France – the heart thrills

ORCHIL DYES

Milan, 19 February 2024

My wife and I were recently hiking in the Vienna woods, which at one point required crossing a large open field. We were halfway across it when I was startled to see an emerald green tree on its edge. It was certainly not leaves which were making it green at this time of year. And what was strange was that all the branches were emerald green. Luckily for my sanity, the path we were taking passed close by it, so I was able to inspect the tree more closely. It turned out that all the branches of the tree were thickly covered with a bright green lichen. Foolishly, I didn’t take a photo of the tree, so I’m afraid this photo will have to do.

This vision got me thinking about lichen. They’re very modest beings for the most part, clinging closely to their rock or branch, so I’ve never given them much thought. They give us some gentle splashes of colour on our winter hikes, when all the trees are bare, wildflowers are still asleep, and the skies are grey.

Lichens might be modest beings but they are fascinating. I’m bursting with desire to tell my readers all about them, but I already see my wife shifting around in her seat at the thought of hearing all sorts of biological details that she never wanted to hear about. So, since vibrant colour is what started this post, I’ll just focus on lichens’ connection to dyeing. Which, as readers will see in a minute, will also lead me to write about trade, a topic which I’ve written about many times in these posts.

Let me start by saying that I am really filled with admiration for our remote ancestors. They looked around their ecosystems and tried to find a use for everything that Nature offered them. I, a pampered product of an oversupplied culture, who can get anything I want from anywhere in the world with a mere click of my mouse, would never, ever dream of trying to use lichens as a dye. But our ancestors did, particularly those who lived in ecosystems which did not support a huge amount of biodiversity and so didn’t have that many plants or animals to exploit.

Most of them used lichens as dye sources in the easiest way. They collected them, simmered them in boiling water, waited a while for the lichen to leach out the colour, then added the yarns, simmered, and waited some more (I simplify, but not by much). Modern artisanal dye masters have replicated the processes, with which you can get some quite nice colourings. These photos show some of the lichens used as well as the yarns they have coloured.

But pride of place in lichen dyeing goes to the various species which give us orchil dyes. These are dyes in the red-mauve to dark purple spectrum – this photo shows the range of colours which modern artisanal masters have managed to tease out of these lichens.

Since they are the source of these lovely colours, I feel I should honour the main species of lichen from which orchil dyes are extracted.
Lasallia pustulata

Ochrolechia tartarea

Evernia prunastri

Roccella tinctoria

Unless some of my readers are passionate lichenologists, I think we can all agree that these lichens are not terribly, terribly beautiful. But by the wonders of biochemistry, they can deliver us lovely dyes. Beauty out of the beasts, as it were.

Anyway, the process to extract orchil dyes is much more complex than the simple boil-it-up-and-dunk-the-yarn-in-it process which I just described. One has to crush the lichen in a solution of ammonia and keep the mix well oxygenated for several weeks. The ammonia slowly reacts with chemicals in the lichens, with the product of these reactions being the purple dye. This effect of ammonia was discovered a long, long time ago, at least in Roman times and very probably before. And in those days the source of the ammonia was … stale urine. Yes, the lichen was steeped in stale urine.

Again, I’m just filled with amazement. How on earth did our ancestors figure this one out? I try imagining scenarios of how someone stumbled across this urine effect by accident – because it had to be by accident. The only thing I can think of is this. Did readers know that in the olden days people used stale urine to “dry clean” their clothes? – ammonia, it seems, is a good stain remover. I came across this … err … interesting procedure when I randomly found myself reading an article about a house which had been excavated in Pompeii. It was a fullery, owned by a fellow called Stephanus. Since the photos of the ruins themselves are not very interesting, I throw in here a reconstruction which some enterprising soul has made.

Readers with good eyes can see the various baths where cloth was fulled. In addition to fulling cloth, Stephanus (or rather his slaves) was dry-cleaning clothes with urine. Given my childish sense of humour (I already see my wife rolling her eyes at this point), I was delighted to read that Stephanus had vases placed in the lane on which the fullery abutted, into which (presumably male) passers-by were invited to pee; I wonder if they ever demanded a payment for their liquid contribution to Stephanus’s business? As for the cleaning itself, this was carried out by some poor bastards whom Stephanus had bought in Pompeii’s slave market. They had to stomp on the urine-soaked clothes for hours. For some reason, another fuller in Pompeii, Veranius Hypsaeus, thought that this operation was a good subject for a fresco in his workshop.

I can’t think of a worse job (well, if I thought hard enough about it, I probably could). But some sources I read brightly informed me that the urine was good for the skin of the feet – a small consolation … And just in case any readers are asking themselves, after the stomping session the clothes were washed in water, to rid them of the smell of urine.

Anyway, my theory is that one day, somewhere, someone used a urine-dry-clean on some clothes which had been dyed with orchil-creating lichens in the traditional way (boil-yarn-and-lichen-and-water-together). For some reason, they left the clothes stewing in the urine for a while – perhaps they were called off to some emergency somewhere and didn’t come back for a week or two – and saw to their astonishment that the clothes had turned purple. It’s a wild guess but it satisfies my fervid imagination.

Orchil really delivers quite a lovely colour. But even more important, that colour is purple. At the time, the best purple dye on the market was Tyrian purple. It was extracted from the gland of a number of shellfish, and it took a huge number of molluscs to extract modest amounts of dye. So readers can understand that it was a very expensive dye. Which meant that only the upper crust could afford it, and eventually in the period of the Roman Empire it was decreed that only the Emperor and his family could wear clothes dyed with Tyrian purple. Unfortunately, the statues we have of Roman Emperors have all lost the colouring they used to have. Luckily, though, we have a coloured picture of one Emperor, Justinian, in the mosaics of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. As readers can see, his cloak (and even maybe his shoes?) do indeed seem to be purple.

Note, too, the two fellows to Justinian’s right. They were high-level courtiers and were generously allowed to have a broad purple stripe in their cloak. Ah, the complexities of sumptuary regulations …

In this world of strict social hierarchies, orchil allowed society’s wannabes to swan around in purple clothes, aping the manners of their social superiors (it also allowed dyers to use orchil as an initial, or “bottom”, dye, and then use much smaller amounts of the eye-wateringly expensive Tyrian purple to finish the job – and no doubt sell the cloth as 100% dyed with Tyrian purple).

With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the use of orchil dyes, along with the knowledge of how to make them, pretty much disappeared in Europe. One place where that was not the case was Florence. In the Middle Ages, the city was a major textiles manufacturing centre. Raw wool, and later raw silk, came into the city from all over Europe and beyond, it was processed into cloth – which meant among other things dyeing the yarn – and then the finished cloth was exported all over Europe and beyond. Here we have a photo of Florentine dyers at work.

Florence’s famous banking system, created by the Medici and other families, was basically created to finance this international trade in textiles. Here we have Florentine bankers working at their banco.

In the 1100s, one of the men working in Florence’s textile industry, a certain Alemanno, rediscovered the techniques of making and using orchil dyes. Quite how he did this is a matter of speculation; business trips to the Levant are invoked, or to the Balearic Islands. Or maybe the techniques hadn’t actually disappeared completely in Italy; he just knew a good business opportunity when he saw one and exploited it effectively. However he did it, Alemanno built a fortune on the purple cloth he made, and his descendants, the Rucellai, became Florentine grandees in the succeeding generations. The family name reflected the original source of their wealth; it is thought to be derived from oricello, the Italian name for the dye (which might in turn be derived from the Italian name for urine, orina). By the 1300s, their wealth and status got them a side chapel in the basilica di Santa Maria Novella. The original frescoes are sadly deteriorated, but there is a rather nice statue of a Madonna with Child by Nino Pisani on the altar.

That Madonna and Child is so charming that I am moved to show a close-up.

By the time the 1400s rolled around, Giovanni Rucellai was the head of the family. While he continued to make money hand over fist from the textile business, like all good Florentines of this golden age he was also a patron of the arts. He paid for the completion of the façade of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella.

He commissioned the family palazzo in via della Vigna Nuova.

And finally he commissioned his tomb, a small-scale copy of the so-called edicule in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (any reader interested in comparing the two can do no worse than go to this link).

As befits a Great Man, someone – his heirs, no doubt – commissioned a posthumous portrait of him (note the façade of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella and his tomb in the background).

All of this great – and expensive – art paid for by urine …

This woodcut shows Florence about ten years after Giovanni died, in 1481.

By then, the world was about to change for the worse for Florence and the Mediterranean world in general. A few years after Giovanni’s death, the Portuguese finally reached the Cape of Good Hope, and then a few years after that they crossed the Indian Ocean and reached India, while Christopher Columbus, in an effort to beat the Portuguese to the Indies, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and stumbled across the Americas. Trade patterns were to change profoundly, with the trade and use of orchil-producing lichens being one modest part of those changes.

Already things were changing when Giovanni was born, in 1403. The year before, a Frenchman by the name of Jean de Béthencourt was conquering the Canary Islands in the name of the King of Spain.

Like all conquistadors, he might have been in it for the glory but he was definitely in it for his own personal gain. One of the things he made his money with was orchil-producing lichens, creating a monopoly, controlled by him of course, in the lichen harvesting business. It was not easy harvesting the lichens. They grew close to the sea, and once the easy bunches had been picked the only source left was lichens growing on the sea cliffs. This photo shows a bunch of Rocella tinctoria hanging over a cliff edge.

To get to these lichen, harvesters had to dangle precariously on ropes over cliff edges, hoping no doubt that sudden strong gusts of wind wouldn’t blow them off, and trying not to look into the abyss below.

As readers can imagine, it was only slaves or other poor sods who did this work.

Jean had the harvested lichen shipped back to his domains in Normandy, where there happened to be a village which specialised in textile manufacturing. With the Canarian lichen, the village’s manufacturers were now able to dye their cloth purple; clearly, the secret – if it ever really was a secret – of using urine to make orchil dye was out. The village grew into a prosperous little town on the back of the dye (and let’s not forget the urine), in recognition of which it is now called Grainville-la-Tinturière, or Grainville-the-Dyer (the village is also twinned with two towns in the Canary Islands in recognition of its historic ties to these islands). As far as I can make out, there seems to be absolutely nothing left of the textile industry in the town, so I shall just throw in a photo of an old postcard of the place.

About 50 years later, in 1456, as the Portuguese crept down the coast of western Africa, they discovered and took over the islands of Cabo Verde. There, too, the same orchil-producing lichens clung to sea cliffs, and there, too, poor bastards hung precariously over the cliff edges to harvest them. In this case, the lichens were shipped back to Lisbon, for onward export to Antwerp and other places. I throw in photos of Lisbon and Antwerp, respectively, in this general period.

As the Portuguese kept creeping down the coast of western Africa, they discovered another source of orchil-producing lichens in Angola, although there – luckily for the harvesters – the lichens grew on trees and were easier to harvest. This photo is from a completely different part of the world, but it gives a good idea of what Angolan harvesters were faced with.

All this meant that for several centuries large quantities of orchil-producing lichens poured into Europe from European colonies. In the meantime, as the science of chemistry progressed, there were improvements to the manufacturing process which led to the production of better dyes. All was going swimmingly until a young English chemist called Henry Perkin kick-started the artificial dye industry by serendipitously creating a completely new dye, which he called mauveine, from coal tar residues. I’ve covered this story in my post on Indigo dye and insert again here the photo I used of this beautiful dye.
That discovery was the death knell of the natural dye industry: artificial dyes were more colour fast, light fast and cheaper. And so making orchil from lichen, and dyeing with lichens more generally, pretty much disappeared. Which actually is probably a good thing. Lichens grow very slowly, so the dye business was decimating them. I never thought I would say this, but for once I’m grateful to chemicals made from fossil fuels. Without them, who knows what would have been the status of lichens today? As it is, they are under threat. Lichens are very sensitive to pollution (one of their modern uses is as indicators of pollution levels), and a good number of species are on the IUCN’s list of endangered species.

So, – ooh, this is hard for me to say – three cheers for the organic chemicals industry!

HIGH ALPINE PASTURES

Vienna, 14 October 2023

All along the arc of the Alps, the farmers must be bringing their cattle down from the high Alpine pastures where they’ve been grazing all summer. Or maybe they’ve been down a few weeks already. A couple of years ago, in late September, my wife and I went hiking up one of the side valleys of the Inn valley, near Innsbruck, and we were lucky enough to catch the ceremony of the cows being brought down from their high pastures. And it really is a ceremony. The cows are decorated with floral wreaths, while the herders wear traditional dress. I only managed to take one rather poor photo of a cow with her floral wreath.

But others have posted much nicer photos online.

This ceremony is of course meant to signal that bringing the cows home is a joyful occasion, but this summer my wife and I came across a story which shows that it cannot always have been so joyful. We were starting a hike up into the Totes Gebirge (the Dead Mountains; strange name) from the shores of Altaussee lake. My wife later took this very Japanese-looking photo of the lake.

