Mesolithic Snack Food

Hazelnuts (image from Wikimedia Commons)

From the BBC News website comes this article about a recent find of a large quantity of charred hazelnut shells on the Isle of Skye near Staffin Bay. This is interesting because the find is approximately 8,000 years old. 

The article is headlined "Hazelnut Shells Found at Skye Mesolithic Site," and the write-up characterizes hazelnuts as the "snack food" of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The dig was conducted by the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) along with the Staffin Community Trust, and school children and volunteers also worked on the dig. The UHI team found so much material in the dig that they cannot analyze it all on their budget, but are hoping to find additional funds to complete the job. 

What I love about archaeology is its ability to show us what foods were eaten thousands of years ago. Hazelnuts are not commonly eaten here in the US, but I need to shop for some now that I know that they were commonly eaten, at least in Britain, during the Stone Age.

The Ultimate Preservation Technique

A few days ago, I came across this article about invented a technique invented by some Swedish graduate students for turning fruits and vegetables into powder. That's right, powder. They call it FoPo. 

The point of the the new product is to have shelf-stable (they supposedly keep for up to two years), easily shippable food that can be sent to disaster sites, thus improving the diets of people attempting to recover from disasters. According to the article, the fruit powders at least taste a lot like the original fruit and can be mixed with other foods for eating.

I'm not sure exactly how adding powdered fruit to an emergency diet helps refugees, though powdered vegetables might provide nutrients that would not otherwise be available.   Then again, adding different flavors to a bland emergency diet might be enough of a benefit in itself, especially if the product is not expensive to make.  

Powdered emergency foods (think pemmican) have been available since prehistoric times, but this is the first effort I've heard about that adds produce to the powdered repertoire.  It will be interesting to see whether the new powders will become a part of emergency foodstuffs everywhere or fall by the wayside on practicality grounds.

My Second Moretum Experiment

Second moretum experiment--results

This afternoon, while taking a break from scanning the Internet for plausible job openings, I made another batch of moretum, based on my friend Stella Anderson's redaction of Virgil's recipe.

I started out with a chunk of a cheese called Oro Antico, which claimed to be a Pecorino Toscano (which, like Pecorino Romano, is a sheep's milk cheese) that had been aged for 6 months.  I ended up using a piece of the chunk that was about the size of the palm of my hand and roughly an inch thick.  

The cheese was quite tough and dry after sitting in my refrigerator for nearly 2 weeks, so I chopped it up into 1/2 cm-sized bits before I made a serious effort to pound it.  And I do mean "pound".  Virgil is right about Symilus "pounding" his cheese.  The normal twisting, grinding motion I normally employ in using a mortar and pestle did nothing to the cheese bits--the mortar simply skidded off without discernible effect.  However, holding the mortar vertical and bringing it straight down onto the cheese bits with controlled force worked very well. By this method I eventually managed to turn my chunk of cheese into a quantity of coarse, slightly fluffy damp powder, into which I ground an equal volume of diced celery.  With the celery, conventional grinding was necessary to work it into the mass of powdered cheese.  

After I got the cheese and celery somewhat combined, I began adding olive oil to the mixture.  A small "dribble" did nothing, but about an ounce or so of oil turned the powder into a  spreadable, if coarse, paste.  Then I ground in an 1/8th of a teaspoon of ground coriander seeds, about a tablespoon of chopped parsley, and 3  small cloves of garlic.   I would have tried adding rue if I had had any on hand.

The result of my labors was indeed tasty.  It still tasted like Pecorino Toscano, but was moister and had a pleasant tang from the herbs.  It didn't have much garlic taste, which leads me to conclude that the older and harder your cheese is, the more garlic can be added to the recipe without the garlic flavor becoming overwhelming.  I shudder to think how tough Symilus's cheese must have been if he needed four heads of garlic to make it palatable!

From this second moretum experiment, I conclude that the recipe in Virgil's poem assumes that a hard cheese like a Pecorino was used; such a cheese requires "pounding" instead of grinding in the mortar and can tolerate the addition of much more garlic than a soft cheese.  Celery is also a critical addition, because in addition to having a pleasant flavor it makes the resulting cheese-and-olive-oil paste moister and easier to spread.  I suspect that the use of any herbs or vegetables other than celery would depend upon maker's taste and the herbs available to him or her.  For example, Symilus didn't use basil in his moretum, but basil would probably be quite tasty in this recipe instead of (or perhaps even in addition to) the parsley. 

Many thanks to Stella and the author of opus anglicanum for motivating me to rethink my original assumptions and arrive at a more plausibly historical moretum recipe.

