In my previous post, I wrote about the sad end of the earliest paleochristian basilica in Roman-era Milan, the basilica vetus or – as it later came to be called – the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was torn down to make way for an even more splendid – and bigger – cathedral, today’s Duomo of Milan. What is important for my story today, the basilica’s baptistery, the baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti, was also torn down. All that remains of it are a few ruins buried under the Duomo’s floor.
One of the most famous people to be baptised in that baptistery was Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was baptised on Easter Sunday 386 C.E., at the age of 32, by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was Ambrose who had finally persuaded Augustine to become a Christian after a lifetime of resistance. Here, we have a fresco painting of that scene by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1464, to be found in the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano.
It is actually the woman at the back who interests us. She is Saint Monica, Augustine’s mother. She was from Rome’s North African province, from a city which today is in Algeria. Christian from an early age, she was married off young to an older man who was violent and unfaithful. To make matters worse, she had to keep house with her mother-in-law, who was as dissolute as her son. But she bore all her trials and tribulations with Christian fortitude. She had three children who survived infancy, Augustine, Navigius, and Perpetua. She wanted them all to be good Christians, and tried to set them on the path of righteousness. But from an early age, Augustine caused her much anguish. He was wayward, lazy, loose in his morals – at the age of 17, he started living with a woman by whom he had a child but whom never married – and worst of all he joined a heretical sect of Christianity. At some point during all these trials and tribulations, she went to see her local bishop and poured out her heart to him. He consoled her with the words, “the child of those tears shall never perish.” Mark those words, dear readers, we will come back to them.
But Augustine had one thing going for him: he was intelligent. After studying in Carthage, he taught rhetoric there, then moved to Rome to set up a school of rhetoric, and then moved again to Milan when he was offered a professorship in rhetoric by the Imperial court. Monica, now widowed, followed him, pushing him to give up his “concubine” (which he did), get properly married with a woman from a good family (which he nearly did), and – last but not least – become a Christian (which, as we’ve seen, he did, thanks to Saint Ambrose). Having become a Christian, Augustine gave up teaching rhetoric and decided to return home. Monica of course accompanied him, but having finally achieved her aim and with nothing left to live for, she died in Ostia while they were waiting for the ship to take them across to North Africa. We see her death depicted here, in the same church in San Gimignano and by the same artist
Not surprisingly, given her history, Monica is the patron saint of difficult marriages, disappointing children, victims of adultery or unfaithfulness, and of lapsed Catholics (I wonder if my mother ever prayed to Saint Monica à propos of my lapsed status?). From the Middle Ages on, her cult grew and spread throughout Christendom. The story of her crying her eyes out over Augustine became part of the popular stories about her. In fact, one can still buy statues of her in tears; here is a modern example: yours, courtesy of the gift shop of the Norbertine sisters, for a mere $180.
In 1768, as part of its attempts to shore up its claims over the Pacific coast of North America, the Spanish government ordered an expedition to set out from Baja California and lay stake to all of the territories lying between San Diego and Monterey. The expedition set out from San Diego in July 1769 and reached Monterey in October. They actually failed to recognise Monterey (the bay had been previously described by a Spanish navigator sailing up the coast, but they couldn’t match his descriptions with what they were seeing) and kept marching northwards, which led the expedition to its most momentous discovery in November, the huge bay of San Francisco. Somewhat astonishingly, ships from various nations had sailed past the mouth of the bay in the past without ever noticing it – the fog which commonly envelops the area has been given as the reason. Its job done, the expedition marched back to San Diego. The Franciscans who accompanied the expedition used it to lay the groundwork for a string of 21 Missions which they built over the next several decades all the way from San Diego to Sonoma just north of San Francisco. Here’s a photo of the mission church in Santa Barbara.
Source
But it’s not these large-scale events that interest me, it’s a small incident that happened in early August 1769 as the expedition force moved northward. On 2 August, the force arrived at the confluence of the Los Angeles river and the Arroyo Seco, very close to what is now downtown Los Angeles. The next day, the men moved on and camped a mere 4 km from where I’m writing this, at the Tongva village of Kuruvungna. The village was located close to a pair of springs which were sacred to the Tongvta people. The village has vanished, as have all the villages of the First Nations who lived in this part of California, but the springs still exist, now located in the grounds of the University High School on Texas Avenue in Los Angeles.
Juan Crespí, a Franciscan friar who was with the expedition, renamed the springs San Gregorio. But the new name didn’t stick. Someone in the following decades, someone with a poetic bent, saw in those two springs the eyes of Saint Monica with tears continuously welling out of them, and so they became known as the fuentes de las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica, the springs of the Tears of Saint Monica. From there, by a sort of geographical osmosis, the general area around the springs became known as Santa Mónica. So when, in 1839, the Mexican governor of Alta California gave a certain Francisco Sepúlveda II a grant of 33,000 acres of land for a rancho, a grant which included the springs, Señor Sepúlveda called his rancho San Vincente y Santa Mónica (the San Vincente part of the name presumably came from another location on the rancho).
Fast forward another thirty years, to 1872 – California was now a US State – and the Sepúlveda family sold half of the rancho’s lands to a Col. Robert Baker, a businessman with a finger in many pies. In turn, two years later, Col. Baker sold three-quarters of his part of the rancho to another businessman, John Percival Jones, who had made a fortune in silver mining out in Nevada. In 1875, the two agreed to create a new town on part of their land holdings. Again, by geographical osmosis, they decided to call the town Santa Monica (even though the springs are not part of the township). Thus started the town which is now part of the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. My wife and I are on the bus from Santa Monica as I write this, having just visited the Cayton Children’s Museum with our grandson, where great fun was had by all. The bus is passing street after street of houses, which have all been built over the 33,000 acres of the rancho of Francisco Sepúlveda II. A lot of people have made a lot of money in real estate.
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Over its lifetime, the town of Santa Monica has given its name to a variety of other things in the town. Perhaps the best known is the Santa Monica Pier, which has housed an amusement park out on the ocean’s edge since the 1920s.
Who hasn’t thrilled at the idea of travelling along Route 66? I certainly have. I’ve told my wife that one of these days, once we’ve finished visiting our daughter in LA, we’ll roar off down Route 66 all the way to Chicago. I think we’ll have to do this trip in a Corvette, a red one if possible.
And of course we’ll be listening to Nat King Cole’s “Route 66” on the radio.
Source
Although we’ll do the trip in the opposite direction to Nat King Cole’s lyrics: LA – San Bernadino – Barstow – Kingman – Winona – Flagstaff, Arizona – Gallup, New Mexico – Amarillo – Oklahoma City – Joplin, Missouri – Saint Louis – Chicago
“Get your kicks
On Route sixty-six”
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.
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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
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.
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.
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).
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!
This past Christmas, my wife and I were debating what we should cook for Christmas lunch. We finally decided to adopt a programme in honour of our children, whereby over the coming years we will use Christmas lunches to celebrate our children’s rich and varied heritage. This will mean that over the course of the next six Christmases we will prepare typical Christmas lunches starting with Puglia in the south of Italy, going on to Lombardy, Beaujolais, England, Scotland, and finally Norway. After Norway, we will extend the programme at least several more years, by celebrating the extra heritage of our currently only grandchild, which will take us to Ireland and to Lithuania and Bielorussia. If there are further grandchildren with other heritages to bring – literally – to the table, we will tack on more years to the programme (assuming we haven’t popped our clogs before that).
With this multi-year framework programme agreed upon, we got to work and started our research: what would be a typical Christmas lunch in Puglia? Just to get us into an Apulian mood, I throw in here a photo of an Apulian olive grove with millenarian olive trees.
Unfortunately, my wife had never been brought up in Apulian traditions: it was her maternal grandfather who had been the Apulian of the family; he had immigrated to Milan as a young man before World War I, and like many immigrants before and after him he had wanted to blend in to the local, northern Italian, culture. So we had to fall back on the internet. Our initial surfing showed us that there are actually several traditional Apulian Christmas lunches to choose from, broadly divided between fish and meat. After some to-ing and fro-ing, we plumped for roast lamb and potatoes, with something called lampascioni on the side, and we left hanging the question of what to do about dessert.
Well, lamb and potatoes aren’t particularly Apulian, nor did any of the articles we read say that a particular cut of lamb was required for the Apulian Christmas lunch, so we took whatever cuts of lamb were available at our local supermarket. What was truly Apulian about the lunch were the lampascioni. No doubt like us, many of my readers will have no idea what these lampascioni are. I certainly had no idea whatsoever, and my wife had only heard of them but had never tried them. They are the bulb of a flower which goes by the English name of tassel hyacinth. Its natural range is the Mediterranean basin, although it is also found as far east as Iran and as far west as the Canary Islands. It naturalizes quite easily, though, and over the centuries it has moved northward to Poland. Now, of course, with globalisation, it’s also found in many other parts of the world. As this photo shows, the flower is really quite handsome.
