lancers on the whole with the lighter cavalry intended for raiding and skirmishing, but in reality, took their place in the main battle lines during set-piece battles. In that same collection are remnants of the ugly wars fought within the growing baking powder industry around the turn of the 20th century. As alum baking powder companies like Calumet's and Clabber Girl's captured more and more of the baking powder market, Royal Baking Powder in particular fought to discredit them. In advertisements, Royal touted the "purity" of its more expensive product, while claiming that other baking powders were "injurious" to one’s health.The Landwehr fought bravely in the later wars of the period, fighting hard in the 1813 campaigns and ultimately at the climax of the Hundred Days campaign that was Ligny and Waterloo. The Prussian infantry consisted of fusiliers, musketeers, landwehr and jägers. Regiments, consisting of three battalions, were a tactical unit similar to those of the french. Each regular Line regiment had two musketeer battalions and one fusilier battalion, while the Landwehr regiments had three battalions of musketeers. Line Infantry Food historian Civitello tells a complicated and sordid tale of corporate mischief that will surprise many readers."-- Booklist