As we walked along the lakeshore, there came a point where the path narrowed dramatically, with a steep drop into the lake. And there, on the side of the path, we passed this memorial nailed to a tree.

The picture gives us a pretty clear idea of what happened, but the German text removes any doubt. It says:

On 17 October 1777, Anna Kain, aged 32, died here. During the cattle drive she was pushed by a cow into the lake and drowned. Lord, grant her eternal rest and a joyful resurrection. Amen

At the lake’s end, we swung left onto a trail that took us 1,000 metres up to the high pastures of the Totes Gebirge. As we crossed them, making for the mountain hut we would be staying the night at, we came across cows placidly munching away.

Judging by the old cowpats on the trail up, these cows had used the same trail we used to get to the high pastures in the early Summer, and will be going down the same way – like those cows back in 1777 – round about now, if they haven’t already done so. Given the narrowness and roughness of the path, it’s a miracle that more Anna Kains – and cows – didn’t fall off the path to a sure death. Perhaps they did but got no memorial.

Taking cows to and from the Alp’s high pastures seems to be a very old tradition, maybe 6,000 years old. It has been a key element in the economies of the Alpine valleys, so key that I can hazard to state that Switzerland exists because of it. As readers can imagine, locals living in Alpine valleys saw the surrounding high pastures as theirs and didn’t take too kindly to outsiders trying to cut in. In the early 1300s, a long-simmering feud between the people of Schwyz and Eisiedeln Abbey over grazing rights erupted into active fighting. Settlers from Schwyz had moved into unused parts of territories claimed by the Abbey, where they established farms and pastures. The abbot complained to the bishop of Constance, who excommunicated Schwyz. In retaliation, a band of Schwyz men raided the abbey, plundered it, desecrated the abbey church, and took several monks hostage. The abbot managed to escape and alerted the bishop, who extended the excommunication to Uri and Unterwalden (I suppose they had loudly applauded the exploits of their Schwyz neighbours, or maybe even taken part). It so happened that the abbey was under the formal protection of the Hapsburgs, so Leopold I, Duke of Austria, decided to show who was the boss. In 1315, he sent in an army to teach these Swiss peasants a lesson. But the clever men of Schwyz, supported by their allies from Uri and Unterwalden, ambushed the Austrian army near the shores of Lake Ägeri in Schwyz. After a brief close-quarters battle, the army was routed, with numerous slain or drowned. This illustration from the Tschachtlanchronik of 1470 shows the Austrians being skewered on land and drowning in the lake. Amen

This victory led to the consolidation the so-called League of the Three Forest Cantons, which formed the core of the Old Swiss Confederacy, which in turn eventually became the Swiss Confederation that we know today.

As I said, grazing cattle on the high pastures is an old, old tradition. So for millennia now we have had cattle eating fresh Alpine grass all summer long and making what German-speakers call heumilch, or haymilk. Milk aficionados say haymilk tastes different from normal, valley bottom milk, where the cows also eat fermented feed. I bow to the experts, never having drunk haymilk in my life (although maybe I should check the local supermarket shelves; it wouldn’t surprise me if the Austrians offer heumilch as a local delicacy). But in the days before refrigeration, the milk which the cows produced all summer long in the high pastures couldn’t just be drunk; it had to be turned into a more durable product. Thus we have the creation of that glorious, glorious category of cheeses, the Alpine cheeses. I’m sure we’ve all heard of some of the more famous Swiss entries to the category: Emmental, Gruyère, Raclette, Appenzeller. But every country with Alpine territory has their champion Alpine cheeses: Beaufort and Comté in France, the various Almkäse, Alpkäse and Bergkäse in Austria and Bavaria, Fontina in Italy. I use a wheel of Gruyère as a stand-in for all these wonderful Alpine cheeses.

I also throw in a cut of Emmental, because of those holes so beloved by children.

In the old days, those holes, or “eyes” in the technical jargon, were considered unfortunate imperfections in the cheesemaking process. But then some Swiss PR whiz kid turned the imperfections into a Unique Selling Point and fortunes were made in the Emmen valley and beyond. Several other Alpine cheeses have eyes, although not as big as those in the photo above. They are caused by the presence during the cheesemaking process of a bacterium which produces carbon dioxide – the holes are actually bubbles of carbon dioxide.

The presence of this bacterium is due to a particularity in the process for making Alpine cheeses. Unlike most cheeses, where salt is liberally used during the cheesemaking process, the herders up in the high pastures used very little if any salt, simply because it was heavy and thus a pain in the ass to haul up to the high pastures (having carried moderately heavy backpacks up mountains, I can sympathise). Instead, timber was plentiful up there.

so the herders chopped trees down, made fires, and cooked the curds in copper kettles. Even though things are considerably easier now, low salt and cooking on copper is still an important part of the Standard Operating Procedure for making these cheeses, and it is the low salt levels (and low acidity levels) that allow the bubble-making bacterium to flourish.

Once the herders had made those large wheels of cheese, they had to also bring them down to the valley bottom. I wonder how they did that? When they were bringing the cows down, did they roll them down like those crazy people in Gloucestershire who take part in the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll?

You can see these mad people charging down a hill after a cheese wheel.

As we can see, the hill is pretty steep and people seem to just tumble down.

And somehow, someone wins.

I can’t believe herders would have rolled the wheels, even in a more temperate way. It would have ruined them. They were valuable products (indeed, a number of those pesky abbeys had their peasants pay their annual tribute in cheese wheels). I have to guess that the herders loaded them up on the cows when they brought them down, or maybe they had a team of mules for this. Or maybe there were people who spent the whole summer going up to the high pastures and then staggering back down with wheels of cheese on their backs.

Well, I can think of no better way for me and my wife to salute those Alpine cows and the haymilk they produce than for us to break our boring diet and get ourselves a nice slice of Alpkäse or Bergkäse (or both? in for a penny, in for a pound!) and eat it (or them) one of these evenings, with a big chunk of bread and a nice glass of wine. And why not throw in some nuts while we’re at it? In for a penny etc.

MY FAVOURITE AQUARELLE

Milan, 5 June 2023

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my little collection of art – nothing hugely expensive, I hasten to add; the most I have ever paid for a painting is €2,000, and I went back and forth in an agony of indecision for several days before made the final plunge. I love all my paintings, but there is one that I am particularly proud of because of the sleuthing which I carried out to properly identify its subject.

A little bit of background is in order. I bought the painting at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna – although not during an actual auction, but rather in the part of the Dorotheum where paintings and other objects are sold at fixed prices. I throw in a photo of it.

It’s an aquarelle, not very big – 46 by 63 cm. I loved its naïve style, I found the colour scheme cheerful, and I was intrigued by the scene it depicted. The description the Dorotheum gave it was:
“Belgien, 19. Jhdt.
Panoramablick von einer Brücke an einem Fluss, links and rechts Häuserzeilen, im Vordergrund Spaziergänger”

Or:
“Belgium, 19^th C.
Panoramic view from a bridge on a river, left and right rows of houses, in the foreground strollers.”

The first thing I did was to take it to a framer who has a shop down the road from our apartment, for him to take off the frame and check the painting over. And here came a big surprise. On the back of the painting, someone had written “Vor Stadt im Paris”, which can be translated “In front of the City in Paris”. So the painting probably wasn’t of somewhere in Belgium as the Dorotheum’s description had suggested, but of Paris!

But where in Paris was this scene painted? Answering this question meant first understanding what waterways existed in Paris in the early 1800s – from the clothes the people in the painting are wearing it’s clear that the scene was painted some time in that period. A bit of sleuthing led me to the conclusion that the only waterway of any substance which existed in Paris in this period was the River Seine. The three canals which currently exist in and around Paris – Canal Saint-Martin, Canal Saint-Denis, Canal de l’Ourq – only got the go-ahead to be built in 1802 (from the-then First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte), and were only completed in the early 1820s, which is a bit late for the painting. So not only Paris but the River Seine! More and more exciting!

I won’t bore my readers with a summary of the hours I spent trying to find out where on the River Seine my painting was executed. Suffice to say that, given that the painting depicted a bridge, I became a real expert on all the bridges crossing the Seine in Paris in the early 1800s. But actually the breakthrough came from digging around for information on the shop to the far right of the painting – I throw in a close-up of it.

As readers can see, the shop’s name was “DUHAMEL M^D [MARCHAND] FAYENCIER” while underneath it says “Magazin de Porcelan …” (the rest to me is unreadable; however, if any of my sharper-eyed readers can make out what’s written please do tell me). So it seems that the shop was owned by a certain Duhamel and he sold porcelain and possibly earthenware. And here I had a real stroke of luck. Searching away on the internet, I discovered that the Bibliothèque de France had scanned a series of “Almanach du Commerce de Paris”. Here is the front page of the Almanac for 1798-1799, or Year VII in the Revolutionary Calendar, the first of these Almanacs that the Library had scanned.

These Almanacs were the period’s equivalent to the old Yellow Pages that we used to have before the internet came along (minus the phone numbers, of course). They listed all the businesses and shops in Paris, with – very important for me – their addresses. And here, in the Almanac for the Year VII, in the category of “Fayanciers” (the spelling wasn’t yet settled, it seems), I found an entry for a Duhamel. This was extremely encouraging! The name and trade fitted the name of the shop in the painting. The shop was listed as being in rue de la Lanterne. This street no longer exists. It is now the northern section of the rue de la Cité, which runs across the Île de la Cité, linking two bridges, the Pont Notre-Dame to the north and the Pont Cardinal-Lustiger to the south. I held my breath. Could the bridge in the painting be the Pont Notre-Dame? To make sure, I started working my way through successive Almanacs, and I soon got confirmation that the shop had been located at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. Already in the Almanacs for the years 1806 to 1808 (the Revolutionary Calendar had been dropped by then), the address of the shop was given as “rue du Pont-Notre-Dame, 1” rather than rue de la Lanterne (although they went back to this address in later years), which strongly suggested that the shop was right next to the bridge itself. But the clincher came in the Almanac of 1812, where the address was given as “rue de la Lanterne 1 (Cité) et pont Notre-Dame”, while the Almanac of 1813 gave the address as “rue de la Lanterne, 1, au coin du quai Napoléon”, which at that time was the name of the quay that ran alongside the Seine from Pont Notre-Dame to Pont Saint-Louis at the far end of the island.

So I could finally identify the bridge! It is Pont Notre-Dame. This identification was strengthened by another feature of the painting. Readers will notice that a number of people crossing the bridge are holding plants. I throw in a close-up of two of them.

It just so happens that behind viewers’ right shoulders as they look at the painting, a flower market was located! (and is still located.) Here is a drawing of that market done in 1829.

So now we can understand that the people in the painting holding plants have just bought something at the flower market and are presumably taking them home. The vicinity of the flower market to the shop is emphasised in the entry in the Almanac of 1817, where the address of the shop is given as “au bas du pont Notre-Dame, en face le marché aux Fleurs” (the emphasis is in the original), or “at the foot of Notre-Dame bridge, facing the flower market”. This connection, by the way, tells us that the aquarelle must have been executed after 1809, which is when the market was created.

Identifying the bridge in the painting as the Pont Notre-Dame also clarifies the rather odd wording of the phrase written on the back of the painting, “In front of the City in Paris”. Clearly, the “city” in this case is the Île de la Cité, which takes up most of the right-hand side of the painting.

A few years ago, during a visit my wife and I made to Paris, we visited the Pont Notre-Dame. I was curious to see how much the view had changed. Unfortunately, there were roadworks going on on the bridge and the traffic was horrendous, so I wasn’t able to get a clear view from the point where our artist must have been more or less standing. So I’ve turned to Google Maps Street View for today’s view from the bridge. It’s not brilliant, but it will have to do.

As readers can see, the view has changed quite considerably in the intervening 200 years. At the back of the painting, readers will note a somewhat humpbacked bridge – I throw in a close-up of it.

That bridge is the Pont Marie, which connects the right bank of the Seine to the Île Saint-Louis. Here is a rather more professional painting of it from 1757.

The bridge in this painting has five arches and a slight hump. The painter of the aquarelle faithfully gave the bridge five arches but made the hump much more pronounced. This particular version of the bridge still exists, although the houses on the bridge, some of which you can still see in the 1757 painting, were all torn down by the time the aquarelle was painted, and more recently the hump has been flattened.

Since the aquarelle was painted, two more bridges have been built between Pont Notre-Dame and Pont Marie. One of them, Pont d’Arcole, is visible in the Google Street View photo.

The banks of the river have also been built up in the intervening 200 years. The most obvious change is on the left of the painting, where viewers can see a sort of beach (which is also visible in the 1757 painting of Pont Marie).

This used to be the Place de Grève, a place where boats could be pulled up onto the beach and cargo loaded or unloaded. I presume that those white cocoon-looking things on the beach are some sort of cargo, Lord knows what. Here’s a more sophisticated view of the beach, by the same painter who painted the Pont Marie.

