The Universe of Discourse

Dancing bread

Marnanel Thurman reported the following item that they found in an 1875 book titled How to Entertain a Social Party:

To Make a Loaf of Bread Dance on the Table.

— Having a quill filled with quicksilver and stopped close, you secretly thrust it into a hot roll or loaf, which will put it in motion.

(Bottom of page 46.) No further explanation is given.

This may remind you of an episode from Huckleberry Finn:

Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there.

(Chapter 8.)

When I first read this I assumed it was a local Southern superstition, characteristic of that place and time. But it seems not! According to this article by Dan Rolph of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the belief was longstanding and widespread, lasting from at least 1767 to 1872, and appearing also in London and in Pennsylvania.

Details of the dancing bread trick are lacking. I guess the quicksilver stays inside the stopped-up quill. (Otherwise, there would be no need to “stop it close”.) Then perhaps on being heated by the bread, the quicksilver expands lengthwise as in a thermometer, and then… my imagination fails me.

The procedure for making drowned-body-finding bread is quite different. Rolph's sources all agree: you poke in your finger and scoop out a bit of the inside, pour the quicksilver into the cavity, and then plug up the hole. So there's no quill; the quicksilver is just sloshing around loose in there. Huckleberry Finn agrees:

I took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quicksilver…

Does anyone have more information about this? Does hot bread filled with mercury really dance on the table, and if so why? Is the supersition about bread finding drowned bodies related to this, or is it a coincidence?

Also, what song did the sirens sing, and by what name was Achilles called when he hid among women?

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