Marco Polo and Pasta May 21, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
***Dedicated to Zach Nowak and Beach’s good friends over at FoodinItaly***
The lunatic idea that Marco Polo brought back spaghetti from China to grateful Italians is a modern food myth. There is no proof for this in MP’s writing: though there is an interpolated passage that might have started the confusion. In fact, the idea of MP hauling kilos of Barilla can be disproved by external sources that show pasta was already around in Italy before MP’s birth. When did this myth begin? We don’t know, but it was certainly running up steam in 1926 when it became the subject of an American advertising campaign. Enjoy this.
Accordingly [Marco Polo] steered his ship as close to the shore as safety would permit, and sent several of his men off in a small boat in quest of fresh water. One of the sailors in the party was a Venetian named Spaghetti, and it is around this man that the legend centers. When the small boat reached the beach the 3 or 4 sailors comprising the party separated, each striking out in a different direction. They knew there would be fresh water close by, but of course did not know its exact location. Spaghetti in his search, soon came to a little patch of huts. He realised that water must be close but before advancing into the village his attention was drawn to a native man and woman working over a crude mixing bowl. The woman appeared to be mixing a dough of some kind, particles of which had overflowed the mixing bowl and extended to the ground. The warm, dry air characteristic of the country, had in a short time hardened these slender strings of dough, and had made them extremely brittle. Spaghetti observed the ingredients used, the simple method of mixing, and it immediately occurred to him that a dry food of this kind would be a welcome addition to their ship’s menu. His curiosity prompted him to approach the couple and make known his wants as best he could. Through signs and gestures he managed to obtain a quantity of the grains used in making this strange dough, also a batch of the ready mixed dough and several strings which had dried. After relating his experience, upon returning to the ship, Spaghetti ‘worked’ the entire quantity of dough into long slender ribbons. As they dried he broke them into shorter and more convenient lengths. The problem of preparing the food had not been given much thought and it was one which would have to be experimented upon. The sticks were not palatable if eaten dry, and when cooked in fresh water were not much better. Thereupon Spaghetti conceived the idea of boiling strips in sea water, which, as every one knows, is intensely salt [sic]. This method seemed to produce the best result, and to bring out the flavour of the food. Before returning to Venice Spaghetti learned much of this new and appetising food. He discovered its energy providing qualities, its ability to remain fresh [? copy not clear] and wholesome for long periods to time and noted the acclaim with which it was received by his shipmates and other Europeans to whom he introduced it. Upon Spaghetti’s arrival home the popularity of this new delicacy spread among the villagers and before long a similar food made of home grown wheat was to be found on every table.
John Dickie in his history of Italian food claims that this campaign marks the origin of Marco Polo pasta-myth: note, incidentally, the way that the advertisers don’t entirely give the credit to the Chinese. It was from there, then, that we surmise that the myth was picked up by the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, in which there is a memorable scene showing some Chinese Christians eating spaghetti with MP and his imbecile sidekick. Beach can’t find the videoclip on line, sorry… It is well worth seeing.
However, as an extract that we, long ago, passed on to FoodinItaly has shown the legend dates back to at least 1900 when this appeared in an English language cookbook.
And why, so far, no word of pasta, that ever present, ubiquitous Italian dish? For the reason that Pasta, whatever it may be to-day, is said not originally to have been a native of the country, but is alleged to be one of the many wonders brought home by the 13th century explorer, Marco Polo, from his travels in China. Nevertheless, although Pasta, in its many shapes and forms, may not have started off as a true native of Italy, to-day it seems as much a part of the country as an operatic tenor, and anyone wanting to present a truly Italian meal must perforce learn a few of the ways of preparing and cooking Pasta…
The myth seems to have already been around when this was written. So where does the myth come from and when does it begin? Can anyone help Beach and FoodinItaly track the myth down? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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23 May 2012 John G writes in with this link that contains the Marco Polo link at about twelve minutes. Beach does not have a media player on this computer so he has not been able to check the exact seconds. Thanks John!
Honey and the Anvils of Women’s Thighs April 25, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval
Beachcombing has been enjoying some reading in Arabic aphrodisiacs: aphrodisiacs understood as any food that creates desire or that deals with problems of desire from impotence to disinterest. The Arab world seems to have been pre-eminent in this field and opusculi were written with such wonderful titles as the medieval The Book of Exposition in the Science of Coition with its invocation to make the ‘thighs of women anvils for the spear-handles of men’: a long way this from the Taliban stoning pedlars for playing mouth organs. Beachcombing was particularly intrigued by this recipe from The Perfumed Garden, a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century work.
He who feels he is weak for coition should drink before going to bed a glassful of very thick honey and eat twenty almonds and one hundred grams of the pine tree. He must follow this regime for three days. He may also pound onion seed, sift it and mix it afterwards with honey, stirring the mixture well, and taking of this mixture while still fasting.
