the heart thrills

MY FAVOURITE AQUARELLE

Milan, 5 June 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

which can be loosely translated as:

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

Then we have an itinerant shoe-shiner.

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

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

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

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

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

LA MARINIÈRE

Milan, 14 May 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a self-portrait from 1943.

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

WESTMINSTER ABBEY’S COSMATESQUE PAVEMENT

Vienna, 8 April 2023

I don’t understand it, my wife and I have not yet received our invitation to attend King Charles III’s coronation in Westminster Abbey! It’s taking place very soon, on 6 May!

This is a huge problem, because I won’t get a chance to surreptitiously inspect the Cosmatesque pavement laid in front of the Abbey’s High Altar while the assembled Archbishops drone their way through the coronation liturgy.

The fact is, the pavement is covered up almost all the time, to protect it. It’s only during a coronation or other exceptional events that it is uncovered. In fact, the last time it was uncovered was when William and Kate were married in the Abbey back in 2011 (another event to which my wife and I were not invited; have they mislaid our address, I wonder?)

Why my anxiety to inspect the pavement? Well, the Abbey’s Cosmatesque pavement is quite remarkable, simply because it really shouldn’t be there. One finds this style of pavement primarily in and around Rome, where it was developed from the end of the 11th Century to the 13th Century by a number of families of artisans, the most well-known of which were the Cosmati, who have given their name to the style. As a rule, Cosmatesque pavements have white or light-coloured marbles for background, into which have been inlaid triangles, squares, parallelograms, and circles of darker stones. These are surrounded by ribbons of mosaic composed of coloured and gold-glass tesseræ. The result are lovely geometrical designs of swirling colours over the floor. Here are some of the best examples that have come down to us.

Basilica di San Clemente:

Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin

Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme

Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura

Basilica di San Saba

The artisans laying down these pavements recycled much of the stones they used from the copious ancient Roman ruins that still littered Rome and its environs; the circles in particular were sliced off columns that couldn’t be used as columns any more. The artisans would dig through old ruins, looking for marble to salvage (with one of their side businesses being selling off the statues which they came across during their digs). This painting by Canaletto is from many centuries later, and it just shows people visiting the ruins in Rome rather than digging into them, but it gives a nice impression of what it must have been like to live with all those ruins around one.

The sources I’ve read talk airily about examples of Cosmatesque work also existing north of the Alps, although the only example they ever cite is Westminster Abbey. I haven’t been able to find a single other example of Cosmatesque pavement outside of the Roman heartlands, not even in the north of Italy (if any readers know of examples outside Italy, please let me know). So the presence of a Cosmatesque pavement in Westminster Abbey is indeed pretty remarkable. How come there is this one isolated example north of the Alps?

The answer to that question lies in the history of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey has always had a special relationship with the English (and later, British) crown, ever since King Edward the Confessor in the 1040s established his royal palace by the banks of the river Thames west of the city of London and decided to re-endow and greatly enlarge a small Benedictine monastery already located there. This included building the first cathedral, the “west minster” (as opposed to the “east minster”, St. Paul’s cathedral, in the city of London). Here, we have a scene from the Bayeux tapestry, showing the funeral procession of Edward the Confessor, bringing him to his cathedral where he was buried.

Thereafter, the English kings patronised the abbey and its cathedral, with all the coronations of English (and then British) monarchs from 1066 onwards (bar two) taking place in the cathedral.

Presumably as a reflection of its special royal status, in the period we’re interested in, namely the second half of the 13th Century, the Abbot reported directly to the papacy and not to any local bishop as would normally have been the case. This meant that it was the Pope who approved the choice of abbot made by Westminster’s monks. Which explains why, in 1258, a certain Richard de Ware, whom the monks of Westminster had chosen as their new abbot, travelled down to Rome to obtain the necessary papal approval. It just so happened that the pope and his court were residing in the town of Agnani, some 60 km south-east of Rome, when Richard arrived (for a while, it was a popular place for Popes to spend their summers). So Richard made his way there. He of course visited the cathedral in Agnani, where he was captivated by its Cosmatesque pavement. I deliberately left this pavement out from the examples I gave above so that I could show it here in all its splendour and imagine Richard de Ware’s feelings when he set eyes on it. The first photo shows the pavement in the main church, the second the pavement in the crypt.

It seems that Richard lusted after this pavement: “I must have it in my abbey church!”, I can hear him cry (in Latin) to the assistants who travelled with him (ever since the beginning of time, Important People have had what the Italians call portaborse, or bag carriers, to accompany them wherever they go).

Richard was probably encouraged to have these lustful thoughts because Westminster Abbey was in the middle of a total makeover. In 1245, England’s king, Henry III, had launched a rebuilding programme of the cathedral, adopting the-then ultramodern Gothic style. I presume that when Richard got back from Agnani, he persuaded Henry that a Cosmatesque pavement in front of the high altar was de rigeur if the cathedral was to be fully at the architectural cutting edge. But it took another ten years for the pavement to be laid. Work on the cathedral’s makeover proceeded fitfully; Henry was always chronically short of funds, and he was constantly at war with his Barons (at one point, he was even their prisoner). But finally, in 1268, after Richard got a team of artisans headed by a certain Odoricus to come from Rome to do the work, the pavement in front of the high altar was finished.

If I’ve repeated the photo of Westminster Abbey’s pavement, it’s to allow readers to compare it better to the pavement in the cathedral of Agnani and the other Roman and Lazian examples which I gave earlier. One fundamental difference jumps out: in Westminster, the background stone – the stone in which the rest of the stones are inlaid – is dark while in the Roman and Lazian examples it is white. I have to say, personally I feel that the Abbey’s pavement suffers from this change in background colour. A white background allows the geometric patterns and swirls to stand out much more effectively. The only reason I’ve found in my readings for this change of colour is that the white Carrara marble used in Italy suffers in damp climates – and heaven knows the UK is damp! But maybe English tastes were anyway for dark stone. Certainly the stone used – Purbeck marble, which comes from a quarry near Bournemouth in Dorset – was popular in English church architecture; it’s to be found in virtually all of the cathedrals in the south of England. Here, we have quarriers of Purbeck marble from 150 or so years ago.

Considering now the design of the pavement, I can assure readers that there is a meaning to the way it was laid out. Cutting through all the symbolic froth, it evokes a sacred centre of the world, what the Ancient Greeks called the omphalion, the navel of the world, which in turn is at the centre of the universe. And it is on that omphalion in the centre of Westminster Abbey’s pavement that the clergy will place coronation chair on which Charles will sit to be crowned, as they have for all the English and British monarchs (bar two, as I said earlier) who have come before him. I show here a photo of the previous coronation, of Queen Elizabeth II – as readers will note, the pavement was covered up that time.

