Category Archives: Food and Drink
Vix krater
Paul Cartledge is the inaugural A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College. He is also Hellenic Parliament Global Distinguished Professor in the History and Theory of Democracy, at New York University. He is the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of over 20 books, including his latest, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities.
He is an honorary citizen of modern Sparta and holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor awarded by the President of Greece.Cheese: a world of gastronomy
By Andrew Dalby
Nobody knows when cheese was invented, but it could have been one of the great ideas of the Neolithic revolution, nine thousand years ago.
The inventor was surely a traveller who thought of carrying milk in a bag made from an animal’s stomach, found that it had curdled, and decided to taste the result. This unknown benefactor of the human race (at least, of humans who can digest lactose) had discovered the only practical pre-refrigeration method of storing milk. Dairy farming could now provide food all year round, and not just for people who lived on the farm. Animals could be fully used for their milk as well as their meat, and one more foodstuff could be delivered to the towns where humans were just beginning to live.
One more foodstuff? That isn’t the full story. Cheese is not one food but an infinite range of flavors and textures, a whole world of gastronomy. Any neolithic townie might appreciate the difference between new and mature cheese, cheese from the eastern lowlands and the western hills, cheese from sheep and goats and cows. Among the earliest pyramid burials, around 3,000 BC, archaeologists identified a fortunate ruler of both halves of Egypt who was dispatched to the next world with labelled supplies of ‘northern cheese’ and ‘southern cheese’.
Ancient Greeks imported cheese from Sicily. Classical Romans sampled it from all round the Mediterranean, though some still preferred the smoked cheese that reached perfection in Rome’s crowded Velabrum district. Charlemagne, who ruled France and Germany in AD 800, is the first recorded fashion-setter to appreciate blue cheese (was it Roquefort? No one knows). Rock-like Parmesan and runny Brie were already Europe’s favourites in the 15th century. Cheese-making was among the most essential skills of the early colonists of the New World. Globalization? Cheese was far ahead of the game.
Andrew Dalby is a linguist, translator and historian, based in France. He is the author of Cheese: A Global History – Edible)
and many other books including Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece
(1996), which won the Runciman Award. Andrew also makes hard cider…in France; where he recently enjoyed a holiday bottle!
IMAGE: Sheep are milked and maids carry the milk home: from the Luttrell Psalter, about 1340
Pie in the Sky
By Mollie Cox-Bryan
Mrs. Rowe would never have called herself a feminist. A self-made successful restaurateur during a time when most women were still at home, who probably worked harder than any man she knew, Mildred Rowe never had the time to entertain ideas like feminism. Yet, women everywhere can look at the founder of the famous Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant and Bakery, Staunton, Va. as life example and feminist icon.
Born Mildred Craft in 1913, her young world consisted of a tiny, secluded, mountain subsistence farm in Rich Patch, Virginia, deep in the Alleghany Highlands. Words like “gambling” and “divorce” were never whispered in the decidedly Southern Baptist upbringing she shared with her 12 brothers and sisters. Gambling was a sin and once you were married, it was for life. Even as a young woman working in factories in nearby Covington, she knew nobody who had ever gotten a divorce. But things were changing.
As Mildred Craft became Mrs. Eugene DiGrassie in 1934, she married man who was unique to the region. He was French-Italian, Catholic, and Yankee. She was Scotch Irish and German, and Baptist. Most of her sisters and their friends married men who grew up on the same mountain or in Covington. They were mostly farmers, miners, and factory workers. Dapper Eugene DiGrassie was a shoe salesman and window display artist with big dreams. Turns out, he also had bit of a wandering eye. After ten years of marriage, he left her for another woman.
Mildred DiGrassie took their three small children and moved to nearby Goshen, where she would not have to suffer the humiliation of wagging tongues in Covington. There were no regular child support payments from DiGrassie as he embarked on his new life. And during the 1940s Americans did not have social security or welfare. The court system was not really dealing with “deadbeat dads” then. When it came to divorce, none of the support systems divorced women have in place today were there—think about it—there were no Oprah Winfrey’s or Dr. Phil’s helping from the television, either.
She took what she knew—cooking—and started a little restaurant in Goshen, serving up Southern home style food to the travelers that frequented the area. She succeeded in more than taking care of her children. Within 6 years she paid off her loan and had a little money in the bank to invest in her next business with her new husband Willard Rowe. Their little business now serves half a million meals a year and is celebrating 67 years in operation — the most successful family-owned restaurant in the state of Virginia.
