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Antiquity, Autumn 2024, Global Exchange, Herbal Medicine, Medieval, Plants and Herbs, Posts

Imagery of Empire: Merchantry and Folk Medicine on the Mastic Island

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By Tedi A. Pascarella

«BUONDELMONTI, Cristoforo, Liber Insularum Archipelagi [1420]» in Τόπος και Εικόνα, χαρακτικά ξένων περιηγητών για την Ελλάδα, από σπάνια βιβλία της Γενναδείου Βιβλιοθήκης, Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Ιδιωτικών Συλλογών [Space and image, engravings by foreign travellers to Greece from rare books of the Gennadius Library, the Benaki Museum and private collections], vol. I, Athens, Olkos, (Aikaterini Laskardis Foundation, 1978). http://eng.travelogues.gr/item.php?view=51701.

The island of Chios, located in the North Aegean region, is Greece’s fifth largest island, and the only place in the world that the mastic evergreen shrub, or Pistacia lentiscus, successfully produces its tears: crystalized resin that results from punctures in the bark. The island’s environmental history paints a rich tapestry that showcases Chios as mastic-centric—its tourism focusing on ecological wonders and local foodstuffs. Chios, for centuries, was a cornerstone of Ottoman, Genoese, and Chian mercantile exchange in the greater Mediterranean. The vestiges of occupation can be seen strongly even today: Christopher Columbus’s home in the medieval village of Pyrgi, minarets decorating the skyline, and images of Islamic floral motifs scattered among passersby of the bustling city center of Chios Town. From antiquity—through the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the peak of Genoese presence on the island)—and beyond, mastic (or mastiha) was a coveted commodity: gems monopolized by the sultans of the Ottoman hegemony, as well as an ingredient in folk dishes and medicines. Its properties and a pine-like taste offer today’s Instagram ‘food as medicine’ algorithm ‘back to nature’ and “antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-ulcer, anti-diabetic, cardioprotective and anti-cancer” benefits.1 From bygone uses (Hypocrites suggesting mastiha for gastrointestinal inflammation) to spotlight features on British Bake Off, it is then no surprise there exist countless articles and blog posts with cheeky titles, like “Something Herbal to Chew on” and “Can This Ancient Greek Medicine Cure Humanity?” Powerful merchant families from Genoa occupied the island beginning in the early fourteenth century, culminating in Ottoman dominion from 1566 to 1912.2 While Chios existed as a lucrative point of interest for its trading ports between East and West, mastiha was valued as highly as gold.

This 1783 romantic painting commemorates a Genoese family and its connection to the island of Chios, as well as the virtues associated by Christianity. The use of the foreign is expressed here as the ‘exotic’ through the presence of trade in the Aegean (see Figure 5, below: the female personification of the island of Chios is dressed in flowing fabrics, complete with a turban-like headdress). Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Glorification of the Giustiniani Family, 1783, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437814.

         The famous ruling Giustiniani family, in addition to taxes, paid Sultan Mehmet II a hefty portion of mastiha after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. From a ground-up approach—cultivation of the plant and processing of the resin done by Chians—mastiha was made widely available, making Chios extraordinarily prized. The mastichochoria, or twenty-four buttressed hamlet villages, in southern Chios categorized life by the growth and production of mastiha. George Sidiropoulos writes, the design of the enclosed, fortress-like labyrinth of the Mesta village was a direct impact of the importance of mastiha, in which the “Byzantine Empire exploited this product as a monopoly,” the Genoese Maonacompany exploited farm workers for mastic production, and lastly, the Ottomans, in turn, introduced infrastructural organization, awarding some benefits for those living and working here, like protection from pirates and mercenaries.3

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s description: “This oil sketch is a precious record of a ceiling in Genoa’s ducal palace that was destroyed in the 1860s. Tiepolo’s composition can be compared with his father’s ceiling design for Würzburg, which Domenico helped to execute (see the oil sketch for that painting nearby). The younger Tiepolo depicted a Giustiniani family patriarch, Jacopo, at the top of a staircase, kneeling before a personification of the Ligurian Republic. At left is a female personification of the Aegean island of Chios, which the Giustiniani family ruled for two centuries. At right, figures in exotic dress allude to the family’s commercial enterprises in Asia Minor.”