There’s more heavy symbolism to the pavement’s design, alluded to by the Latin inscription which ran around it but of which very little is left today. Luckily, several hundred years ago, someone transcribed it while it was still legible. It said (translated from the original Latin):

In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the city [of London, presumably], Odoricus [the head of the crew which laid the pavement] and the abbot [Richard de Ware] put these porphyry stones together. If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge [lives for] three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.

According to scholars who have spent many hours parsing this gobbledygook, it shows that the pavement was meant to symbolise not only the world and the universe, but also to predict the number of years to its end. Very reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”!

The stones set into the dark Purbeck marble tell us another story, a story of trade, one of the many which I have recounted in these posts. Looking at the Westminster pavement, we can trace a story of a trade in stones across the Roman Empire, the breakdown of that trade as the Roman Empire collapsed, and – as Europe developed economically – its replacement by a European trade in stones. To appreciate these trade flows, readers have to know that the pavement we see today in the Abbey is not exactly the original. Three limited restorations have been carried out over the ages – one in the mid-17th Century, one at the turn of the 18th Century, and a final one in the mid-19th Century – where some of the original stones, worn or lost, were replaced by other stones.

In the original parts of the pavement, purple and green porphyry are the most abundant inlaid stones. Purple porphyry was the “imperial” stone in the Roman and Byzantine Empires (purple being the imperial colour), and it could only be used in connection with the Emperors and their closest family.

That’s why, for instance, the sculpture of the four Tetrarchs (who between them reigned over the Roman Empire in the late 290s, early 300s AD), which today is set into the corner of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, is made with porphyry.

This stone is found in only one set of quarries, located in Egypt’s harsh Eastern Desert. The Romans, and the Byzantines after them, mined it there and transported it all over the Empire. This is a photo of the mountain that the Romans called Mons Porphyris, with remains of the Roman mining town in the foreground.

When the Byzantines lost control of Egypt to the Arabs in the 7th Century, they lost access to porphyry. Thereafter, they were forced to recycle the porphyry already scattered around the Empire.

The green porphyry, on the other hand, originally came from quarries in the Greek Peloponnese.

The quarries were located near the small town of Krokees, not too far from Sparta.

This stone too was traded all over the Empire, a trade that sputtered to a halt after the 5th Century AD as the Empire began to fall apart. The location of the quarries was forgotten and they were only recently rediscovered.

Surprisingly, given the highly symbolic nature of the pavement, porphyry was not used in the central roundel, where the monarchs are crowned. Instead, an alabaster stone was used.

The precise provenance of this alabaster (also used in several other places in the pavement) is not known, but in all probability it was mined somewhere in what is now Turkey but what was in Roman times called Asia Minor.

Odoricus and his crew used a few other stones in minor quantities: africano, a red and black marble breccia, which was also quarried in Asia Minor near what is today Izmir; breccia corallina, a breccia of white marble in a coral-pink matrix, also quarried in Asia Minor, but in what used to be the ancient kingdom of Bythinia; and gabbro, another stone that was quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.

By the time the Westminster pavement was laid down, the trade in these stones had been dead for some 800 years. So contemporary trade was not their source. Just as the stones in the Cosmatesque pavements in Rome were extracted from the Roman ruins scattered around the city, they could have come as spolia from England’s sparse Roman ruins. But Richard de Ware left us a message which suggests that Rome was the source. His grave (which lies on the north side of the pavement) once carried an inscription, which read (in Latin): “Abbot Richard de Ware, who rests here, now bears those stones which he himself bore hither from the City”, in this case the Eternal City, Rome. I can’t believe that Richard’s entourage personally carried the stones back from Rome, like bags of swag slung over their shoulders. I take the inscription to mean that when he got Odoricus and his crew to come from Rome, they brought with them the necessary stones, excavated from the Roman ruins in and around the city.

Interestingly enough, one stone which is common in Rome’s Cosmatesque pavements, but which for some reason Odoricus brought very little of, is giallo antico, a yellow limestone. Here is a nice example of a Cosmatesque use of this stone, in a roundel in the church of San Benedetto in Piscinula.

It was used extensively by the Romans and was mined by them in quarries near Carthage in what is now Tunisia.

The few pieces of this stone in the Westminster pavement have been supplemented by an English stone, Tadcaster limestone from North Yorkshire.

Fast-forward 3½-4 Centuries, to when repairs needed to be carried out to the pavement, and the picture had changed. Stones were being traded once again across Europe. And so, to fill in pieces of missing purple porphyry, ammonitico rosso from the Alps near Verona was used, as was rouge royale, a red limestone from the area around Dinant in Belgium. Any missing green porphyry was substituted either by verde genova, which comes from the mountains lying between Piedmont and Liguria, or verde di Prato, which is mined on the Tuscan side of the Appenines. Where dark-coloured stones needed replacing, a couple of black/grey-black limestones from Belgium were used.

So many interesting things to ponder on! Medieval symbolism, international trade through the ages, political ties between England and Rome in the Middle Ages, and who knows what else! But I can’t do any of this pondering if my wife and I don’t get invited to Charles’s coronation! What can I do to unhook an invite? What favours owed to me can I call in? Let me check my list of contacts for Important Persons whom I can importune to help me get invites. Two measly invites is all I’m looking for!

STOP THE PRESSES! I have just learned that for a limited period just after the coronation, tours are being offered of Westminster Abbey which will include visiting the pavement (shoeless, of course). Unfortunately, all the tickets are already sold out. Who can I buy tickets from, no doubt at highly inflated prices?

MY FATHER AND POETRY

Milan, 26 March 2023

A few days ago, I realised with a start that it was my father’s birthday. He would have been 106 years old had he made it this far – a venerable age indeed. But he shuffled off this mortal coil some twenty years ago already, and hopefully is singing with the choirs invisible (although he was terribly tone deaf; hearing him sing was a sufferance).

I am now at an age when I can reflect on my father more as an equal than as a Father Figure. We were never really that close: a generational thing, I think – he was a child of the severe, repressed, melancholic post-War 1930s, I was a child of the optimistic 1960s. But the gap between us was intensified by our different characters – he was a brooder, I never brood. I don’t suppose it helped that I hardly grew up with him. From the ages of 8 to 18 I spent three-quarters of the year away from the family. Most of that was in boarding school, but one school holiday a year was also spent with relations; for all of my life my father worked outside the UK.