Mollie Cox-Bryan, author of Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies
, grew up in the hills of western Pennsylvania. She’s a graduate of Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pa. She currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where she runs, reads, and writes. Click here for Mollie’s website
For a chance to win a copy of Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies, click here
IMAGE: the late Mrs. Mildred Rowe and the sign outside her legendary restaurant.
The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola
Reviewed by Mollie Cox Bryan
Food and politics are scattered throughout today’s headlines, but food has always been a part of the political conversation, whether it’s blatant or not—and writers have often used food as metaphor for love, life, politics, and more. In Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” the writer skillfully weaves food into the everyday aspect of nineteenth-century Paris life, while keeping an artistic eye on food. As Mark Kurlansky notes in the introduction, this book is probably the first ”foodie” novel—a trend in current fiction.
The novel opens as the main character, Florent Quenu, finds his way back into Paris to Les Halles. He is literally starving, having just escaped from prison on Devil’s Island, As he stands in the middle of one of the biggest food markets in the world at the time, smelling and seeing all the incredible mounds of fresh cabbages and carrots and so on. Immediately, the reader is treated to an incredible outsider’s view of the market—pages and pages of food description as Florent wanders and eventually finds his way to his brother and his wife.
At first, things appear to be looking up for Florent, as he settles into the quiet life living with his family who operates a charcutiere. The descriptions of bloody animal parts and meat preparation are enough to turn the stomach of any meat eater. Still, it’s a bloody and cruel business, even though this slice of life is not pleasant to ponder.
If Wine Could Talk
How did the triple-expansion steam engine of the late 19th century
drive Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to absinthe, La Fée Verte?
By Michael Bywater
The wonderful John Aubrey, snapper-up of well-considered trifles, wrote in his Brief Lives that “When a boy, he did ever love to converse with old men, as living histories.”1
You might say the same of wine; each bottle, each vintage, each vineyard is a living history, and to drink it happily is to enjoy a conversation, not only with one’s companions gathered around the corkscrew, but with the wine itself. And curiosity about wines begins much the same as curiosity about other people: their names, their provenance, their appearance, the essentials and differences of their personalities.
And, as with people, as time goes on more intimate or idiosyncratic curiosities emerge. We start to ask questions. What are their stories? What are their peculiarities? Why is this rot foul, but that rot noble? Who was the original Robert Parker? Why are there great bunches of jangling mechanical grapes on the organ at Weingarten Abbey? Why did that most celebrated of wine nations, France, suddenly turn to the frantic and crapulous absinthe? How did a wine-bibbing Symposium of classical Athens actually go? Do we really drink red wine too hot now, and why?
Follow the trail and historical curiosities elucidate themselves, just as if we were gently questioning a new friend on her life. The foul rot attacks the cork, while the noble sweetens the grape. The first recorded version of the influential and utterly confident wine critic Robert Parker is none other than the tireless encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, who died at Vesuvius in 79CE. The mechanical grapes are an homage to the local wines that enriched the monks and paid for the organ. The triple-expansion steam engine shortened the Atlantic crossing until the phylloxera aphid could survive the journey and devastate the French vineyards, whose roots were vulnerable to its attacks; no wine, but the French had to drink something, and so they turned to La Fée Verte. The Symposium was, you might say, hell. Red wine too hot? Yes; for our houses are now far hotter then they were, and so “chambré” is hotter, too.
The difficulty, as always, is knowing when to stop. There is always another cork to be drawn, and always another story to emerge, genie-like, from the bottle.
1 John Aubrey, Brief Lives. Ed. Richard Barber (Rochester, NY, 1982)
Michael Bywater is author with Kathleen Burk of Is This Bottle Corked?: The Secret Life of Wine
. He is also a well known broadcaster, and culture critic.
What’s For Dinner? Porpoise anyone?
Time once again for this week’s Marvelous Link…
From the BBC via the University of Manchester Library comes this short video and write-up on medieval cookery.
The Forme of Cury was published around 1420–and is now available online. My favorite quote in the interview was: “These aren’t like a modern cookery book. This doesn’t give you precise quantities or time. But great for experimenting.”