EDIT:  (7/3/2015)  My moretum got pretty hard sitting in the refrigerator (not a problem Virgil's farmer would have had), so I ended up adding almost another ounce of olive oil, mixing it in with a (non-period style) fork.  This worked pretty well to retain spreadability while not changing the taste.  I also added some salt (totally unnecessary; I'd forgotten that the Pecorino is already salted) and black pepper (which worked well). 

Another Moretum Experiment

I was pretty satisfied with the moretum [i.e.,  the name for an ancient Roman type of cheese spread] I had made until I read my friend Stella Anderson's moretum recipe on her blog, Historical Living with Hvitr.  Stella's blog post makes three points about the redaction of the recipe found in Virgil's poem by the author of Pass the Garum ("PTG") that has made me reconsider my original views about moretum in general and Virgil's recipe in particular.

First, Stella noted that, whether or not garlic heads were smaller in those days, the amount of garlic used by the farmer in Virgil's poem was "insane".  She points out that Virgil intended to convey the idea that the amount of garlic was excessive by stating that the garlic made the farmer's eyes water as he pounded it.  (In contrast, my eyes didn't water at all as I put my single clove into my moretum recipe.)

Second, it turns out that apius, the Latin word actually used in Virgil's poem, means "celery" not "parsley", making it unclear why the translation used by  PTG refers to parsley in the first place.

Third, and most importantly, the poem itself explicitly describes the cheese used in the farmer's moretum as a hard cheese.  I'm not sure how I missed that detail.  I can't read Latin, but the translation used by PTG describes the cheese in question as follows:  "...a cheese transfixed/ By rope of broom through mid-circumference/ Was hanging there, an ancient bundle, too,/ Of dill together tied."  Or, in Stella's words, "...Symilius' cheese is obviously some type of hard cheese.  He keeps it hanging from his roof by a string tied through a hole in the middle of the cheese."

These facts convince me that, however tasty a soft-cheese spread might be with the additions proposed by Virgil, Stella and my friend at Opus Anglicanum (who made up some moretum with her own redaction of the recipe given in Virgil) are right; a hard cheese was meant to be used in the recipe, and may well have been generally preferred for moretum in ancient Rome.  The cheese was pounded in a mortar with olive oil to make it spreadable, and the added vegetables and herbs likely provide a useful level of moisture to the mix as well as a more pleasing flavor. Although Virgil likely exaggerated the amount of garlic used to make the farmer look more like a country bumpkin, a significant amount of garlic might be necessary for achieving a pleasing flavor balance in a salted cheese that was even drier than normal because it had been hanging for a long time.  

So I went looking for some Pecorino Romano, a type of sheep's milk cheese which was already being made in Roman times.  On my first effort, I failed to locate Pecorino Romano in my local supermarket, but did find and purchased some Pecorino Toscano.  I selected an aged version of Pecorino Toscano, hoping to duplicate the effect of Symilius's ancient cheese.  Later, I found Pecorino Romano, and purchased it as well.

Now, I have two possible hard cheeses to experiment with.  I think I'll start with the Pecorino Toscano, because I have a smaller piece of that and because Stella has already vetted Pecorino Romano as a base for moretum.   Pecorino Toscano is somewhat softer in texture and less sharp in flavor than Pecorino Romano, so it is a good choice for my next batch, which I'm going to make using Stella's redaction of the moretum recipe from the poem as a starting point.   The result will be described in this blog.

EDIT:  (7/1/2015) Fact correction; Stella's recipe used Pecorino Romano, not Pecorino Toscano.  I have corrected the text accordingly.

Another Name Change

My long-term readers may recall that this blog was originally called "Food Through Time".  I came up with that name on the spur of the moment the day that I decided to go public with the blog, and I stuck with it for quite a while, even though I didn't like the name much.

Eventually, I came up with the idea of naming the blog "Table Scraps," by analogy to the name of my historical costume blog, "Loose Threads:  Yet Another Costuming Blog".  I was pretty happy with that name until I learned from a friend that there is at least one other blog about food called "Table Scraps"--and that blog is much more popular than mine. It is written by Lynn Kessel, who writes a weekly food column for the Tampa Tribune in Florida.  If you're reading this, Lynn, I apologize--I never wanted to steal your thunder, or your readers.  As a quick look at both of our blogs will show, the nature of my interest in blogging about food is quite different from yours.

So I clearly need to change the name of this blog, again.  But to what?  "Food Through Time" remains available, but I still dislike it for the reasons I disliked it originally--it's way too bland to attract eyeballs.  

I thought of "Bonne Bouche", which carries connotations and denotations of a small food treat,  but there are two other food-related blogs with nearly that same title--Bon Bouche, a blog about cheese, and "La Bonne Bouche",  which is more of a recipe-oriented blog than this one will ever be.

