All posts by Joshua Schlachet

Alchemy, Antiquity, Culinary History, Experimentation, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Plants and Herbs, Posts, Series: Distillation, Tools and Techniques

A Roman Vegetarian Substitute for Fish Sauce

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By Edith Evans

Roman cookery has been one of my research interests since the 1980s; I’ve accumulated a large repertoire of ancient recipes and usually do at least one live demonstration a year.  Most of the recipes include garum or liquamen – fish sauce – as a taste enhancer, providing salt and umami. Whilst finding fish sauce is fairly easy nowadays in Britain (the Romans used the same techniques to make it as the modern Thai and Vietnamese), using it at demonstrations disappoints vegetarians who would otherwise like to sample the plant-based dishes.

I found the answer to this problem in a Late Antique agricultural treatise:

Liquamen from pears: Ritually pure liquamen (liquamen castimoniale) from pears is made like this: Very ripe pears are trodden with salt that has not been crushed. When their flesh has broken down, store it either in small casks or in earthenware vessels lined with pitch. When it is hung up [to drain] after the third month without being pressed on, the flesh of the pears discharges a liquid with a delicious taste but a pastel colour. To counter this, mix in a proportion of dark-coloured wine when you salt the pears.
– Palladius: Opus Agriculturae 3.25.12

Liquamen castimoniale must have been required for people observing certain religious strictures (castimoniale means ‘to do with religious ceremonies’). Why would ordinary liquamen have been thought unsuitable? Was it the fish? (Pliny the Elder writes of a special fish sauce for Jews (Natural History 31.95) that he calls garum castimoniarum, although he’s obviously got the wrong end of the stick when it comes to Jewish food laws because he says it’s made using fish without scales). Alternatively, was it because liquamen was the product of fermentation? Fermentation was often considered a form of decomposition, which might have led it to be regarded as ritually unclean.

This has a bearing on how we interpret the recipe. Although Palladius tells us the ingredients to use (whole pears and salt, plus optional red wine) he does not give any information about the relative proportions. This leaves us with two possible techniques. Either you use a high proportion of salt and effectively create a brine utilising the juice of the pears, or you use a low proportion and promote a lactic fermentation by incubating the mix a suitable temperature (although Palladius doesn’t mention this). When used to flavour food, the product of the first method adds a strong taste of salt but no umami. The second would add some umami but also acidity, but a much lower amount of salt. However, if the problem was the fermentation itself, the second method would have been as unacceptable as standard fish sauce.

I’ve had a go at the lactic fermentation method, using 2% of the weight of the pears in salt, but when I tried it, the mix went mouldy before fermentation had a chance to take hold.  I’ve had much more success with the first method and have repeated it enough times to get a consistent product. The best pears to use are juicy varieties with very tannic skins, like Williams (also known as Bartlett) and Comice. I mash up the pears – stalks, skins, cores and all – mix them with 25% – 50% of their weight in coarse sea salt (I don’t bother with the wine), and leave them at the back of the fridge in a glass jar with the lid only lightly screwed on. At the end of two months (unlike us, the Romans counted inclusively), the pulp has started to separate out. The heavier elements form a pale layer at the bottom of the jar, whilst the top part of the mixture is more liquid and is a pale pinkish-brown. When drained through a nylon sieve, the colour of the resulting liquid is a very pale version of the colour of fish sauce. 

I’ve tried various proportions of salt, and found that, if you use 50%, you seem to get more liquid, probably because the mixture doesn’t draw in moisture from the air to the same extent.  But a smaller percentage of salt allows more of the delightful pear flavour comes through – I find it much more difficult to detect in the 50% version. Stored in a clean bottle it will keep for months without refrigeration.

Figure 1: The pear liqumen is in the flask with dark blue trim

I’ve only had a problem once, when spots of mould had appeared on the surface of a batch six months after I’d made it. As I was due to give a Roman cookery demonstration in a few days’ time I had to quickly rustle up something I could use, so I cored and cut up a pear, boiled it with 25% salt and a little water, removed the peel and pulped the flesh in the blender. It was much too pale, but the taste was the same and I decided it would be a useful method for someone who couldn’t wait two months – in fact that’s what I recommend for my Roman Cookery School videos (https://m.youtube.com/user/GGATArchaeology and https://en-gb.facebook.com/GGATarchaeology/).

Early Modern, Emotion, Knowledge Transmission, Medicine, Posts, Women and Gender

‘The Best That Ever I Had’: Gifting a Medical Recipe in Early Modern Yorkshire

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By Emma Marshall

On 4th September 1700, the elderly gentlewoman Alice Thornton sat down to write to Lady Henrietta Maria Yarburgh. Both women lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire, but Thornton opened her letter by saying that she was ‘soe a great a stranger to your Person’, suggesting that she had never met Lady Yarburgh. [1] She was also of a lower social status and addressed her deferentially, repeatedly ‘begging your Ladyship’s pardon’ for having ‘committed a great piece of Rudeness to be soe free with a person of your quality’.