From what I’ve read in the The Good Wife’s Guide: A Medieval Household Book, I’ll take a pass on whipping up some good medieval eats.
As tasty as that porpoise stew recipe sounds, it’s just too hard to find fresh porpoise at my local Kroger (Publix, Dominicks, Harris Teeter, Piggly Wiggly, whatever).
So about the image: Porpoises are close enough to Dolphins for this Midwestern girl. Dolphins make me think of the French word dauphin. Dauphin makes me think that they called the heir apparent to the French throne, le Dauphin. And this makes me think of Louis le Grand Dauphin (above), who was Louis XIV’s eldest son (1661-1711). See, there’s always a 17th century connection… (Plus it’s the weekend and 150 degrees here, that would make anyone a little punchy!)
The Good Wife’s Guide
Macy Halford posted a great review of The Good Wife’s Guide on the New Yorker’s Book Bench website. Translated by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, The Good Wife’s Guide is a fourteenth-century instruction book for a young bride, written by her husband. It’s a primer on the fine art of male dominence.
The dinner menu the husband offers up goes to prove that real men did not eat quiche in the Middle Ages. Green eel soup or black hare stew, anyone?
As the 17th century specialist that I am, the book reminded me–of course–of Moliere’s Arnolphe in The School for Wives. The wiley Arnolphe offers up a list of “maxims” for his young bride, whom he plucked from a convent. Of course, in the great Moliere tradition, the canny Agnes ends up showing what a nut job her husband really is.
Maxim 1. The woman who intends to be married ought to remember, that the man who takes her, takes her only for himself, notwithstanding the vast numbers of admirers which other women have in these our days.
Maxim 2. She ought to consult her husband about her dress; it being for him along should she take care of her beauty, and regardless whether other people think her handsome or not.
Maxim 3. She must lay aside the practice of ogling, and must use no paints, pomatums, beauty washes, nor the numberless ingredients that are made use of to set off the complexion. These are always mortal poisons to honour, and the pains bestowed to appear beautiful are seldom for the husband’s sake.
Maxim 4. When she goes abroad, she ought, as honour requires, to prevent the wounds her eyes might give, by concealing them under her hood: for she should study to please her husband, and no one else.
Maxim 5. Decency prohibits her from receiving any friends whatever, except such as come to see her husband: those people of gallantry that have no business but with the wife, are very disagreeable to the husband.
There are five more maxims. But you get the point…oh, the things history has done to quiet women.
You might want to head over to a post on Silence and the Scold’s Bridle. Miranda Garno Nesler offers some details about the muzzles that were used to restrain women’s speech in the Renaissance.
Wendy Moore also explores 18th Century Domestic Violence.
More things change, the more they stay the same. Regrettably.
Food for Thought
Here’s a tidbit for any Wonders and Marvels readers out there who may be thinking about starting a family.
Until the late seventeenth century, Galenic notions of the body as a complex system of fluids (humors) dominated. In the sport of baby-making, the end goal was to mix male and female “seed” in just the right quantity and quality to make a boy. So this meant that the hotter the better.
Men were considered hot and dry in humoralist models. So, if the seed mix was hot, a boy would be born.
So, here are a few seventeenth-century tips for all of you out there. If you want a girl, stick with those cold foods like fruit and lettuce. If you want a boy, head straight for foods that early-modern physicians classified as hot: wine, meat, arugula.
I’m not so sure about the recipe for dried stag testicles, though. If it works for you, let us know. Early doctors recommend that you sprinkle them liberally onto your food.
Imagine this: “Excuse me, Sire. But could pass the salt and testicles?”
For more eclectic musings on embryology, childbirth, chastity belts, brothel madams, you name it…
take a peek here.
Take a Peek: 17th Century Cookbooks
By Holly Tucker
I mentioned last week that the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine is one of the wonders of the world for people working in the history of medicine. I have been there several times and have felt like a child in candy store. My last trip was about a year ago. It was generously funded by a Library travel fellowship. I rented a studio flat about five minutes away from the library, which is in central London not from King’s Cross station. I spent my days carefully turning the pages of 400 year old dissection manuals, and my evenings reading up on what I needed to prepare for the next day’s research foray. The trip was blissful.
I recall vividly my first trip to the collections several years ago. I was finishing up a book on women’s medical knowledge in the seventeenth century. I stumbled across the Library’s extraordinary collection of early cookbooks and household manuels.
