Free Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain by Stephen Halliday

different. Early legends suggest that St Patrick learned the art of distillation on the continent (where it was certainly already in use) and took it to Ireland in the 5th century. There is more evidence to suggest that in the 6th century it was taken from Ireland to Scotland by the Dál Riata clan, overlords of the archipelagos and coasts of western Scotland and Northern Ireland. By the 17th century whisky was popular enough in Scotland for the Scottish Parliament to tax it and drive much of the production underground. In 1823 the Excise Act, passed by the British Parliament, moderated the taxes, licensed production and thereby created the foundations for what is now the worldwide whisky business. Scotch, with exports of over £3 billion a year, dominates as Scotland’s largest export business.
Forget Toothpaste: Clean Your Teeth With Sugar
In defence of the sweet stuff
    M ost of us managed without sugar until well into the 16th century when its importation from India and the Americas found a ready market amongst the wealthier classes, human taste buds being predisposed to this sweet but nutritionally valueless product. Its cost meant that it could only be afforded by the wealthiest; this feature of the product was observed by a German visitor called Paul Hentzner who visited Queen Elizabeth I’s court at Greenwich and commented: ‘Her face oblong, fair but wrinkled, her eyes small yet black and pleasant, her nose a little hooked and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar).’ In the years that followed, a number of well-informed commentators observed the harmful effects of sugar, several of them commenting upon what later became know as tooth decay.
    In spite of this, sugar found a redoubtable champion in Frederick Slare (1646–1727), contemporary and friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Fellow of the Royal Society whose book
A Vindication of Sugars
claimed that, far from damaging the teeth, he had ‘made my Gums better and Teeth whiter’ by rubbing them with sugar. Moreover, according to Slare his grandfather, who consumed prodigious quantities of sugar, grew to a hundred and had grown a fresh set of teeth at the age of eighty! Slare also recommended it as a cure for sore eyes and scurvy. Annual sugar consumption peaked at about 43 kilos per head in the 1930s and, despite its well-known harmful properties the average British citizen still consumes approximately 38 kilos per year.
Mashed-up Organs Boiled in Guts, Anyone?
A natural history of the haggis
    H aggis consists of sheep’s offal (heart, liver and lungs) minced with onion, mixed with stock and simmered in the sheep’s stomach for about three hours. It is traditionally served with ‘neeps and tatties’ (swedes, turnips and potatoes) boiled and mashed and with a ‘dram’ (glass) of Scotch whisky. The first recipe for ‘hagese’ is found in a book from Lancashire dated 1430, a reference by the Scottish poet William Dunbar following in 1520. However, Robert Burns’s 1787 poem,
Address to a Haggis
, has made it incontrovertibly Scotland’s national dish and it is invariably served with great ceremony (and the poem recited) at the Burns Night supper celebrations which mark the poet’s birthday on 25th January, an event celebrated not only in Scotland but throughout the world, notably in Russia.

Prostitutes Allegedly the Most Beautiful Women in Britain
In other news, potatoes cause leprosy
    P otatoes, one of the great cornerstones of the modern British diet, did not arrive in Britain until the 1580s. Their introduction, from the Americas, is often attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh though the first reference to them by an Englishmen came from Sir Francis Drake. In November 1577, during his voyage round the world, Drake put into port in Chile and recorded that ‘the people came down to us at the waterside with shew of great curtesie to bring us potatoes, rootes and two very fat sheepe’. The Germans erected a