MOTnews 16 (13/04/2001)

NEWS Again, more news from the mills We can't get enough of our mills, on Sunday April 29, the doors are opend wide for the National Millingday. Millingfreaks can take a look in the Liermolen and the Tommenmolen for free. For the occasion we will also give free acces to the other museum's division, Guldendal. It's well worth a visit.

Baker We were looking for a new baker to give baking demonstrations in the Liermolen for some time now and our search was succesful. On Saturday, April 21, and from then on every first and third Saturday of the month, you can see our baker baking bread in a real wood-burning oven.

DID YOU KNOW? Are our delicacies really so delicious? Nowadays we have a whole host of foodstuffs that we love to see on our plates: various types of cheese, smoked fish, delicious salted butter, an enormous variety of jams, etc. Were all these things invented by huge gluttons and gourmets in the past? No, many of the methods of preparing food that we now consider delicacies were thought up in the past, when there were no refrigerators and no vacuum packing, simply to be able to keep food better. This was the case for cheese and butter, jam and dried fruits, smoked fish and ham and sauerkraut. Fortunately enough, we seem to love the taste of all these old solutions for storing food.

SAY WHAT? In this MOT-NEWS item we try to explain proverbs and sayings that have their roots in our technical history. Similar proverbs are found in different languages, but each language has it's own typical sayings. Therefore we do not translate this item in English.

TRUE or FALSE

You can use matches to light a fire, but flints work as well. You strike two flints against one another to make a fire. You will find the answer in the next MOT NEWS.

ANSWER TRUE or FALSE in MOT NEWS 15 (March 23, 2001) Sheep provide us with wool, and to do this they are shorn, in the past by hand, now electrically. But in the past wool was also plucked from the sheep, without it being shorn.

TRUE

In the past, wool was also simply plucked instead of shearing sheep. This was done in some areas of Scotland, among other places.

KIDS-NEWS : something to tell your children this evening Sherlock pigs? Every springtime in France, farmers make an appeal to the keen nose of pigs to go searching for one of the world's most valuable crops: truffles. Truffles are something like underground mushrooms that grow among the roots of oaks, in only certain areas in the world, the pigs are trained to recognise them by their distinctive aroma. Because of their rareness they are extremely expensive, a kilo or so truffles will cost you about 45.000 BEF, that's what makes it worthwhile to train pigs to track them. Sometimes dogs are used for this lucrative search as well.