All posts by Jess Clark

Jess Clark is an associate professor of history at Brock University. Her first book, The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), analyzes the role of London-based entrepreneurs in developing a national beauty culture. She’s now writing a book on the history of smell and identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Autumn 2023, Environment and Climate, Family and Household, Posts

Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey

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By Su Hyeon Cho

Mid-August is the grape harvest season in Vakfılı, an Armenian village perched on the mountainous region of the southernmost Turkish province of Hatay. Tasting grapes takes the form of ritual in the patient waiting until Surp Asdvadzadzin, the holiday that celebrates the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary by blessing the grapes and cooking a sacred porridge. The prelude to this festive occasion consists of the drumbeats of davul and the blasting of zurna the night before. Cheerful crowds dance around seven steaming cauldrons of harisa in the churchyard overnight. The porridge, made out of sacrificed meat (madagh) and wheat, is simmered overnight on an open fire until the meat disintegrates. The repetitive labour of churning the ingredients into a viscous consistency is key, hence the name harisa (or hrisi in colloquial Arabic), which originated from ‘churning’ or ‘pounding’ in both Armenian and Arabic.

Left, Middle: Distributing harisa during Surp Asdvadzadzin in 2023 (photo credit: Ismail Zubari), Right: The destroyed cross tower on the churchyard of Surp Asdvadzadzin Church, Vakıflı.

 

This year’s Surp Asdvadzadzin was prepared by a much smaller, more dejected crowd, as Lora Baytar Çapar, a resident of Vakıflı, describes in her essay “May the taste of harisa be the same, this holiday lacks its flavour”. Earlier in February this year, a deadly earthquake shook Hatay and the wider region of north Syria and south Turkey, resulting in over 50,000 deaths and the destruction of the livelihoods of millions.

In Vakıflı, villagers also fell victim to the earthquake. Many had left the village by summer. A community centre in the village stood in for the severely damaged churchyard, and candle holders and other ecclesiastical ornaments were brought in to imitate the usual celebration. Yet, the seven once brimming cauldrons were only half full. There were no cheerful rhythms and melodies of davul and zurna. Although the setting may seem insufficient, Çapar underlines, continuing the tradition of cooking harisa is the community’s will to survive.

A cat sitting on the rubble of Hünkar Mescidi in the old town of Antakya in February 2023 (photo credit: Daniel Thorpe)

 

During my visit to Hatay in September, I witnessed construction work in progress, a series of emptied plots of land and what locals call “camp cities” (çadır kentler) along the road from Antakya to the coastal district of Samandağ. After an hour of dusty travel, I reached the Hızır Aleyhisselam Türbesi, where the suprahuman Hızır (al-Khidr) is believed to have met with Moses. In the vicinity of this spiritual centre for the Alawite community, there is a communal kitchen area where harisa is prepared throughout the year. As harisa is the most celebrated sacrificial meal in the region, locals vow to make a sacrificial offering (called adak in Turkish) for the healing, fertility, and safety of their beloved. On that account, Turkish guest workers in Europe (gurbetçi) hurriedly returned to their hometown shortly after the earthquake and cooked harisa.My interlocutors pointed out that cooking harisa is a form of prayer, and post-earthquake harisa reflects this belief even more strongly.

In the wake of the fortieth-day commemoration after the earthquake, Mişel Orduluoğlu pens an essay grieving for the capital Antakya. Orduluoğlu notes that fortieth day signals the departure of the souls that are no longer with us. The writer adds the period of “five Friday prayers, five shabbat meals, and five Sunday masses with candlelight and frankincense” had passed without Antakya’s usual soundscape, a mixture of call for prayer (ezan), church bells (çan), and Jewish canton (hazzan). “When the city has lost its spiritual sites, then where should one convene the funeral procession?” the writer rhetorically asks. The earthquake did not select its victims, and each community, of different ethno-religious backgrounds, is going through the same pain – together. Orduoğlu remarks that harisa is a means of collective mourning for the loss of the diversity of Antakya that residents have long been proud of.

Habib-i Neccar Mosque, built in the mid-7th-century, is one of many buildings with historical and religious significance in Antakya that was severely damaged during the earthquake (photo credit: Daniel Thorpe)

 

No writer would set preparing harisa in a closed, family kitchen. It is a communal dish, cooked in bulk for sharing at sites where communities feel a spiritual connection. The new kitchen setting, surrounded by rubble and debris, is an odd spectacle. In his essay, Hakan Mercan painfully details the destruction of historical buildings, from Habib-i Neccar Mosque to St. Pierre Church, allegedly the first mosque in Anatolia and the oldest cave church in the world, respectively. Amid despair, the author notes, the survival of the Hızır Aleyhisselam Türbesi gave solace to the community. The essay concludes with reclaiming harisa’s boisterous presence, which reads, “Nothing would remain the same as before, but let’s not surrender to the shadow of hopelessness… Excited children will impatiently stand in a long queue in front of the cauldrons of harisa, burning the frankincense. We will bloom again and again.”