But in one thing, I recognise a deep similarity; he was, and I am, a romantic. In my case, I feel it is of a piece with my cheerful character. But in his case, it was quite surprising. Normally, he was a measured man, carefully balancing all things, and pronouncing well argued verdicts; not surprisingly, he had spent much of the first half his working life as a judge and spent the second half ensconced in a law school as a professor. But when it came to poetry, my father’s romantic side emerged into the light and he was floridly, lushly, ridiculously romantic. It seems to me that his 106th birthday is a good excuse to pay tribute to his poetic inclinations (very different from mine, I have to say), through flashbacks of moments when he bared his romantic soul to me through poetry.

Omar Kahyam’s Rubaiyat, or rather Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of it, was a favourite of his. I still have memories, fond ones now, pleasantly blurred by the passage of time, of my father declaiming quatrains from Edward Fitzgerald’s – very loose – translation of the Rubaiyat. This was one of his favourite quotes – I still see him in my mind’s eye declaiming it at lunch one day.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

He once asked me what I thought of Fitzgerald’s poetry. In the callowness of my youth, I found it precious and somewhat ridiculous, but I smiled diplomatically and I think – at least, I hope – I managed not to sound too, too negative (although I have to say that even with the wisdom of old age I find Fitzgerald’s poetry too precious for my tastes). After his death, when my mother invited me to go through his books and take those I wanted, I took his copy of the Rubaiyat. It still graces my shelves.

Once my father retired, he gave freer rein to his poetic inclinations. On one of my infrequent trips to visit my parents, he confessed to me an adoration of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso. He declared that when he read Dante – in the original, old Italian; he was a gifted linguist – the verse would grip him in his vitals. I was rather startled by this turn of phrase from such a measured man. One of my sisters bought him a large, expensive, limited edition, book of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, complete with pictures. But that I didn’t take. In the first place, it weighed a ton. But in addition I was also mindful of what my father said to my mother-in-law when my parents came down to Milan to meet her for the first time. She had proudly shown him one of her treasured possessions, an exact replica of the Bible of Borso d’Este. It’s a beautiful book, enlivened throughout with lovely miniatures.

But my father told her that he was interested in reading books rather than admiring them. The poor woman was quite deflated.

I join him in loving Dante – although in my case, in modern Italian “translation” – but our differing characters brought us to diverge on which parts we liked most. Thoroughly romantic as he was, it was the parts where Dante dwells on his impossible love for Beatrice in Paradise which he delighted in most.

I, instead, found Dante’s Paradise really boring. But his Hell was wonderful, full of fantastic and fun characters.

There was also a time when the opening lines of Inferno resonated with me:

When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.

Have we not all asked ourselves at some point in the later years of our lives if we have strayed from the path we should have taken? What if I had taken that other job, gone to that other university? … What if … what if …?

Another set of books – notebooks, actually – that I took after my father’s death was the diary he wrote from the ages of 16 to 22. This is the first volume.

The diaries start abruptly at the beginning of 1934 – perhaps the result of a New Year’s resolution – and finish equally abruptly in 1939, a piece of blotting paper still sitting between the pages waiting to dry the next entry. Reading them was wonderful. Suddenly, the older man with such gravitas that I had known became a young lad doing silly things with his friends. It is really quite endearing. In the later diaries, when he’s at University, he tells of how he meets my mother, the French friend of his sister’s who is in the UK to brush up her English. Knowing how the story ends (and personally very thankful that it ends that way, allowing me as it does to be born!), it’s a treat to read “hot off the press” how their relationship unfolded. The first thing my father did was to take my mother up to his rooms for tea and cake (I was quite surprised he was allowed to do this, perhaps he smuggled her in) and they read poetry out loud. He chose to read “The Isles of Greece” by Byron.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse:
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest’.

The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

It goes on a good deal longer but I think my readers get the picture. Definitely not a poem I would have chosen, but my father was overwhelmed with emotion, confiding to his diary that “there were tears in my eyes most of the time and I was quivering all over when I had finished.”

My father writes that my mother read a French poem, although he doesn’t report which one she chose. I’m sure it was in a romantic vein; my mother also had a wide romantic streak running through her soul.

My father’s diaries show that the Young Him imagined himself as quite the man about town. Even while building the relationship with my mother, he continued flirting outrageously with other women. In some cases, he was even moved to turn his hand to writing poems about them. As I went through his papers after his death, I came across a cache of these poems, typed up; my father was an intensive user of the typewriter, the rapid click of its keys being a constant soundtrack to my youth. In truth, the poems are not very good, but I treasure them. And at least he tried to write poetry. I have never dared, except for one light-hearted “poem” (rhyming doggerel, really) which I wrote many years ago in response to a poem my son had written at primary school – both poems hang on the wall, side by side, in our apartment.

In his fifties, my father turned back to an earlier love, that of Latin poetry; he had studied Latin and Greek at school and did Classics at University, and he had never lost his deep admiration of the Classics (an admiration he tried to instil in me with embarrassing results; I barely scraped a pass in Latin and Greek at O-levels and then escaped from these hated subjects forever). He was particularly fond of the love poems of Catullus and dedicated his spare moments in his later years to translating them. I remember him trying out one of his translations on me. I think it was of this poem, which is one of Catullus’s better known love poems (I give it in translation, although not translated by my father).

Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.

I remember that his version had the line “Kiss me, Kate” in it somewhere. I suppose he was trying to modernise the poem, Lesbia not being a name one hears nowadays. Why Kate? Maybe it gave him a rhyme, maybe he found the double K pleasing. In any event, I smiled and murmured something noncommittal before escaping. Quite recently, I laughed out loud when on a family WhatsApp group my younger sister confessed to doing the same when my father buttonholed her to try out one of his translations on her. Where did those translations go, I wonder? I found no trace of them among his papers. Perhaps he despaired and threw them away.

I wanted to finish this post with a poem written by a son to his father, but the only one I could find which was half-way satisfying was the poem by Dylan Thomas where he is talking to his dying father. It starts:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Alas, the poem is too late for my father, the dying of the light happened twenty years ago for him. And anyway I’m not sure he would have burned and raved at the close of his day. He believed in God and an afterlife (another difference between him and me) and I’m sure he saw Death as merely a doorway to be passed through to another life.

So let me finish instead with a poem which I dedicate to my wife – my Lesbia, my Kate, my Beatrice. It is a sonnet written by Shakespeare, and it speaks of the love one has in the late autumn of our lives. More satisfying, I think, than the lush romance my father delighted in.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

TABASCO

Milan, 10 March 2023

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.

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.

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.

And here we have an even more suggestive photo of a bayou.

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 I said earlier, the peppers are now grown elsewhere. However, peppers are still grown on the island to produce seed stock.

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?

A discussion for another day.

THE ONE THAT NEARLY GOT AWAY

Vienna, 20 February 2023

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.

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.

The path led us to a dark, creepy corridor, which we felt our way along

until we finally exited back into the light.