This whole area was “tidied up” in the 1830s, when today’s quays were built up.

The dome one can see above the Place de Grève is the dome of the church of St. Paul St. Louis.

As the Google Street View indicates, you can’t see it any more from the Pont Notre-Dame because the intervening buildings have all increased in height, so here is a photo of it from nearby.

More or less opposite that dome on the other side of the painting, readers will see a spire peeking over the roofs. I think that is the spire of the cathedral of Notre-Dame – looking at maps of the period, I can’t see what else it could be.

Alas, this spire no longer exists, having come crashing down when the cathedral’s roof burned down four years ago. This photo shows the spire enveloped in flames.

As for the building in which Duhamel’s shop was located, it has disappeared. The whole block was torn down to make space for a hospital, which was built in 1878. But it looks like Duhamel had already sold up in 1823 or ’24. Certainly, by 1824 the building housed a new shop, called À la Belle Jardinière, which sold ready-made clothes. I suppose this was a revolutionary idea at the time. In any event, it did roaring business, bought up the surrounding houses and turned them into one big shop. When the hospital was built, the shop moved elsewhere and continued to do business until 1972.

The Duhamel involvement in the sale of earthenware and porcelain didn’t stop with the closure of the shop at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. The Almanacs show an interesting story. A younger brother got involved in the business in 1804. Then one of the two moved out in 1809 or ’10 and set up another shop in what is now the first Arrondissement near the Halles. Then in 1820, a son of one of the two Duhamels set up a third shop on Boulevard des Italiens. The disappearance of the first shop in 1824 was followed by the disappearance of the shop on Boulevard des Italiens in 1827. The shop near the Halles kept going until 1837, after which it, too, disappeared from the record. Who knows what happened to the Duhamels after that?

There is one thing which the painter must have got wrong. You can’t see it in the modern photo from the bridge because the Pont d’Arcole blocks the view, but there is a small channel to the back right. This is the arm of the Seine which runs between Île St Louis and Île de la Cité – you see it very well in the painting of the Place de Grève. I can’t believe the painter didn’t see it; I have to assume that he first sketched the scene “en plein air” and then later painted the aquarelle proper, at which point he either forgot about the channel or decided it was making the painting too complicated.

Which brings us back – sort of – to the cast of colourful characters our painter has peopled the bridge with. I’ve already mentioned the persons carrying plants. We also have what seems to me to be a Gendarme on horseback.

Gendarmes were (and are still) a type of policeman with military connections. Here is a modern picture of what the Gendarmes looked like in the early 1800s.

I have no idea what the other military-looking fellow behind our Gendarme could be, the one going for a walk with his Missus. I welcome inputs from any of my readers who are experts in military uniforms.

There is also what looks like a vitrier, or glazier.

Here is a photo of a vitrier from a later period. You can see better the contraption on his back with which he carried his spare window panes.

I was rather pleased to see him. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, my mother often used to sing old French songs, and there was one song in her repertoire about vitriers. It was only one verse, which was repeated ad infinitum, and which went like so.

Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier qui passe
Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier d’passé
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la vitrier qui passe
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier d’passé!

which can be loosely translated as:

Another broken pane, here’s the glazier passing
Another broken pane, here’s the glazier’s gone past
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier passing
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier gone past!

Then we have an itinerant shoe-shiner.

This is another trade which survived into the era of photography. I have chosen a photo of Neapolitan boys offering the service. Readers will see the word Sciuscià written on their box. It’s a term which came into use in Naples during the Second World War; it’s an adaptation into the local vernacular of the English word “shoeshine”, which shoeshine boys picked up from American troops. Vittorio De Sica made a powerful film in 1946 about these Neapolitan shoe-shine boys; I highly recommend it to my readers.

Which brings us to the person whose shoes – or rather boots – are being shone.

This character intrigued me. I thought perhaps he could help me date the painting. As I said, I’m not an expert on military uniforms, and even if I were we don’t know if the painter painted the uniform at all accurately. All that being said, I rather think we are dealing with a lancier rouge (although in the painting the man has a red feather in his shako while it should have been white or white and red). Here is a more sophisticated rendition of this uniform.

The regiment, properly known as the 2^e régiment de chevaux-légers des Lanciers de la Garde Impériale (2nd regiment of Light Horse Lancers of the Imperial Guard), was known colloquially – and for obvious reasons – as the Red Lancers, or somewhat more irreverently as the écrevisses, or crayfish. The regiment has a grim but romantic history. It was originally formed in 1810 from hussars of the Dutch Royal Guard, after Napoleon merged Holland with France, and at the beginning it was primarily made up of Dutch recruits. The regiment served in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, where it was decimated, the depleted ranks being filled by Frenchmen (particularly from Paris and its environs). The regiment was dissolved a first time in 1814 at the Restoration, reformed during the Cent Jours, fought at the battle of Waterloo where it was again decimated, and finally dissolved at the end of 1815. If I’m right about the regiment, this means that the painting can’t have been painted that long after 1815 (soldiers from the disbanded regiment might have continued wearing their uniforms for a few years, either out of defiance or simply because they had nothing else to wear).

Which brings me finally to the anonymous painter. Who was he? (or maybe she, although I rather doubt it). Given the the phrase written on the back of the painting, I’m guessing that he was a German speaker, and given where I picked the painting up that he was a citizen of the Austrian Empire. Looking at the window of 1809 (when the flower market opened) to a few years after 1815 (when the Red Lancers regiment was disbanded) as the time period when the aquarelle was probably painted, I wonder if my anonymous painter was not an officer in one of the Austrian regiments that occupied Paris after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. In which case, the painting – or at least the initial sketch – would have been executed between 1815 and 1818, when the Allies maintained troops on French soil. But I have no name to give to my painter, who has given me so much pleasure since I purchased his aquarelle, and he will probably remain anonymous forever.

LA MARINIÈRE

Milan, 14 May 2023

It is the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso‘s death this year and the art world is overflowing with Picasso exhibitions. My wife and I recently visited one at the Albertina in Vienna (just before the minor operation which has kept me “indisposed” for a while). Meanwhile, one of my sisters announced the other day in our WhatsApp group that she and her husband had just visited the newly refurbished Musée Picasso in Paris, to which another of my sisters replied that she and her husband had just visited the Picasso museum in Malaga, Picasso’s birthplace. No doubt there will be more announcements along these lines throughout the year. However, in this post I do not propose to follow the tide and celebrate Picasso’s artistry. Rather, I want to celebrate his dress sense, and in particular his fondness for wearing, in his later years, a long-sleeved cotton shirt with blue and white horizontal stripes, what the French call la marinière.

If I give it its French name, it’s because it was the French who turned this originally humble shirt into something that cultural movers and shakers like Picasso wore and eventually into an item of high fashion.

I will skip the history of stripes in clothes – or rather the lack of them – in Europe’s earlier history, fascinating though that is, and will cut straight to the chase, in this case an Ordinance emitted in 1858 by the French Ministry of the Navy. This Ordinance decreed that from now on not just Navy officers but also the more humble petty officers and ordinary seamen would wear a uniform, and described in good bureaucratese what this uniform should look like. Here we have a French sailor from a few decades after the Ordinance’s publication.

As the reader can see, the marinière is the shirt beneath the jacket.

It hasn’t changed much since then. Here, we have a couple of modern sailors in the French navy.

The 1858 Ordinance of course also dictated the precise design of this uniform. As far as the marinière was concerned, it was to be made of a fabric knitted in the “jersey” style, and have, front and back, 21 white stripes, each 20 mm wide, interspersed with 21 indigo-blue stripes half as wide, while 14 white and blue stripes of the same widths should run on the sleeves. Why this number of stripes? Lord knows. In the case of the 21 stripes, it has been suggested that they stand for the 21 battles which Napoleon won, although I don’t see how that can be since by my count he won more like 30 battles (and anyway, this is the Navy; why should they memorialise land battles?). In the old days, the blue of the stripes (and probably the blue of the jacket and trousers) came from using my old friend indigo as the dye, but I suppose modern dyes are used today.

It seems that pretty much every Navy has adopted this type of uniform for its seamen. As a result, for the last one hundred and seventy years or so it has become typical in towns near Navy bases to see off-duty seamen in their dashing uniforms lounging about ogling the girls and being ogled back.

But now to the marinière’s upgrade into a fashion item. It seems that Coco Chanel was the first fashionista to take this humble piece of clothing and turn it into a fashion statement. The story goes that during the First World War Chanel would often leave Paris to go and spend time on the Normandy coast; she had a second shop in Deauville, a seaside resort which was the hang-out of the rich and famous. This is a poster for Deauville from the 1920s, when it was once again the place for the rich to go and have fun.

It being wartime when Chanel was going, Deauville must have looked much more sober than in this poster, and I suppose that since the locals were sea folk many of the men would have been called up to the Navy and would have been seen walking around the town in their uniform. Chanel was much struck by the marinière and added her version of it to her collections for women from 1916 onwards. This was quite audacious of her, since she was taking an article of clothing for men, and working men at that, and using it as a fashion item for respectable bourgeois ladies. Initially, she also made her marinières out of jersey fabric; this scandalised people because at the time this was a fabric strictly associated with underwear. She argued that the war made it difficult to source more upscale fabrics – and perhaps it was unpatriotic to use such fabrics at a time when many people were suffering great privation. After the war, she quietly moved to using posher fabrics, especially silk. Here, we have her wearing one of her marinières, along with a pair of trousers, no doubt another cause of scandal (when I was young it was still thought that proper young women did not wear trousers, and certainly not in the workplace).

Of course, Picasso and Chanel knew each other; the artsy world is a small one, everywhere. Jean Cocteau was a firm friend of Picasso’s; he was one of the witnesses to Picasso’s marriage with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. He was also a firm friend of Chanel’s, so naturally he introduced the two to each other … It so happened that Olga was a devoted client of Chanel’s, and Chanel regularly visited the couple after they were married … Some of Chanel’s creations were inspired by Picasso’s cubism … Chanel and Picasso collaborated with Cocteau in his 1922 adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone: Chanel designed the costumes, Picasso designed the sets and masks; here we have the costume for Antigone …

Readers get the picture. I don’t think, though, Picasso ever painted Chanel; at least, I haven’t found any trace of such a painting.

But Picasso did paint another woman who was also instrumental, along with her husband, in promoting the marinière among the more arty folk.

She was Sara Murphy, he Gerald Murphy, both from wealthy American families, who in the 1920s decided to escape from their disapproving parents and live on the French Riviera for a while. They hosted a fashionable bohemian set at their home there: Picasso, of course, was a guest, but so was the painter Fernand Léger, despite his communist sympathies; as readers can guess, Cocteau also turned up (he happened to own a villa in the same general area); Cole Porter – an intimate friend of Gerald’s – was a frequent visitor; a bevvy of American poets and writers travelling through Europe dropped by: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley; and on and on. Chanel could well have also been a guest – she, too, owned a villa on the French Riviera – but I’ve found no trace of her being on the guest list.

The story goes that on a shopping trip to Marseilles – a port city, let’s remember – Gerald was charmed by the marinières that he saw all around him. So he bought a bunch of them and distributed them to his guests, thereby transforming the humble marinière into chic leisurewear. We have here a photo of Gerald wearing a marinière, with his wife on the beach.

And here we have F. Scott Fitzgerald, with his wife Zelda, wearing his marinière together with plus-fours – an interesting combination, shall we say.

I should say in passing that the Murphys are credited with getting the smart set to visit the French Riviera during the summer and not just the winter, as had been the case until then. Prior to their arrival, lying on a beach to enjoy the sun was not done. Occasionally, someone went swimming, but the joys of hanging out on a beach just to soak up the sun were still unknown. It was the Murphys who introduced this as a fashionable activity. We have here Gerald and Picasso on the beach at Antibes.

And here, to complement the photo above of the poster advertising the charms of Deauville, we have a photo of a UK poster from the late 1920s advertising the – warm – charms of the French Riviera.

Even though Gerald may have given Picasso a marinière to wear back in the 1920s, we don’t have a photo of him wearing one then – or at least I haven’t found such a photo. The photos with him in a marinière, like the one I started this post with, are from the 1950s and later. Perhaps it was only when Picasso moved down to the Riviera after World War II that he started wearing one regularly.

In fact, the marinière only seems to have become a common fashion statement in France in the 1950s, and from what I can gather we mainly have Brigitte Bardot to thank for this. She turned up at a Cannes Film Festival – and was photographed – in a marinière. Here, we have a few of these photos.

Here’s another, with BB showing her sex kitten side.

High fashion once more picked up on the marinière. Here, we have Yves Saint Laurent’s 1966 take on this item of clothing.