Image credit: Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York (YM/CP/1, 2/5, 15)

What did Thornton have to say to this ‘stranger’? She explained that she had heard from friends and servants that Lady Yarburgh’s husband was suffering from ‘Paraleticks and Convolutions’. Thornton’s own deceased husband, William, had experienced similar ‘fits’ and she wanted to recommend a recipe for a ‘glister’, or suppository, which she had received from ‘the ablest Physsions’ and described as ‘the best that ever I had to preserve the life of my dere husband’. Thornton included this recipe as a separate insert so ‘that it may be more convenient to Read’, perhaps imagining that Lady Yarburgh would paste it into a book or circulate it among her own acquaintances, both common practices. Thornton also asked Lady Yarburgh to ‘do me the favoure to send me the Paper of Receipts backe againe for I am now very Aged; & cannot see to write the same and have great occasions for it’. These notes on the materiality of medical recipes shed light on their circulation, use and reuse. As proof that the glister was popular and effective on a wide scale, Thornton described using it to ‘cure many more in the same distemper’ as her husband, and clearly copying the recipe out on a regular basis was physically strenuous. However, hinting at its status as a treasured possession also emphasised her respect for Lady Yarburgh and encouraged trust between the two women. Unfortunately, the recipe has been separated from the letter and lost, perhaps suggesting that Lady Yarburgh did indeed return it to Thornton, or pass it on to friends. 

Aware that she was unknown to Lady Yarburgh, Thornton used the recipe’s accompanying letter to recommend her own expertise and character. She did so through narrative episodes, recounting her husband’s fits and her responses in detail. For example, William appeared as if he ‘had bin dead & without breathing or mocion or life 2 daies & 2 nights’ during his first attack, which she remedied with the glister. Emphasising the severity of his illness also stressed the efficacy of her recipe. This was reiterated by her account of William’s death, which she blamed on his disregard of her ‘extreame earnest’ pleas for him to ‘take yt order as usuall’. Thornton also expressed her own emotional reaction to William’s illness through conventional feminine behaviour, stating that she ‘cannot but sympathise with Your Ladyship having had so many frights & tears and watching & excessive sorrow in every fitt my dere husband had’. The link between physical gestures and emotion in sickchamber narratives has been explored by Hannah Newton, and in this letter they were used to communicate shared experience and feeling between writer and recipient. [2] Thornton’s desire to gift the recipe to Lady Yarburgh was explained in similarly personal terms: ‘haveing bin my selfe vissited with ye like calamity I am obliged in Charity to assist others […] in distress.’ She also added that God’s blessing on the medicine and ‘Christian patience’ were needed for positive results. Thornton used the letter to perform her identity as a skilled medical practitioner, loving wife and pious Christian, thus approaching Lady Yarburgh as a virtuous and empathetic friend. 

Despite the loss of the recipe itself, the letter sent alongside it shows how written medical instructions interacted with other forms of inter-household paperwork in early modern England, as described by Katherine Allen. Like her famous autobiography, Thornton’s recommended recipe was bound up with personal memory and emotional experience, a topic discussed by Montserrat Cabré amongst others, but it was also socio-politically significant. Thornton was 74 years old in 1700 and had suffered poverty since her husband’s death. In this context, her medical gift was a strategy to cross social boundaries and form an alliance with a potential patroness. As Elaine Leong notes, reciprocity was key to informal medical exchanges and Thornton could expect material, financial or social favours if the recipe was well received. [3] Of course, asserting medical authority to an unknown social superior could disrupt customary power dynamics, which Thornton navigated with care. She emphasised the recipe’s reliability through storytelling, describing her extensive and successful experiences of its use. However, she also had to prove her personal integrity if she was to be trusted by Lady Yarburgh. Thornton consequently used accounts of the remedy to present herself as a humble and compassionate gentlewoman, in line with traditional gender roles. The gifting of recipes was an important token of friendship and knowledge exchange, but it could also be used to construct self-identity and negotiate relationships rooted in social hierarchy, power and obligation.

Notes

[1] Borthwick Institute for Archives (University of York) YM/CP/1, 2/5, 15.

[2] Hannah Newton, Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 119-21.

[3] Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 37-8, 174.

Notes

[1] Borthwick Institute for Archives (University of York) YM/CP/1, 2/5, 15.

[2] Hannah Newton, Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 119-21.

[3] Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 37-8, 174.