Vernacular writing about harisa in the wake of the earthquake culminates in a recipe for compassion, sharing, solidarity, miracle work, and hope. As such, food writing on harisa does not resemble other food writing. It often contains wordy headnotes about pain and loss, without much in the way of culinary instruction or gastronomic pleasure. Gastronomic pleasure is nowhere to be found. Their recipes for harisa are in the future tense, waiting for the joviality to return, the community to revive.

Su Hyeon Cho is a DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral project ‘Saints and States in a Plastic Bowl: Tales of a Sacred Porridge in Unlikely State’ focuses on harisa-cooking Alawite, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian communities from Hatay to explore the transcending power of rituals in perpetual ruptures from anthropological perspectives. Before returning to academia, she worked in different capacities at research institutions, diplomatic missions, and the United Nations in the Middle East.

Autumn 2023, British Studies, Global Exchange, Posts

A Recipe for Brown Stew

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By Geeta Budhraja

This is the apéritif to what I hope can translate into a larger comprehensive project on the delights of Anglo-Indian cuisine. Born into a family where conversations celebrated food – what to eat, why, the origin of the dish or ingredients, etc. – and a healthy inclination towards fusion, it’s not surprising that Anglo Indian cuisine is by far my all-time favourite.

An illustrated bowl of steaming stew sits on top of a cookbook
Image courtesy of Ms. Priyanka Sarkar.

 

My paternal grandfather was Chief Engineer with the Indian Railways from the early part of the twentieth century when it was still under British governance. He maintained links to this colonial past until well after Indian Independence, which showed up in the cuisine served at railway parties and were a part of celebratory dinners at home. The khansama, or family cook, who was typically local and Indian, was trained in whipping up all the basic Anglo-Indian dishes, as he’d previously been in the employment of the “gora sahib” (white British men).

My father was with Dunlop India Limited, which had its headquarters in the Anglo-Indian Mecca- Free School Street in Calcutta (now Kolkata). So, meals at our home were a celebration of all things Anglo-Indian.

In this post I am going to look at a quintessentially Anglo-Indian dish that is a fusion of a very typical British base to which Indian spices or an Indian touch has been added to rather glorious, if I may say, results.

The khansama had been used to serving British bachelors who came without their wives as the first wave of officers, unsure of living conditions in India. They introduced the gora sahib to Indian spices like turmeric, mustard seeds, cumin, cloves, cardamom, and asafoetida to rather promising responses. When the memsahibs (their wives) arrived, they wanted to reclaim their husbands’ palate, and therein lies the origin of the battle of spices between the khansamas and the memsahibs. Anglo-Indian recipes are the battleground of this war that was never quite won by either but settled into a grudging truce where either one would concede defeat depending on the response of the bada sahib (husband).

A key dish is a brown stew (distinct from the Caribbean one that gets its name from the addition of brown sugar). A British stew is a dish wherein meat and vegetables are simmered to create a very light and flavourful soup-like consistency, while stew in India is trotters simmered in a gravy with onions, garlic, ginger, and yogurt along with spices like cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, and mace. The end result is a rather rich gravy-like dish. The brown stew referred to here is a fusion of these two, and its origin probably lies in one of the kitchens where the British memsahibs would have asked for stew, and the only stew that the khansama knew of was paya (trotters) curry.  So, for his ‘stew,’ he probably substituted the trotters with the meat of choice and added ‘English vegetables’ like carrots, celery, and potatoes. He also retained spices like black cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves, thinking that the memsahib and the bada sahib would not appreciate a bland bowl of soup particularly in the winters when this would be a typical dinner repast. The understanding was that there should be a little bit of warmth to blunt the edge of the season, which of course the spices such as cinnamon and cloves would deliver. Sometimes ‘Indian’ or local vegetables like round gourd and cauliflower would also be added if they were handy.

Additionally, this stew is thickened with whole wheat flour – what in India we call atta, which is the entire kernel of wheat that has been ground – rather than refined flour. To go back to the origin of its use, the khansama in the railway houses, when told to dish out a stew (I believe in my house at least this is what happened), ran out of refined flour and innovated by adding what was available, which was wheat flour. Atta is a little coarser than the refined flour and makes for a richer, earthier gravy with a nutty flavour. A roux calls for light sauteing with clear instructions to not allow browning, while atta requires a rich brown hue to remove the raw taste and enhance the nutty flavour lending a rich brown colour to the stew. Any good khansama wouldn’t consider his “Angrezi” (English) khana (food) complete without a liberal dash of Worcestershire sauce as the crowning glory. The end product would be dished out in elegant white porcelain bowls, usually sprinkled with a little bit of garam masala garnished with a combination of coriander and parsley.