Depending on what a hundred grams of pine tree is – nuts, resin, bark, wood?! – Beachcombing wouldn’t mind trying this. Certainly, this obsession with honey has survived in the Muslim Med. Ekdahl Raviez who offers this passage, states that still today in Turkey – and we guess in the Arabic world – it is possible to buy honey, nut and pepper concoctions for improved sexual vigour. Honey, in fact, comes up repeatedly in Arabic aphrodisiacs: and let’s face it anything is better than oysters. Take this humbling passage from the Thousand and One Nights
He took two ounces of Chinese cubebs; one ounce of fat; extract of Ionian hemp; one ounce of fresh caryophyle (pinks); one ounce of red cinnamon from Serendib, then drachms of white Malabar cardamom, five of Indian ginger, five of white pepper, five of pimento from the isles, one ounce of the berries of Indian staranise, and half an ounce of mountain thyme. These he mixed cunningly, after having pounded and sieved them. He added pure honey until the whole became a thick paste; then he mingled five grains of musk and an ounce of pounded fish roe with the rest. [He then explained] ‘You must eat this paste two hours before the sexual approach, but for three days before that you must eat nothing save roast pigeons excessively seasoned with spice, male fish with the cream complete, and lightly fried ram’s eggs. If after all that you do not pierce the very walls of the room and get the foundations of the house with child [!], you can cut off my beard and spit in my face.
Any other unusual aphrodisiacs? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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26/4/2012 Invisible writes in on a sceptical note and Beach can’t bear it. Don’t know about the other ingredients in this concoction, but I was told by a Middle Eastern Studies librarian that (Richard Burton’s translation aside) many of the stories in the 1001 Nights were the equivalent of our Traveling Salesman/Farmer’s Daughter tales–full of male fantasy sexual stereotypes and light smut. Thanks Invisible!!
Force Feeding Queens April 9, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
One of Beach’s most able students this term did a paper on ‘cultural variance in female beauty’: the fact that what makes a woman attractive varies from society to society. This is rarely truer than with weight. After all, here should we trust the modern American model of the waspish, almost boyish woman or the Mediterranean model of, say, a curvy Calabrian with rotating hips? Beach has not the slightest idea. But he confesses to being intrigued by the extraordinary model offered in nineteenth-century Uganda and described here by a European traveller.
In the afternoon, as I had heard from Musa that the wives of the king and princes were fattened to such an extent that they could not stand upright, I paid my respects to Waze’ze’ru, the king’s eldest brother… with the hope of being able to see for myself the truth of the story. There was no mistake about it. On entering the hut, I found the old man and his chief wife sitting side by side on a bench of earth strewed over with grass, and partitioned like stalls for sleeping apartments, while in front of them were placed numerous wooden pots of milk… I was struck with no small surprise at the way he received me, as well as with the extraordinary dimensions, yet pleasing beauty, of the immoderately fat fair one his wife. She could not rise; and so large were her arms that between the joints the flesh hung down like large, loose-stuffed puddings. Then in came their children, all models of the Abyssinian type of beauty, and as polite in their manners as thorough-bred gentlemen. They had heard of my picture-books from the king, and all wished to see them; which they no sooner did, to their infinite delight, especially when they recognized any of the animals, than the subject was turned by my inquiring what they did with so many milk-pots. This was easily explained by Waze’ze’ru himself, who, pointing to his wife, said, ‘This is all the product of those pots: from early youth upward we keep those pots to their mouths, as it is the fashion at court to have very fat wives.’
Essentially then aristocratic women are force-fed so they attain simply extraordinary dimensions. This next passage comes from the same writer. Here he risked a great deal by going to measure one of these obese beauties and offering his own flesh in payment in a bizarre adult cross-cultural version of you-show-me-and-I’ll-show-you.
After a long and amusing conversation with [the king] in the morning, I called on one of his sisters-in-law, married to an elder brother who was born before Dagara ascended the throne. She was another of those wonders of obesity, unable to stand excepting on all fours. I was desirous to obtain a good view of her, and actually to measure her, and induced her to give me facilities for doing so by offering in return to show her a bit of my naked legs and arms. The bait took as I wished it, and after getting her to sidle and wriggle into the middle of the hut, I did as I promised, and then took her dimensions, as noted below. All of these are exact except the height, and I believe I could have obtained this more accurately if I could have had her laid on the floor. Not knowing what difficulties I should have to contend with in such a piece of engineering, I tried to get her height by raising her up. This, after infinite exertions on the part of us both, was accomplished, when she sank down again, fainting, for her blood had rushed into her head. Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which the father kept her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for, as fattening is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake hands with me. Her features were lively, but her body was as round as a ball.
‘I got up a bit of a flirtation with missy’! For the record the measurements of her mother were as follows: Round the arm, 1 foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf, 1 foot 8 inches; height, 5 feet 8 inches.