But it was Jean-Paul Gaultier who really put the marinière on the high fashion map from the late 1970s onwards. He went crazy for it after seeing Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film “Querelle de Brest”, a film which plays to another side, the homoerotic side, of the Navy uniform.

Here is a selection of Gaultier’s take on the marinière.

There are lots more of Gaultier’s takes on this once humble piece of clothing. Any reader who is interested in dreaming about what flash piece of Gaultier marinière-themed wear they could look for in their local vintage clothes shop can do no worse than surf this site. And there are lots of other high fashion dudes who’ve had a go at the marinière: Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel (unsurprisingly), Kenzo Takada, Sonia Rykiel, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, and on and on. I shall let readers explore.

Meanwhile, although I said at the beginning that I didn’t want to celebrate Picasso’s artistry in this post, it seems to me appropriate to finish up with a couple of his works in which he celebrated the marinière.

Here, we have a man in a marinière smoking a cigarette.

This is a self-portrait from 1943.

And here we have Picasso’s daughter Claude in a marinière-themed dress.

TURKEY – THE BIRD, NOT THE COUNTRY

Milan, 24 June 2022

I’m catching up with the last couple of week’s news – I’ve been much taken writing a rather heavy report on policy support for eco-industrial parks. Fascinating stuff, but pretty time-consuming.

Anyway, my eye was caught by an article about Turkey’s decision to change its official name (in English, at least) from Turkey to Türkiye. This is in line with an honourable tradition, as various places slough off names given to them during colonial times to adopt more local names. So some decades ago, for instance, Bombay became Mumbai and Madras Chennai (those are the changes I’m most familiar with in India, although I gather that quite a number of places there have localised their names). And quite recently, Swaziland became eSwatini. According to the king, the change was driven by a desire to fully break with the country’s colonial past, while ending international confusion between Swaziland and Switzerland.

In the case of Turkey, it’s not a reaction to a colonial past, or at least not obviously so. Rather, it seems that the country’s leader, Mr. Erdoğan, objects to the country having the same name as a vulgar fowl fit only to be eaten. Worse, “turkey” is used as an epithet to describe people who are (according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary) “stupid, foolish, or inept”. This is what I suspect Mr. Erdoğan – a proud and prickly person – really objects to. He senses that English-speaking people – and Americans in particular, given that this is an Americanism – unconsciously apply the epithet to his country (for the record, the epithet is also used of theatrical productions which are a flop, as in “Well, that musical is a real turkey!”, as well as of three successive strikes in bowling, as in “Wow, Bob, that’s your second turkey this evening, lucky for us you’re not on our bowling team!”).

I rather suspect that the epithet is linked to the bird, since at least the domesticated variety has a reputation for being pretty dumb. I remember once reading that turkeys are so stupid that when it rains they’ll look up and drown.

I’m sure this is an urban legend, but it gives readers a flavour of the generally low esteem in which the bird is held. It doesn’t help that we are shown photos like this of poor battery-raised turkeys.

I feel moved to come to the defence of this much maligned fowl. In its natural state, out in the wild, it’s a magnificent looking bird.

Here, we see a male turkey “strutting”, raising his feathers, like peacocks, as a mating ritual. The brilliantly coloured face is an absolute marvel. Here is a close-up.

And by the way, these colours can change, depending on whether the bird is calm or excited.

The female, as is often the case with birds, is more modest in her appearance.

Contrary to domesticated turkeys, the wild progenitors can fly – not far, but very fast.

So I really think we should stop thinking of the turkey as a stupid, dumb bird.

Coming back now to the issue which started this post, readers may be asking themselves why on earth the bird came to have the same name as Mr. Erdoğan’s country (well, I certainly asked myself that, which is why I’m writing this post …). It doesn’t come from Turkey or anywhere near there. The wild progenitor of today’s domesticated turkey was once very common throughout much of the United States and Central America.

Its spread to the rest of the world is yet another example of the Columbian Exchange, which I’ve written about in several previous posts: all those foodstuffs, plants and animals which were shipped from the Americas to Europe and then to the rest of the world (and all the diseases and enslaved people which were shipped the other way).

The Spaniards found an already domesticated turkey when they conquered Mexico and they brought it back to Europe, from whence it spread throughout the rest of the world.

At this point, let’s imagine that we come across new foodstuffs we’ve never seen before. Basically, there are two ways we’ll give names to these foodstuffs. Either we’ll adopt the local name (often modifying it in the process to fit our modes of speech) or we’ll give it a name based on other things we know which it reminds us of. Both approaches were used with the new foodstuffs which the Europeans discovered in the Americas. For instance, just considering English names, maize, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, avocados, cacao, are all Anglicized versions of the local names – mahiz, batata, cazzábbi, in the language of the Taino people of the Caribbean islands (whose annihilation I alluded to a few posts ago); tomatl, ahuacatl, cacaua in Nahuatl, the language spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. On the other hand, pineapples, peanuts, and bell peppers were given their names based on similarities in looks or tastes to known objects: pineapple was a name already used for pine cones, which look quite similar to smaller pineapples; peanuts were nuts that were pea-sized; anything with a peppery taste was called pepper.

The name “turkey” falls into the latter category. When the bird finally arrived in England, people confused it with another imported bird, the helmeted guineafowl.

Originally from Sub-Saharan Africa, the guineafowl was being imported to England from the Ottoman Empire by the Turkey Company, an English chartered company. Because of that, people often called them turkey cocks or turkey hens. The new arrival from the Americas quickly displaced the guineafowl and added insult to injury by also appropriating to itself the nickname. Thus did the British start raising a bird originally from the Americas which they called “turkey”, much to the future chagrin of Mr. Erdoğan.

His chagrin doesn’t finish with the British. There are of course all the other English-speaking countries which have adopted the same name for this American bird, foremost among them the United States. And then there are the other ex-British colonies; many of these have also adopted the name, suitably transliterated to fit their local languages. Thus, most of the languages from the Indian subcontinent call the bird ṭarki or turkee. So too have a number of languages used in ex-British colonies in Africa: for instance, we have toki in Igbo, tọki in Yoruba, tɔki in Krio, dɔkɔ in Ewe, uturuki in Swahili. And then we have a good number of countries which have no obvious connection to the UK but which for some reason have nevertheless adopted, with the usual linguistic adaptations, the British name for the bird: tierkei in Luxembourgish; ćurka in Serbian and Bosnian; turketi in Georgian; tirka in Kurdish; turīki in Amharic; tuorki in Khmer; tu la ki in Lao. All told, about 40% of the world’s population use the name “turkey” or some variant of it – although, in truth, some of the names have drifted so far from “turkey” as to be almost unrecognizable – some comfort, perhaps, to Mr. Erdoğan.

Luckily, another proud and prickly leader, Mr. Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, doesn’t seen to have noticed that a whole series of countries – including, I should note, Turkey – have instead named this “stupid bird” after India! Perhaps he has been too busy beating up on his country’s Muslim population.

I think this naming is the fault of the French, who named the American bird coq d’Inde (or poule d’Inde in the feminine). Later the coq and poule were dropped, as was the apostrophe, and the French simply called the bird dinde (with, as a further modification, dindon becoming the masculine version).

As usual, the French’s logic was impeccable – if we remember that Christopher Columbus confused everyone in Europe by claiming that he had reached the Indies when actually he had stumbled across the Americas. For quite a while thereafter, everything that came from the Americas was thought to come from the Indies (and in English at least this confusion lingers on in our calling the Caribbean islands the West Indies and calling the native populations of the Americas Indians). So when the French said this new bird came from the Indies they were correct given the knowledge of the time. But they were fundamentally wrong: a great example of “rubbish in, rubbish out”.

Unfortunately for any proud and prickly Indians – the real ones, the ones from India – the French’s innocent mistake has percolated into various other languages. Two of these are languages on France’s border, Catalan and Basque, where we have gall dindi and indioilarra, respectively. Then we have a cluster of languages from the ex-Russian Empire: Polish (indyk), Russian (indeyka), Ukrainian (indychka), Belarusian (indyčka), Kyrgyz (ündük), and Armenian (hndkahav). Finally, we have three countries – Turkey, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan – with close linguistic and cultural ties, which all use the name hindi. Luckily for Mr. Modi, only some 12% of the world’s populations use this potentially offensive name for our bird from the Americas.

That being said, there may be more here to potentially offend Mr. Modi, and we have the Dutch to thank for that. For reasons which I don’t understand at all, the Dutch called our bird from the Americas Kalkoense haan, or “chicken from Calcoen”, the then-used name for the Indian city of Calicut in the state of Kerala (which, in another example of India decolonizing its place names, is now called Kozhikodez). Calcoen-Calicut was a big trading partner in Europe’s first interactions with India, and in the early 1600s the Dutch entered into a treaty with the local ruler to boot out the Portuguese. But none of that explains – to me at least – why the Dutch seemed to think that this bird came from Calcoen. But they did.

The Dutch eventually shortened the name to kalkoen, and in closely related forms it spread far and wide. I suppose because the Dutch were very active traders in the Baltic Sea and took the bird with them on their trading ventures, almost all the countries along that sea’s shores have adopted the Dutch name in the form of kalkun or something similar. But the Dutch also took the bird with them on their colonizing ventures. Thus, Sri Lankan speakers of Sinhalese call the bird kaḷukumā (Sri Lanka was Dutch for a while, after they kicked out the Portuguese, before they were themselves kicked out by the British). For their part, the Indonesians appropriated the name from their former colonial masters and call the bird kalkun (I’ve commented on Indonesian’s cheerful appropriation of foreign words in an earlier post). As you would expect, the descendants of the Dutch settlers in South Africa, the Afrikaaners, call the bird kalkoen, and the name has percolated into at least one of the languages of southern Africa, northern Shona, as kalakune. Still, at the end of the day, only about 5% of the world’s population use this name for our bird from the Americas. On top of it, the connection to India is really not that obvious, so I think Mr. Modi can breathe easy – assuming he has spent any time at all thinking about this potential slight to Indian pride.

If Mr. Modi were ever to get exercised by the link between India and the supposedly stupid bird from the Americas, I really don’t think he could adopt the course taken by Mr. Erdoğan. I just can’t see what changes could be brought to his country’s name which would sufficiently distance it from the India-like names which have been given to our bird. It would be far better for Mr. Modi to initiate an international process (through the UN, perhaps) to change the bird’s name. And I have just the name to propose: huehxōlōtl! This is the Nahuatl name for our bird. It seems to me to fit beautifully with the general move to decolonize our languages. Each language could take this name and fit it into their way of speaking. The Spanish-speaking Latin Americans already did this a while back. Contrary to the Spaniards, who call our bird pavo, they call it guajolote, a hispanicized form of the original Nahuatl name. In English, it could be transliterated to “whexolot”. That’s a bit awkward, but knowing people’s tendency to shorten and simplify words, I’m guessing that over time this could become “whellot”. That rolls off my English tongue fairly easily: “500 grams of whellot, please. I’ll have it tonight with maize and potatoes”.

ICE CREAM, SORBET, GRANITA

Milan, 2 May 2022

Whenever my wife and I complete a hike, we like to give ourselves a little treat. In my last post, I described the rum baba I will have after hiking in Liguria, coming off the Monte di Portofino and rolling into Santa Margherita. But the more common treat we’ll give ourselves for completing a hike in Italy is an ice cream. I mean, after a long hike in Italy, when you’re tired and hot, is there any better treat you could give yourself than a gelato?

Given the enjoyment we get from consuming ice creams (my wife especially), I’ve been meaning to dig deeper into this delicious foodstuff for some time now, but have never quite got around to it. My writing of the previous post on the rum baba finally turned thought into action.

Let me immediately be completely up front. For decades now, I have been eating ice cream but I have never, ever made the stuff. The making of ice cream has been a completely closed book for me. Until now.

As usual, I began to read; not just on the making of ice cream but also – given my natural proclivities – on its history. And the more I read – or rather, the more rabbit holes I fell down – the more I realized that the story of ice cream was intimately linked to the stories of the sorbet and the granita.

Not only that, but the stories of all three were intimately linked to the story of the trade in ice and snow. Since it was the latter that allowed the creation of the former, let me start with this.

We are all now so used to artificial refrigeration that we don’t give a second thought to going over to that white, quietly humming box in our kitchens on a devilishly hot day and pulling out cold food and drinks.

But in the history of mankind, that’s a really recent phenomenon – artificial refrigeration has only been around for some 120 years. Before that, on that hot day you could only sweat and dream of that cool, cool beer, and if you had fresh produce you made sure to eat it as quickly as possible before it spoilt. Unless, that is, you were a king or emperor or other potentate, or generally were incredibly rich; one of the 1%, or more likely the 0.001%.

In this case, you had another option, that of paying people to climb high mountains where snow lay even in summer, to collect that snow and bring it back to your palace or other rich man’s pad.