The large bound volumes had clearly been passed on through generations. The hand written recipes and notes were in the hand of different women at different moments. These were not recipes on how to make cakes. No, the recipes included procedures for distilling herbs, curing common ailments, and even tips on how to stay beautiful.
I gasped aloud when I turned the page of one such cookbook–I think it was the one by a French family dated 1699–and discovered several meticulously pressed leaves. Imagine this: those leaves had been in the book for nearly 3oo years. This is why I do what I do for a living. This is why I delight in being a researcher.
The Wellcome has made many of its cookbooks now accessible online. In fact, they’re looking for beta testers. If you want to have a look yourself, just head over to the Library’s outstanding blog for more information.
And let me know if you’re hooked too. I’ll bet you will be!
Image Wellcome Library.
A History of Rum
By Frederick H. Smith, Ph.D.
In the summer of 1996 I went to Barbados to prepare a historical archaeological field school in Bridgetown with my colleague Dr. Karl Watson and his students from the department of history at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. On the morning of Saturday, July 13, Watson called to say that construction workers in a part of the city known as the Pierhead had unearthed skeletal remains while preparing a site for the expansion of a local shopping mall.
The skeletal remains turned out to be human, and further investigation revealed more burials at the site. We spent the day surveying this unmarked and forgotten cemetery, and recording information about the site. Based on the absence of grave markers, the cemetery’s location on the periphery of the town, and the presence of a mid-eighteenth century white kaolin clay tobacco pipe, which had been placed in the crook of the right arm of one the deceased, we determined that the graveyard was the final resting place of Bridgetown’s slave population.
Throughout the day, construction workers and residents from the nearby neighborhoods monitored our excavation and pondered our work. Some mentioned the ghosts of those buried at the site and the restlessness of duppies, the mischievous, and sometimes malicious, spirits of the dead. At the end of the day, we removed the skeleton with the tobacco pipe and began packaging it for proper storage at the University of the West Indies. About that time, someone in the crowd shouted that we needed to pour libations to those buried at the site, and within minutes a bottle of rum was produced for that purpose. The rum was poured on the ground and the pouring was punctuated by requests that the duppies “rest in peace” and “leave us alone.”
This event was a major turning point in my academic career. Since 1991, I had conducted fieldwork in different parts of the Caribbean and during these visits had the opportunity to observe the central place of rum and other forms of alcohol in Caribbean society. I had also come across numerous references to rum in the primary documents I was reading. During the excavations at the Pierhead cemetery in Bridgetown, however, I was an actual participant in an event that embodied and expressed centuries of alcohol-related traditions in the Caribbean, which inspired me to pursue further study.
My book explores the role of alcohol in the Caribbean from the sixteenth century to the present. Drawing on materials from Africa, Europe, and throughout the Americas, it contributes to the growing field of Atlantic studies and breaks new ground in using an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence. It investigates the economic impact of Caribbean rum on multiple scales, including rum’s contribution to sugar plantation revenues, its role in bolstering colonial and post-colonial economies, and its impact on Atlantic trade. A number of political-economic trends determined the volume and value of rum exports from the Caribbean, especially war, competition from other alcohol industries, slavery and slave emancipation, temperance movements, and globalization.
My book also examines the social and sacred uses of rum and identifies the forces that shaped alcohol drinking in the Caribbean. While the enormous amounts of rum available in the Caribbean contributed to a climate of excessive drinking, levels of alcohol consumption varied among different social groups. The different drinking patterns reflect more than simply access to rum. For example, levels of drinking and drunken comportment conveyed messages about the underlying tensions that existed in the Caribbean, which were driven by the coercive exploitation of labor and set within a highly contentious social hierarchy based on class, race, gender, religion, and ethnic identity. Moreover, these tensions were often magnified by epidemic disease, poor living conditions, natural disasters, international conflicts, and unstable food supplies. While nearly everyone in the Caribbean drank, the differing levels of alcohol use by various social groups highlights the ways in which drinking became a means to confront anxiety.
To put your name in for a copy of Caribbean Rum, click HERE.
Frederick Smith is author of Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. He teaches Anthropology at the College of William & Mary.
Image: A West India Sportsman by Lieutenant Abraham James (1807). Barbados Museum and Historical Society
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