Beach wonders how much she weighed? Any other extreme versions of feminine beauty? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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30/4/2012: KHM writes in ‘The preference for the fat female seems to go back far into prehistory as the article below from Wikipedia on venus figurines indicates. Since thin females are less likely to conceive than fatter ones, the preference may be rooted in reproductive advantage, perhaps as in the cultural concept of the “earth mother.”The further back we go, the more important the earth mother, matriarchy and polyandry is relative to the male sky or heaven gods controlling the weather. It is quite possible that before the Biblical Fall both culture and religion revolved around the female rather than the male. (Adam was defined as includingboth male and female genders.) These extremely old traditions die very slowly – I think the Ottoman Turks were one of the last cultures to favor artificially fat females, but not to the same degree as the Ugandans, of course. Now that the biosphere is suffering from extinction of many species, especially those in the wild, the earth as a mother will be unappreciated andunrecognized. Free food derived from hunting, fishing and gathering in the wild will be replaced by human effort and intervention at all stages of the food production process. Expect females to lose much of their distinctive physical appearance as they dress and act more like males in the long-term future.’ Thanks KHM!!
The Bizarrest Date in History March 29, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
Long-term readers of this blog will know that Beachcombing has a thing about futurist food: previous posts have included, indeed, an overview of attempts by the futurists to revolutionize what we eat and, perhaps better, still an unusual meal that ended with a woman being devoured.
For those who have not the time or the inclination to go back and dig up past dirt futurist food was all about sensual experience. Ideally, the futurists argue, we should reject the ghastly duties of alimentation. Nutrition should be given to us through a daily injection, with only powerful experiential blasts actually put into the mouth.
Beachcombing recently stumbled upon another exceptional futurist recipe set: this time from a futurist date. As our author puts it : ‘a shy lover yearns to express his feelings to a beautiful and intelligent woman. The following Declaration of Love Dinner served on the terrace of a grand hotel in the twinkling night of the city will help him achieve his aim.’
Enjoy now the following menu and note the strangely abject attitude of the ‘beautiful and intelligent woman’ who first must eat bread and butter on instruction while the man looks on, after must sun herself in mirrored plate, after again will get in trouble for batting an eyelid and then is presumably to answer ‘your place’ in reply to the inevitable question from our ‘shy’ paramour.
Beach can’t help asking himself at which course most modern ‘beautiful and intelligent’ women will have made an excuse and legged it to the taxi rank.
I Desire You: antipasto composed of a myriad selection of exquisite tid-bits, which the waiter will only let them admire, while She contents herself with bread and butter.
Flesh Adored: a big plate made from a shining mirror. In the centre, chicken slices perfumed with amber and covered with a thin layer of cherry jam. She, while eating, will admire her reflection in the plate.
This is How I’ll Love You: Little tubes of pastry filled with many different flavours, one of plums, one of apples cooked in rum, one of potatoes drenched in cognac, one of sweet rice, etc. She, without batting an eyelid, will eat them all.
Super Passion: A very compact cake of sweet pastry with small cavities on the top filled with anise, glacier mints, rum, juniper and Amaro.
Tonight with Me: A very ripe orange enclosed in a large hollowed-out sweet pepper, embedded in a thick zabaglione [egg yolks, wine and sugar] flavoured with juniper and salted with little bits of oyster and drops of sea water.
While pondering this Beach wondered too whether there is not a bizarre history file to be opened on important historical dates: dates that included great men and women (what was it like to end up at a restaurant with Stalin?); dates that mattered (dates that changed the lives of the participants); and disastrous dates (dates that led to bloodshed). But Beachcombing came up with an almost complete blank. Any ideas: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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30/April/2012: John G offers some ‘bad’ dates: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at The Granita Restaurant, The Last Supper, Elements of the Glencoe Massacre, Alexander and the burning of The Palace of Xerxes (Probably not strictly a date), The death of Christopher Marlowe, I read one account that it was an argument about the bill, it’s a pity that TB and GB didn’t have a similar dispute. How different would the world be if Cleopatra hadn’t had her unusual date with Julius Caesar?’ Then Wade chips in with dating that results in family honor killing. Thanks John and thanks Wade!
From North Carolina to Chad: Families and Food March 10, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite
An ‘ill’ day with interesting complications in the throat area so Beach is going to go off topic with this extraordinary book he recently stumbled upon: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (Peter Menzel 2005). This exercise in photo-journalism has a fair bit of manipulation behind it: but the idea itself is an extraordinarily simple and effective one. Turn up in about 30 of the 200 odd countries in the world and then photograph a family with the food that they expect to eat in one week.
Of course – and this is where the manipulation comes in – there is going to be quite a lot of picking and choosing. As you cannot visit every single country how do you decide which countries to choose? And as you are going to have to choose a region within a country how do you choose which part of the country, never mind what family in that region?
In the United States you could pick, as the editor decided to here, a family from North Carolina who seem to live almost without fresh food: there is a solitary bunch of grapes. Or you could choose a wealthy white family from southern California with their vegan chef as the editor did not. Naturally, a junk-food family that can buy lots of cheap but bad food comes closer to the stereotype of American families (Michael Pollin etc) and is perhaps closer to a genuine median?