Once there, you would store it in an ice house. Your servants (or probably your slaves) would pack the snow in, insulating it as well as possible (straw seems to have been a popular insulating material; sawdust is also mentioned). Here is a type of ice house used in Persia.

After which, it could be doled out during the hot months to keep food fresh or to make cold desserts with which to turn your guests green with envy when you invited them around for a banquet. I suppose it was the ancient equivalent of a Russian oligarch inviting guests for a spin in his super yacht.

This practice has a long history. There are cuneiform tablets which show that snow was already being carried down to the plains of Mesopotamia in about 1750 B.C.E. The Persians were carrying snow down from the Taurus mountains in about 400 B.C.E. The Greeks did it, as did the Romans, bringing snow down from Vesuvius and Etna, as well as from the Apennines. Snow was carried down from the mountains of Lebanon to Damascus and Baghdad. The Mughal emperors had snow carried down from the Himalayas to Delhi. Granada and Seville had corporations which were tasked with carrying snow down from the Sierra Nevada to these cities. The Spaniards brought the practice to the New World, both to their Andean colonies as well as to Mexico.

In regions where climates were sufficiently cold in the winter for good ice formation on water bodies, a different strategy could be adopted: the ice was harvested during the winter and stored in ice houses for use during the summer. The Chinese were doing this by the time of the Tang Dynasty, if not before. Kings and aristocrats from Europe were doing it by the 16th Century, using ponds or lakes on their large estates to create the necessary ice, which they would then store in their ice houses. My wife and I recently came across this on one of our hikes around Lake Como. We happened to visit one of the old villas on the lake, Villa del Balbianello.

Tucked away in the corner of the grounds, on the cold side of the hill, was this ice house (in which, I should note in passing, the last owner had himself buried).

Rich colonialists in New England and the Canadian provinces copied the practice. But the democratic (and capitalist) spirit of the colonies was too strong. By 1800, businessmen in New England democratized the practice, harvesting ice on a large enough scale to make it affordable for modest households, who could use it in primitive refrigerators.

The ice was delivered to one’s doorstep by ice vendors.

These New England “ice entrepreneurs” even began to export their ice, eventually exporting it as far as Australia! Norway learnt from the Americans and got into the act on a big scale, exporting ice to many countries in Europe. Other European countries got involved in this international trade on a more modest scale: Switzerland exported ice to France, ice harvested in the mountains along what is now the Italian-Slovenian border were exported through the port of Trieste to countries further south in the Mediterranean, …

This flourishing ice business came to a crashing halt when artificial refrigeration came along in the early 1900s. The take-over by artificial refrigeration came in stages. Until quite recently, ice was still being delivered to households (I remember my parents receiving their deliveries of ice in the 1960s in West Africa), but now that ice was being made in a centralized refrigeration plant and not in a lake. And then even the local trade in ice disappeared as just about every household eventually owned their own refrigerator.

Coming back now to the Holy Trinity of ice cream, sorbet, and granita, as I said earlier one of the things all those rich Mesopotamians, Chinese, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Indians and other moneyed folk could do with the ice they had had collected was to have their cooks make cold desserts. What exactly these cold desserts were composed of is a bit of a mystery, but we can guess that the ice, no doubt crushed in a mortar, was mixed with honey or various fruit-based syrups and served to guests, perhaps sprinkled with petals, seeds and other such niceties. Something like this – without all the niceties, though – was quite a common summer street food in Italy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, made affordable by a plentiful supply of cheap ice – indeed, you can still find it to this day in one or two places in Rome, under the name of grattachecca.

Basically, ice is grated from an ice block and put into a glass, onto which are then poured various types of syrups – black cherry, tamarind, mint, orgeat, coco, lemon, you name it …. Simple, cheap, and cooling on a hot summer’s day. If any of my readers are in Rome on a hot summer’s day and want to try a grattachecca, this is one of the places you can still get it.

I’ve never had a grattachecca, but I can imagine one drawback with it. When it’s still cold you take a mouthful of the mixture and end up swallowing the now-watery syrup and then sucking on tasteless pieces of ice. And when it’s warmed up all you’re having is a cold drink.

Then, in the 16th Century in Europe, came a revolutionary discovery. Someone, somewhere discovered that if you put salt on ice you can actually drop the temperature to below 0°C. Anyone living in a country with cold winters is familiar with this phenomenon. It’s behind the use of salt on roads to melt black ice. I won’t go into the science behind the phenomenon, fascinating though it is. I’ll just say that you can drop the temperature to as low as -20°C in this way! I can’t stop myself throwing in a so-called phase diagram for salt solutions. They’re kind of neat, and any of my readers who have studied some science at some point in their lives can have fun looking at it. Other readers can skip it.

It may not be immediately obvious to readers why this was important to our particular story. But what it meant was that cooks finally had a way of freezing things rather than only being able to cool them using ice from the ice house. We’re so used to having artificial refrigeration at our fingertips that we can have difficulties understanding what a revolution this was.

As far as our story is concerned, this was the key to making granita, sorbet, and ice cream. That snow brought down from the mountains or the ice harvested from a nearby lake were now no longer an intimate part of the dessert; instead, mixed with salt, they became merely an operational material in the making of that dessert. Center place was now given to various sweet concoctions which cooks came up with and which they then froze.

Or actually, as far as our Holy Trinity is concerned, partially froze. Because if granite, sorbets, and ice creams were truly frozen, they would be hard as rock and completely inedible. They needed to be cold but soft enough to be scooped up with a spoon – or bitten or licked off, as we see these French ladies, post French Revolution, doing with gusto.

Here, sugar is key. Just as salty solutions of water freeze at lower temperatures than pure water so do sugary solutions. In effect, what happens as you cool sugary solutions below 0°C is that the water molecules freeze, creating crystals of ice, while the sugar molecules do not. The result of this is that as more and more water molecules are pulled out of the sugary solution to form crystals, so the remaining sugary solution gets more and more concentrated. In addition, the sugar molecules get in the way of the crystallizing water molecules and impede them from ever creating big ice crystals. The net result of this is a whole lot of small to tiny ice crystals scattered throughout a very sugary syrup. It is primarily this that gives granite, sorbets, and ice creams their cold but semi-solid consistency (primarily, but not wholly; another ingredient, which we’ll get to in a minute, is present in sorbets and ice creams, and is very important in ensuring that semi-solid consistency).

But what were the sugary solutions that cooks began to freeze? And to answer this, we have to look at the history of a sweet drink called sharbat. The roots of this drink are in Persia, where it continues to be drunk to this day.

Originally, it was simply sugarcane juice (sugarcane had been brought to the Persian lands from India in the 8th Century). But to this base Persians added various things: syrups, spices, herbs, nuts, flower petals, and what have you. And, if you were a very rich Persian, it was cooled with that snow and ice which you had paid handsomely to have brought down from the high mountains. The Turks adopted the drink, calling it şerbet. And then the Venetians, and possibly other Italian traders who traded with the Ottoman Empire, brought the drink back to Italy, calling it sorbetto. The Turks helpfully created ready-mixed, transportable şerbet bases to which water could be added; these came in the form of syrups, pastes, tablets, and even powders. Since cane sugar was not yet readily available in Europe, I’m guessing that it was in one of these forms that şerbet first entered Italy and then other European countries. Certainly in the 17th Century the UK was importing “sherbet powders” from the Ottoman Empire (and no doubt these powders are the ancestors of that revolting powder now sold in the UK as “sherbet”, which tastes horribly sugary and fizzes in your mouth when you eat it).

This sugary drink was perfect for our new freezing process. Without wanting to fly any flag too ostentatiously, I think it was the Italians who first applied the process to the sorbetto drink and basically turned this drink into a semi-solid dessert. Recognizing the origin, the granita was initially called the sorbetto granito while the sorbet was called the sorbetto gelato. With time, the former simply became known as the granita and the latter as the sorbetto (while the gelato bit got assigned to the ice cream).

But what actually is the difference between the granita and the sorbet? Two things. The first is the size of the ice crystals. In the granita, they tend to be larger than in the sorbet – but not too large! Otherwise, you would end up with something like the grattachecca. It’s the larger crystals that give granita its granulous feel in the mouth (hence the name). One can fix ice crystal size by playing around with the amount of sugar (the less sugar, the larger the crystals) and by the amount of stirring one does as the solution is freezing (the more stirring, the smaller the crystals). You have here a strawberry granita. Notice the bun in the background; in Sicily especially, where the granita is very popular, it is common to eat one’s granita with a bun.

The sorbet, on the other hand, has tiny crystals. And it has a secret ingredient: air. Someone, somewhere had the idea of constantly churning their sorbetto as it was freezing, rather than churning it from time to time as is the case with the granita. Not only did this constant churning stop the ice crystals from growing, it also introduced a lot of air into the mix. The tiny ice crystals made for a much smoother sensation in the mouth, while the air led to a softer product (and to higher profit margins since the air was free and it puffed up the volume). Staying with strawberries, here is a strawberry sorbet.

Another someone, somewhere invented a machine specifically for making sorbets, known of course as a sorbettiera in Italian and a sorbetière in French. Here’s a model from the late 1800s.

Which brings us to ice cream. Yet another someone, somewhere had the bright idea of adding cream and egg yolks to the sorbet mix. This complicates the science even more, because with the cream you have added fats to the mix and as we know fat and water don’t mix, which is where the egg yolks come in. They act as an emulsifier, which is a fancy term for something that gets molecules unwilling to mix to do so. I suppose the idea was to make sorbets “creamier”, or maybe someone was playing around in a kitchen, decided to see what would happen if you added cream and egg yolks and hey presto! ice cream was born.

Otherwise, ice cream was made like sorbet: constant churning and dragging in of air. Voilà! Or maybe I should say Ecco! because I’m almost certain Italians invented ice cream. Staying on theme, here is a strawberry ice cream.

As I said earlier, since air is free and puffs up the volume of the product it’s very much in the interests of manufacturers of low quality ice cream to get as much air into their product as possible. Which leads to that disgusting ice cream which comes out of a machine like toothpaste and looks like this.

This revolting product is my first memory of ice cream, bought from a truck like this one.

They nearly put me off ice cream for life. It was only when I came to Italy that I began to enjoy ice cream.

Now as I say, I’m almost certain that it was the Italians who invented both sorbet and ice cream. But it was the French who really put them on the map – the must things to serve your guests. And in those days at least, as far as tastes were concerned, where the French went the others followed.

It was a café – another novelty of the age – that made sorbet and ice cream all the rage. The Café Procope opened its doors in 1686, in the reign of Louis XIV. It was established by an Italian, a Sicilian to be precise, by the name of Francesco Procopio Cutò.

Cutò emigrated to Paris at the age of 19. After working for a couple of years as a garçon in someone else’s café, he managed to scrape enough money together to buy the-then oldest café in Paris at the tender age of 21 and had enough hubris to give it his name. It was a fantastic success; all the chattering classes of the time came running to his café, and devoured its famous sorbets and ice creams. As far as sorbets were concerned, the café offered 80 different types! Some of the more popular tastes were mint, clove, pistachio, daffodil, bergamot, and grape. I’ve not been able to discover how many types of ice cream the café offered but presumably the listing was just as long.

From the Café Procope the sorbet and ice cream entered the kitchens of the Parisian moneyed classes, and from there they entered the kitchens of the European moneyed classes more generally: all the rich Europeans wanted to ape the French rich folk. And from there, they spread to the kitchens of more modest middle class households: everyone wanted to ape their social superiors. And from there, the industrial revolution turned the ice cream especially (not so much the sorbet) into a cheap and not terribly good product, to be consumed by the masses on their day out at the seaside.

So it is with many, many products. Luckily, though, the Italians still make high-quality but affordable ice creams, which my wife and I can enjoy after a long, hot and tiring hike. Thank God for that!

RUM BABA

Vienna, 9 April 2022

One of my guilty pleasures (the weight! the diet!) is eating a rum baba with my tea in the afternoon when my wife and I have walked off the Monte di Portofino down to Santa Margherita. There’s a little café in the pedestrian zone there, which offers a variety of sweet pastries. One of these is rum baba. We always make a bee-line for the café, plonk ourselves down at one of the tables outside it, and order two teas – milk for my wife, lemon for me – and a rum baba for me (depending on the weight situation, my wife will either look on enviously, or take a bite, or order her own pastry). Ah, the silky, squishy, sugary deliciousness of it!!

I had my first rum baba at the age of 10 or thereabouts, one of the times I was staying with my English grandmother on the way to, or on the way back from, boarding school. She had bought two of them specially – I now rather suspect that she had a weakness for rum babas and used my presence as a good excuse to buy them. Apart from the deliciousness of them, there was the excitement of slurping down Something Forbidden: rum! A highly alcoholic drink, with thrilling connections to the most dubious characters, as I knew from reading Treasure Island (“Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum” sang the pirates) and Tintin’s Rackam Le Rouge.

There was also the name, baba, which was satisfyingly quirky, vaguely evoking in my young mind something exotic.