Culinary History, Experimentation, Food and Drink, Modern, Posts, Tools and Techniques

Say Ohm: Japanese Electric Bread and the Joy of Panko

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By Nathan Hopson

In 1998, the New York Times introduced readers to an exotic new ingredient described as “a light, airy variety [of breadcrumb] worlds away from the acrid, herb-flecked, additive-laden bread crumbs in the supermarket,” with a texture “more like crushed cornflakes or potato chips” than its plebeian brethren (Fabricant 1998). That ingredient was panko, which has since become a staple for American home and professional cooks alike. In 2007, panko accounted for only 3% of US breadcrumb sales, for instance. Five years later, one in six American households regularly stocked panko in the pantry. Panko caught on because it is crunchier (and stays crunchy under restaurant heat lamps), absorbs less oil, and adds more volume than traditional breadcrumbs (Nassauer 2013).

Why are these Japanese breadcrumbs different? How did they get to be that way? The story told by American manufacturers such as LA-based Upper Crust Enterprises―an ironic name given that the secret to panko is crust-free bread―is that “Japanese soldiers during World War II discovered [that] crustless bread made for better breadcrumbs as they cooked it with electricity from tank batteries, not wanting to draw the enemy’s attention with smoke from a fire”(Nassauer 2013). Upper Crust’s president, Gary Kawaguchi, affirmed this account in a recent interview.

This is a cool story. Turns out, the truth is just as cool.

Japanese inventors had tinkered with electric cooking prototypes since at least the 1920s. Then in 1933, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) commissioned a “field kitchen that can prepare both rice and bread”(Aoki 2019, 11). Cost was no object and time was of the essence. As Katarzyna Cwiertka has noted, the military generally advocated bread, but there was a special urgency in light of the logistical difficulties of supplying rice to new front lines in Siberia and Manchuria. In 1937, paymaster captain Akutsu Shōzō’s design became the “Type 97” field kitchen, first deployed with the IJA’s First Independent Mixed Brigade that year (Uchida 2020, 2–4). The 97’s cooker was an insulated wooden box with electrode plates attached to the base and four sides of the interior. The highly efficient cooking process Akutsu used goes by several names, including ohmic and Joule heating. It is a form of electroconductive heating that passes electric current through foods to heat them rapidly and uniformly, quickly producing a light, yeasty, crust-free bread.

Figure 1: Type 97 field kitchen interior structure. Courtesy of JACAR.

After the war, companies such as Sony began selling rice cookers and bread machines that adapted these wartime technologies, and DIY home bread makers were showcased in magazines and newspapers. Influential women’s magazine Shufu no tomo and the inaugural issue of boys’ DIY magazine Shōnen kōsaku both featured instructions for bread makers derived from Akutsu’s design in 1946, reflecting the popularity of electric power in light of consumer fuel shortages and, conversely, excess generating capacity with military factories shut down (Uchida and Aoki 2019, 484).

In the 1960s, the new postwar frozen food industry hungered for high-quality breadcrumbs. Wheat had poured into Japan after 1945, the result of food aid; the use of bread and other wheat products in Japan’s school lunch program; and endless marketing promotions. Although ambitious American visions to recenter the national diet on wheat were soon abandoned, US agricultural imports and food technologies remained critical to Japan’s changing postwar food systems. Improved and upscaled food processing equipment met a market awash in cheap wheat, enthusiastic consumers (about half of whom owned electric refrigerators by the mid-1960s), and improved logistics. Frozen foods were among the shiny new things of postwar Japan’s shiny new “bright life,” and the mass use of frozen foods to cater the 1964 Olympiad and 1970 World’s Fair made them even more attractive symbols of Japan reborn.

These factors spurred rapid growth in breadcrumb demand, which was met in large part by the industrial-scale use of ohmic heating to create “electric breads” that were airy and uniform, and fried up crisply and uniformly when made into panko (Uchida and Aoki 2019, 485).

Sources Cited

Aoki Takashi. 2019. “Denkyokushiki chōri no hatsumei kara panko e tsuzuku rekishi oyobi saigen jikken.” Science Journal of Kanagawa University, no. 30 (June): 9–16.

Fabricant, Florence. 1998. “From Japan, the Secret of Crunchy Coating.” New York Times, December 1998.

Nassauer, Sarah. 2013. “Panko Tries to Find a Place in Every Pantry.” Dow Jones Institutional News, March 7, 2013.

Uchida Takashi. 2020. “Suihan o kigen to shi panko seizō ni tsuzuku denki pan no rekishi (1): Rikugun suiji jidōsha to Kōseishiki denki suihanki to Takara ohachi.” Tōkyō Yakka Daigaku kenkyū kiyō, no. 23 (March): 1–14.