But if choices are not always scientific the effect is nevertheless striking. This book is an efficient twenty-first century equivalent of parents telling their children ‘Eat that! There are children starving in Africa!’ Of which more below… Going down the scale we come next to a Polish family with their predictable predominance of root and ground vegetables and reduced processed food.
Then Egypt where processed foods are becoming increasingly a luxury item: indeed, from friends in Egypt Beachcombing knows that the ‘sophisticated’ diet is a modern processed one, that naturally cannot be afforded by most of the population.
From here we come to a very rural family in Ecuador: this, Beachcombing should note, is not how most people in Ecuador eat, nor is it how most people in Ecuador dress!
Then finally and most tragically this image of a refugee family in Chad, a country that has spent most of the last generation as the armpit of the world: the result of a corrupt political class, unstable neighbours and lots of guns.
The American family spends about 250 dollars a week. The fatherless bairns in this picture are, with their mother, all fed on less than 1 dollar a week. They can’t get much more than a thousand calories a day from this mush of beans and grains: there are six of them, five of them in a phase of acute growth.
Beachcombing is always looking for striking and unusual books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Vintages Past January 17, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Modern
***Dedicated to Larry***
There is a beautiful scene in the junky teen fantasy Highlander (1986) where Connor (the decapitator) opens a bottle of eighteenth-century brandy in late twentieth century New York.
‘1783’ states our hero ‘was a very good year. Mozart wrote his Great Mass. The Montgolfier brothers went up in the first hot-air balloon. And England recognized the independence of the United States.’
Personally Beachcombing gets excited when he drinks a 2009 bottle to think that he is taking into his body the juices of three seasons past. But imagine drinking a vintage from 1950, or 1850 or, yes, 1783! Those grapes were picked by men and women who are now dust beneath our feet…
Such aren’t the moments when history come alive. They are the moments when history lays its long clammy hands on our shoulders and says ‘you’re next’!
Of course, it does not fall to everyone to be able to sample two or three hundred year old bottles of wine and experience this rare transcendence. But some have been so lucky. Trimalchio’s feast has a hundred year old vintage – though part of the joke seems to be that it is not particularly good – and Beach has previously in this place celebrated a 120 year old bottle of Polish wine that was opened in 1918 to celebrate Poland’s renewed nationhood.
But there have been older drinking experiences (outside of Hollywood films) particularly when wine has been isolated in the bulks of wrecked ships in cold seas. For example in June 2011 some 150 year old wine was found on a civil war era ship that had gone down in 1864 near Bermuda. In 2010 some champagne was discovered at the bottom of the Baltic and allegedly tasted pretty good.
Then if you really want blood poisoning last August some 2000 year old wine was found in a ship off the Albanian coast. Actually Beach jests: the stoppers had rotted away and sea water had got in: there was no Roman wine to talk of… just an interesting coloured salt-water.
If you can’t afford the old bottles you can at least buy recreations. Beach has been wanting for years to find some way around custom restrictions and import a bottle of Tutankhamen Ale, recreated using the molecular traces of beer found in an ancient Egyptian temple kitchen. And ditto for Stone Age beer, disgusting by all accounts.
But what really got Beach thinking about this was an email from Larry this morning about an eccentric Englishman – hardly a rare occurrence we know – who has decided to make the world’s oldest wine from scratch.
An Englishman working in Chile has launched what is believed to be the first wine aged with a meteorite formed during the birth of the solar system. Norwich-born Ian Hutcheon has released a Cabernet Sauvignon called Meteorito [!], aged with a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Any other ancient vintages: preferably drinkable ones? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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18/01/2012: WKJ writes in ‘It’s fictional and not drinkable, but your post on vintage wine sent me back to reading “a vintage from Atlantis” by Clark Ashton Smith. (which is online, Eldritch Dark website I think). Thanks WKJ!
21/01/12: Next up is Andy the Mad Monk ‘This is a quote from the book The Blandys of Madeira: 1811 – 2011 by Marcus Binney. Churchill visited Madeira in 1950 and was royally entertained: Graham Blandy describes how towards the end of dinner Churchill ‘asked me what was the best Madeira on the list, to which I replied I believed that it was the 1792 Blandy Solera’. When it arrived at the table Churchill said, ‘I must do honour to this,’ and stood up, put his napkin over his elbow and poured the wine for each of his guests. Then he sat down and talked of the year 1792, three years after the French Revolution, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still alive. The bottle came from a pipe (105 gallons) taken on board HMS Northumberland as it sailed south carrying Napoleon to exile in St. Helena. The Emperor had not drunk the wine and, as it had never been paid for, the pipe returned to Madeira. And this might tickle your fancy on ale from Edward VIII’s coronation. And on Sumerian beer. Adrian Sterling, meanwhile, from the Anomalist writes in with some ancient recipes or as he puts it ‘Who needs to import when you can make it at home and thumb your nose at customs? You can make a batch then have your friends over to watch Arsenal kick some Manchester butt while loudly musing ‘I can’t believe they DRANK this stuff.’ Inimitable! Thanks Adrian and Andy!