After that momentous first time, I came across this pastry occasionally. I have a vague memory from my teenage years of my mother ordering one in a French high-end café, this time in its French form, le baba au rhum. But overall it has been quite a rarity in my culinary experiences, so it is a pleasure to have found a place where with relatively little effort I can sample this delight more frequently, in its Italian form, il babà.

But what, some of my readers may be asking impatiently, is a rum baba?! It’s basically a small cake, made with Brewer’s yeast so that the dough will rise, which, after it is baked, is allowed to dry out a little and then is imbibed with a mix of sugar syrup and rum. The shape of the rum baba depends on the country: in France, it’s normally doughnut-shaped (ditto in the UK, because they copied all their ote kwizeen from the French). Note the heavy dose of Chantilly cream, which is often ladled onto rum babas.

The Italians, on the other hand, tend to make it mushroom-shaped (or like the cork of a champagne bottle). Note in this case, too, the heavy dose of cream.

And where was the rum baba invented, readers might also be asking? (at least, I hope they’re asking this vital question). Well, to answer that, I have to introduce my readers to a sad prince, Stanisław Leszczyński.

Born in 1677 into a high-ranking Polish family, he had the bad luck of being on the losing end of the perpetual political quarrels in Poland. His undoing was the Great War of the North, a war which involved Sweden on one side and Russia, Denmark, and Saxony on the other. Just for the hell of it, I throw in here a picture of a painting of one of the battles in this war; for some reason, these paintings always show officers prancing around on horses.

Charles XII of Sweden initially had the upper hand militarily. Among other things, he pushed out the-then King of Poland, August II (who was also Prince Elector of Saxony), and in 1704 put Leszczyński in his place with the dynastic name of Stanisław I. In 1709, however, Charles XII was soundly beaten by the Russians. The result was that August II was back on the Polish throne and Leszczyński was out on his ear. With his wife and two daughters in tow, he took the road to exile. In 1714, either out of pity or because he was a bit embarrassed, Charles XII let Leszczyński live in one of his holdings, the Palatinate of Zweibrücken, in what is now southern Germany close to the modern French border of Lorraine. Here, Leszczyński could live the life of a Prince Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire.

Alas, he was only allowed four years of the princely life. In 1718, Charles XII was killed still fighting the Great War of the North, the Palatinate passed to a cousin of his, and Leszczyński was once more out on his ear. This time, his neighbour the Duke of Lorraine came to the rescue and took him and his family in. But this could only be temporary and after some negotiations with the French Regent (Louis XV being under age at the time) Leszczyński was given a modest pension and allowed to settle on French territory. The place chosen was Wissembourg, a small town close to the far northern border of Alsace. It was 1719 and Leszczyński was to live there until 1725, surrounded by an ever-diminishing coterie of Polish nobles playing at being the Polish court in-exile.

Which brings us back to the rum baba. For it was in Wissembourg, in Leszczyński’s kitchens, that the rum baba, or rather its immediate ancestor, was born. Stanisław Leszczyński was probably not the best candidate for Polish king. That position needed a man of cunning and resourcefulness, with a ruthless streak, able to ride herd on the quarrelsome Polish nobles and juggle the competing aggressions of the countries surrounding Poland. That was not Leszczyński. He was a Man of Letters, at home in libraries (of which he built several during his lifetime) and author of a book or two. He saw himself as an Ambassador of the Enlightenment, writing various philosophical essays to promote its ideas. He was also a bon vivant, as the French say, a man who liked the pleasures of the flesh, particularly his food. With his modest pension, he couldn’t afford the best cooks, but his staff did what they could with what was locally on offer. Luckily for us, they hired a young Alsatian from the local region who went by the name of Nicolas Stohrer. He was 14 when he entered Leszczyński’s kitchens as a kitchen boy, but he must have been pretty damned good because he quickly became the chef in charge of cold and hot pastries and stews and desserts. Unfortunately, Stohrer left no pictures of himself behind, at least not on the internet, so I’m afraid readers will just have to imagine what he might have looked like.

One of the desserts Leszczyński loved was kougelhopf, a local Alsatian cake.

It’s actually a cake that is found throughout a wide swathe of Central Europe, from southern Germany through Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, and the ex-Yugoslavian countries, to the Czech Republic and Poland. It goes by various names; my wife and I know it as Gugelhupf, its name in Austria, which is where we first came across it (and I can certainly understand why Stanisław loved it so much, for it is indeed a very yummy cake). Important for our story, in Poland this cake is known as babka, or by the diminutive baba. And Leszczyński loved his kougelhopf in part because it reminded him of the baba he used to eat in Poland: like many exiles and immigrants, he no doubt found comfort in food from the Old Country.

The story goes that one day Leszczyński found his kougelhopf too dry (one source adds that he had lost his teeth by now, making it difficult for him to eat anything hard; a nice touch, but I’m not sure how much to believe it). He reminisced out loud – presumably in the presence of Stohrer – of how in the Old Country one sometimes drenched the baba in tokay wine from Hungary. Inspired by this tale, Stohrer went off to the kitchen, played around with the kougelhof, and eventually came up with the idea of a smaller cake, left to dry out a little, which could then be drenched by diners with a sauce based on fortified wine – here, the sources diverge somewhat: some say Madeira wine, others Malaga wine, yet others a mix of Malaga wine and an infusion of Tansy (for those readers who, like me before writing this post, have no idea what Tansy is, it’s a plant with a rather nice yellow flower which can be steeped in alcohol to give an infusion with a strong, camphor-like and bitter taste; no doubt it was used in small quantities to give sweet things a slight edge). To (literally) top off this creation, diners would add a (large) dollop of crème pâtissière, which is a thicker form of custard.

Leszczyński just loved this new cake. When asked by Stohrer what to name it, he declared it should be known as baba. One half of rum baba’s name was now in place.

Leszczyński’s family loved it too; in fact, more than 100 years later (and just a few years after the rum baba was finally invented in its entirety), a writer reported that Leszczyński’s descendants still served the dessert the original way, with a sauce boat being handed around and diners liberally saucing the cake with a sweet-wine based sauce. Leszczyński’s guests, when served it, loved it too. Some 30 years after the baba’s creation, the philosopher and encyclopedist Diderot wrote enthusiastically to one of his friends about the baba after he had been invited to dine with the Leszczyńskis. But what really led to a dramatic increase in the cake’s popularity was the marriage between 15-year old Louis XV and Leszczyński’s 22-year old daughter Maria Leszczyńska.

This was definitely not a marriage made in heaven. As readers have seen, the Leszczyńskis were not a great dynasty; a short reign on a modest throne was all Leszczyński père could boast of. At this point they had neither lands nor money; they “depended on the kindness of strangers”, living off a very modest pension. Louis XV, on the other hand, was la crème pâtissière de la crème pâtissière, dynastically speaking, and had lands, properties, and funds to match. The simple fact is, Maria Leszczyńska was the only Catholic princess of marriageable age whom all the opposing factions surrounding the young king had nothing against. And the Regent was in a hurry to marry Louis off; the child had always been sickly and there were real fears that he would die young and childless, precipitating a succession crisis.

So an envoy was dispatched to Wissembourg with the king’s offer of marriage. Readers can imagine that when she read the offer, Maria Leszczyńska fell over herself to accept it, and no doubt Stanisław Leszczyński executed a little Polish jig in his living room upon hearing the news. His fortunes were definitely turning for the better!

Leszczyński fades out of our story at this point. But not to leave readers hanging, wondering what happened to him, let me zip through the rest of his long, long life. As befitted the parents-in-law of the king, who, though, didn’t have two coins of their own to rub together, Leszczyński and his wife were lent one of the king’s many grand residences to live in, in this case the Château de Chambord in the Loire valley, and they were given a considerably bigger pension to live on. He was now a fully-fledged French aristocrat.

About ten years after Maria Leszczyńska married, August II of Poland died. Leszczyński saw his chance and rushed to Poland. But this second attempt to haul himself onto the Polish throne was an even more miserable failure than the first and within two years he was back in France with his tail between his legs. At the time, Louis XV was trying to bring a related war with the Austrian Emperor to a close. After some difficult negotiations, it was agreed, among other things, that the-then Duke of Lorraine (who happened to be married to the future Empress Maria Theresa of Austria) would give up his Duchy (and be given the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in return), that Leszczyński would take over the Duchy of Lorraine and the ducal title, but that the Duchy would revert to the kingdom of France upon his death. Thus did Lorraine become part of France. Leszczyński occupied the ducal throne for nearly 30 years. Since officers of the French King actually ran the Duchy, he spent much of his time beautifying its capital, Nancy, which is indeed a very beautiful city – my wife and I visited it a number of years ago before starting a tour of the French sector of the Western Front. At the exceedingly venerable age of 88, he died – but in a horrible way, alas! He fell asleep near his fire, a cinder fell on his dressing gown, which started to burn fiercely. He died of his burns after several days of agony. RIP Stanisław Leszczyński.

But coming back now to the rum baba. At her wedding, Maria Leszczyńska asked her father if she could take Nicolas Stohrer with her to Versailles. It must have been a wrench, but Leszczyński agreed; he probably didn’t have much else to give her as a dowry. And so Stohrer joined the kitchens of Versailles, helping to serve up meals at glittering court events.

He introduced the court to the baba, but he also invented other pastry dishes in the kitchens of Versailles, some of which are still with us today, notably la bouchée à la reine.

For reasons which are not clear – at least from the records available to me – after five years at Versailles Stohrer handed in his notice (or whatever one did in those days) and set himself up in his own pâtisserie in Paris, at 51 rue Montorgueil, in the 2ème arrondissement.

Amazingly enough, it’s still there! Although no longer owned by the original family, alas …

I have to think that the idea of pre-soaking the baba in the sweet wine sauce must have occurred now if it had not already occurred in the kitchens of Versailles. I can’t see Nicolas Stohrer saying to a customer as he sells them the baba, “take this dried-out cake home and ladle the sauce I’m giving you in this crock over the cake when you serve it. That’ll be 3 francs, 5 sous, please.” I really don’t see that as a sellable proposition. In any event, we can now leave Stohrer and his descendants happily selling babas and other pastries from their shop, and consider the second vital ingredient of our dessert, rum.

Rum is essentially a by-product of the sugar industry. At some point in the refining process, molasses is generated.

Unless some use can be found for it, it is a waste. From the beginning of the slave-based sugar industry in South America and the Caribbean islands, plantation owners were asking themselves what to do with this molasses.

About 50 years before Leszczyński was born, rum began to be made with it.

Initially, the distillation technology was crude, so the rum produced was very rough: “a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor” is how one document, written in Barbados in 1651, described it. Its main consumers seem to have been slaves, who were allowed to inebriate themselves with it and temporarily forget their terrible lot. With time, its customer base spread to the poor white trash of the colonies, sailors (and of course pirates, as I mentioned earlier), and other riffraff. Sadly, it also became one of the main currencies of exchange in the slave trade. The local slave traders in Africa, the ones who captured the slaves inland and brought them down to the coast, sold their “cargo” to the European slave traders for rum.

Plantation owners of course also eyed the much larger markets in their home countries and tried to export their rum there, or to export their molasses to local rum makers. In the case of France, they came up against the determined resistance of the brandy makers. The making of brandy was a wonderful way for French vintners and others involved in the wine trade to deal with poor quality grapes and soured wine. They already had a good market and were damned if these bloody colonial upstarts and their partners in France were going to cut into their sales. So they launched a strong lobbying effort (what else is new?) and eventually, in 1713 (more or less when Leszczyński became an exile), they persuaded the government to ban the production in France, and sale on the French market, of any alcoholic spirit not made with grapes (which therefore included other spirits like gin, which was also becoming popular).

And that was that for rum in France for nearly 100 years. It was only in 1803 that Napoleon finally allowed rum back onto the French market. By then, distillation techniques had considerably improved and along with them the quality of the rum brought to market. Apart from the population drinking it, I suppose French chefs tinkered with it in their kitchens, to see how it could be used in cooking. Included amongst these tinkerers must have been the Stohrer descendant who now owned that pâtisserie on rue Montorgeuil, or one of his staff. Whoever it was, they had the idea of substituting rum diluted in a syrup of sugar for the sweet-wine mixtures used up to then. The tinkering succeeded and finally the momentous day arrived. In 1835, the new baba au rhum began to be served to the clientele!

The rum baba was of course an immediate success. Other chefs and pâtissiers got into the game.