They may be handsome flowers, but the inhabitants of the heel, instep, and toe of Italy’s boot, namely the regions of Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, have other ideas. They have taken to eating the bulb of the plant (a habit, I should say in passing, that they share with the inhabitants of the island of Crete).
The bulbs are not an obvious candidate for the dining table since in their natural state they have an unpleasantly bitter taste. But at some point in the distant past (there is evidence that the bulbs were already being eaten in Neolithic times), this problem was solved. To be edible, the bulbs have to be left to steep in water for a significant period of time (one day should do it, with a change of water in between) and then cooked. At which point, they look like this.
It was all very well to want to have lampascioni for lunch, but where were we going to buy them? A very regional foodstuff like this was only going to be sold in a specialist shop. As luck would have it, I discovered that a long urban walk we had planned (to a modern church on the outskirts of Milan – perhaps the subject of a later post) happened to take us by a small shop selling Apulian foodstuffs. So I persuaded my wife to make a small detour to check the shop out. When we reached it, we entered with our hearts in our mouths – and there on the shelf were jars of lampascioni! They were immersed in a lovely Apulian olive oil.
This is the normal way of selling lampascioni; the bulbs are only harvested in the early months of the year. So, to be able to eat them all year round, they are kept in olive oil (the Cretans instead, I can once again mention in passing, keep them in vinegar on which is floated a thin layer of olive oil).
So we had our lampascioni to accompany the lamb and potatoes! We were moving along nicely. Most satisfactorily, the same shop also solved our dessert problem. They were selling trays of something called cartellate con vincotto di fichi. I had certainly never heard of these cartellate, and neither had my wife. Nevertheless, they were obviously Apulian and obviously a dessert. So a decision was rapidly taken and a tray of cartellate joined the jar of lampascioni.
I think I need to explain what these cartellate are. I had to look it up on the internet because just looking at them didn’t help. They are made with thin, long and narrow slices of dough (with, interestingly enough, a local white wine taking the place of water). These are rolled up into the shape of rosettes, and the rosettes are then deep-fried in oil. Into the little cups of the rosettes is poured a thick syrup made by boiling figs over a long, long time and sieving out the solids. I think I should add in a photo of the these cartellate out of the packaging, so that readers can get a better idea of what they look like (in passing, I find it strange that they call this syrup vincotto di fichi, which translates as “cooked wine of figs”, because no wine is involved).
So now we had all the ingredients we needed! 25 December dawned, and it was time to start cooking the lamb and potatoes. Our son, who was going to eat lunch with us, joined us for the preparations.
Since our internet sources hadn’t mentioned a typically Apulian way of roasting the lamb, we chose a recipe from the Italian cookery site Giallo Zafferano. The only thing which, to us at least, was untoward about this recipe was its insistence on adding a lot of water to the pan in which the lamb and potatoes were being roasted.
After an hour or so, the lamb and potatoes were ready.
It was time for us to sit ourselves down at the table. The lamb and potatoes were ceremoniously brought to the table, my wife served us, we fished the lampascioni out of their jar, and we tucked in.
The lamb was delicious. The addition of water worked really well. The lamb was juicy and tender, with just a bit of crispiness on the top where the meat was above the water, and the potatoes were done to perfection.
And how about the lampascioni? What did they taste like? Well, they tasted slightly bitter, as one might imagine, but also slightly sweet. So there was an interesting sweet-and-sour thing going on with the taste buds. They also had a most interesting texture, almost melting in the mouth. I have to say, they were an excellent accompaniment to the lamb and spuds. And the oil that was left after we had polished off the lampascioni was exquisite. Apulian olive oil is anyway very good, but now it had a slight umami taste to it, which made it an excellent oil to put on my post-Christmas salads, adding an evanescent flavour to otherwise rather staid vegetables. I would buy another jar of lampascioni just for its oil.
I’m afraid the cartellate were a different story. I don’t want to badmouth them, but we won’t be buying them again, at least not if they are made with fig syrup. All that boiling meant that the syrup actually had a somewhat bitter taste to it, which rather ruined the experience of eating the cartellate. Internet sites suggest that alternatives can be used: grape syrup (but I suspect there would be the same problem of bitterness), honey, or icing sugar. If ever we come across cartellate made with any of these alternatives, we might give the dish a second chance.
So there we have it. Apulian Christmas lunch: done! Next year: Lombard Christmas lunch.
At the end of October, my wife and I did a two-day hike from Gubbio to Assisi, along the Via di San Francesco. As the trail’s name suggests, it centres around the life and times of St. Francis of Assisi. As befits any saint from the Middle Ages, he was the protagonist of a great number of stories, many of which became the subject of the late 13th Century frescoes painted in Assisi and elsewhere after his death in 1226. I will choose some of these to illustrate stories which took place in the localities linked by the trail.
to the north of Assisi, the trail starts at La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata.
As for the southern portion of the trail, it starts in Rome, where Francis went a number of times to keep his movement on the right side of the Church authorities – this fresco depicts his critical first meeting with Pope Innocent III, to receive the pope’s blessing for his nascent movement.
It goes on to Rieti, where Francis came many times. His last visit was shortly before his death, to have an operation on his eyes – he had become nearly blind (the operation failed, alas).
Nearby, while resting and preparing for his operation, he worked on his Canticle of the Sun:
“Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.”
He goes on to praise “Sister Moon”, “Brother Wind”, “Sister Water”, “Brother Fire”, “Sister Mother Earth”. He completed the last verse on “Sister Bodily Death” as he lay dying in Assisi soon after.
In nearby Greccio, he created the first living crèche, using locals as the actors in the drama. It was his way of telling the Christmas story to rural folk, who couldn’t understand the Latin in which the story was normally told.
And it, too, of course ends in Assisi, where Francis’s spiritual journey began and ended. Of the many stories about him that happen in the town, I choose two:
His renunciation of his father and family, stripping himself naked in the town’s piazza and giving his clothes back to his father;
And then there is the tiny church of Porziuncola down in the valley below the town, which Francis had rebuilt and where he loved to spend time. Here is an artist’s rendering of what it looked like in his day. Those two rows of little huts are where the friars stayed.
It was in that church – chapel, really – that Francis heard the priest read out from the Gospel of Matthew the passage where Christ sends his disciples far and wide to proclaim the Good News, with the following instructions: “You received without charge, give without charge. Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with coppers for your purses, with no haversack for the journey or spare tunic or footwear or a staff, for the labourer deserves his keep.” Then and there, he decided that he and his followers would do the same. Thus was born the order of mendicant friars which was to take his name, the Franciscan Order.
Funnily enough, this momentous decision doesn’t feature in any of the frescoes about him – at least, none that I have found. But other stories involving Porziuncola have been the subject of frescoes. I choose three:
His welcoming of Clare when she ran away from her family to join Francis’s movement and eventually established the Order of Poor Clares;
After our two days of hiking, my wife and I spent a day in Assisi. Alas, I can’t say that I liked the town in its modern guise. It’s just a tourist trap, crowded, full of shops selling tourist tat and restaurants selling overpriced food.
Francis would have been horrified at all these shops pushing tourists to consume – and in his name at that. I rather think – I hope – that like Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem he would have gone after all these sellers of tat. Turning once again to Matthew: “Jesus then went into the Temple and drove out all those who were selling and buying there; he upset the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers. He said to them, ‘According to scripture, my house will be called a house of prayer; but you are turning it into a bandits’ den.'” I throw in a painting by El Greco of Jesus wielding the whip in the Temple, one that always comes to my mind when I see these shops in places that are supposed to be havens of religion.
But even the basilica of St. Francis, which one reaches after braving the tourist shops and overpriced restaurants, disappointed me. Yes, it is full of art whose creation supposedly kick-started the Italian Renaissance, and I’ve used many of its frescoes above as illustrations. But I was struck by something I read. In his testament, Francis had specified where he wanted to be buried in Assisi. It was at the far end of the town, its lower end. It was here that convicts were executed and the town’s lepers and other outcasts congregated. Its noisome reputation led to the area being called the “collis Inferni”, the hill of Hell. Francis had often spent time on that hill, ministering to the wretched who eked out a living there. It was of a piece with his beliefs to want to be put to rest in a humble grave among the lowest of the low. Yet, the Church authorities, actively supported by the Franciscan Order’s hierarchy, were having none of that. It was decreed that a splendid basilica would rise on the collis Inferni, turning it into the “collis Paradisi”, the hill of Paradise.
Poor Francis must have been spinning in his coffin when he was finally interred in that basilica, four years after he died. It was a betrayal of everything he stood for.
As for Porziuncola, that humble chapel so beloved by Francis, Pope Pius V in the 16th Century ordered a huge church to be built, Santa Maria degli Angeli.
The ostensible reason for building the church was to better control the flow of pilgrims. The guide books are at pains to point out the bareness of the interior of this mastodontic church, as proof of its respect for Francis’s vows to Lady Poverty. But, standing on the square in front of the church, it is difficult not to see this as one more example of the Church authorities glorifying themselves. I’m certain that Francis would have been horrified.
As I’ve said in an earlier post, I am a great admirer of Francis – not the religious side of him; as I’ve said in another post, I am an atheist and have been since I fell off the straight-and-narrow as a student at University. But his turning away from the material side of life – a core part of the Rule he wrote for his friars being that they should own nothing – makes him truly a man for our times.
I hardly ever allow my professional work to leak into my posts, but today will be different; I suppose it’s because I’m writing this post in Kyoto where I am giving my annual course to university students on precisely this: how we can build a society that has a much smaller footprint. What I tell my students is that after working for 45 years in the environmental field, I have become convinced that our excessive consumption is literally destroying our planet. Look at these photos taken by Peter Menzel. He travelled to different countries and invited households whom he met to put everything they owned out on the street in front of where they lived. This photo is of a family somewhere in North America, a place with one of the highest levels of per capita consumption in the world.
This is all worrying enough. But what’s even more worrying is that people who live in less developed countries, whose levels of ownership and consumption of stuff are still modest, like South Africa
they want to have the same levels of consumption as the richer countries.
That impulse is perfectly understandable. But it cannot be. We cannot all consume at the levels of that North American family, or even of that Japanese family. We must heed Francis’s call to adopt a life shorn of stuff. We must – we must – reduce our levels of consumption, or else we will face an ecological catastrophe. Here, too, Francis is a man for our times because of his views on Nature. Unlike most of his contemporaries, and indeed unlike most of humanity even today, he saw the rest of Nature as equal to us humans. His Canticle to the Sun is an ode to Nature, as relevant today as it was when he wrote it 800 years ago. Of course, his reverence of Nature sprang from his reverence of God – if God created Nature, his argument went, we should revere Nature as God’s work. My position is rather different. Whether we like it or not, we are an intimate part of the world’s biosphere, and if it dies we die. Yet, because of our huge levels of consumption, growing ever huger with every passing year, we are ripping our biosphere apart, one result being that the Earth is losing species at rates which have not been seen in the last 10 million years. Francis, I’m sure, would have been appalled. If we go on like this, we are going towards a general collapse of the world’s ecosystems, which will sweep away our civilisations – for all our cleverness, we will not survive breakdowns in our biological life-support systems.
And finally Francis is a man for our times because he felt closest to the poor, the outcasts, the lowest of the low. Today, we live in a world riven by inequalities. In the photos above, I showed one type of inequality, the inequality between countries. Seemingly, this type of inequality is narrowing, but only to be replaced by a much more insidious inequality, the inequality between the citizens of these countries. Already rich individuals are getting ever richer at the expense of everyone else and don’t care anymore about their fellow citizens. We have to change that. We must – we must – pay more attention to the greater societal good rather than to our own individual desires. Frankly, this is not – as was the case for Francis – a disinterested decision, an “act of love for our fellow men”; it is very self-interested. If we don’t look after those who have been left behind, they will eventually come for us with their pitchforks.
And this should not be an average. Every one of us should have this level of consumption, from the Bezoses and Musks of this world to the homeless that haunt our streets.
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.
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.
My wife’s photo
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.
My photo
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.
My wife’s photo
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.
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.
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.
It rained the day we visited Petra. Not a huge amount, just a sprinkle. But it was enough to keep the skies covered and the temperatures moderate. This was the one time in my life that I’ve been pleased to have rain when I visited somewhere. It was the last days of May, and my wife and I had been worried that we would be visiting the site under a burning sun.
We entered the site through the Siq, that long, long gash in the mountains.
my photo
We followed its meanderings, hopping out of the way of the electric vehicles ferrying tourists back and forth, all the while craning our necks backwards to look at the walls of rock soaring above us.
my wife’s photo
And so we came to the end of the Siq and found ourselves in front of the Khazneh, the Treasury, the building that “is” Petra. It was a gradual unfolding, as we exited from the narrowness of the Siq.
My wife’s photoMy wife’s photoMy wife’s photo
It wasn’t actually a treasury. That’s what the local Bedouins believed. They thought there was treasure hidden in that urn on the very top of the rotunda, as witnessed by the pockmarks on it caused by Bedouins firing at it to try to break it open – a waste of time and bullets since the urn is solid sandstone. In reality, it was a mausoleum for the Nabatean king Aretas IV Philopatris (“friend of his people”, which probably means he wasn’t their friend at all). We have – possibly – a likeness of this friend of the people on one of his coins.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament will be interested to know that Aretas’s daughter married Herod Antipas, and it was the latter’s decision to divorce her and marry his stepbrother’s wife Herodias that eventually led to the beheading of John the Baptist. Here’s Caravaggio’s take on this execution.
I actually first came across the Treasury in the Tintin album “Coke en Stock”. For reasons which are too convoluted to explain, Tintin, with Captain Haddock in tow, is crossing the fictional Middle Eastern country of Khemed on horseback to get to the Red Sea. On the way, they pass through a narrow gorge. The relevant page from the album recounts the rest of the incident.
my photomy photo
As I say, the story is highly convoluted, and I invite curious readers to go back to the original album to understand who is who and what is going on. Let’s just focus on the Treasury (although I have to say, I’ve always asked myself what that lady was saying to Captain Haddock).
When I read the album, I had no idea that this was the Treasury in Petra. Neither it nor Petra itself is mentioned by name. Captain Haddock says it is a Roman temple, and that is all we are told. It was only years later, when I happened to see a guidebook on Petra, that I realised where Hergé had got his inspiration. Here is one of the many, many guidebooks on Petra with the Treasury on its cover.
The official photos of the plaza in front of the Treasury normally have few if any people. But as my wife’s photo above shows, when we there it was like a souk, although a very modern one. Large crowds of tourists were milling around, taking photos, taking selfies, reading guide books, listening to guides they had rented, or chattering among themselves, before they moved on to the next ruin. In the middle of all this, and rather getting in the way, camels and donkeys waited patiently, with the local Bedouins hawking a ride on them down to the rest of the ruins. Other Bedouins called out from the cliffs above, inviting tourists to climb up and have a drink. Others still manned the stalls lining the side of the canyon which brought us all to the rest of Petra, selling tourist tat.
I noticed that getting one’s eyes lined with kohl was a popular offering when we were there, with all the Bedouins – men and women – heavily eyelined in kohl to advertise the service.
We ignored the tourist tat and the calls to climb onto a camel, or donkey, or horse, and walked down the Street of Facades, the canyon leading away from the Treasury with buildings cut into the canyon walls.
We finally made it to the path leading to the Monastery and then slowly made our way up the long, long – 850-steps-long – climb, part of a steady stream of tourists struggling upwards in panting silence (thank God for the cloud cover!).
My photo
As we climbed we had to squeeze our way through yet more tourist stalls jammed onto the narrow path, with their Bedouin owners loudly advertising their wares.
We finally emerged onto the plaza abutting the Monastery.
It was of course never a monastery, although quite what it was is not clear. Experts’ best guess is that it was dedicated to the cult of the deified King Obodas I. Once again, we can possibly get an idea of what he looked like through his coinage.
Obodas’s people deified him because he was a Mighty Kicker of Ass. He gave the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled over Judea, a severe drubbing near the Sea of Galilee, from which Alexander barely managed to escape alive (I’ve mentioned Alexander before; he was the High Priest who was pelted by the faithful with citrons). Then a few years later, after the Seleucid king, Antiochus XII Dionysus, had invaded the Nabatean kingdom, Obodas attacked his army. Antiochus was killed and the remains of his army perished miserably in the desert.
After a well-deserved rest and drink, we joined the stream of tourists going back down, now skipping along and chattering as they went. Once back down to the Colonnaded Street, we headed up onto the hillside to the north, to have a view down on the site.
My photo
Looking at all these dusty ruins, it’s difficult to understand what Petra looked like when it was a living, thriving city, so I have resorted to showing a reconstruction.
At the very top of the photo, in the middle, one can just make out the Treasury. Coming down the canyon from the Treasury, we have the royal tombs to the right and the theatre to the left. We are looking down at the red roofs of the Colonnaded Street, with the colonnades finishing at the Temenos Gate. The path to the Monastery, which is not visible here, is off at the bottom right of the photo.
The water in the stream running along the Colonnaded Street is ridiculously blue, like a swimming pool. I wonder how much water there even was in that stream bed. Water was a precious resource in Petra, and its citizens had created a complex network of dams, reservoirs, cisterns, and basins, the whole connected by some 200 km of channels and pipes, to collect, store, and distribute the little amount of rain which fell in the environs.
In its heyday, this network was able to support a population of some 20-30,000 people, about the same size as the small town of Wadi Musa situated on the edge of Petra, where we stayed the night. Not large by today’s standards, but populations were much, much smaller back then.
There was also an important transient population – of both man and beast – to supply water to, for Petra’s importance – and wealth – came from it being at the crossroads of important trade routes.
From Yemen in the south came frankincense and myrrh, those precious incenses so desired for religious ceremonies throughout the Middle East and beyond. It’s no coincidence that in his Gospel, Matthew has the Three Wise Men bringing frankincense and myrrh, along with gold, as presents fit for Christ the King.
The goods moved west to Gaza, or north to Damascus and then west to the coast of what is now Lebanon, from whence they were shipped across the Mediterranean. The Nabateans welcomed all these traders who crossed their kingdom and offered them protection, shelter, and water – for a price. And that price paid for all the buildings and infrastructure in Petra.
Nearly all gone now. The earthquake of 363 CE did massive damage, changes in trade routes did the rest. Once sailors understood how to sail the monsoons in the Arabian Sea, ships from India could sail up the Red Sea and transit through Alexandria, cutting out the Nabateans, while Palmyra to the north drew away much of the rest of the east-west trade. By the time of the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634 CE, Petra had been forgotten. Sic transit gloria mundi.
We slowly made our way back to the Siq and left the site. Tomorrow, we were on our way to Amman, where I was going to give a training course on green industry policies.
It was an exploded view of a hamburger which I saw recently at a fast food joint while my wife was getting coffees that set me off. The hamburger was separated, accordion-like, so that each of its ingredients was clearly separated from the others while still being part of a recognisable whole. I just managed to take a photo before the subway arrived – a bit wonky, given I was in a hurry.
my photo
This exploded hamburger got me asking myself: “How many of the ingredients in that most American, most iconic, of hamburgers, McDonald’s Big Mac, originated in the US?”. Here is a photo of this deliciously yummy – but frightfully-bad-for-you – fast food offering.
Of course, I’m sure that many if not most of the ingredients which are used in a Big Mac sold in the US are grown or raised there, but how many of them originally came from the North American continent in the distant past?
The answer, dear reader, is none. Not a single one of its main ingredients, or even of its not-so-main ingredients, originated in the North American continent.
In case any readers don’t believe me, here is a list of the Big Mac’s ingredients, courtesy of MacDonald’s website. We are informed that the Big Mac contains:
two beef patties
pasteurised process American cheese
shredded lettuce
minced onions
pickle slices
Big Mac sauce
three slices of sesame-seed bun
Now let’s see where all the foodstuffs behind these ingredients came from. Let’s start with the beef patties, which surely – with the bread – are the heart of a hamburger; the rest are just add-ons.
The cattle which give us the beef patties were originally domesticated from the wild auroch in about 8,500 BCE, somewhere in the Levant and/or central Anatolia and/or Western Iran (aurochs were domesticated once more, possibly twice more, but the cattle MacDonald’s use almost certainly come from that first domestication event). Aurochs were hunted by our Cro-Magnon ancestors, who left us beautiful paintings of these beasts on the walls of caves like Lascaux.
Alas, they are now extinct, the last one having perished in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest in Poland. All that’s left are some miserable skeletons in museums.
There is a minor, but important ingredient that goes along with the patties, and that is black pepper, which MacDonald’s tells us that their patties are grilled with. The black pepper vine is native to South and South-East Asia and it was there that farmers began to intentionally grow the vine to harvest its crop. We see it here in the wild.
The domestication of cattle not only led to the patties but also to dairy products, so it’s fitting to deal next with the “pasteurised process American cheese” in the Big Mac.
Source
I don’t know what readers think, but these slices of stuff don’t look like any cheese I’ve ever seen. Nevertheless, McDonald’s assures us that it is actually 60% cheese – 51% cheddar and 9% other, unspecified, cheese. The remaining 40% includes various other milk-related products – whey powder, butter, milk protein – as well as water and of course various other crap – sorry, food additives – which act as emulsifiers, anti-caking agents, colourants, and Lord knows what else. We’ll ignore all those horrors and focus on the milk-related products.
It makes sense to think that the domestication of aurochs – and of the other two main dairy animals, sheep and goats – pretty quickly led our ancestors to exploit their milk as well as their meat. And in fact, our earliest archaeological evidence of dairying is lipid residue in prehistoric pottery found in Southwest Asia, dated to the seventh millennium BCE. This all suggests that once again the Middle East – broadly defined – was the point of origin of all the cow milk-related products – cheese, whey, butter – in that slice of pasteurized process American cheese. To celebrate all these milk products, I throw in various photos. the first is of a farmer’s wife milking a cow. I remember this from my childhood. My French grandmother would send me to the nearby farm with a small jug, which the lady would fill, milking her cow in front of me in the barn.
The third photo celebrates Little Miss Muffet who was eating curds and whey, with curds being the first step in cheese production, before that pesky spider frightened her away.
McDonald’s tells us it uses iceberg lettuce, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter which variety of lettuce they use because all lettuces descend from the same domestication event. We have the ancient Egyptians to thank for first cultivating the lettuce, with the earliest evidence of its cultivation being from about 2700 BCE. Here is a photo of what the first domesticated lettuces looked like (those plants to the left).
I should hastily explain that apart from eating lettuce, the ancient Egyptians believed the plant to be the sacred to Min, the god of reproduction; I don’t think I need to point him out in the photo. The Egyptians thought lettuce helped the god “perform the sexual act untiringly”, because it stood straight and tall and when cut it oozed a semen-like latex. (I wonder if some echo of these beliefs explains why my wife’s maternal grandfather liked to eat a head of lettuce every day?) In any event, as readers can see the ancient lettuce looked quite different from modern lettuces; we have to thank the patient work of countless generations of farmers for that.
We can now turn our attention to the minced onion.
There is no general agreement about where the onion was first domesticated. Many experts think the domestication event took place in Central Asia, but there are partisans for Iran and western Pakistan. As to when it was domesticated, traces of onions have been recovered from Bronze Age settlements in China dated to 5000 BCE, so domestication must have occurred quite a good deal earlier. I throw in a photo of a wild onion plant, although not the plant which was domesticated; it’s not clear to experts which onion plant was.
The wild plant is native to the Himalayan foothills, with a range that stretches from western India all the way to China, but it was the Indians who domesticated it, by at least 3000 BCE. As an example of the Himalayan foothills, I throw in here a picture of a rope bridge across the Alaknanda River near Srinagar in Kashmir, from the late 18th/early 19th Centuries.
This picture is actually a plate in a six-volume book entitled Oriental Scenery, but I have an aquarelle of exactly the same scene, which I picked up at the Dorotheum auction house for a pittance.
But back to the topic in hand. Of course, it’s not just cucumbers we need here, we also need vinegar to pickle them (pickling is also possible with salt and other things, but MacDonald’s lists vinegar as one of the ingredients for its pickle slices). The first documented evidence of the deliberate making of vinegar (rather than an alcoholic beverage spoiling and turning into vinegar) was in Mesopotamia, in about 3000 BCE. Not surprisingly, the earliest evidence of pickling in vinegar has also been found in Mesopotamia, from around 2400 BCE, with archaeological evidence of cucumbers in particular being pickled there from 2030 BCE.
We now have to tackle the special Big Mac sauce, which I think readers will agree – or at least those who will admit to having eaten a Big Mac – is the clou of this fast food offering. Let’s be frank, without that yummy, finger-lickin’ly-delicious sauce the Big Mac would be rather bland.
Of course, MacDonald’s keeps the precise recipe a closely guarded secret, a commercial tactic which I’ve commented on before, and their bald list of ingredients doesn’t really tell you how exactly the sauce is put together. Luckily, however, litres of electronic ink have been spilled all over the internet detailing people’s attempts to recreate the sauce, and these give us the basic “design” of the sauce. It is just a mix of mayonnaise and “sweet relish”.
The mayo part gives us a number of new ingredients to consider: egg yolks, oil, and mustard (as part of a “spice mix”). Vinegar is of course also required to make mayonnaise, but we have already covered that. As for the sweet relish part, that’s just our friend pickled cucumber with sugar added. So all we need to consider is the sugar which is added as sweetener. (In all this, I am ignoring the evil food additives which MacDonald’s throws into the mix, to emulsify and thicken and make even sweeter and preserve and firm up and, and, and …).
Egg yolks is really the story of the domestication of the chicken; this is one case where the chicken comes before the egg. The chicken was domesticated from the red junglefowl in about 6,000 BCE in Southeast Asia. There are still wild red junglefowl padding through the jungle undergrowth. They are magnificent creatures – at least, the males are.
My wife and I were lucky enough to see junglefowls, or chickens that were still quite junglefowlish, in Indonesia. Really lovely creatures.
Interestingly enough, the red junglefowl may have originally been domesticated not for food but for cockfighting. Here is a Roman mosaic of a cock fight, when the practice was already centuries old.
It was only later that chickens became a major source of eggs and later still a major source of meat – the earliest archaeological evidence of large-scale eating of chickens is only from about 400 BCE.
As for the oil which goes into the mayonnaise, recipes in different parts of MacDonald’s website list soybean oil in one place and rapeseed oil in another. I presume this simply means that the choice of oil depends on availability. Let’s start with soybean oil. Given the popularity of soy products in East Asia, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers to learn that it was in that part of the world that soybean plants were first domesticated. In fact, it seems to have been domesticated several times. The oldest domestication event was in China, some time between 7000 and 6000 BCE, with another domestication event in Japan some 2000 years later and yet another in Korea some 6000 years later. Here we have modern Chinese farmers bringing in the soybean harvest.
For rapeseed, on the other hand, the honour for first domestication seems to go to India, which is where the earliest evidence of domesticated rapeseed, dated at 2000 BCE, has been found. That being said, it should be pointed out that it was only very, very recently – in the 1970s, in Manitoba, Canada – that a cultivar of rapeseed was created that produced edible oil, which is really what interests us for the Big Mac special sauce. Before that, a chemical naturally present in rapeseed oil gave it a disagreeable taste, so it was only used for such things as oil for lamps. Which explains why it’s only in the last 50-some years that the European countryside has become covered with acre after monotonous acre of yellow-flowered rapeseed being grown to produce edible oil.
The mustard-spice mix is such a small part of the overall Big Mac that it doesn’t get a picture om MacDonald’s website. But mustard is an interesting plant, which I’ve written about in an earlier post. It’s a complicated plant. For starters, focusing for a minute on the seeds – which is what we are interested in from a condiments point of view – there are three types: black, brown and white seeds. Each come from different plants with their individual domestication histories.
Sources: various Amazon sites
The first two are the most common, and of these two MacDonald’s almost certainly uses brown seeds, for the simple reason that a cultivar of the plant has been developed where the seed pods don’t shatter when harvested, whereas such a cultivar doesn’t exist for black mustard (having seed pods which don’t shatter during harvesting is incredibly important; the last thing you need when you harvest a seed crop is to have the pods shatter and the precious seeds scatter all over the ground). So here is the plant Brassica juncea which was domesticated to give us brown seeds.
But it was also separately domesticated for its edible root, leaves, and stem, and it has been difficult for scientists to distinguish between these various domestication events. Nevertheless, the latest analyses suggest that the plant was first domesticated for its seeds in what is now Afghanistan, in about 2000 BCE.
All that being said, the critical point about mustard – what makes mustard powder become the fiery condiment we know today – is its mixing with liquids, often nowadays vinegar. Although the vinegar in the mayonnaise is playing another role, I have to assume that when the powdered mustard seeds are added to the mix, their fire is unleashed (my earlier post explains the biochemistry). The Ancient Romans were the first to come up with this innovation – “mustard” comes, via the French, from the Latin “mustum ardens”, fiery must. It seems that the Romans liked to use must as the liquid to set mustard seeds off.
Which brings us to the sugar in the sweet relish part of the Big Mac sauce. Here, too, there is a complication, because MacDonald’s could easily be sourcing their sugar from two quite different sources: sugar extracted from sugar cane or from sugar beet. Let’s start with sugar cane, the oldest of the two sources. Modern sugar cane is the result of an initial domestication event and then a key hybridisation event. The initial domestication event took place in New Guinea, in about 4000 BCE, when the Papuans domesticated the wild grass Saccharum robustum to create S. officinarum. This domesticate travelled west to Island Southeast Asia (mostly what we call today Indonesia), where, at some point, it hybridised with S. spontaneum, another species of the family. Without this hybridisation, sugar cane would not have become the global crop it is today because S. spontaneum gave the resultant cross high tolerance to environmental stress. We have here a rather pretty botanical painting of S. officinarum, much nicer than photos of fields of sugar cane, which are really monotonous.
One further important technical innovation took place in about 350 CE, in India. Until then, people had drunk the juice squeezed from the cane. It was the Indians who first figured out how to turn the juice into the granulated sugar we know and use today. A useless factoid: the word “sugar” derives from the Sanskrit word sharkara, which means “gravel” or “sand”.
How about sugar from beetroot? This has a much, much shorter history than any of the other ingredients considered up to now, with the exception of the edible form of rapeseed oil. It wasn’t until the 18th Century, in Prussia, that a cultivar of the beetroot was developed which contained high enough levels of sugar to make it competitive with sugar cane. This is a rare case where we know the names of the people who were responsible. It was the Prussian scientists Franz Karl Achard and Moritz Baron von Koppy and his son, although the initial impulse – and funds – for their efforts came from Frederick the Great, who wanted to develop a local source of sugar. That being said, the French really pushed the development of sugar beet. It started with Napoleon, who was looking for another source of sugar to take the place of the Caribbean cane sugar whose import into France was being blockaded by the filthy English. Here is a French sugar beet factory from 1843.
This is what sort of holds all the other ingredients together (I say sort of, because my experience with Big Macs is that, well lubricated by the Big Mac sauce, the other ingredients tend to slide out from between the bread slices onto the table or, worse, onto my trousers). Going back once again to the list of ingredients on MacDonald’s website, I can see that there are only two primary ingredients in the bun that I need to discuss, the wheat flour and the sesame seeds sprinkled over the top bun. I’ve already covered the other major ingredients, sugar and oil (soybean or rapeseed). (And of course I am once again ignoring all the filthy food additives which are also part of the recipe. I’ve also decided not to go on a rant about the fact that MacDonald’s uses wheat flour fortified with iron and various B vitamins. I will limit myself to say that if they used whole grain flour, all these micro-nutrients would still be in the flour and there would be no need for the flour producers to add them back in).
Although there are a number of different wheats, it’s almost certain that MacDonald’s uses common wheat, Triticum aestivum, to make their buns; this variety makes up about 95% of wheat produced worldwide; the remaining 5% is durum wheat. The origin story of common wheat is similar to that of cane sugar: an initial domestication, in this case of emmer wheat, followed by a hybridisation with wild goat-grass. Emmer wheat was first domesticated in about 10,000 BCE, in what is now southern Turkey, while archaeological evidence from the same general area suggests that its hybridisation with wild goat-grass had already occurred by about 6500 BCE. Here is a photo of wild emmer wheat in its natural environment.
Which brings us to our final ingredient, the sesame seeds sprinkled on top of the bun. The plant on which the seeds grow, Sesamum indicum, originated – as its scientific name indicates – in India. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Indians had domesticated the plant by at least 3500 BCE. This photo shows another side of the plant, its rather lovely flower.
So, like I said at the beginning, not one of the ingredients in that uber-American fast food product the Big Mac originated in North America. Which in a way is strange; I read somewhere that approximately 60% of the food consumed worldwide originated from the Americas. I’m guessing that the massive consumption of maize around the world is primarily responsible for that, with potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes adding to it. But actually, given the history of North America’s colonisation, it is not so strange.
When we step back and look at where all the Big Mac’s ingredients originated, we can see that the great majority of them came from somewhere between the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Over the millennia, the domesticates moved west into Europe (as well into East Asia and Africa, but it’s the movement into Europe which interests us). My sense – perhaps completely unfounded – is that much of this movement came about peacefully, in many possible ways. A farmer got hold of seeds from their neighbour and tried them out, and then other farmers got seeds from that farmer, and so on, spreading seeds in a sort of ripple effect. Or maybe seeds moved with marriages, with women (probably) bringing seeds from their village. Or maybe people picked up new seeds as they travelled to foreign places for trade or other reasons. Maybe new foodstuffs were actually part of trades: “I give you this fine bronze dagger for seeds of that new foodstuff you have there”. Or maybe foodstuffs were gifts between rulers.
No doubt some movement of foodstuffs also came about through aggression. For instance, there could have been forced displacement of one group of people by another carrying their own seeds. This could have been the case when farming people, bringing their foodstuffs, cereals especially, migrated into Europe from Anatolia and replaced the original hunter-gathering people there – although I’ve also read that the hunter-gatherers simply got absorbed into the new farming societies; I’ve also recently read that perhaps there were few if any hunter-gatherers left to replace because they had been wiped out by bubonic plague – a bit like what happened in the Americas. Or maybe new foodstuffs were part of the booty of conquest. If you conquered a new land, you checked out its foodstuffs and brought back what you thought could be used by your people. I can imagine that the Ancient Egyptians’ wars against the Assyrians could have been one way new foodstuffs entered Egypt. And it is often suggested that Alexander the Great’s armies came back from the East with new foodstuffs in their baggage (I mentioned something similar in my recent post on Tabasco peppers, suggesting that American soldiers fighting in Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 could have brought seeds of the Tabasco pepper back to the US).
However it happened, by the time European colonists arrived in North America, all the foodstuffs in the Big Mac were part of their agricultural baggage. Quite naturally, they brought their foodstuffs with them as well as their culinary habits. Initially, when the colonists were few and the balance of forces more even between them and the Native Americans, they were happy to try Native American food – isn’t that what Thanksgiving celebrates? But as more and more colonists arrived, they pushed aside the Native Americans and created a “little Europe”, mostly eating the foods of their homelands. It was in this context that the Big Mac was born. Basically, it was a European dish created in the USA by Americans of European heritage.
It’s a pity, I think, that not more of the foodstuffs Native Americans were eating have stayed in the American diet. Apart from anything else, it could help make American food systems more resilient in the face of climate change, since the native foodstuffs belong to the American ecosystem while the imported foodstuffs do not. But it would require a lot of work. Many of the foods that Native Americans were eating were wild – there was little farming in North America when the Europeans started arriving, the Native Americans were primarily hunter-gatherers – so the whole process of domesticating them would have to be undertaken. With modern, scientific methods, maybe that could be done faster than in the past. But it would still require time, effort – and money. Who would spend the money? But still, if you take a spin through the internet, you find a lot of people trying to recover Native American foods and dishes. How about merging the old with the new? Could we redesign the Big Mac to make it only with North American ingredients, I wonder?
My wife and I recently completed our annual hike in the Dolomites. It was, as usual, a wonderful trip. I throw in a couple of photos to give readers a taste of what we saw.
My photoMy photoMy photoMy photo
But, wonderful though it was, the hike is not the subject of this post. The subject is a flower.
It was on our last day and we were heading down back into the valley. We had passed the tree line and were walking through woods when we came across this stand of lupins, the flowers glistening blue, pink, and white in the sun.
my photo
I have to tell readers that lupins are one of my favourite flowers, especially when they grow wild like this on the side of the road. Upon seeing them, I was immediately reminded of a similar stand of lupins we drove past one summer holiday when my wife and I (the children had already flown the coop) were driving around the north of Scotland. I don’t think I took a photo, and even if I did I have no idea where it is, so this photo from the internet will have to stand in for that Scottish vision of yesteryear.
It also reminded me of an incident from a long, long time ago when I was a boy – maybe 12 years old? – at boarding school. We were on our way back by bus from an away game of cricket when I spotted, close to the roadside and not far from the turn-off to the school, a lupin or two. I decided I would try to dig one of them up and put it in the little patch of land I had been assigned to grow things in (I remember carrots but also marigolds and sweet williams). But the lupins being off school property, I had to get permission from the headmaster. He looked at me doubtfully if not downright suspiciously, but he eventually gave me permission. Thinking about it, I don’t think I would have got permission today. It required me to cross and walk along a main road for 50-100 metres. I suppose school authorities were more lackadaisical then. They trusted us students more, parents were much less likely to sue, and there were considerably less cars on the roads sixty years ago. In any event, off I went, armed with a spade, up through the little wood where we did our scouting on Sundays, crossed the road and walked along it till I reached the patch of lupins, and got to work with my spade. It was a complete washout. I hadn’t reckoned with the stone-hard ground and the plant’s very long tap root. After sweating away ineffectually for 20 minutes, I gave up and went back to the school. I just hope I didn’t fatally wound the lupin which I had targeted. In memory of this incident, I throw in a photo of lupins on the verge of a road.
Of course, lupins have been used as ornamentals in formal gardens for a long, long time. Here is a modern example, lupins in the gardens of Chatsworth House in England.
Personally, I prefer them wild: “We were born / Born to be wild / We can climb so high / I never wanna die”, as Steppenwolf sang a year or so after my futile attempt to dig up that roadside lupin.
I may find lupins beautiful, but I’m not sure that this was an emotion which stirred early inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula who domesticated Lupinus graecus some time before 2000 BC, more or less at the time of the transition to the Bronze Age. Here is a photo of L. graecus in modern Greece.
I would imagine that these Balkan inhabitants, rather than saying “wow! that’s a lovely patch of flowers” would have said something like “hmm, can this plant feed me?”, “can it cure my ills?” or maybe even (given that I’m reading a book about fungi) “can it bend my mind and let me commune with the gods?” Food seems to have been the main reason lupins were domesticated: after the flowers come the beans – not as beautiful but certainly more useful, loaded as they are with plant-based protein.
Or at least potentially more useful, because the beans are actually difficult and possibly even dangerous to eat! Unlike other beans in the legume family, they contain alkaloids which make them bitter to the taste and even toxic. Somehow, though, our early ancestors figured out that if they soaked the beans and washed them well they became edible.
And so started a habit which continues to this day throughout the Mediterranean region, the eating of brined or pickled lupin beans.
Source
I discovered through a colleague of mine who works in Egypt that eating lupin beans is very popular there, especially during the very ancient Sham el-Nessim festival, which marks the beginning of spring. Here, we have Egyptians going out for the traditional picnic, in which lupin beans play a role along with many other foodstuffs.
But my colleague, who is from the south of Italy, told me that they also eat lupin beans in her part of the world, commonly as a snack to be served with a beer, rather than peanuts as might be the case elsewhere. And Peroni beer is the go-to beer.
And you will find lupin bean eaters from Spain to Portugal, from Morocco to Algeria, from Lebanon to Israel and Palestine. And of course in Greece, the original European source of this foodstuff.
I say “European” because it wasn’t only in Europe that people figured out a way of eating lupin beans. The European lupins have a lot of distant cousins in the Americas. They got separated from each other when plate tectonics broke up the ancient continent of Laurasia and the pieces that later became North America and Europe drifted away from each other. Later still, the North American lupins migrated into South America. Which allowed the inhabitants of the high Andes in what is today Peru to domesticate their local lupin some time in 600-700 BC.
Like the Europeans, they learned to eat the beans by washing them thoroughly. The habit of eating lupin beans spread to other parts of the Americas. For instance, there were tribes in Arizona which grew and ate the beans. Eating lupin beans in the Americas nearly died out – it seems the European colonisers and their descendants weren’t particularly interested in this particular crop – but there is now a bit of a comeback. We have here a photo from a project by the Inter-American Development Bank promoting the lupin.
I could witter on at length about the other ways we have made lupins useful to us: as a green manure (like all legumes, lupins have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air), as a source of feed for farm animals (but only after scientists were able to crack the problem of producing a form of lupin with alkaloid-free beans in the 1920s and ’30s). I could also trill on about how they might be even more useful to us in the future: as an alternative to soybean as a feed (this hopefully helping to reduce deforestation rates in the Amazon, where much of the world’s soybean is now grown), as a raw material for making vegan alternatives to meat, egg, and dairy products (lupin beans contain high levels of plant-based protein). But I won’t, because in the end what I love about lupins is their beauty and not their utility (I can now confess to never having eaten a single lupin bean in my life). So I invite any readers who are interested in knowing more about the utilitarian aspects of the lupin to read this post, and I finish with another photo of beautiful lupins, this time from Prince Edward Island in Canada.
Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt have noticed that in my last post I mentioned the Mexican State of Tabasco; I was saying in passing that we had visited the state’s capital Villahermosa.
Source: Google Maps
As I wrote that, a little voice in my head asked, “What’s the connection, I wonder, between the State of Tabasco and Tabasco sauce?” I am, of course, referring to the world-famous little bottle of red, and very spicy, sauce that one frequently comes across in restaurants, in people’s spice and condiment racks, in bars (to add to Bloody Marys), and who knows where else.
Source
I personally never, ever use the stuff. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I hate hot spices with a passion. But you’d have to be a hermit living on top of some remote mountain since the age of five to never have come across this cute little bottle at some point in your life.
In any event, a short answer to the little voice in my head is that Tabasco, the State, and Tabasco, the Sauce, are connected by tabasco, the chilli peppers, which are used in the sauce.
For those of my readers who are not majorly into chilli peppers, the tabasco pepper is a domesticated cultivar of the wild species Capsicum frutescens. It’s actually quite a pretty plant, with its strangely upright fruit (a characteristic of all C. Frutescens cultivars) going from pale yellow-green to yellow, to orange, and finally to bright red when the fruit is fully ripe. In fact, some people choose it as an ornamental plant.
In terms of heat, the tabasco pepper scores 30,000-50,000 on the so-called Scoville scale, which is a way of measuring scientifically the heat levels of chilli peppers. That’s mildly hot, in the same range as cayenne pepper. There are peppers with insanely higher scores on the Scoville scale: 1,000,000 and more. I simply don’t understand why people let such chilli peppers get anywhere near their mouths. But they do.
Just when the tabasco pepper was domesticated is unknown, although it was surely before the Europeans arrived in the Americas. Where it was domesticated is equally unknown, although one can guess that it was somewhere in the natural range of C. frutescens. As this map shows, that range is strongly focused on the region which is now the State of Tabasco, although it also extends quite a bit into the neighbouring State of Veracruz.
As I said, that was the short answer. But it doesn’t tell us how a chilli pepper domesticated in the general region of Tabasco ended up being put in a sauce created in the late 1860s in coastal Louisiana.
I have to tell my readers that the fame of Tabasco sauce is such that it has led to a bunch of armchair historians trying to figure out every aspect of the sauce’s life and times as well as to a multitude of people spinning yarns about the sauce to liven up their websites. I am merely reporting what I’ve read, although I have tried to sort the grain from the chaff.
There is a general consensus among the armchair historians that tabasco peppers had turned up in New Orleans by the late 1840s. I throw in a few prints of the city to set the scene.
How the peppers got there is unknown, and probably unknowable. But that hasn’t stopped various theories being propounded.
The fanciest of these is that the pepper’s arrival was linked somehow to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. I invite any readers who are curious about this rather obscure war to google it. For our purposes, all we need to know is that an American army disembarked in Veracruz to march on Mexico City, that in parallel there was a navy blockade of Mexico’s Gulf coast which resulted on two attacks by American marines on Villahermosa (at that time called San Juan Bautista), and that at the end of the war many of the American soldiers were shipped back home via the port of New Orleans. Just to get us in a military mood, I throw in photos of paintings from this war. The first shows an assault on the city of Veracruz, the second of the second assault on San Juan Bautista.
The thinking is that someone involved in those military actions – and there were a good number of volunteers from Louisiana who fought in the war – still took time out to sample the local cuisine and, appreciating this new chilli pepper, decided to bring some of its seeds back to Louisiana to grow on the family farm (we have to remember that most of the volunteers were rural folk).
Now, I don’t want to be a party pooper – I like the storyline of army veterans coming home with their pockets stuffed with tabasco pepper seeds, I really do – but I’m thinking that the explanation could just as well be something much more prosaic, like a Louisiana merchant who was doing business in Tabasco before the war thinking that the pepper would be popular back home and bringing back some seeds.
In any event, we know that the tabasco pepper was present in the coastal area of Louisiana by the late 1840s. We now fast forward 20 years to Avery Island, located some 200 km west of New Orleans in the heart of Cajun Country. It’s actually not really an island, just a piece of higher ground rising out of the surrounding bayous and marshes. Here we have a rather suggestive photo of Avery Island from the mid 1970s.
It was here that a certain Edmund McIlhenny created Tabasco sauce in 1867-68, a few years after the end of the American Civil War. McIlhenny originally hailed from Maryland but had moved to New Orleans in around 1840. He got into banking, made a small fortune, and started a bank of his own. He married into the Avery family, who owned the eponymous island and ran a sugar plantation there. Here, we have what he looked like in this period, a solid member of the New Orleans bourgeoisie.
Unfortunately for McIlhenny, the South’s economic collapse after its defeat in the American Civil War ruined him; having no more than the proverbial shirt on his back, he was forced to go and live with his in-laws on their island. There, with time on his hands, he started cultivating tabasco peppers and turning them into a fiery sauce, which he immediately started selling through grocers in New Orleans.
Quite what brought him, a banker by profession, to the idea of making a chilli pepper based sauce is not clear, at least not in the documentation available on the internet. But he did. For what it’s worth, my take is that in 1869, when McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce first came out on the market, there “was something in the air”, as the band Thunderclap Newman sang in my youth: somehow, either through the increasing presence on dining tables of similar home-made sauces, or because of chatter among the Right Sort of People, a demand for a spicy sauce had been created and McIlhenny saw a business opportunity – and he was unemployed, broke, and had a family to maintain.
It’s time to see how McIlhenny made his fiery sauce. But before even the processing, there was the picking. McIlhenny was most particular that only fully ripe, bright red peppers should be used to make his sauce.
Initially, all of the peppers McIlhenny used in his sauce making were grown on Avery Island. To ensure high levels of ripeness, McIlhenny gave his labourers a “little red stick” by which they could judge if a pepper was ready to pick or not. A cute idea. The McIlhenny Company says that while their peppers are now grown in many different parts of the world, they still insist on their peppers being picked by hand and still give their growers a little red stick to judge pepper ripeness.
Once picked, the ripe chilli peppers were crushed and the resulting “mash” mixed with salt (the salt was actually mined on the island, which sits atop a huge dome of rock salt). The mixture was then left to ferment for a month, using whatever containers were at hand – earthenware crocks and jars, recycled molasses barrels. At the end of the month, the fermented mixture was skimmed to remove the layer of mold that had formed on top. The skimmed mash was then mixed with white wine vinegar. The resulting mixture was aged for another month. Finally, any new mold that had formed was removed, the chilli skins and seeds were strained out through a fine sieve, and the sauce was bottled.
Interestingly enough, the little bottles which McIlhenny used were actually cologne bottles. As far as I can make out, because the sauce was so strong, he wanted a bottle from which the sauce could be sprinkled onto the food, not poured; cologne bottles were perfect for the task because the necks were so small. To make doubly sure that users only sprinkled the sauce, he also had a sprinkler system fitted onto the bottles. Finally, he designed a diamond-shaped label to put on his bottles. In 1869, he sent out 658 of his little bottles to grocers in and around New Orleans, under the name Tabasco brand pepper sauce.
We need not dwell long on the rest of the little bottle’s history. Through savvy marketing, the sauce spread throughout the US and then the world. The look of the product has hardly changed at all in the intervening years; here we have an early bottle next to a modern one.
As for the process to make the sauce, that has not changed materially. The one big difference is that the initial mash of peppers and salt is now aged for three years rather than the original month. It is still only made in the factory on Avery Island, which looks pleasingly retro.
That being said, I wonder how long production of the sauce will manage to stay on the island? Because of climate change, the storms crashing through southern Louisiana are getting more and more extreme. Already back in 2005, the island was hit so hard by Hurricane Rita that the company built a 5 m-high levee around the low side of the factory to protect it.
What is heartening is that the company is still a family-owned business, with the current CEO being a cousin of some sort of Edmund McIlhenny’s direct descendants. As I’ve bewailed in an earlier post, it’s a tragedy that once proud brands have simply become part of the large “portfolios” of multinational behemoths, to be traded between themselves like schoolboys trading marbles in the schoolyard.
What is less nice is that ever since the death of Edmund McIlhenny, the company, with the help of a bevy of lawyers, has aggressively gone after any other company which dared use the word “Tabasco” in the name of a sauce, even if was made with tabasco peppers. Somehow, with the agreement of the courts, they managed to turn a place-name, something which by definition is in the public sphere, into a Trademarked name! The wonders of commercial law … I wonder if this legal transmutation doesn’t explain why the company has also done a verbal transmutation and always writes Tabasco in capital letters, as in TABASCO®.
Normally, I would stop this post here, having replied in considerable detail to my original question. But I ask for readers’ indulgence to go back a little in this story, because one of the many things which my “research” (i.e., falling down rabbit holes on the internet) did was to throw a harsh light on the issue of slavery, a topic much in the news these days.
As I said earlier, the tabasco pepper had arrived in southern Louisiana by the late 1840s. However it arrived, once there it found an enthusiastic supporter in a certain Col. Maunsel White. White had come to the US from Ireland as a penniless teenager, but he had lived the American dream. Through hard work (and no doubt some luck), he first became a successful businessman and then entered Louisiana’s political establishment. By the time he posed for this painting he was a well-known personage in New Orleans’s upper crust.
And of course, this being antebellum Louisiana, no doubt as a mark of the fact that he had made it, White had bought himself several plantations as well as the slaves to go with them. He was a large slave owner; on one of his plantations alone, lying close to the Mississippi River downstream of New Orleans, he had nearly 200 slaves (to give readers an idea, less than 1% of white Southerners owned more than 100 slaves, so White was definitely a one-percenter).
In this same plantation, White grew sugar. We have here a Louisiana sugar plantation from that period.
When he discovered tabasco peppers, he put aside several acres to grow them. White actually seems to have made the first sauce from tabasco peppers, for use at his, and his friends’, table as a condiment. But from what I can make out, that was not his main objective at all. White seems to have primarily seen the peppers as a cheap way of keeping his slaves healthy. In 1849, a letter was printed in the New Orleans Daily Delta newspaper.
It purported to be from a visitor to White’s plantation, in which the letter writer said the following: “I must not omit to notice the Colonel’s pepper patch, which is two acres in extent, all planted with a new species of red pepper, which Colonel White has introduced into this country, called Tobasco [sic] red pepper. The Colonel attributes the admirable health of his [slave] hands to the free use of this pepper.” In the same newspaper, in 1850, the same or another letter writer reported, “Col. White has not had a single case of cholera among his large gang of negroes since the disease appeared in the south. He attributes this to the free use of this valuable agent.” In this, White was merely following a common belief of the time that the well-known cayenne chilli pepper was a convenient and inexpensive “medicine” that helped keep slaves fit for work. In fact, his enthusiasm for tabasco peppers may have had to do with the fact that he mistakenly believed them to be hotter than cayenne peppers (the letter writer of 1850 referred to “the celebrated tobasco red pepper, the very strongest of all peppers”) and therefore likely to work even better as a “medicine”.
And why the sauce? The letter writer of 1850 helpfully explains: “Owing to [the pepper’s] oleaginous character, Col. White found it impossible to preserve it by drying” (tabasco peppers are indeed the only variety of chilli pepper which is “juicy”, not dry, on the inside). The letter writer went on to say: “but by pouring strong vinegar on it after boiling, he has made a sauce or pepper decoction of it, which possesses in a most concentrated form all the qualities of the vegetable. A single drop of the sauce will flavor a whole plate of soup or other food. The use of a decoction like this, particularly in preparing the food for laboring persons, would be found exceedingly beneficial in a relaxing climate like this.” Again, the stress is on the pepper’s beneficial effects for “laboring persons”. I’m not sure if the word “relaxing” is being used more or less as it is used today, but I certainly read between the lines that not only did White believe that having his slaves eat tabasco peppers avoided them getting sick but the kick of the chilli also made them work harder.
It’s hard not to read these lines with great discomfort, but before casting stones at White and his kind I for one am minded to remember the Biblical injunction: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” I don’t know if any of my readers have read the articles which have been appearing recently in the British press, telling of well-to-do families which have been shocked to discover that their current financial security was greatly enhanced if not originally created by their forefathers building their fortunes on the backs of slaves. Do I have any slave owners in my family tree, I wonder?
Taking a strictly patriarchal view and looking only at the male line of descent, I think not. Those ancestors of mine were part of the rural poor in Derbyshire when British fortunes were being made in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. But what if I were to look more broadly, taking all the lines of descent to lil ol’ me?
Would I find a slave owner or two lurking somewhere back there? I have a memory of my father saying that there was some connection to slavery in the family – not on the British side, actually, but on the French side. I have made a mental note to ask my brother, who is the historian in the family, what he knows. But even if I were to find that some part of my DNA comes from slave owners, what would I do?
I’m normally quite good at writing posts about the wonderful experiences which my wife and I have enjoyed as we pass through this Autumn of our lives. Sometimes, though, they escape me. We get carried along by the River of Life as it rolls remorselessly on and soon something else has happened which becomes the topic of my next post. That experience disappears from the rear-view mirror and is gone for ever.
This post is about one such experience, which I am determined will not wriggle free of my electronic pen, because it was simply too wonderful not to document. It’s been eight years since it occurred but it has never quite disappeared from my mind’s eye. Every time the memories resurface, I castigate myself for my laziness and vow to write That Post. I am finally making good on that vow.
As I said, I have to take my readers back eight years, when we went to spend the Christmas break in Mexico with our son and daughter – he was working there, and she flew down from New York where she was working. As a last trip before we went back to Bangkok, where I was stationed at the time, the two of us along with our son (our daughter had had to go back) flew down to the state of Chiapas, which borders with Guatemala. We had arranged for a car and driver to pick us up in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, from which we were to take a one-week tour. The itinerary was put together by an agency, with limited input from our side; we were happy to go along with their recommendations. And so we found ourselves going to the Sumidero Canyon, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, a couple of Mayan ruins in the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules down by the Guatemalan border, and finishing off in Villahermosa in the neighbouring state of Tabasco (I had to check our photos floating around in the i-cloud to remember where we’d been).
Ever since my wife and I, together with my mother-in-law, had toured central and southern Mexico back in the early 1980s, I have had an enduring fascination for the ruins of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilisations. On that earlier trip, we had visited Palenque, so I looked forward to revisiting the site. Alas, the intervening years have not been kind. The site was in good shape, I hasten to say; that wasn’t the problem. Actually, the site was in too good a shape, very much tamed, with the surrounding semi-tropical vegetation cut back and kept under control, a far cry from my memory of Palenque as a place where the ruins poked out of the jungle. And it was terribly crowded! The curse of having been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I’m sure. So I’m afraid to say I felt slightly deflated after the visit.
The next day, the driver announced that we would be visiting two other Mayan sites today. They were quite remote, requiring us to drive a good long way down to the Guatemalan border. It all sounded very intriguing, but after Palenque I, for one, was game for a little adventure. So off we went, down this rather minor road, with our driver doing some alarming overtaking along the way. After a while, we reached the first site, Bonampak, which lay just off the road.
Its main claim to fame are its murals, which are indeed quite remarkable. I thought of inserting here some of our photos of these murals which are adrift in my i-cloud, but I find that other photos available on the internet are much better, so as is my habit I have instead shamelessly lifted these two photos, showing some of the murals.
On we drove, until finally we reached a river (I later learned that Guatemala started on the other side). Our driver parked the car and we got out. Where was the site, we asked, looking around. Oh no, he said, you could only get to the site by boat. We would be taking one of the boats (rather frail-looking, I found) pulled up on the bank, and it would take us about 40 minutes to get there.
out photo
And with that, he handed us over to the skipper of one of the boats and brightly informed us that he’d be waiting for us. Right, we said, and took our seats somewhat gingerly in the boat. As the skipper roared off upstream, I was feeling quite like Indiana Jones setting off into the jungle to discover a long-lost temple stuffed with gold.
A sudden squall of rain dampened the thrill, especially as our trousers and shoes began to get seriously wet. But the rain left mist trailing romantically through the increasingly thick jungle on the Mexican side of the river.
Finally, our skipper pulled up to a jetty and motioned us to take a path which disappeared off into the jungle. And so we climbed up through thick vegetation until we finally entered some moss-covered ruins jutting out of the jungle.
Our photo
The path led us to a dark, creepy corridor, which we felt our way along
Our photo
until we finally exited back into the light.
Our photo
We walked into a clearing, where we could see other ruins peaking out of the surrounding jungle.
Our photo
We had entered the ancient Mayan city of Yaxchilán.
I find any ancient ruin fascinating – the pull of a place once the centre of a vibrant life but now just a tumbled pile of mouldering stones. Others before me have captured this melancholy fascination of ruins in words much better than mine. Sultan Mehmet II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, is said to have murmured a distich by the Persian poet Ferdowsi as he surveyed the ruins of what had been the Sacred Palace of the emperors of Byzantium:
The Spider has wove her web in the imperial palace,
The Owl has sung her watch song upon the towers of Samarkand.
While an anonymous Anglo-Saxon penned these lines about Roman ruins he encountered somewhere in Britain:
Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,
Walls gape, torn up, destroyed, consumed by age.
A hundred generations have passed.
Earth-grip holds the proud builders, departed, long lost,
In the hard grasp of the grave. How often has this wall,
Hoary with lichen, red-stained, outlasted the passing reigns,
Withstanding the storms; the high arch now has fallen …
(At this point, there is a gap, for the parchment on which the poem was written has itself suffered badly from the passage of time).
But there is something very special about ruins like Yaxchilàn immersed in jungle. It has to do, I think, with Nature much more obviously reclaiming what is hers, a powerful reminder of the warning uttered endlessly by the catholic priests of my boyhood on Ash Wednesday as they crossed your forehead with ash, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” That sense of Nature slowly growing back and smothering men’s foolish dreams in stone is overpowering in Angkor Wat, of which this one photo, endlessly reproduced, is a potent example.
And beyond which rolled away to the horizon the thick jungle of the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules.
As we walked around we came across carved stone steles showing the proud rulers of this once thriving city state.
Our photoOur photoOur photoOur photo
Looking at them, it was hard not to murmur Shelley’s Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
And so we travellers walked back down to the river, got into our boat, and skimmed along the river to our waiting driver.
the heart thrills 