3/Feb/2012: And here is Andy at it again with a past beer recipe. Thanks Andy!
Cocaine, Nicotine and Ancient Egypt October 24, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient
As regular readers of this column will attest Beachcombing is your typical small-minded historian. He doesn’t much like novelty and if there is a controversy he will float effortlessly into the orthodox camp. But with the argument over cocaine use in the ancient world he risks, however briefly, going the other way: if only to annoy archaeologists.
For those who have never come across it here is ‘the story so far’.
In 1992 a respected German scientific periodical, Naturwissenschaften, published a note by a series of accredited academics claiming that they had discovered traces of cocaine and tobacco in hair samples from ancient Egyptian mummies.
Drug use among the ancients, as among the moderns, is no cause for surprise. The Neolithic Revolution, the single most important human event, the event, indeed, that begins our millennial-long escape from the seasons, was arguably buoyed along by the need to create intoxicants.
Hashish and opium have been found in antique tombs.
There were certainly drugs around then ‘back in the day’. But the worrying thing about this particular discovery was that tobacco and cocaine are made from New World plants and yet here they allegedly were in Ancient Egyptian bodies a little short of three thousand years before Columbus!
If you are going to introduce a piece of evidence that breaks a historic orthodoxy like the early modern discovery of the Americas then there are three ways you can do this.
First, you can play at Darwin and become a pioneer: you can wade in with a long five hundred page book, backing up your assertion with years of research and oodles of footnotes. Let’s hope that you have a Huxley or two in the wings.
Second, the coward’s way out, you can publish your findings, making fun of them and explaining that you are flummoxed and that you probably need to clean your lab.
Or, third, the pragmatist, you can bring them out in a low-key fashion, say in a note, then run for cover.
The scholars involved took the most sensible way forward, the pragmatic one. They ran the flag a little way up the flag mast just to see what would happen. And, of course, the first sound they heard was machine gun fire ripping their flag to shreds.
Scholars reacted with what might diplomatically be called ‘bewilderment’ and various solutions were offered as a way out of this paradigm-breaking discovery. The lab results were simply wrong; the lab results were right but the results had come about from post-mortem treatment of some kind; the lab results were right but the corpses had been ‘infected’ after discovery in the modern period; the lab results were right but the mummies were not genuine ancient mummies, rather they were early modern fakes.
If Beachcombing had been at the receiving end of this he would have already been beating a hasty retreat. But to her credit the toxicologist whose name was at the top of the 1992 paper, Svetlana Balabanova did no such thing, though she reports receiving insulting letters.
Like several scientists sucked into this dispute she had been surprised by the results and had exhaustively repeated her tests before going public. Her attitude seemed to be: I’m no historian, it is not down to me to sort this out, but I stand by the quality of my lab work.
Historians and archaeologists, once the initial hubbub was over, just shook their heads and moved on. Few were going to risk professional ridicule by even interacting with this material.
In fact, it fell to a documentary maker to put together The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies setting out the implications of the discovery. The programme was actually far better than the title suggests and transcripts are to be found online. In short, diffusionists, Egyptologists and archaeologists were all brought together for a happy old mish mash.
Not the least interesting part of the show was a respected Egyptologist Dr Rosalie David, at Manchester University, going back over some of the material from the original tests. RD, a sceptic, was not given access to the mummies from Germany used by Balabanova – though she decided, after several hours in the archives, that most of these were genuine ancient mummies as opposed to modern fakes. However, she ran too a series of tests on three ancient bodies from a museum in Manchester and to her shock these had nicotine in their hair and tissue samples.
In subsequent years other testers found similar results. The greatest interest admittedly came from Svetlana Balabanova’s lab: SB by now seemed to be suffering from an understandable obsession over the matter.
[SB] tested tissue from 134 naturally preserved bodies from an excavated cemetery in Sudan, once part of the Egyptian empire. Although from a later period, the bodies were still many centuries before Columbus discovered the Americas. About a third of them tested positive for nicotine and cocaine. Balabanova was mystified by the presence of cocaine in Africa but thought she have a way of explaining the nicotine. As well as Egypt and Sudan, she tested bodies from China, Germany and Austria, spanning a period from 3700BC to 1100AD. A percentage of bodies from the other regions also contained nicotine. Egypt 89%, Sudan 90%, China 62.5%, Germany 34%, Austria 100%. [documentary]
Beachcombing recently wrote of the pain of accepting new knowledge in any discipline. There is always a conflict: the need to be open to new ideas, and yet, at the same time, the need to have filters.
The case of suspected Egyptian cocaine use is the finest example he knows from history/archaeology of professionals getting this balance wrong. After all the people involved here were not fringe crackpots, but experts who were staking their reputation on the accuracy of results that had, at first, surprised them.