While it is true we know that mastiha was utilized by the ancients as remedy for upset stomachs and fresh breath, day-to-day cultural exchange resulted in traditional recipes and uses via word-of-mouth. Because of this, scholars have turned to not only official imperial records but local folk and village narratives to help adjust and add to the historical record, quite literally a ground-up approach. Folk costumes and modes of dress juxtaposed with architecture and village ethos in the artwork of award-winning photographer George Tatakis epitomizes, through visual art, mastic’s food science as well as the island’s ecological footprint, connecting cultural past, present, and future. Tatakis, capturing the mystic qualities of the island and its mastiha, writes, “legend has it that the mastic was a gift from Saint Isidore, who sought refuge near Mesta in 250 AD after being chased and injured by the Romans. Exhausted and unable to continue, he found solace under a mastic tree where it is said that the tree wept tears of the fragrant resin.”Tatakis captures the costume of Nenita, among other villages, including elaborate embroidery, linens, and headscarf, accompanied by rustic tools of the mastic warehouse, like the pans used to sort and clean the tears. While the horrors, complications, and interactions of a history of occupation is fraught in the island’s past, the opulence of lore abounds, as mastic remains a keystone ingredient of the identity recipe of Chios. 

Tedi A. Pascarella, MA History, is a world historian based in New Jersey. Her academic focuses include the early modern Mediterranean, environmental, textile histories, and their intersections. She has taught as an instructor at Monmouth University. A bibliography of her publications can be found at tediapascarella.com. 

  1. Vasiliki Pachi, et al. “Traditional Uses, Phtochemistry and Pharmacology of Chios Mastic Gum (Pistacia Lentiscus Var Chia, Anacardiaceae): A Review” in Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2020. ↩︎
  2. A product of the mastic tree, pitch, distilled from turpentine, also had uses as caulking for the seams in ships and the waterproofing of slate roofing and tiles. And as Kenneth M. Setton stipulates, “Asiatic drugs and spices were transshipped from Chios to the chief ports of western Europe. Loss of the island was not to improve the economy of the home government, and was to destroy the last remnants of Genoese prestige in the East. Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 1976), 324. ↩︎
  3. George Sidiropoulos, “The Development Status and Prospects of a Medieval Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean in Journal of the Knowledge Economy (2016): 631-643. ↩︎
Autumn 2024, Culinary History, Early Modern, Food and Drink, Posts

Recipe Sharing Across the Channel: French Recipe for Plum Pudding

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By Lauren Owens

Plum pudding is a classic dish in English cuisine. Indeed, the boiled sweet is one of those cultural markers associated with England, and yet it features ingredients that are not native to England: currants, raisins, nutmeg, and ginger. These ingredients make tangible (and edible)the reach of the British Empire.1 By the eighteenth century, boiling was a cooking trend that had largely died out in continental Europe, yet printed French texts from the nineteenth century show that plum pudding had made its way to France.2 How did knowledge of this dish spread to Europe? I found this document while doing archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Arsenal location in Paris.3 This recipe for plum pudding was in a folder of random culinary recipes. I was looking for medical recipes and remedies, but this folder caught my eye with its contents: recipes for cheese, strawberry syrups, almond cake, and how to conserve vegetables. Finding this folder was a treat while working in the archive. It provided another area of recipe production that I was not actively looking for. 

“Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#

This recipe shows that knowledge about popular cultural dishes was shared across the pond much earlier than the published texts indicate. This recipe was titled, “recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” and follows popular English recipes for the dish.4 However, this record is distinct in two ways. It features two sets of handwriting, showing that someone added to this recipe and altered the ingredients to their tastes. Second, this new author added two spoonfuls of brandy and two spoonfuls of powdered sugar to the recipe while the English recipe uses the natural sweetness of the dried fruit for the sugar content. This source is significant for showing the process of recipe alteration and adaptation. 

I decided to make the pudding at home. My sources often lack specific voices and explanations behind the recipe. This opportunity allowed me to think like the people I study.

“Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#

I began by cutting a pound of softened butter; the recipe called for suet, lard, tallow, or butter. Butter was the cost-effective choice. I folded the currents and raisins into the butter with my hands so they would fuse. Next, I grated a loaf of white bread into fine pieces and then folded that into the butter. The butter, dried fruits, and bread mixed gave off a strong smell of apple cider vinegar. I added nutmeg, ginger, and a dash of salt.

Image taken by the author.

I separated eight egg yolks from their whites and saved four whites to add to a pint of milk. After adding the liquids, I created powdered sugar in a mortar and pestle and added two spoonsful to the mix with the liqueur; this added richness and sweetness to the batter. The recipe called for the batter to be thick enough for a wooden spoon to stand on its own.