Recipes were included in cook books and knock-offs were created (the most famous being the savarin, which is to all intents and purposes a baba but soaked in a different sauce). It spread to other regions in Europe, one of the most notable being the Bourbon kingdom of Naples. For some reason, il babà (as it was known) became wildly popular there, and over the years it has become an integral part of the food landscape in the Region of Campania, to the point that it has been denominated a Traditional Italian Food Product (Prodotto agroalimentare tradizionale italiano) by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture. Well! That’s pretty cheeky of the Campanians! Talk about cultural appropriation. I wonder what the French think about that? (but then maybe the Poles have something to say about the French taking their baba …) At least the Campanians make it in a different shape (as I noted above) and often use a different liqueur to soak it in, for instance limoncello. But still … In any event, this is the kind of rum baba which I eat in that little café in Santa Margherita, and after tut-tutting about the issue of cultural appropriation, I happily tuck in.

So that’s the story of this wonderful pastry. I urge all my readers to immediately go out and also tuck into a rum baba. As for me, since I happen to be writing this in Vienna where my wife and I have come to spend the month of April, all this research I’ve done has made me hanker after the original cake, the Gugelhopf. I think we should use the time we’re here to have a nice slice of this yummy cake somewhere. I’ll bring this up with my wife – and diet be damned!

PRETTY INDUSTRIAL CHIMNEYS

Milan, 12 December 2021

If there’s one thing that will always depress me when I see them, it’s those tall industrial chimneys belching out white clouds of steam (sometimes tinged a faint orange by the oxides of nitrogen they can contain, depending on which way the sun is shining). Here’s a typical example of the genre, this one a frequent sight on our hikes upstream of Vienna – it belongs to a power plant.

It’s all that grey concrete that does it, often topped with garish red and white stripes to keep planes from flying into them. Just so ugly! And so damned tall that you can’t ignore them!! So in your face!!! They just drain any brightness and colour out of the surrounding landscape.
I almost think that the older designs of brick chimneys were nicer on the eye. They were less high for one thing, and – at least in some models – took the form of long thin cones, which are considerably more elegant than mere cylinders. But that black smoke which they routinely belched out! Like in this British painting from about 1830.

*View of Rotherham, South Yorkshire* (c. 1830) by William Cowen (1791-1864). Photo credit: Rotherham Heritage Services

The fact that someone actually painted all that black muck shows how our sensitivities have changed in the last fifty years or so. When the artist painted this, black smoke was a thing to be celebrated, it meant the economy was growing. Now, we think instead that the company’s top managers should be in jail for allowing it to happen.

But back to today’s industrial chimneys. Among all the gloom they have brought to my life, there have been two bright shafts of light over the years, caused by chimneys which I’ve actually enjoyed looking at. The first of these is a chimney in Vienna which belongs to a waste incinerator.

Wonderful piece of work! The design, both of the chimney as well as the rest of the facility, is due to an Austrian artist by the name of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His normal output looks like this.

I’m sure readers can see the relation between this type of work and his chimney design.

The incinerator has been originally built in the late 1960s, but needed extensive repairs after a fire broke out in 1987. I was told that the mayor of Vienna brought Hundertwasser in to redesign the facades of the facility as well as the chimney, because the local community was up in arms about the city fathers’ plan to continue having a working incinerator in their neighbourhood. Hundertwasser, who was quite an environmentalist, was only persuaded to accept the commission when he was promised that the most up-to-date emissions abatement technology would be installed – and in fact the chimney hardly ever gives off anything. I must say I’m quite glad Hundertwasser accepted the commission, because he created what must be the jauntiest waste incinerator in the world. It makes you almost want to work there (almost …)

It was the second sighting, that of the chimney of another waste incinerator on the outskirts of Milan, which moved me to write this post, although it has taken me nearly nine months to get around to it. Last April, after the success of the hike my wife and I did from Milan to Monza, I decided to do a similar hike in another direction. I chose the direction pretty much at random, which meant, among other things, that there was one stretch where we had to walk along a very busy road with trucks thundering by and no space on the edge of the road for us to walk on. My wife regularly reminds me of this walk whenever I suggest doing a hike sight unseen around the edges of Milan … In any event, it was on this grim stretch of road that we stumbled across the waste incinerator. Its chimney immediately caught my attention. It had been painted a most extraordinary colour, a sort of shimmering, silvery grey blue, merging, but not quite, with the surrounding sky. It was really lovely to look at. I took several photos of it between the thundering trucks. I’m not sure any of them do justice to the chimney’s colour but I throw in the best one.

By one of those extraordinary coincidences that make one believe that there is some order after all in the chaos of the universe, this chimney happens to have been painted by another Austrian artist! Jorrit Tornquist is his name; his Wikipedia entry informs me that he is a color theorist and color consultant (no doubt it was in this latter role that he was called in by Milan’s waste management company to paint the chimney). As an artist, he does works like this.

Again, readers can surely see the relation between this type of work and the chimney.

As I say, these are the only two industrial chimneys which have ever brought some happiness into my life. But writing this post has moved me to search the Internet to see what other painted industrial chimneys await me and my wife on hikes we might one day do around the world. Here’s what I found, in no particular order.

A couple of chimneys in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet, being finished up in classic trompe l’oeil style.

A chimney at the sewage works in Milwaukee, where the art is actually part of the city’s water management system. The chimney is normally blue-coloured but turns red when heavy rain is forecast, warning people to reduce their water use so that the city’s drains are not overwhelmed.

An old chimney in Mount Vernon, Virginia, now hosting two graceful tulips.

I finish with a chimney which happens to be in Milan! It’s the chimney of the old factory where the Italian amaro, or bitter, Fernet Branca used to be produced.

For those of my readers who might not be too familiar with this drink, this is what a bottle of Fernet Branca looks like.

This particular bitter was first formulated in 1845 in Milan. It is made by steeping 27 herbs and other ingredients in alcohol. Which herbs and ingredients are used is of course a tightly-held secret, a pesky problem I have already come across for these kinds of drinks. But apparently at least some of the herbs are pictured on the chimney, so perhaps a close reading of the chimney will lead me to figure out what herbs are used in this drink.

As readers have no doubt understood, I am planning to view this chimney. It can be the object of one of the urban walks my wife and I will take this winter. I’ve already checked on Google Maps to see how to get there, and I’m happy to report that we will not need to walk along busy roads with trucks thundering by. I’m going to have to wait for the right moment in which to casually suggest to my wife that we go for this walk, without spilling the beans about what we are going to see – and of course I will have to reassure her about the absence of busy roads with thundering trucks.

VANILLA

This post is dedicated to my dearest wife,

the most faithful of my readers

Vienna, 4 September 2021

Some months ago, I was asked by the Student Sustainability Committee of a school in Wales which I’m involved with to help them estimate the carbon footprint of the food eaten in the school. In the case of prepared food, which made up a substantial portion of the food consumed at the school, this exercise required me to plough through a lot of recipes to understand what were the raw ingredients of these prepared foodstuffs (so as to calculate the carbon footprint of each ingredient). Apart from this being a hell of a lot of work, as my wife will testify (“have you still not finished that stuff?!”), I discovered with surprise that many, many prepared foodstuffs of the sweet variety (biscuits, cakes, chocolate, and various sundry others) have vanilla extract as one of their ingredients (and as a side note, I was very surprised to see that these sweet foodstuffs made up a large portion of all the food consumed in the school; it didn’t seem to be a very healthy diet).

These constant references to vanilla extract intrigued me, and I decided that one day I would investigate vanilla a bit more. This decision crystallized into action over the last few weeks, because it so happens that my wife is very fond of vanilla. In the Bad Old Days, before we started our rigorous dieting, she consumed a fair amount of vanilla-based ice creams, normally those covered with a chocolate casing (I will not give free publicity to her favourite brand by naming it; I will leave my readers to guess). Now, in these more virtuous times, diet-wise, her vanilla consumption mainly takes the form of vanilla-flavored yogurt, and this only for lunch on our hikes (which these summer days has meant quite frequently). For the sake of complete transparency, I should state that she still consumes a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream from time to time, whenever a hike is judged to have been particularly strenuous.

The brand of vanilla-flavored yoghurt which my wife generally favours is this one – I should add that she favours it simply because our local supermarket offers it, at a very reasonable price.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the flower on the tub. This is the vanilla orchid, Vanilla planifolia. Here’s a photo of the Real Thing.

And here is the plant more or less in its natural state (readers will note that this orchid is a type of vine; in Nature it will grow up trees, like the pepper vine).

It’s really a very pretty flower, but it is only of passing interest to the vanilla aficionado. She or he is after the “fruit”, a seed pod really, that the flower creates once it has been pollinated. The three dark-coloured stringy things pictured behind the flower on the yoghurt tub are these seed pods. Again, here is a photo of the Real Thing.

But even the seed pod, if in its natural state, just picked from the vine, does not interest the vanilla aficionado, because it contains very low levels of vanilla flavour and aroma (these, by the way, come mostly from the chemical vanillin, although there are a number of other chemicals present which it is claimed enhance both flavour and aroma). It is only once the seed pod has been cured that the vanilla aficionado becomes interested, because now the levels of vanillin are considerably higher, high enough to add that distinct vanilla flavour and aroma to foods and drinks.

The curing of vanilla seed pods is a rather complicated, months-long process, whose purpose is to bring about an enzymatic reaction in the pods which turns the glucovanillin they contain into vanillin proper (in case any readers were asking themselves, glucovanillin has no flavour or aroma). Curing consists of four basic steps: killing, sweating, slow-drying, and conditioning. In the killing step, the seed pods are generally heated (in hot water or in an oven or by exposing the pods to the sun).

This stops any further vegetative growth in the pods and initiates the necessary enzymatic reactions.

In the sweating step, the pods are kept at temperatures of 45–65°C and at high humidity levels by stacking them densely and insulating them in wool or other cloth. The pods are subjected to this Turkish bath regime for 7 to 10 days, possibly with a daily exposure to the sun or a dip in hot water.

The desired enzymatic reactions love these conditions, so by the end of the sweating step the seed pods have attained much of the desired vanilla flavour and aroma. However, they still have a high moisture content. Which brings us to drying.

To prevent the pods from rotting and to lock in the vanilla aroma, drying is required. And so, over a period of three to four weeks, the pods are exposed to air and to periods of shade and sunlight.

In the final, conditioning step, the dried pods are stored for five to six months in closed boxes, where the fragrance further develops.

The end result looks like this.

This is what vanilla aficionados lust after, what they dream of incorporating into their dishes, from soup to sweet dishes. And they are willing to pay top money. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice, after saffron. Those wrinkled-up beans can set you back anywhere from $50 to $500 per kilogram.

When I look at these kinds of convoluted processes, I always ask myself, “How on earth did anyone discover this process?” I mean, really, how did the first vanilla producers stand in front of those aroma-less and flavour-less seed pods and figure out that this long and complicated process would eventually lead them to seed pods with a wonderful aroma and flavour of vanilla? I would have to ask this question to the ancestors of the Totonacs, an Amerindian people who live on the east coast of Mexico. It was they who first “made” vanilla-flavoured seed pods from the vanilla orchid – the orchid’s natural habitat is in this part of the world. Here, we have Diego Rivera’s take on the Totonacs, as part of one of his murals in the National Palace in Mexico City.

Unfortunately, I’m sure today’s Totonacs have no idea; I just have to accept that the answer is lost in the mists of time.

Readers might think that since the vanilla orchid is natural to Mexico’s eastern seaboard, that country would be a major producer of vanilla. Alas, not so! The reason for that is the great Columbian exchange, that massive movement of plants, animals, humans – and diseases – which took place between the New and Old Worlds after the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. The vanilla orchid was part of that exchange. The Conquistadors, like the Totonacs (and like the Aztecs) loved the flavour and aroma of vanilla and figured that people back home would love it too. They exported the pods back to Europe, where they caused a sensation, at least among the elites, who had the money to burn on this rare and expensive novelty. They put it in everything, from chocolate (also a product of Mexico) to soup. They adopted the Spanish name for it (vanilla is a corruption of the Spanish vainilla, meaning “little pod”). Other Europeans looked on enviously. Eventually, the French laid their hands on some exemplars of the plant and took them to their colonies which had similar climates to Mexico’s eastern seaboard, namely those in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, especially the islands of Madagascar, Réunion, and Mauritius.

For a while, Mexico continued to be the main global producer of vanilla, because this transplant of the vanilla orchid to other places was a failure. The plant flowered alright, but it never produced pods. The reason for this is an exquisite example of specialized evolution: vanilla flowers can only be pollinated by this little critter, Eulaema meriana, one of some 25 species of orchid bees.

No other insect is attracted by the sex pheromones emitted by the flower, nor can any other insect successfully navigate the orchid’s complicated geometry and pollinate the flower along the way.

Once non-Mexican wannabe vanilla producers realized the problem, they tried the obvious thing, which was to transplant the vanilla-pollinating orchid bee along with the orchid. But it didn’t work; the bee couldn’t survive outside of its native habitat. The wannabe vanilla producers were stumped. Until 1841.