Personally, Beach would bet, if not his house, then a significant part of his mortgage that cocaine and tobacco did not make its way across either the Pacific or the Atlantic in prehistory. But the initial contempt – remember the letters? – and more strikingly the deadening silence that followed on from these finds – with plenty of guffawing into sleeves – was hardly, shall we say, ‘polite’.
Surely any self-confident discipline should be able to accept anomalous material on board, take it under cognizance and then have a generation either to research it out of existence or to integrate it into ‘core knowledge’?
When archaeologists and historians get all hot and bothered about Erik von Daniken and his ilk, they forget that these kinds of displays invite talk of establishment cover-ups.
These kinds of displays also get in the way of sensible solutions.
A small group of scholars have had the guts to wrestle with this material directly. Larry Cartmell and Cheryl Weems, for example, in 2001 published a brief note (Chungara: Revista de Antropología Chilena) looking at eighteen ancient individuals from the Oasis of Dakhleh in Egypt all of whom were negative in hair samples for cocaine, but fourteen of whom had positive readings for nicotine. The authors play up an idea from the margins of the cocaine/tobacco debate, in as much as a debate had taken place. Perhaps there was an African plant that could have produced these nicotine readings? They note that the low levels of nicotine present in the hair samples suggest dietary use rather than smoking.
But where, in the world, did the cocaine (if that is what it is) come from? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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24 Oct 2011: Open Sesame writes: ‘Just one initial reaction. I personally am ready to believe just about anything if the evidence takes me there. But where I start to have problems is with the quantity of tobacco and cocaine that would be needed to create these readings across Euro-Asia-Africa. It is the equivalent of every burial in antique Europe having strips of silk from China. Items from far away were extremely rare and valuable. We would expect occasional readings not the kind of numbers you’ve offered here. Perhaps we really are looking for a local source of nicotine and ‘cocaine’ then.’ SY also writes in ‘I quote the abstract of the following piece by Balabanova from 2001 that suggests that she is rapidly going in the ‘native crop solution’: at least for nicotine. ‘Nicotine use in early Mediaeval Kirchheim/Teck, Germany’, Journal of Comparative Human Biology 52 (2001) 72-76, Human bone samples of 123 Alemans of the 5th to 7th c AD were investigated for nicotine. In 23 individuals nicotine was found at levels between 31 and 150 ng/g, and in 49 others nicotine was found in traces. The results indicate that in Germany plants of the genus Nicotiana should have been present, known and used, well before Columbus. The purposes behind this use might have been domestic/medical or ritual, or possibly even as a luxury as occurs today.’ Thanks OS and SY!
8 Nov 2011: David Counsell writes in with what looks like a vital corrective. ‘I am a medical doctor who has worked with the Manchester Mummy Project since the Mid 1990s. I looked at this as part of my PhD on Intoxicant use in Ancient Egypt and my results have been published in 2 sources in addition to my thesis - check out Chapter 13 in Egyptiam Mummies and Modern Science, Editor Rosalie David; which gives a full explanation. In a nutshell the amount of these drugs found in the mummies was overestimated as rather than being presented in the common unit, nanogrames per mg of sample material (ng/mg) they were presented as nanogrames per gram of sample (ng/g) giving a figure 1000 fold exaggerated. When you adjust the unit you find that the level of nicotine found is not as high as in smokers and is consistent with a dietary source of nicotine eg Celery which was known to the Ancient Egyptians. Similarly the cocaine level once corrected is so low as to be considered negative by most labs in the mid 1990s and is most likely a trace contaminant form the lab where the work was done. Overall the explanation is quite dull which perhaps explains why it hasn’t had the same publicity as the original ‘discovery’.’ Thanks David!
The Meal that Stopped a Suicide October 9, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
As Beach soars out of his convalescence here is a modern nonsense post to enjoy from the immortal meals series. The problem is that Beach cannot be sure that this meal ever took place: given the loons involved it may just have been a Futurist fantasy. But where the likes of Marinetti and Fillìa are involved picnics on Venus are not out of the question.
11 May 1930 a friend a certain Giulio Onesti sent an urgent telegram to the Italian artist and provocateur Filippo Marinetti.
Dearest friend, since She departed forever have been wracked with tormenting anguish STOP immense sadness prevents my survival STOP beg you come immediately before arrival of the one who resembles her too much but not enough GIULIO
For those lucky enough not to have grown up in the strange demi world of futurist erotics Giuilio has lost a love – who we learn elsewhere had died in New York – and yet was about to be tormented by the arrival of another lover who was not the dead woman’s equal but who would, nevertheless, tempt him between the sheets. For reasons that escape Beachcombing this had pushed the poor man to the edge of suicide. But never fear: Marinetti, Fillìa and Prampolini are on their way to rescue their friend and they have determined to drive him out of suicide with their cooking.
Readers of this blog with an impressive memory may vaguely recall the bizarre facts of futurist fun in the kitchen: everything from fried roses to phallic salami with eau d’cologne. However, on this occasion the boys are determined to limit themselves to cannibalism.