Brown stew, as I know it, is a steaming hot, rich, and flavourful repast. It is redolent with a heady mix of spices, spiked with tangy Worcestershire sauce and generous portions of chicken, mutton, or pork. This dish is an ode to a successful marriage of culinary cultures.

 

Dr. Geeta Budhraja is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Aryabhatta College, Delhi University. With over 30 years of teaching experience, she has been actively involved with students and college life in the classroom and areas of art and culture, theatre, and other administrative responsibilities. She works actively in theatre production, culinary culture, and gender studies, and has contributed articles on Feminist Theory, Performance Theory, and book reviews in national and international journals. She has also been an invited speaker on Cultural Studies in international and national forums. She writes poetry and non-fiction.

She may be contacted at drgeetabudhiraja@gmail.com.

Autumn 2023, Ingredients, Recipes and Recipe Books

Towards an Inclusive Recipe Literature

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By John Broadway

Like any other piece of literature, a recipe is an act of translation. As literature takes the complexity of the human experience and translates it into a coherent set of signs and symbols, recipes take nature’s diversity and translate it, through language, into a recognizable semiotics. Yet in this translation process information is lost and changed. Just as literature is prone to omit minorities (and focus on the straight, white and male), recipes are liable to problematic limitations through their in- and exclusions.

An incredible diversity of colors, shapes, flavors, and applications flow from this one vegetable. Courtesy of iStock.com/letterberry.

 

Take the humble carrot. There are two main classifications for carrots: eastern and western. Under the western branch, there are four subdivisions: Chantenay, Danvers, Imperator, and Nantes. Some estimates put the total number of individual carrot varietals in the hundreds. Soil type influences carrots’ flavor, with peat soil creating the most sweetness, while sandy soil results in more perfectly formed roots. An incredible diversity of colors, shapes, flavors, and applications flow from this one vegetable.

And yet: how many recipes acknowledge this diversity? In culinary school one of the first formulas shared was the classical mirepoix: two parts onion, one part celery and one part carrot. But which carrots? And for that matter, which onions, and which celery? Behind each of these words, incredible diversities of beautiful, unique, delicious things are hidden. How often does one find a recipe calling for Deep Purple Hybrids, Imperator 58s, Lunar Whites, Parisian Heirlooms, or Purple Dragons? There is only one default carrot, and it is obfuscating a world of diversity.

Exclusion has consequences. Just as traditional western literature is prone to shortcomings in representation, recipes are complicit in creating a world where nature is similarly monolithic, containing only a fraction of its constituent complexity. It then becomes much more difficult for nature to be made visible in its fullness.

In the late 20th century, French feminists argued persuasively for the creative, generative power of language. Hélѐne Cixous (1976) claimed that masculine language being the norm made the feminine other. More recently, Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars, especially Annemarie Mol (1999) and Bruno Latour (2013), have argued for epistemology’s role in shaping ontology; that what we know, how we know, and the ways we go about knowing, all have consequences for emergent conceptions of our realities (very much in the plural). Following Cixous, a literature that falls short in representation creates a world in which diversity is othered – exorcised, even – in favor of monoculture.

It’s a thorny problem. Recipe authors know they need to prescribe ingredients that cooks can reliably find. And yet, a recipe calling for a one-pound bag of carrots is working with a completely different set of assumptions about the world than a recipe that calls for sixteen early-season Thumbelinas. Moreover, each generates a very different sort of world. In the former, there’s only one thing that goes by the name carrot, and it’s the same every time. In the latter, there are myriad things known as carrot, and what they are, what they taste like, and how they cook, varies depending on time of year and provenance. There is an ontological politics at play that, carried out over the entire corpus of recipes and cookbooks, creates a world in which nature’s diversity ceases to exist. As Donna Haraway (2016) teaches, stories make worlds and worlds make stories.

Of course, in a world where access to any fruit or vegetable, before even considering which type, is not only fraught but oftentimes impossible, it’s clear that the work of equity is pressing. Still, the relationship between humans and nature is in dangerous need of reconciliation, for the betterment of all. Part of this work must be a critical evaluation of what we understand nature to be, and how we arrive at that understanding. A more inclusive recipe literature would help better understand the nature in which we are but one small part.

 

References

Cixous, Hélѐne. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1, 4 (1976): 875–93.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016.

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Mol, Annemarie. “Ontological politics. A word and some questions.” The Sociological Review. 47, 1 (1999): 74-89.