In that year, a 12-year old slave called Edmond (no surname, he was a slave), who had been born into slavery on the Island of Réunion, came up with a quick and easy way of pollinating the vanilla orchid flower by hand. He had been lent out by his master to a botanist by the name of Ferreol Bellier-Beaumont, to help him out. Beaumont had shown him how to hand pollinate a watermelon plant and the boy went off and successfully applied his new skills to the vanilla orchid. (For anyone considering hand-pollinating a vanilla orchid flower, here’s what you do: with a small sliver of bamboo or wood (or even a stem of grass), lift the membrane separating the flower’s anther and stigma; then, using your thumb, transfer the pollinia from anther to stigma.)

Edmond never got anything out of his discovery. Who did were all the the slave-owning planters on Réunion who now got into vanilla growing: for a while, Réunion became the world’s largest producer of vanilla. But the French authorities made sure the method was transferred to its other island colonies in the Indian Ocean and in the Caribbean. Since then, Madagascar has dominated world production (Indonesia, which muscled into the market in the 1980s, is now second in the producers’ league table). Mexico, on the other hand, has pretty much vanished from the scene, which is a crying shame.

As for Edmond, seven years after his discovery, at the age of 19, he got his freedom; the French government finally outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1848. He left the world of plantations to work as a kitchen hand in the island’s main city, and adopted the surname Albius, from the Latin alba or white, in reference to the vanilla orchid’s colour. Beaumont tried to get the governor of Réunion to give Edmond a stipend or at least a reward for his great discovery but the governor ignored the petition. No doubt, he didn’t think it was worth spending public monies on a black ex-slave.

Unfortunately, Edmond fell in with a bad crowd in his new life and got involved in a theft of jewelry. He was caught and sentenced to 10 years in jail, which, after an appeal by Beaumont to the governor, was reduced to five. After doing his time, Edmond moved back to a village close to the plantation and got married.

Edmond’s travails were not over. It seems to have been an irritation in certain quarters that where white professional botanists had failed, a black slave, and a child to boot, had succeeded. Some time in 1860s a well-known French botanist and plant collector by the name of Jean Richard claimed that actually, he had come up with this revolutionary pollination method in the late 1830s, that he had taught it to some planters in Réunion, and that Edmond must have sneaked into the meeting and heard his explanation. Luckily, Beaumont and a few others vigorously defended Edmond’s primacy to the discovery, although Richard’s false claim did get some traction for a while. May Richard’s name be damned forever …

Edmond died in poverty in 1880, at the age of 51. Luckily, he left a physical trace of himself in history, rare for ex-slaves. Here we have a rather grainy photograph of him when young.

And here we have a lithograph of him from a book published in 1863, standing gravely in front of a vanilla orchid vine.

Wonderful story, the vanilla story, no? Except that as far as the vanilla in my wife’s yoghurt is concerned, it is all a big red herring.

I’m afraid to tell her, and any other readers who might be vanilla lovers, that the vast majority of the vanillin used commercially in the world is fake – well, artificial might be a less inflammatory word. Most of the world’s vanillin is produced from crude oil derivatives in chemical plants: benzene is alkylated with propylene to form cumene, which is then oxidized to phenol. Phenol is hydroxylated into catechol, which is further methylated into guaiacol. Finally, guaiacol is reacted with glyoxilic acid by electrophilic aromatic substitution to produce vanillylmandelic acid, which is converted to vanillin by oxidative decarboxylation. The remainder of the world’s artificial vanillin is made from a waste stream generated in the sulphite process to make paper pulp.

Yes, I know, very disappointing. And the worst of it is that when Cooks Illustrated ran some taste tests which pitted natural vanilla against artificial vanillin used in baked goods and other applications, tasters could not tell the difference! Don’t know what the world is coming to … Luckily, the tasters could tell the difference where ice cream was concerned, with natural vanilla winning out; l’onore è salvo, honour has been saved, as my wife might say.

IRISES

Milan, 4 June 2021

On the hikes which my wife and I have been doing around Lake Como, we frequently come across irises blooming in people’s gardens. They are very nice, of course, but what I really admire are those irises which we spy on the side of the path, normally growing out of a small mound of garden waste. Clearly, someone in the vicinity did some clearing in their gardens, which included pulling up some iris rhizomes (their tuber-like roots), and then they just chucked the waste by the side of the path. But these irises are tough. In the face of adversity, they’ve just kept going, rooting into their new environment and continuing to bloom, to the delight of passersby. Unfortunately, the photos which I took at the time of these feral irises have disappeared into the Photo Black Hole in my iPhone, so I throw in this stock photo instead.

I really admire the irises’ toughness. They remind me rather of a similarly tough plant with lovely flowers which I’ve written about earlier, common chicory.

Irises also reach back deep into my subconscious. My mother had planted irises in her garden in the house of my early childhood in Eritrea – or maybe she inherited them from previous renters of the house; that will to survive which I was just mentioning – and small child though I was (I could not have been more than six years’ old), I was awestruck by these lovely, bright, complex-looking flowers, with their sword-like leaves. My memory may be playing tricks with me but I remember them being yellow irises.

Yet another encounter during a walk last week around Lake Como with irises growing out of waste piles has finally persuaded me to take up my electronic pen and write about them.

Not that there’s a huge amount to write about, unless you’re fixated about irises (and a good number of people do seem to be fixated by them). I was rather astonished to discover that taxonomists recognize something like 280 species of iris (there are also thousands of hybrids – the iris is a flower which enthusiasts have loved to fiddle with – but I won’t bother with them; it’s the Real Thing that interests me). Their natural distribution spans much of northern Eurasia, although there are also a number of species which are native to North America. I throw in some photos of irises in their natural habitat, not imprisoned in someone’s garden: as I’ve remarked in an earlier post about tulips, it’s so much nicer to see flowers in their natural state.
A field of irises in North America:

Iris sibirica in Central Europe

Iris haynei in the Middle East

The Nazareth iris, also from the Middle East

Iris lortetii, also from the Middle East

With 280 species to choose from, I suppose I could have added a good deal more photos of wild irises. But I think that will do. I’m struck by the colours I chose; I rather suspect that I wanted to get away from the typical purple and yellow irises one sees in gardens.

Talking of natural states, it seems to me that iris is a bit of a fancy name for a flower, at least in English. Something like mugwort or yellow flag (actually an alternative name for one of the irises) seems more English. In fact, it appears that we owe the flower’s name to the French. Someone there, some time in the 13th Century, noticing that the flower’s petals had iridescent reflections gave the flower the Greek name for rainbow. Perhaps the deep violet colour of many of the species, resembling the violet and indigo bands of the rainbow, also played a part in this naming exercise.

I’m not completely convinced by this explanation of the name; my inspections of the flower don’t show any obvious iridescence; maybe it was the flowers’ way of shading from colour to colour that inspired the French to name it iris.

In any event, I find that this explanation makes more sense to me than the other explanation bouncing around the Internet, namely that the flower was called iris because it comes in all the shades of the rainbow; this clearly is not the case.

Whatever the right explanation, a connection has been made with a Greek goddess, which has given me an excuse to explore this member of the Greek pantheon. She is, I must admit, a very minor member. Her sole role in life was to carry messages from the gods to other gods or mortals. But she did this very prettily, by laying down a rainbow and walking along it to whoever she was delivering a message to. Apparently, there are no ancient statues of her bar one; one of the statues on the frieze of the Parthenon now in the British Museum – I will skate over the passionate arguments that this relocation to London has generated.

Yes, well, I mutter under my breath, how can anyone know who this very bashed up piece of stone is meant to represent? Nevertheless, I bow to the Experts and accept their attribution.

We seem to be on firmer ground when it comes to paintings on Greek pottery. Here we have a picture of Iris on this vase from the 5th Century BC.

Iris was also depicted by those European artists of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries who went in for classical themes – not my cup of tea, but hey! it takes all sorts to make a world. This particular painting from 1811, by Pierre Narcisse Guerin, falls into this category.

I have to say, it seems to me that the painting is verging on soft porn. In any event, it claims to be portraying a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Juno sends Iris to give a message to Somnus, the god of sleep – the message is, “send a dream to Alcyone that her husband Ceyx is dead” (any reader who wants to know the backstory is welcome to read the Metamorphoses). Iris throws down a rainbow and walks along it (or slides down it?) into the underworld, where Somnus sleeps away his days and nights. She can barely rouse him from his slumbers but finally manages and delivers the message. She then gets the hell out of there as she feels she is about to fall asleep, and clambers back up her rainbow. I should explain at this point that Somnus has one thousand sons, whose job it is to deliver dreams to us mortals. He summons his son Morpheus, the best deliverer of dreams, instructs him to pass on Juno’s message, and promptly falls back to sleep. Guerin got the story wrong by depicting Iris delivering the message directly to Morpheus. But Somnus was presumably middle-aged while Morpheus was a strapping young fellow, so no doubt Guerin took some artistic license so as to be able to paint a nakedly handsome young man as a worthy companion to the nakedly pretty young woman.

The French not only gave the flower its modern name, they also brought the flower’s heraldic representation, the fleur-de-lys, to great prominence, through the adoption by the French kings of the fleur-de-lys as their heraldic emblem. I have to admit to have been really surprised to discover this connection. Why are fleur-de-lys not called fleur-de-iris, then? The best explanation I’ve come across is that the French kings were descended from a line of Frankish chiefs who had lived originally around the river Lies in Belgium before they invaded France. These Frankish chiefs took as their heraldic symbol the yellow Iris pseudacorus, which grows in abundance along the edges of the River Lies, and which is known in Frankish – their original tongue – as Lieschbloem, the bloom of the Lies. It’s easy to see how that could have been frenchified to fleur-de-lys. Here, we have the Lieschbloem in its natural riverine habitat.

And here we have a comparison of a Lieschbloem in close-up and a fleur-de-lys.

I think one can appreciate that the fleur-de-lys could well be a stylized Lieschbloem. As a clincher, readers should note that the background of the French kings’ armorials was blue (“azure” in heraldic lingo) – a representation of the River Lies? Here are the arms of King Louis XVI.

The kings changed their the number of fleur-de-lys on their arms quite frequently, and I chose him because everyone has probably heard of him – the one who got his head cut off during the French Revolution.

Talking of fleur-de-lys, it was also – still is, actually – the centrepiece of the arms of Florence. But there’s an interesting story to the colour scheme. Originally – we’re talking before 1251 – the colours were a white fleur-de-lys on a red background.

The white Iris florentina grew wild in the area around Florence.

It even grew, it is said, on the city’s walls – this is no longer the case, alas, for the few stretches of the walls still left around Florence.

So I suppose it was quite reasonable for the City Fathers to choose a white iris as the city’s heraldic symbol (why they placed it on a red background I don’t know).

In 1251, the government of the city was in the hands of the Ghibelline faction. I hope my readers are at least vaguely familiar with the fighting between Guelphs and the Ghibellines that roiled pretty much all of the city-states in northern and central Italy in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Here, for instance, we have Guelphs and Ghibellines duking it out in Bologna.

Formally, the Guelphs supported the Popes and the Ghibellines the Holy Roman Emperors in the never-ending feud of these two about who controlled who. But in many cities this was just an excuse to cover local quarrels. In Florence, for instance, it was more about the patricians (Ghibellines) versus the plebs (Guelphs). In 1251, the Guelph faction wrested control of the city from the Ghibellines, and to signal that there had been a definitive political change, the Guelphs switched the colours around on the city’s armorial bearings. I suppose they were in power for long enough for the switch to become definitive, because still today we have a red fleur-de-lys on a white background.

One side-effect of this colour switch was people trying to breed a truly red bearded iris (the group of irises to which Iris florentina belongs) and failing dismally. The judgement of Those Who Know is that there is no truly red iris, bearded or otherwise. Well of course the experts know, but the copper iris from North America looks pretty red to me.

But, once again, I bow to the Experts.

It would seem that the Florentines discovered another interesting thing about their Iris florentina, namely that if you take the plant’s rhizome and dry it for a very long time – 3 to 5 years – reactions slowly take place in the rhizome which eventually lead to the production of chemicals with the fragrance of violets. This fragrance is liberated by crushing the now rock-hard rhizomes to a powder. Catherine de’ Medici brought this alchemist-like knowledge to the French court when she married Henry II of France in 1533. Mixed with rice powder, it eventually became a popular way for Europe’s upper crust to perfume their faces, clothes, and eventually wigs when these later came into fashion. Nowadays, perfumers plant huge fields of a light purple cousin of Iris florentina, Iris pallida.

They dig up the rhizomes, dry them, and then steam distill them to obtain a thick, buttery oil known as orris oil. Eyewateringly expensive stuff – like €100,000 a kilo – it’s used by perfumers to give a base note to their creations.

After all of this, though, I’m sure my readers will agree with me when I say, let’s just forget all the metaphorical, allegorical, or representational bla-bla with which irises have been enveloped, and let’s just enjoy the flowers as they are. So let me close with a couple of paintings of irises by Vincent Van Gogh.