Enrico Prampolini cried: ‘Our ingenious hands need a hundred sacks of the following indispensable ingredients: chestnut flour, wheat flour, ground almonds, rye flour, cornmeal, cocoa powder, red pepper, sugar and eggs. Ten jars of honey, oil and milk. A quintal of dates and bananas… The servants immediately began to fetch great heavy sacks, emptying them into pyramidical heaps of yellow, white, black and red and transforming the kitchens into fantastic laboratories where enormous upturned saucepans on the floor changed into grandiose pedestals predisposed to supporting unpredictable statuary. ‘To work my aeorpainters and aerosculptors!’ said Marinetti. ‘My aeropoetry will ventilate your brains like whirring propellers.’
Quite. The Futurist cooks create 22 edible women – memories of a Margaret Atwood novel from when Beach used to read ‘serious’ fiction. It must have been something to see and Giulio vents his emotions on The Curves of the World and Their Secrets.
‘Kneeling before it he began like a lover to adore it with his lips, tongue and teeth. Searching and overturning the pretty little sugar palm tree like a ravenous tiger, he bit off and ate a sweet little foot skating on a cloud. At three that morning, with a terrible writhing of his loins, he bit into the dense heart-of-hearts of pleasure… At dawn he devoured the mammellary spheres of all mothers’ milk. When his tongue skimmed the long eyelashes that guarded the great jewels of her gaze, the clouds which had gathered swiftly over the lake suddenly loosed a violent orange thunderbolt whose long green rays tore through the reed beds a few metres from the armoury.
Fact or fiction? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Either way this is one of the most alarming things that Beachcombing has ever read: and this is someone who grew up on Charlie Brown. The quotation comes from Chronicle Books excellent English translation of the Futurist Cookbook now, sadly, long since out of print.
The Sausage War August 26, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
Beachcombing has been paying perhaps too much attention to Finland in the last two months: the result of a long infatuation with Mannerheim, the aristocratic military commander who twice saved his young country from the Soviets. He kicked off with the tale of Mannerheim’s cigar. He moved onto a WIBT moment in the court of the red Tsar when Finnish democrats had the naivety to tell Stalin and Molotov to buck up and respect international law. Today though, before he leaves Finland behind for a while, he will pass from diplomacy and smoking to a weird war episode and one of the most extraordinary moments in the Winter War: the Battle of the Sausages.
It began with a rare Soviet success: we are on the Tolvajarvi front not far from the village of that name. A Soviet battalion has, December 10, marched in silence through the snowy woods and is ready to fall on a crucial Finnish supply position in a brilliantly executed night attack.
The attack worked almost perfectly. Finnish personnel here were few and many were non-military – medical orderlies and the like. The Finns were also – a rare event in the Winter War when the snow boot was normally on the other foot – taken by surprise. It looked very much as if the Soviets had scored an outstanding victory. That was until they reached the kitchens…
The Soviet soldiers in the Winter War were badly led and, more importantly, badly fed. Cannibalism in the Russian ranks is well attested in Finnish photographs from the period. And emerging out of the icy night they suddenly found themselves on the edge of a great victory in front of fleeing cooks and huge pans of sausage soup. They froze, they lowered their weapons – Beachcombing imagines that they looked at each other – and then they began to eat.
It is just possible that they could have got away with this if they were fighting a tired British regiment or demoralized Italians. But these were, for God’s sake, the Finns! A Colonel Pajari rounded up his scattered men: including the outraged chefs and counterattacked with bayonets. The Sausage War was a bloody affair and soon the Russians were in full retreat as the ‘real’ Finnish soldier arrived to finish the job.
Allegedly the battalion was almost wiped out and a hundred frozen Russians were found in the field kitchen the next morning. Beachcombing likes to think that they died with the taste of good Finnish sausage in their mouths. There is something ghastly about men being shot or stabbed while they eat: perhaps eating is a convivial moment or perhaps there is a vague unspoken convention that understands we are at our most vulnerable with food in our hands.
All this got Beach thinking about food and drink leading other armies astray: dr beachcombing AT yahoo DOT com for other examples.
There are the accounts of the half starving Germans in Operation Michael, the last desperate throw of the dice in the Great War, being amazed by Allied supplied of food as they overran trench after trench in 1918. It goes without saying though that the Germans didn’t stop.
Another example is the haunting description in Thucydides of a thirsty Athenian army, 413 BC, running forward to drink from the river Assinarus (another post another day) even though they were under fire from both banks. They drank with all too predictable consequences.
Then there are those many battles where drunkenness has played its part…
Keats, Wordsworth, Haydon, Lamb, Monkhouse, Ritchie and the Comptroller March 14, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing spent yesterday looking for modern food-tasters and, in so doing, found himself inspired by another question. What meal in history would he most want to have eaten at?
Now, of course, there are two ways that the best meal might be judged: either in terms of the food eaten or in terms of the company. Beachcombing would not be averse to sitting down with the most delicious nosh ever made (especially if gluten free), but for today’s purposes he is more interested in the host who managed to drag, around a small table, the most interesting guests.