Image taken by the author.

The next step was prepping my cheesecloth for boiling. I soaked the cloth in hot water and added the filling.5 Now, it was time to boil: though it was not large (about the size of a grapefruit), this pudding took five hours. To keep the pudding submerged, I had to keep adding water as it was cooking on the highest heat of my stove. By the end, the water resembled that of a beef tea. Got Bovril? 

Image taken by the author.

Finally, the taste: what does an eighteenth-century plum pudding taste like? Well…it tastes like wet bread and raisins. The smell resembled that of eggy bread, which makes sense considering the main ingredients were a loaf of bread, eight yolks, and milk. It was not bad, but it lacked significant flavor, and my pudding did not conform fully during the boiling process. My expectations were low in terms of taste, but the experience was certainly rewarding. This experiment has helped me find creative methods for conducting my dissertation research when I find myself lacking creativity and struggling to find the words to write about my recipes. This research has helped me with how I think about recipe production. The lack of diagrams or sketches to follow made me focus on the directions. I found myself having to work and think more slowly than I usually do in the kitchen. I relied more on my sense of smell and touch with this recipe. The lack of images with this recipe was freeing for this attempt—I was not worried about looks. I wanted the demonstration to work. I would argue that in modern-day recipes, there are almost too many images; this can inhibit the adaptable nature of cooking and recipe development. The images provided with a recipe signify that the experiment has worked; these ingredients cooked at this temperature will make this product–great—but too many images could lead to feelings of failure if the final product does not match the source. I have learned from this experiment (quite literally) that the proof is in the pudding, to understand the individuals who made these recipes we must be willing to try it their way, but we must also be willing to modify and change the recipes for our liking. I would have added dates, cinnamon, and more sugar to this pudding for a stronger flavor and sweetness.

Boiling the pudding. Image taken by the author.

These sources are evidence that popular recipes passed back and forth between countries earlier than the printed texts show. This French recipe shows how these individuals altered the English plum pudding to their tastes after experimenting with the original source. By continuing to use recipes to unpack the development of cultural cuisines and national dishes, we can understand how people made sense of their class status and cooking knowledge and developed their tastes during the eighteenth century with the influx of new ingredients, foods, and tastes.

The finished pudding. Image taken by the author.

Lauren Owens is a PhD candidate at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Lauren is working on her dissertation on recipe and remedy production and cultures of health and wellness in eighteenth-century France. Follow @lowenshistory on X for sporadic tweets and the occasional meme.

 

  1. Kaori O’Connor. “The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes, and the Commodities of Empire,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 1, (2009): 127-55. ↩︎
  2. The French recipes are featured in Antoine Beauvillier’s L’art du cuisiner published in 1814, and Émile Littrés dictionnaire de la langue française (Littré) Tome 3, in 1843, respectively. These texts do not elaborate much on the recipes for plum pudding, in fact, in L’art du cuisiner, the dish is listed under the salad category, as “plombpoutinge, sauce au vin de Malaga.” A.B, Beauvilliers, A. B, Katherine Golden Bitting Collection on Gastronomy, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection. L’art Du Cuisinier. A Paris: Chez Pilet, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1814. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/07023590/ 
    Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (Littré) Tome 3, Hachette, Paris, 1873. Dictionnaire D’autrefois Public Access Collection. https://artflsrv04.uchicago.edu/philologic4.7/publicdicos/navigate/16/18643?byte=25827192. 2024 ↩︎
  3. “Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#  ↩︎
  4. Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery made plain and easy/ by a Lady (Hannah Glasse). 1747. Book. London: Prospect Books, 1983. The Wellcome Collection. 2024. ↩︎
  5. Glasse, The art of cookery made plain and easy/ by a Lady. ↩︎
Autumn 2024, Bodies, Family and Household, Posts

Crafting Food, Crafting Senses

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By Sonakshi Srivastava

There is something about my mother’s hands. At once so mundane, at once so magical – they infuse life to the oft-quoted, almost quotidian, Hindi idiom haathon mein jaadoo hai (there is magic in your hands).  I have often marvelled at the multiplicities of hands in general, and my mother’s in particular. Her hands, naturally, embody the essence of life to me. They contain the world, and open it up too – by appealing to the innate, the familial, the sensuous, her hands are no less than a recipe that nurtures life. 