 

After earning a BA in English at St. Olaf College, John Broadway spent ten years working throughout the food industry. He recently completed an MBA at the University of Oregon and an MA in Cultural Studies at Malmö University while managing sustainability communications for Yogi Tea. He hopes to continue his interest in food with a PhD next.
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A Scent of Luxury, or Reading Aetius of Amida’s “Libri medicinales” in a New Context

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By Zofia Rzeźnicka

Dealing with the consequences of perspiration in the Roman period has already been discussed on the blog by Cari Casteel, who, referring to Latin source material, showed that unpleasant bodily smell was perceived as a pressing social problem at that time. Little wonder, then, that the Romans were familiar with the production of various deodorising preparations able to arrest or attenuate unpleasant bodily odour, which is, for instance, testified by Pliny’s Naturalis historia.

A figure lounges in a bath, while a clothed attendant washes their left arm.
Fig. 1. Detail from Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “A Favourite Custom,” 1909. Tate Gallery, London. Public Domain.

 

I would like to return to this topic, though on a different literary corpus, and for a slightly different purpose than Cari Casteel. I will instead focus on a fragment found in Libri medicinales by Aetius of Amida (6th c. AD) – which the author took from the lost treatise Cosmetica penned by Criton of Heraclea (2nd c. AD) – in order to prove that medical literature contains important data on both social and economic history.

To those wishing to eliminate excessive perspiration, Aetius of Amida recommends fragrant pills called katapásmata,[i]the strength of which, as we can assume from the chapter, was adjusted to the season. For instance, in summer, when the problem of intensive sweating was especially troublesome, the physician recommended the so-called theriná, i.e. the most effective deodorants for the hottest time of the year.[ii]

One of them was a preparation termed euódes therinón, made from a combination of dried roses, cassia-cinnamon, cardamom, costus, nard and the styptic agent called styptería (most probably alum). According to the recipe, the ingredients were mixed with a fragrant and long-matured wine, and the resultant paste was shaped into pills which were left to dry in a shaded place. Before application, they were crushed and sieved, and the obtained powder was sprinkled over the body and rubbed into the skin during a bath to be finally rinsed off with cold water.[iii]

Three nude figures bathe beneath a spouting fountain.
Fig. 2. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “Strigils and Sponges” (1879). Public domain, care of WikiMedia Commons.

Let us note that each of the above ingredients had its specific function; styptería was to close skin pores,[iv] while substances such as roses, cassia-cinnamon, cardamom, costus and nard were included to provide the body with a pleasant scent. Since the fragrant components (except for roses) were not native to the Mediterranean, they would have had to be imported from far-flung regions of the Greco-Roman civilisation (which undoubtedly meant that the cost of their transportation was high).[v] Their inclusion in the recipe would have considerably increased the price of the cosmetic, and, consequently, made it only accessible to those who were affluent. This conclusion seems to be corroborated by Aetius’ remark that the preparation was carefully massaged into the body in a bath-house, because it suggests that this sort of care products were produced for people with enough leisure time to regularly afford such a visit, i.e. that their everyday life was not filled entirely with professional duties. As bath-houses were mainly located in urban areas it seems that the discussed cosmetic was usually made use of by city dwellers. Last but not least, despite reading in the introduction to the passage on katapásmata that they were used both by men and women, the fact that Aetius’ narration mentions women first, and that the noun “women” is preceded by the phrase “not only” suggests that the latter applied them more frequently. Thus, it seems that in Antiquity and later in the Byzantine period, women were more concerned with the impression they made on other people than men.

The above data is merely a sample of how the ingredients of medical prescriptions recommended by physicians reflected social and economic divisions in the Empire. Hopefully, further analysis of medical works will complement our knowledge of certain economic and social aspects of everyday life.

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Dr. Zofia Rzeźnicka is an assistant professor at the Ceraneum Centre, University of Lodz, Poland and is interested in ancient and early Byzantine pharmacopeia and food history.

 

[i] Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VIII, 7: II 410, 23 – 412, 16 Olivieri (1950).

[ii] Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VIII, 7: II 410, 24 – 411, 4 Olivieri (1950).

[iii] Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VIII, 7: II 411, 4–9 Olivieri (1950).

[iv] Cf. Dioscorides, De materia medica, V, 106, 1–6: III 75, 13 – 77, 12 Wellmann (1914) (styptic properties of styptería – V, 106, 4: III 76, 15).

[v] Even though we do not possess any accurate data on the prices of the mentioned substances in the time of Aetius of Amida’s professional activity, in the chapter devoted to hair thinning preparations (Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VI, 65: II 211, 22 – 212, 15 Olivieri [1950]), the physician writes expressis verbis that ‘the rich’ can enhance the aroma of the medicaments inter alia with nard, cardamom and costus, see Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VI, 65: II 212, 9–12 Olivieri (1950). Cassia-cinnamon is also listed as one of the ingredients of a medicament for the rich in the chapter on ointments for oral cavities, see Aetius of Amida, Libri medicinales, VIII, 47: II 467, 21 – 469, 7 Olivieri (1950) (cassia-cinnamon – VIII, 47: II 468, 6–7).