First, some obvious ground rules. Large meals are fine as long as there is some intimate conversation. You might imagine, for example, that soup with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta would have been illuminating: but their entourages were so big that there was probably relatively little chatting among the ‘big three’ before the cigars. Attlee and Molotov constantly getting in the way…
After much thought Beachcombing settled on an obscure nineteenth-century meal. 28 December 1817 the painter and writer Benjamin Haydon invited to a small but delightful soiree perhaps the two greatest - with apologies to Browning and Whitman - nineteenth-century English-speaking poets: John Keats and William Wordsworth. Wordsworth and Keats accepted as did the explosive playwright Charles Lamb, most famous today for his tales from Shakespeare. Then along with these luminaries came Thomas Monkhouse (a city gentleman, cousin of Wordsworth) and Joseph Ritchie an explorer who would die a year later on his way to Timbuktu.
It is one thing to get such an extraordinary group together, it is another thing for the evening to be a success: yet somehow Haydon pulled it off. The key seems to have been the unusual combination of Lamb and Wordsworth: Lamb punctured Wordsworth’s sage-like reserve. Then over them hung Haydon’s most recent work (pictured above) Christ Entering Jerusalem with cameos of Keats, Newton (!) and others.
On 28 December the immortal dinner came off in my painting-room, with Jerusalem towering up behind us as a background. Wordsworth was in fine cue, and we had a glorious set to – on Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry and exquisitely witty; and his fun in the midst of Wordsworth’s solemn intonations of oratory was like the sarcasm and wit of the Fool in the intervals of Lear’s passion. He made a speech and voted me absent, and made them drink my health. ‘Now’, said Lamb, ‘you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why do you call Voltaire dull?’ We all defended Wordsworth, and affirmed there was a state of mind when Voltaire would be dull. ‘Well’, said Lamb, ‘here’s Voltaire – the Messiah of the French nation, and a very proper one too.’
He then, in a strain of humour beyond description, abused me for putting Newton’s head into my picture; ‘a fellow’ said he ‘who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle’. And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was impossible to resist him, and we all drank ‘Newton’s health and confusion to mathematics’. It was delightful to see the good humour of Wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation and laughing as heartily as the best of us.
Wordsworth rarely laughed…
The evening was then truly immortalised by the arrival of the Comptroller of Stamps, one of the great idiots of literary history, as impressive, in his way, as the ‘person from Porlock’.
In the morning of this delightful day, a gentleman, a perfect stranger, had called on me. He said he knew my friends, had an enthusiasm for Wordsworth, and begged I would procure him the happiness of an introduction. He told me he was a comptroller of stamps, and often had correspondence with the poet. 1 I thought it a liberty; but still, as he seemed a gentleman, I told him he might come. When we retired to tea we found the comptroller. In introducing him to Wordsworth I forgot to say who he was. After a little time the comptroller looked down, looked up, and said to Wordsworth: ‘Don’t you think, sir, Milton was a great genius?’ Keats looked at me, Wordsworth looked at the comptroller. Lamb who was dozing by the fire turned round and said: ‘Pray, sir, did you say Milton was a great genius?’ ‘ No, sir, I asked Mr. Wordsworth if he were not.’ ‘Oh,’ said Lamb, ‘then you are a silly fellow’. ‘Charles! my dear Charles!’ said Wordsworth; but Lamb, perfectly innocent of the confusion he had created, was off again by the fire. After an awful pause the comptroller said: ‘Don’t you think Newton a great genius?’ I could not stand it any longer. Keats put his head into my books. Ritchie squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking himself: ‘Who is this?’ Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said: ‘Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?’ He then turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the comptroller he chanted:
‘Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on’.
The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who he was, said in a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of assured victory: ‘I have had the honour of some correspondence with you, Mr. Wordsworth’. ‘With me, sir?’ said Wordsworth, ‘not that I remember’. ‘Don’t you, sir? I am a comptroller of stamps.’ There was a dead silence, the comptroller evidently thinking that was enough…
Keats and I hurried Lamb into the painting-room, shut the door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. Monkhouse followed and tried to get Lamb away. We went back, but the comptroller was irreconcilable. We soothed and smiled, and asked him to supper. He stayed, though his dignity was sorely affected. However, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and no ill effects followed. All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could hear Lamb struggling in the painting-room, and calling at intervals: ‘Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more’.
It was indeed an immortal evening. Wordsworth’s fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats’ eager inspired look, Lamb’s quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my solemn Jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long
glow upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude (316-320)
Haydon finishes his description with a melancholy consideration… When he published his account in 1853 only Wordsworth and himself were still alive. Ritchie had croaked in Africa in 1819, Keats – his name ‘writ on water’ – in Rome in 1821 and Lamb in 1834 just short of 60. Haydon and Wordsworth would soon totter off the mortal coil as well. The only witness of that fabulous evening is now Christ Enters Jerusalem lost in a private collection somewhere in the States.
Any other immortal meals? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