Hands, I believe, are perhaps the most versatile parts of the human body. Crafted for tactility, and capable of creating, the catalogue of hands’ works run aplenty. Hands assume a life of their own. A mental recollection of a person would necessarily entail a recollection of their hands or by extension, a creation by their hands. Consequently, a sudden surge of memories announces itself, brimming forth with the sensual affectations of the tactile, the olfactory, the auditory. It is almost as if the senses are enmeshed with the hands, a kind of memory randomly accessed. 

My mother’s hands intrigue me. They are an archive, an extensive chronicler of time, a document of experiences – always nourishing, always nurturing. In their negotiations with the everyday, a rhythmic grammar of sameness emerges – those hands at work – mending, cooking, healing. This visual essay rings up the vocabulary of one such particular memory – the sameness that emerged when I saw her prepare my favourite dish, ghuiyyan ke patte ke pakode (fritters made from the leaves of colocasia), and when she mended and dyed a dupatta for me, and how these images spoke to the sensuous realm, thereby making me aware of the unity of the body and the mind. 

सामग्री//Ingredients:

  • spices
  • thread
  • leaves of colocasia
  • fabric
  • thread
  • flowers
  • scissors

 विधि//Steps:

1. गंध// Smell

Image credit: Anoushka Srivastava

Gather the ingredients together. Pay attention to how each ingredient evokes the senses. The smell of the marigolds, the smell of the spices, the smell of the leaves of colocasia, the gradient of the veins of the leaves, the texture of the dupatta, the edge of the scissors, of the needle.

2. स्पर्श//Touch

Image credit: Anoushka Srivastava

Hands at work. The ingredients are infused with life as the fingers gently spread the petals on the dupatta, the masala paste on the leaves. The ingredients are now works in-progress. 

3. ध्वनि//Sound

Image credit: Anoushka Srivastava

The congruency begins to emerge as the hands perform similar actions in crafting together the dupatta, the fritters. The flowers rustle in the dupatta rolling over, the masala paste is enveloped in the rolling leaves.

4. दृष्टि//Sight

Image credit: Anoushka Srivastava

Threading together as an act of putting together. The hands tread carefully, negotiating between the fragile cloth and the sharp needle, the supple leaf against the abrasive thread.  

5. स्वाद//Taste

Image credit: Anoushka Srivastava

A severance, a cut – in the cloth, in the rolled-up leaf. The carved-out parts are now dyed, and fried respectively – the final act of feeding the aesthetics.

When I moved away from home in 2015, epiphanic realizations about things that I had taken for granted hit me. I realized the importance of the most mundane things – from stitching to cooking. In an attempt to learn these skills, I pivoted to my mother’s hands – the hope was to be able to recreate a part of her haathon ka jaadoo, to be able to bask in the familial impressions of the senses that are closely tied to my mother’s hands.  The mere sight of her hands – in person, or in memory conjure up images of deep familiarity and warmth. I am instantly struck by the fertile machinations of my mother’s hands, and how a sheer recollection of the same is capable of dishing out images of my favourite recipe by her, thoroughly refreshing my senses. 

My mother’s hands are the artificer of memories – constantly weaving the present for a reflection of the past, for a window into the future.

Sonakshi Srivastava is a senior writing tutor at Ashoka University, the translations editor at The Usawa Literary Review, and an educational arm assistant at Asymptote. As opposed to eating, she loves writing and talking about food. 

 


Autumn 2024, Posts

Portrayal of Women in North Carolina Kitchen-Related Advertising

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By Simone Gillespie

In an attempt to promote the modernization of homes and the switch to electric, in the first half of the twentieth century, North Carolina power companies ran advertisements that focused on the housewife and her work in the kitchen. In both the imagery and language of these advertisements, housewives are portrayed as hospitable servants to those within their households. Occasionally the advertisements leave room for activities outside of the home, but they primarily allude to how their products help to alleviate the effort and time spent completing domestic tasks. To showcase the breadth of advertisements produced by these power companies, the ads examined for this article were published in North Carolina newspapers, cookbooks, yearbooks, and city directories between 1915 to 1965. 

Image Credit: The Charlotte News, August 28, 1919

Some advertisements used a personified lightning bolt, Reddy Kilowatt, as a stand-in for the invisible electrical current powering new kitchen appliances. Created in 1926 (though he didn’t appear in NC until 1935) Reddy was the mascot for power companies across the country during the twentieth century and is a clever advertising ploy that distracts the reader from the reality of the situation. For example, an ad printed in The Tryon Daily Bulletin by Duke Power told readers: “With Reddy’s help she prepared 20 meals a week, tidies 6 rooms daily, keeps clothes clean and in order for 4 people.” Giving this personification of electricity a name and credit attempts to negate the work completed by the housewife; it creates an illusion that she has a second person helping her complete tasks, despite the fact that it is still only her doing the work. 