We walked into a clearing, where we could see other ruins peaking out of the surrounding jungle.

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.

But it was also there in Yaxchilàn, all the more so since the overcast weather gave the site a brooding feel.

And so, with the site more or less to ourselves, we wandered from ruin to ruin.

Finally, we climbed a long flight of stairs that disappeared up into the surrounding vegetation.

At the top of which there was this structure.

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.

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.

SERENDIPITY

Milan, 20 January 2023

I love serendipity, those moments in life when, quite by chance, something wonderful happens to you. Such a moment occurred a month or so ago now, when my wife and I, free for the day from our babysitting duties, headed off to LA’s Chinatown, to have our hair cut and to nose around a little. Pleasant as this all was, it was not where the serendipitous moment occurred. It was later, when we decided to walk from Chinatown to Bunker Hill, hoping to catch an exhibition at the Broad Museum or the Museum of Contemporary Art, which both sit on that hill. There was indeed a wonderful exhibition at MOCA, but fascinating as it was, it was also not there that the serendipitous moment occurred. It happened on the way; by sheer chance, I chose a route which took us past LA’s Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

I cannot stress strongly enough, one should never go past a church without visiting it. For two thousand years, churches have been the repositories of some of the best art our cultures have produced (as indeed have temples and other sites of worship the world over), so there are very good chances that there will be something interesting to see in every church. The Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels was a brilliant example of the truth of my injunction, “Enter that church! Do not walk past it!”

The cathedral itself, opened in 2002, is certainly an interesting example of postmodern design by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo (who also designed the fantastic museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, which my wife and I visited some 15 years ago; but that is another story). These two photos give an idea of what the cathedral looks like inside and out.

As I said, interesting. But the real jewel – that serendipitous moment – were the tapestries that lined the two walls of the nave. They were magnificent. They were designed by the Californian artist John Nava and woven in Belgium, a country with a centuries-old tradition in the making of tapestries.

This photo shows their general layout.

Readers with good eyes will be able to see that the tapestries depict a procession of people – women, men, children – moving towards the cross above the high altar. Closer inspection shows that most of these people are saints (or in certain cases blesseds). These photos show some of the panels (there are 26 of them in all).
Some of the tapestries on the southern wall:

Sone of the tapestries on the northern wall:

With the more modern saints, Nava used photos or contemporary paintings to create their likeness, otherwise he used family members, acquaintances, and models. He wanted his saints to look like real people, where we the viewers could say “hey, that looks awfully like so-and-so”.

The tapestries show quite a mix of saints and blesseds, from all over the world (although Europe does predominate) and across all ages. A good number I’m familiar with. My mother, may she rest in peace, used to ply me with comic books (graphic novels might be a more respectable term, given the subject matter) of the lives of various saints, to give me good examples to live up to. So, for instance, I’m familiar with Jean Vianney, the Curé d’Ars (the saint on the far right in this photo).

Source
Then there’s Saint Francis, a saint I am particularly fond of as I’ve written about in an earlier post (again, the saint on the far right of this photo).

Then there’s San Carlo Borromeo; you cannot live in Milan for any length of time without coming across him multiple times (he’s the second from the left in the photo below).

I’ve mentioned San Carlo a few times in my posts, and I think Nava has made his nose too small – all the paintings of the saint I’ve ever seen show that he had a monstrous conk.

Some are saints who were alive during my lifetime and with whom I have a certain familiarity – Mother Theresa and Pope John XXIII, for instance.

I like the fact that Nava has mixed in a number of anonymous people with his saints and blesseds – mostly children, as we see in the first of these close-up photos – to remind us that we can all be saints (although, as history has sadly taught us, we can all be devils too; but we’ll draw a veil over that today).

Readers will see that while the faces which Nava created are intact, the clothes of many show gaps and scars, reminiscent of old frescoes which have been partly destroyed; a nice touch, I found.

Stumbling across these tapestries was wonderful enough. But what was even more delightful was that this modern procession of saints immediately brought to my mind another such procession, in a church nearly 10,000 km away and erected some 1,500 years before the cathedral of our Lady of the Angels: Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, a church which has been the subject of several of my earlier posts.

Ravenna is one of my most favorite places in the world, filled as it is with early Christian churches whose interiors house mosaics. Any long-term readers of my blog will know that early Christian mosaics hold a special place in my heart. I still remember that morning in early July of 1975 when I walked into Sant’Apollinare Nuovo for the first time: another serendipitous moment. Callow youth that I was, I had put Ravenna on my itinerary because the Michelin Green Guide, which I was religiously following, assigned the town its maximum of three stars. I had no idea what to expect, and I was overcome by what I found before me. The walls of Sant’Apollinare glitter with wonderful mosaics showing a line of virgins and martyrs processing solemnly towards the high altar. In a sign of how things have changed in the intervening 1,500 years, whereas in the tapestries all the saints are mixed companionably together, in Ravenna they are rigorously segregated by gender, with the virgins processing down one wall and the martyrs (all male) processing down the other (they are also all white, showing the much more local reach of the Christian church then than now).

Here we have the procession of the virgins.

And here, a little less clearly, we have the procession of the martyrs.

I throw in a couple of close-ups to give readers a better sense of what the mosaics are like. Here, are some of the virgins, with names that we would recognize today – Christina, Caterina, Paulina.

And here are some of the martyrs, with names like Clement and Laurence but also others which are far less familiar to us today – Sistus, Hypolitus, Cornelius.

The other mosaics I discovered that day – in the churches of Sant’Apollinare in Classe and of San Vitale, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, in the Baptistery of Neon and the Arian Baptistery – were just as magnificent and are forever etched in my mind.

Ah, the thrill of serendipity! Remember, readers: never pass a church (or a mosque, or a synagogue, or a temple, or a gurdwara) without going in! (if they allow you, that is) Chances are you’ll see something interesting, and sometimes you’ll find something wonderful.

LIMONCELLO

Los Angeles, 24 December 2022

One of the duties which my wife and I have as grandparents is to walk our newborn grandchild around, mostly to put him asleep but also just to keep him occupied while his mother gets herself ready to feed him. When it’s my turn, I like to take him into the back garden to admire the plants there – well, I fondly imagine that he’s looking at the plants, although in my more sober moments I recognize that he hardly distinguishes colours and shapes yet.

One of the plants in the back garden is a lemon tree – more of a lemon bush, actually, but still covered in lemons.

We pick the lemons off the bush and use them in the typical way, on fish, in sauces, in tea. But we have difficulty keeping up with the bush’s production and I’ve been thinking on and off about what other – easy – uses my daughter could put the lemons to (in principle, they could be used to make lemon tarts and what have you, but that requires far too much work). It just so happens that we’ve returned from a lightning visit to a couple who live in Seattle, old friends from the distant, distant past. As we chatted about this and that, they happened to mention that they would soon be getting a couple of bottles of home-made limoncello from a friend. A light went on in my head.

Could my daughter and her partner be making limoncello with their lemons?

For those of my readers who are not familiar with limoncello, it is a lemon-based liqueur whose origins lie somewhere in the south of Italy. Here’s some shelves with a number of different limoncello brands on them.

On the face of it, it’s quite easy to make. Drop lemon zest into pretty much pure alcohol. Let the zest steep for several weeks to make sure that the alcohol extracts all the essential oils and aromatics in the zest, by which point the alcohol will have taken on the product’s characteristic yellow hue which you see in the photo above. Add syrup, that is to say, water with a lot of sugar dissolved in it. Let the mixture stand for another couple of weeks. Strain out the zest. Bottle. Voilà! Or actually, since we are talking about an Italian product, Ecco!

Of course, it’s not really ecco!; the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Let’s start with the lemons. Since their whole purpose is to imbue the alcohol with essential oils, the sources insist on using types of lemons whose zest is packed with these oils. That’s one thing I learned in researching for this post, that there are many types of lemons. In my ignorance, I had assumed that a lemon is a lemon is a lemon. Eh no, amici miei! There are actually many types of lemons, 30 to 40 depending on the source you read. And – vital for our story – some have more essential oils in their zest than others.

Now, I have no idea what type of lemons are growing in my daughter’s garden. I just have to hope that they contain sufficient amounts of essential oils for a passable limoncello to be made from them. But if my readers are are interested and have a choice, a good lemon to use is the limone di Sorrento which, as the name suggests, originally came from the Sorrentine peninsula and now grows all around the bay of Naples (and has been exported around the world, so it is almost certainly available somewhere in California).

Somehow, the locals living on the Amalfi coast managed to get the lemon certified as having Protected Geographical Indication under the name of sfusato amalfitano; they must have enjoyed taking over the name and thumbing their collective noses at the Sorrentini! One of those wonderful stories of local rivalries in Italy, which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post.

In any event, it’s certainly true that the little towns along the Amalfi coast have been most vociferous in their claims to be the source of limoncello, although there is no solid evidence to this effect. Here, we have one of those vociferating towns.

There is a rather fanciful Creation Story doing the rounds, which involves the grandmother of the owner of a bar on the Amalfi coast. He offered his clients this wonderful lemon-based liqueur made the way his dear old grandmum used to make it, using the same lemons from the old lemon trees which grew in her lovely little garden … the rest is history! I rather cynically suspect that the Amalfi coast’s claims have something to do with the locals’ pressing need to find an outlet for all the lemons that grew there. There was a time when the various navies of Europe bought them to deal with scurvy, and the steep, rocky hillsides were turned into a tapestry of tiny lemon orchards to meet the demand.

With the bottom of that market dropping out, another outlet was needed if all these slips of lemon orchards were not to go to rack and ruin. Limoncello seems to have saved the day. I read that more than half of the Amalfi coast’s lemon crop is now used to make the liqueur. In passing, I should note, in case any of my readers are interested, that some enterprising people have organised a Sentiero dei Limoni, or Lemon Trail, which runs from the village of Maiori to the village of Minori through the lemon orchards, under the trellises over which the trees grow.

Having good lemons is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making a good limoncello. The manner in which the zest is removed is also key. The sources are most insistent on this. No pith must make its way into the brewing limoncello! It will add bitterness. One source suggests that even a vegetable peeler is too risky, a microplane should be used, and the zested lemons should look like this at the end of the process (also showing the zest and the microplane).

But that leaves a lot of wounded lemons. I’m sure my daughter could make a lemonade, or a sauce for a fish dish, but what, I wonder, do commercial producers of limoncello do with the tonnes of lemons they’ve zested? The sources are silent on this point.

Pithless lemon zest is also a necessary but not sufficient condition to make a good limoncello. There’s the alcohol into which you put the zest. As I said earlier, the sources talk about using pretty much pure alcohol, what’s called rectified spirits in the trade, with some sources strongly suggesting to use an alcohol with nothing less than 90% alcohol by volume, i.e., 90 ABV or, to use the older system, 180-proof. For me, that’s like saying that your alcohol should come from a place like this.

I would prefer to use something more natural, something distilled from fruit or grain or tubers, out of a pot still like this.

And I would like this equipment to be used by some farmer somewhere, like these French farmers, so-called “bouilleurs de cru”, who were caught in the act of making eau-de-vie by the French painter Henri-Edmond Cross in this painting of 1893 (by the way, “bouilleurs de cru” were farmers who were given a tax-free, and hereditary, privilege by Napoleon to make eau de vie, in order to boost production of strong alcohol for his troops).

A number of sources suggest using vodka (no doubt because it has little or no taste of its own, a fact well-known by those who are in need of an early-morning shot but don’t want others to smell it on their breath). But, alas, I read that a number of vodka brands are actually made by taking industrially-made ethanol and simply adding water to reduce its strength to more drinkable levels. So I suspect that going for a cheap brand of vodka to make limoncello (no point buying an expensive brand…) would not actually avoid using alcohol produced in a chemical refinery.

In any event, I think there is something fundamentally wrong in using a Polish-Russian alcohol to make an Italian liqueur. We need an Italian alcohol! Which really means using either grappa or acquavite (both made with grapes, but grappa uses the pomace generated during wine-making, while acquavite is made with grape must and pomace). Of the two, I would plump for acquavite, for two reasons. First, grappa is primarily made in the north of Italy, so that wouldn’t do for a southern Italian product – see my comment above about local rivalries in Italy. Second, I was thrilled to learn that the technique of distillation was reintroduced into Europe in the 11th Century by the doctors at the medical school in Salerno, who in turn picked up the technique from the Muslims in Andalusia. Here’s a Medieval miniature showing the good doctors at work.

What’s so wonderful about this is that Salerno is a mere hop, skip and a jump from the Amalfi coast, and those worthy doctors used the newfound distillation technique to make acquavite! Well! Even though the good doctors made their acquavite for medical purposes, that’s enough of a coincidence to make me say that acquavite has to be the go-to alcohol base for limoncello. There is a small-scale producer of limoncello on the Amalfi coast by the name of L’Alambicco who agrees with me; its owner declares that his product is made with acquavite made in-house. That being said, I’m embarrassed to say that as far as I can make out the only commercial producers of acquavite are all from the north of Italy and generally also make grappa. So, rather unwillingly, I throw in here a photo of a bottle of acquavite from one of these northern Italian producers, chosen, I have to say, more for the pleasant shape of the bottle than for the quality of its contents.

After all that, though, my daughter might have to opt for vodka. The fact is, I’m not sure she can find acquavite in LA (there’s a fancy Eataly store here, which carries grappa – at hideously high prices – but no acquavite).

So now we are at the last step in the process. Two things are happening here: sweetening and dilution. To this effect, the sources suggest using a concentrated solution of sugar in water. As far as dilution is concerned, I suppose that depends on what the ABV or proof of the original alcohol was. Anything with an ABV of around 40 (proof of around 80) probably won’t need dilution, while anything with ABVs above that, will. But that depends on whether or not one likes one’s liquor that grows hairs on one’s chest, as they say.

As for the sugar, the quantities added is a matter of taste. The couple in Seattle, for example, prefer the limoncello made by their friend because his product is less sweet than commercial brands. I would tend to agree with them, commercial limoncelli do tend to be too much on the sweet side. But hey, sweetness is on the tongue of the taster (to mangle the saying about beauty being in the eye of the beholder). As for the type of sugar to use, most people – my daughter included, I’m sure – would stretch out their hand for the cane sugar they have in their kitchen cupboard. And I understand that; why make your life more difficult than it has to be? But since I took the high road of localism with the alcohol, I feel I should point out that cane sugar actually originated in New Guinea and South-East Asia (and was then exported all around the world), so I now make a plea for using a more local source of sweetness. For instance, staying with the grape theme, one can now find grape sugar on the market. I throw in here a photo of one such product, made by an American company – but with Italian grapes! A very pleasing coda, I find, to this post dedicated to an Italian product.

Here’s a more romantic photo of this type of sugar.

Well, with that, I make a toast to all my readers, may you all have wonderful end-of-the-year festivities! cin-cin!

JERKY AND PEMMICAN

Los Angeles, 29 November 2022

Our daughter is currently in the sleep-eat-repeat mode with her newborn. Since she is breast-feeding and the little one is somewhat dilatory at the breast, she spends a lot of her time sitting on the sofa either feeding him or having skin-time with him. Which in turn means that my wife and I have taken over a lot of the routine household tasks. One of these is doing the shopping at the local supermarket.

It was while we were on one of these shopping trips, traipsing up and down aisles trying to find things, that I came across these displays.

As sharp-eyed readers will see (especially if they blow up the photos), what we have here is a wide array of different brands of beef jerky (along with a couple of bags of turkey jerky and other dried meat products thrown in).

For those of my readers who are not familiar with jerky, it’s basically thin strips of lean meat which have been dried out to stop spoilage by bacteria. In the past, this drying was done by laying the meat out in the sun.

Alternatively, it could be smoked.

Nowadays, it is more often than not salted. It can be marinated beforehand in spices and – in my opinion, most unfortunately – sugar. The net result looks like this.

Contrary to what one might think, the meat is not that hard or tough; crumbly might be a better description. Depending on what marinades are used, it can be salty or – yech! – sweetish. If prepared and stored properly, jerky can remain edible for months.

My discovery of this display of jerkies got me all excited. Nowadays, it is marketed as a protein-rich snack. But in the old days, when the Europeans were moving west across North America it was a great way of carrying food around with you on your travels: light but rich in protein, long shelf-life, no need for refrigeration. I’m sure it was used by the pioneers as their carriages creaked slowly across the prairies.

But for me, it evokes more romantic visions of old-time cowboys out on the range driving cattle to the rail heads.

Or perhaps out in a posse hunting down Billy the Kid or some other outlaw.

I’m sure my boyhood cowboy hero Lucky Luke would have eaten jerky, although I don’t recall any of his stories showing this.

The drying of meat (and fish) as a way of preserving it has of course been used in many cultures all over the world, but jerky specifically has its roots in the Americas. The word itself hails from the Andes, coming from the language of the Quechua people.

When the Spaniards conquered the Incan Empire, they found the Quechua making a dried-meat product from the llamas and alpacas which they had domesticated. The Quechua called it (as transliterated into the Roman alphabet) ch’arki, which simply means “dried meat”.

The Spaniards must have been very impressed with this product because they adopted both the product as well as its name, hispanicised to charqui, and spread its use throughout their American dominions. Not surprisingly, though, the source of meat changed along the way, with beef coming to predominate. So did the methods of preparation and drying. The Quechua dried pieces of meat with the bone still in place and they relied on the particular climate of the high Andes for the drying, with the meat slow-cooking in the hot sun during the day and freezing during the night. The Spaniards instead ended up cutting the meat into small thin strips and smoke-drying them.

I have to assume that when, in their migrations through the Americas, other Europeans collided with the Spaniards, they adopted this practice of preparing and eating dried beef; they also adopted the name, although the English-speaking among them eventually anglicized it to jerky. The Romantic-In-Me would like to think that American cowboys picked up the jerky habit from Mexican vaqueros somewhere out in the Far West.

But there is probably a more mundane explanation. Take, for instance, John Smith, who established the first successful colony in Virginia, at Jamestown, in 1612 (and who Disney studios had looking like this in the animated film Pocahontas

but who in reality looked more like this).

Smith had obviously heard of jerky. He had this to say about the culinary habits of the local Native American tribes he met living around the new colony: “Their fish and flesh … after the Spanish fashion, putting it on a spit, they turne first the one side, then the other, til it be as drie as their ierkin beefe in the west Indies, that they may keepe it a month or more without putrifying.” Which suggests that the name “jerky” may have come to North America via the Caribbean island colonies and a good deal earlier than the cowboys.

John Smith’s comment also tells us that the habit of drying fish and meat to preserve it was prevalent throughout the Americas – which is not really surprising; as I said, many cultures the world over have discovered this method for preserving fish and meat. Having no domesticated animals (apart from dogs), the First Nations of North America sourced their meat from the wild animals that roamed free around them: bison, deer, elk, moose, but also sometimes duck. Which brings me in a rather roundabout way to another foodstuff that makes me dream, pemmican.

For those of my readers who may not be familiar with this foodstuff, it is made by grinding jerky to a crumble and then mixing it with tallow (rendered animal fat) and sometimes with locally available dried berries. Like jerky, it can last a long time. This is what pemmican looks like.

The word itself is derived from the Cree word pimîhkân – other First Nation tribes had different names for it, but I suppose the Europeans only started using it when they entered into contact with the Cree people.

Why, readers may ask, does pemmican make me dream? Here, I have to explain that there was a time in my life, in my early teens, when my parents lived in Winnipeg, capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba. Winnipeg became an important link in the beaver fur trade routes which linked the north-west of Canada with both Montreal and Hudson Bay. A book I read when I was a sober adult, titled “A Green History of the World”, informed me that the trade itself was a catastrophe, leading to collapse after collapse of local beaver populations as they were hunted out of existence in one river system after another. But when I was a young teen, it wasn’t the poor little furry animals that interested me, it was the voyageurs. These were the men (and only men) who held the fur trade together. It was they who paddled the big canoes which in the Spring carried goods out west to trade for the beaver furs and in the Fall carried the furs back east.

To the Young Me, the lives of these voyageurs seemed impossibly romantic: paddling through the vast wilderness that was then Canada

sleeping by the fire under the stars

meeting people of the First Nations when they were still – more or less – living their original lives …

I had one, tiny taste of this life when I was 14 going 15, paddling a canoe for a couple of weeks along the Rainy River and across Lake of the Woods, camping at night on the shore of the river and on islands in the middle of the lake

and one day meeting a very old man on one island who thrillingly remembered as a child hiding from the local First Nations tribes who had gone on the warpath.

Of course, the voyageurs’ life was considerably harder than I ever imagined it as a boy. For instance, coming back to pemmican, they didn’t have space in their canoes to carry their own food, nor did they have time to forage for it. They were expected to work 14 hours a day, paddling at 50 strokes a minute or carrying the canoes and their load over sometimes miles-long portages, from May to October. So they had to be supplied with food along the way. In the region around Winnipeg that meant being supplied with pemmican.

A whole industry sprang up to supply the large quantities of pemmican needed by the voyageurs. It was run by the Métis, another fascinating group of people. As the Frenchmen (mostly, if not all, men) pushed out into the Canadian West, many married, more or less formally, First Nations women from the local tribes. The primary purpose of these marriages was to cement trading relations with local tribes; it was also a way of creating the necessary interpreters. The children of these marriages were the Métis (which is French for people of mixed heritage). They in turn intermarried, or married First Nations people, and over time, created what were essentially new tribes. Although the Métis retained some European customs, the most important of which being the speaking of French, for the most part they adopted the customs of the First Nations.

There were especially large groupings of Métis around what was to become Winnipeg. One of the bigger groupings lived in St. Boniface on the Red River.

This has now become one of the quarters of Winnipeg, and is where my parents used to live. At that time (we are talking the late 1960s), most of the population of St. Boniface was still Francophone and I suspect that many were descendants of the Métis, although they would not have publicized the fact. Being Métis was rather looked down on at the time.

One of the customs which the Métis adopted from the First Nations was the making and eating of pemmican, hunting the numerous bison which then still roamed the central plains of North America for both the meat and the tallow they required. But the demand from the fur trade business upped the ante, and the Métis started producing pemmican on a quasi-industrial scale. Twice yearly, large hunting groups left the Winnipeg area and moved south and west looking for the bison herds. Here we have a series of paintings, watercolours, and lithographs showing the various phases of these bison hunts.

The Métis encamped out on the plains.

The hunts.

Drying the bison meat and creating the tallow, preparatory to mixing them to make pemmican.

It all seemed glorious to me when I was a boy – a sort of souped-up, months-long Scout camp – but as a sober adult I learned of the very dark side of these twice-yearly hunting expeditions. Huge numbers of bison were killed during these hunts, especially females, which were the preferred target; this was a significant factor in the near-extinction of the bison in North America. Luckily, they have survived, although in much diminished numbers. One summer in Winnipeg, my father took us to a park where bison ranged free; we were able to get quite close – magnificent animals.

On that same trip, we spied a beaver dam somewhat like this one in the photo below through the trees and decided to go and have a peek.

But we were driven back by the swarms of voracious mosquitoes which, literally smelling blood, rose up from the ground as one and closed in on us. The voyageurs were also much troubled by mosquitoes and black flies during the few hours of sleep allowed to them; they used smudge fires to keep them away. As a result, many suffered from respiratory problems – another side to their not-so romantic lives.

My father also used to take us for rides down towards the American border, where the Métis had once travelled for their bison hunts, trekking across prairies which – as the paintings above intimate – had stretched to the horizon. But they’ve nearly all disappeared too; a few shreds remain in some national parks.

What we saw was wheat stretching to the horizon.

Ah, memories, memories … I’ve told my wife that one day I’ll take her to Winnipeg. We can visit St. Boniface and talk French. And drive through the endless waves of wheat towards Saskatchewan. Perhaps go north to Lake Winnipeg, so big you can’t see the other side of it from the shore. And camp out in a provincial park, under the stars.

SAINT NOTBURGA

Los Angeles, 26 September 2022

Just before my wife and I hurried over to Los Angeles to help our daughter, we spent a very pleasant long weekend in Innsbruck, celebrating our wedding anniversary. We actually weren’t visiting Innsbruck itself but rather using it as a base to do some hiking. As the city’s name indicates, it is situated on the river Inn. The valley down which the river flows is flanked on both sides by mountains, and it was these that we were there to hike, up, down and along.

Nevertheless, on the way to and from our hikes we found ourselves enjoying various parts of the old town through which we strode (on the way out) or shuffled (on the way back), and on the last morning we had time enough before our train left for Vienna to visit one museum. Being a fanatic believer in the Green Michelin Guide, I quickly looked up what museums it suggested to visit in Innsbruck, and discovered that this august publication bestowed its maximum encomium, three stars, on only one museum in the city: the Museum of Tyrolean Arts and Handicrafts. So the Museum of Tyrolean Arts and Handicrafts it was!

As usual, the Michelin Green Guide was spot on. I earnestly recommend any of my readers who are spending some time in Innsbruck to visit this museum. But this post is not really about the museum. It is about one particular painting which I chanced upon, of St. Notburga.

Well! As any faithful reader of my posts will know, I have a very soft spot for obscure saints, the obscurer the better. In my time, I have written posts about Saints Radegund, Pancras, Blaise (who is also, incidentally, the subject of a small painting in the museum), John of Nepomuk, Hubert, Peter of Verona, Fructuosus, and a few other odds and ends in the Saints’ Department. So it was clear from the moment I clapped eyes on the painting that I would have to write a post about her. The train journey back to Vienna gave me all the time I needed to do the background research.

St. Notburga’s story is quickly told, and hinges around three miracles. If she existed at all, and I for one have my doubts about that, she was born in 1265 or thereabouts, into a humble family living in the small town of Rattenberg situated on the river Inn some 50 kilometres downstream from Innsbruck. So she was a Tyrolean girl.

Some time in her teens, she went to work as a servant in the household of the local aristocrats, the Count and Countess of Rottenburg. She was – of course – a very good girl and was scandalized by the fact that the leftover food from the Count’s meals was fed to the pigs when there were lots of townsfolk who went hungry. So with the Count and Countess’s blessing, she collected the leftovers and distributed them to the poor. (From here on, I show, very blown-up, some of the scenes which circle the painting above. They are somewhat dark and fuzzy; if I had known about Notburga beforehand, I would have taken close-ups from the painting itself. Ah well …)

Alas! the Count died, and his son inherited his father’s title, lands, and servants. The new Count and his lady wife didn’t approve of Notburga’s good works at all. They wanted all the leftovers to go to their pigs. So the Countess, who was in charge of running the household, told Notburga to stop.

Being – of course – a very obedient girl, Notburga did as she was commanded. But how she suffered! So she decided to put aside some of her own food instead, especially on Fridays – being not only good but pious, she fasted on Fridays – and gave this to the poor. The nasty Count and Countess didn’t like that either. As far as they were concerned, she was giving away their food, not hers, and saw this as theft. The Count decided to catch her in the act of leaving the castle with the food.

FIRST MIRACLE: So one Friday, Notburga was as usual carrying the food she had put aside for the poor in her apron and a jug of wine in her hand, when she encountered the Count and his entourage in the castle’s courtyard. He demanded to know what she was carrying. Notburga replied, “wood shavings and lye, Master”. The Count scoffed and commanded her to open her apron. Notburga obeyed, but in place of food, the Count saw only wood shavings and sawdust! Then he tried the wine, but tasted only lye!

Of course, the Count being a nasty man, he suspected that Notburga had played a trick on him and fired her. She accepted her fate with forbearance, and left the castle and moved to a small village of Eben on Lake Achen, some 20 kilometres from Ratenberg. Here we have her (I think) walking to Eben.

There, she was employed as a farm worker by a local farmer. She looked after the cattle and helped with the field work. Being, as I say, a very pious girl, Notburga only asked that the farmer let her stop work to pray when the bell first rang in the evening and let her go to Mass on Sunday and holy days, to which he graciously agreed.

SECOND MIRACLE: One afternoon, as always, Notburga stopped work when the first bell rang. But the weather was threatening to change, so the farmer demanded that no one stop until all the grain had been collected. Seeking divine assistance to make her case, Notburga raised up her sickle and said: “Let my sickle be judge between me and you.” She let go – and the sickle remained suspended in mid-air, caught on a ray of sunshine!

Frightened half out of his wits, the farmer let her stop working, and he never tried that one again!

In the meantime, things were going very badly for Count Rottenburg. His pigs – the ones to whom the leftover food was given – were ravaged by some mysterious disease. His wife’s half-brother set the castle on fire after a bitter quarrel. Here, we have the half-brother attacking the castle.

Finally, his wife sickened and died. Many residents decided that the Count had been cursed and left. The Count began to ascribe all his misfortunes to his dismissal of Notburga. He sought her out, together with his new wife, and implored her to return to work for him.

She accepted, but only on condition that he let her resume her care for the poor. The Count immediately agreed, and of course his fortunes took a great turn for the better when Notburga came back. For 18 years, she served in the castle as nanny for the Count’s children, then cook, all the while continuing her charitable good works. She also succeeded in reconciling the Count with his first wife’s half-brother, the one who had very nearly burned the castle to the ground.

THIRD MIRACLE: In September of 1313, sensing that death was approaching, Notburga requested her master to place her corpse on a wagon drawn by two oxen and to bury her wherever the oxen would stand still. The Count did as she had asked. So off went the oxen, followed by the funeral procession.

When the cart reached the Inn, the river parted and all the mourners were able to cross to the other shore without harm!

The oxen continued on their way, covering at a leisurely pace the 20 kilometres to Eben (the mourners must have all had sore feet by now). There, just outside a wayside chapel on the outskirts of Eben they finally stopped. With much pomp and ceremony, she was laid to rest in the chapel; it is even said that angels carried her coffin into the chapel.

And that’s Notburga’s life wrapped up. Readers will have noted by now the importance of the sickle in Notburga’s life. Hence her being represented in the painting above prominently waving a sickle around. I insert here a statue of her which I also came across in the museum, again waving that sickle around.

I have told her story somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Quite honestly, it’s difficult for me to see what was so saintly about her life. I find the miracles ascribed to almost akin to conjurors’ tricks. But somethings about her definitely captured the imagination of the rural folk of the Tyrol and contiguous areas. Pilgrimages to that little chapel in Eben started up and became big enough for Maximilian I (whose own mausoleum sits in the church next to the museum) to decide to have a bigger church built in the village at the beginning of the 16th Century. It got a late Baroque makeover a few centuries later. Here is an aerial view of the church, set in the beautiful Tyrolean landscape (it really is a beautiful part of the world).

And here is a view of the church’s interior.

Her skeleton (or someone’s skeleton) was unearthed from the original chapel and, dressed in rich clothing, now rather macabrely presides over the church’s interior.

Notburga was until recently one of the most revered saints in Tyrol and South Bavaria, as well as in East Styria and Slovenia (I would imagine that the general dechristianization of Europe has put paid to this, although a quick search on LinkedIn and Facebook show that there are still quite a lot of people called Notburga). Rural folk would ask for her intervention in many situations of distress, from human or animal sickness to threatening storms. Apart from her representation on religious furniture and furnishings (paintings, votive images, statues, stained glass windows, church bells, even offering boxes and holy water basins) her image could be found on all sorts of objects of everyday use like salt shakers, stove tiles, and cupboards. There are even tiny, 2 by 2.8 cm., pictures of her to be swallowed or “inhaled” from; they were used as part of religious folk medicine and belonged in the home apothecary. It was believed that consuming or breathing in from these little images would release Notburga’s healing powers. Little silver Notburga sickles were worn on watch chains and rosaries as amulets. Many songs, prayers and litanies were dedicated to her.

There are those who say that Notburga was a Christian personification of much older goddesses who were prayed to in the mountains. Her sickle, for instance, is considered as pointing to a connection with a moon goddess, a common goddess throughout Europe and indeed the world; we have here the Roman goddess Luna.

Notburga’s association with fields, crops, grain and bread recalls the “grain mothers” like the Greek fertility goddess Demeter and the Roman Ceres.

This could well all be true. But I see another thread in her story, the constant struggle of rural folk with hunger, linked at least in part to their exploitation by landowners, both big (aristocrats) and small (rich farmers). Those rich folk were wasting food? Ha! She took it all and redistributed it to us poor folk! The Count fired her? Ha! He sure suffered for having done that! The farmer insisted that his workers work long hours? Ha! She sure put the fear of God in him for doing that, and after that he behaved himself! It’s no coincidence that she is the patron saint of the downtrodden in rural areas: servants, female agricultural workers, and the peasantry in general. I can understand that people would pray to her to deal with the richer folk making their life miserable. Personally, though, I think unionization is the better way to go.

Just saying …