Uchida Takashi, and Aoki Takashi. 2019. “Suihan, denki pan, pan seizō ni itaru Nihon no denkyokushiki chōri no rekishi: Rikugun ‘suiji jidōsha’ o kigen to suru denki pan jikken.” Nihon Yakugaku Kyōiku Gakkai ronbunshū, no. 43: 483–86.

This post is part five in an ongoing series by Hopson on the history of nutrition in modern Japan. You can read his previous post here.

18th Century, Apothecaries, Early Modern, Medicine

Bulk Medicine and Waged Labor in Eighteenth-Century London

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By Zachary Dorner

In the eighteenth century, druggists, chemists, and apothecaries began producing medicines in larger quantities for sale in a variety of markets, resulting in a more coherent manufacturing sector in Britain. Making medicines at such scale typically involved labor-intensive chemical processes occurring in laboratories that resembled other early industrial spaces as sites of work. We can catch a glimpse of these spaces in images like the frontispiece of the chemist Francis Spilsbury’s Friendly Physician (1773) where two figures toil with mortars, stills, and other instruments in the background, separated from the well-organized shop in the image’s foreground. A variety of business records from period pharmacies, including wage books, inventories, and recipes, enable us to uncover a little more about those indistinct figures bent over their work.

Figure 1: Interior of a pharmacy. From Spilsbury, The Friendly Physician (1773). Image credit: Wellcome Collection, London.

The increasing concentration of labor and capital in London’s medical marketplace encouraged men and women to set up laboratories, big and small, around the city, as seen in contemporary fire insurance policies. These laboratories were no longer artisanal workshops, though also not yet the steam-powered production lines of the nineteenth century. Alchemical techniques formerly applied to the transmutation of metals found use in the production of medicines in these spaces, such as the chemical laboratory depicted in William Lewis’s Philosophical Commerce of Arts (1763). They could contain machinery for grinding, pounding, and sifting drugs (the raw materials for compound medicines), as well as high-pressure boilers and furnaces for distillation and drying. Open fires were common beneath hundred-gallon stills, evaporating pans, condensers, copper boilers, and stoves. If temperatures went unmanaged, ingredients could burn, ruining a preparation; even worse, stills could boil over or even explode. Manufacturing medicines with this equipment required significant inputs of energy, increasingly supplied by waged labor forces during the eighteenth century.

Figure 2: A view of William Lewis’s chemical laboratory. From Lewis, Commercium Philosophico-Technicum (1763). Image credit: Wellcome Collection, London.

Some traces of their daily routines can be found in recipe books from Corbyn & Company, one of the highest volume producers and distributors of medicine in London at the time. A recipe for flower of benzoin (benzoic acid, a topical antiseptic also used for a variety of internal matters) from the 1760s, for example, evokes the work of pharmacy. To start the process, several hundredweight of gum benzoin, a fragrant resin from the benjamin tree of Sumatra and Java, had to be purchased at auction and carted to the partnership’s laboratory at Cold Bath Fields where it would be pressed and milled, requiring several days, multiple men, and lots of charcoal. These manipulations were followed by 50 days purifying the resin through distillation (called rectifying). All in all, Thomas Corbyn estimated that the production of benzoin took 63 days and cost about 2 shillings per day for the work, which also included cleaning the distillation equipment, wear and tear of the machinery, and extra expenses (such as 8 weeks of beer for the workers costing 18 pence per week). These costs, nevertheless, remained relatively minor compared to the sometimes quite significant costs of raw materials, thus incentivizing production at scale.

Figure 3: Flower of benzoin costing from Thomas Corbyn’s miscellaneous papers, c. 1760, MS.5448/2, Wellcome Collection.

Corbyn & Co. shipped much of the medicine they produced, such as the hard-pressed flower of benzoin, to the overseas markets provided by imperial institutions, such as the Royal Navy, East India Company, transatlantic slave trade, and Caribbean plantations. With increasing demand at home and aboard, political support, and capitalization, London’s pharmacies kept growing in the early nineteenth century, with some of them providing the seeds of several of today’s major pharma firms.

Figure 4: Glass medicine bottles for export used in the eighteenth century. Image credit: Wellcome Collection, London.

It can be surprisingly easy to miss the labor in London’s laboratories that underwrote the expanding production of medicines in eighteenth-century London. A chemist’s or druggist’s work area has received far less attention in histories of capitalism or industry than the cotton mill, for example. Recipes and other business records from London’s pharmacies, however, offer an opportunity to begin reconstructing the rhythms of work in these spaces and reintegrate them into studies of economy, labor, and health.

Figure 5: Plan of the laboratory at Apothecaries’ Hall, 1823. From The Origin, Progress and Present State… (1823). Image credit: Wellcome Collection, London.