Then I thought of smörgåsbord, a Scandinavian buffet consisting mostly of cold foods that diners can take small portions from and combine them into a meal. Despite my continuing interest in food (and other elements of material culture) from Viking Age Scandinavia, I didn't want to use that word either, partly because it's specifically Scandinavian and the topics I write about are geographically broader than that, and partly because all of the blogs I've found that used the word as a title have no connection with food. They use the word in its broader sense--a variety of diverse items to choose from.

However, I learned something interesting from the Wikipedia entry on the term smörgåsbord.   It turns out that smörgåsbord  is a Swedish word.  Norwegian and Danish use different expressions that translate as "the cold table" or "the cold board" (referring to the fact that smörgåsbords tend to feature foods that are not cooked and don't require cooking).

That tidbit gave me the idea for a new title for this blog: "The Cold Table". "The Cold Table" invokes the concept of a choice from many small items, and being a synonym for smörgåsbord it preserves a connection to food. Best of all, because it refers to a "cold" table it explicitly indicates that this is not primarily a blog about the heat of the kitchen but about the cooler activities of analyzing food and food-related technologies in their cultural and historical contexts.

Besides, who other than me would be strange enough to use such a phrase as a blog title?

So tonight, I am changing the title of my blog, "Table Scraps," to "The Cold Table."  Even if the change doesn't increase my readership, I think it is a much more interesting name than "Food Through Time," and that pleases me.

EDIT:  (6/25/2015) Improved and clarified the original language of this post just a little.

A Short History of Space Food

From the online magazine Serious Eats comes an interesting short history about space food--the food astronauts eat while traveling in space capsules, on the International Space Station ("ISS"), and in other no-gravity locales.

The most informative part of the article is the part that addresses what makes foods appropriate for space.  Three qualities are important.  A suitable food should be stable at shirt-sleeve temperatures (there's no refrigeration on space missions); it should not generate crumbs (too difficult to contain and keep from entering and ruining delicate equipment); and it should be possible to package it in such a way that it can be  eaten without too much trouble.  So although those styrofoam-like bricks of ice cream aren't used in the space program nowadays (too crumbly), most space foods are vacuum-sealed into plastic pouches that must be opened with scissors before they can be eaten.

Variety isn't much of a problem, either; each astronaut gets to select a specified number of foods to be personally packed for him or her before each flight.  What's trickier is combining foods in space before actually eating them.  The video on the right, linked in the article, shows Chris Hadfield on the ISS, illustrating the challenges of assembling foods in space by making a peanut butter and honey tortilla sandwich.  (The real problem: keeping the tortilla from floating away while you open the peanut butter and honey in order to spread them on the tortilla.)  Here's another fun video, also involving Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, in which Hadfield makes and eats a burrito on the ISS. The taste is very different, but the same problems (keeping your bread from floating off while you open the condiments for spreading on it) still apply.

What made the article fascinating to me is how it highlights the role of technology in the preparation of food.  None of the foods eaten aboard the ISS are novel; what makes them different from what you and I eat, or can eat, is solely the packaging and formulation necessary to adapt them for use in a zero-gravity environment.  In my opinion, that fact makes space food more interesting, but less influential, than the expansion of food types and preparation techniques which have resulted from exploration and colonization on Earth. 

Earliest Use of Mushrooms as Food?

For a few weeks now, I've been meaning to post about this  news article from the Archaeology News Network. This article showcases a recent archaeological discovery that demonstrates the antiquity of the use of mushrooms as a food for homo sapiens, and it's an excellent demonstration of why I believe that archaeology is greatly changing and expanding the history of material culture.

The remains in question are those of humans of the Magdalenian culture of the upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) period of prehistory, i.e., sometime between 18,000 and 12,000 BCE. They were found in the El Mirón cave in Cantabria in northern Spain.  A team of German archaologists obtained some of the dental calculus (i.e., plaque) found on the teeth of the remains and discovered evidence of microremains from "plant, fungal, animal and mineral sources that these people had eaten a wide variety of different types of food.  Among the possible food sources suggested by this evidence were bolete mushrooms, according to the abstract of the archaeologists' formal publication in ScienceDirect.  Their article is available for purchase (cost:  $35.95 USD) here. I may read it eventually, though at this point $36.00 is more than I'm prepared to spend to obtain one article.

I continue to be in awe over how new technologies can make it possible to glean information about diet and clothing from remains that would once have been dismissed as mere bones.   This is one of the scientific trends of the last few decades that I see as overwhelmingly positive, and I hope that it continues.