Image Credit: The Charlotte Observer, September 9, 1919, North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

The language used in power company’s ads further serves as a reflection of the attitudes toward domestic life in the first half of the century. Ads often used language such as “my wife,” “she,” “your wife,” etc., never addressing the woman herself, only the man. It wasn’t until World War II, when women took charge of their household while their husbands were at war, that the advertisements began to shift their language, referring to “her money,” which did not free the housewives from their homemaking duties, but gave them some household autonomy. Later ads refer to the housewife’s budget,which was allotted from her husband’s overall household budget. 

Positioning women as being a servant was ingrained in society from a young age. One Southern Public Utilities ad printed in 1925 in The Black and Gold, the yearbook of Richard J. Reynolds High School, read “An Electric Range in your home means a Cleaner Kitchen and a Happy Wife.” This language presumed that most male students would shortly thereafter find a wife. Another ad, run by Duke Power in 1947, focused on “the older school girls” not having to “hurry straight home from school to help mother” with household tasks thanks to an electric oven. 

Image Credit: The Black and Gold, Richard J. Reynolds High School, 1925, North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

Many of these advertisements reference the “drudgery” of the kitchen. Drudgery – “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work” –  is the common enemy in ads promoting modern kitchen conveniences; drudgery may mean maintaining fires, washing dishes, or boiling water. These advertisements show housewives either partaking in or being relieved of the drudgery of domestic labor. Some harken back to days of the past while others show modern housewives with big smiles in their electric kitchens because, according to Southern Public Utilities, “it enables you to remain fresh and sweet for the family,” and to Duke Power, access to electricity “add[s] so much to her charm, health and disposition.” 

One Duke Power ad implies that if a husband provides his wife with an electric kitchen, she will be happy and healthy, a “Rosy Cheeked Smiling Wife” freed from “kitchen drudgery and worry.” Another boasts a “Recipe for a HEALTHY.. HAPPY WIFE!” In this ad, the recipe is laid out as follows:  “Plenty of time for outdoor recreation, for social activities, time to spend with her children and relief from kitchen drudgery and worry!,” all provided by a modern electric range. Even though these advertisements craft a narrative of  less time being spent in the kitchen for the wives and mothers to do other things and lead healthier and happier lives, they still position domestic work as the wife or mother’s duty. 

In the 1930s Duke Power Company ran a series of ads titled “Lovable wives and livable kitchens.” One installment of this series, printed in the April 15, 1937 edition of The Yadkin Ripple, shows a husband and wife in an embrace in their kitchen. The opening line reads, “Romance lives again for the happy wife who discovers the chance of kitchen drudgery.” There is an implication that if the husband opts to provide his wife with these new kitchen appliances, she will have more time to spend with him romantically, even sexually. The ad goes on to implore the husband to “Give your wife freedom from kitchen toils–help her to keep that youthful sweetness–let romance live again.” It is not hard to read between the lines here and draw the connection that sex may be in the husband’s future should he gift his wife with an electric kitchen. 

Beyond the heteronormative household structures reinforced and encouraged by these ads, I feel that it must be acknowledged that in each of these ads where images of people appeared, only conventionally attractive white people were showcased– further demonstrating the world in which they were created. Through the imagery and language used in these advertisements, a recipe was developed, tweaked, and perfected over time. In a sense, these ads, when collected and shown together, create a recipe book focusing on how to be a loving and hospitable housewife. Just as recipes throughout time reflect the modernization of kitchens across America, so do these “recipes” reflect on how to be a good housewife. Morphing from gas to electric, fresh to frozen, the kitchen and ingredients have changed, but the housewife’s duties and ties to the kitchen have remained the same. These recipes for hospitable housewives are not clear cut instructions, but are woven into the bylines and takeaways of each advertisement, reflecting societal norms and further instilling these heteronormative beliefs in the reader.

Simone Gillespie, an early career librarian and archivist, is a two-time graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving her BA in History and English in 2020 and her MS in Library Science in 2024. Her research and archival interests include LGBTQ+ history, Southern foodways, community archives, archival access, Americana, and sports history.

Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine