Before the invention of refrigeration, preserving food took a great deal of innovation, patience, and hard work. Of course, salting, pickling, smoking, and canning could be used to preserve meats and produce, but dairy products were particularly tricky to keep fresh. Springhouses were structures built directly over cold springs, so that the cool running water underneath would provide the proper temperatures for storing cheese, milk, and butter.

Many homesteads relied on springhouses to store their milk-based products, but others simply used frogs. Several tales of Russian lore tell of folks dropping frogs into buckets of milk in order to keep the liquid safe for consumption. It was believed that the cold-blooded temperature of the amphibians would transfer to the milk.

This was hardly a scientific conclusion, but still, the old wives' tale was commonly believed, and so became the subject of the folk tales. While the body temperature of frogs likely had nothing to do with keeping milk fresh, the method curiously seemed to work. Today, the choice of froggy milk or no milk at all seems like a no-brainer, but before refrigeration, it was probably easier to turn a blind eye towards Kermit the Frog taking a dip in your morning glass.

The reason it worked It turns out that the belief about keeping a frog in your milk to keep it fresh, indeed, had plenty of merit. But, of course, it wasn't because of the frog's body temperature. Back in 2012, scientists at the found that the secretio.