Category Archives: Environment and Climate

‘All Manner of Fluxes:’ Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America

Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Fiona O’Brien

The flows and fluxes of bodily fluids that determined an early modern woman’s embodied existence would need to be, if not controlled, understood by her. If we focus on the fluidity of the early modern reproductive body, we can begin to better understand the materia medica used to treat it; once we do so, we can begin to compare worldviews more aptly, and examine, for example, the continuities and breaks between the reproductive pharmacopeias used by Indigenous Americans and English colonists. If we accept population expansion and settlement to be a key aspect of the building of the early paternalistic American state, these materia medica used for regulating the female body become pertinent to histories of colonization, law, and politics. How was the natalist conquest of early Northeast America fueled by this piecemeal process of filling a pharmacopeia full of the familiar, and stuffing the unfamiliar into known molds? How do we investigate this process as historians, when both parties of women concerned, Indigenous and English, left few records behind?

European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.


English colonists uniformly observed that Indigenous women gave birth in total isolation, did not feel pain while doing so, and recovered almost immediately: in 1634, William Wood tells English readers that for Indigenous women in New England, “a bigge bellie hinders no business, nor a childebirthe takes much time.” [1] Clearly, there was a lack of interest in recording the birthing practices of Indigenous women. But maybe we begin to get answers if we flow between sources, thus crafting an amorphous middle-ground. Early modern recipes encourage us to engage with sources collectively; those sources themselves cannot be understood in isolation, but require that the historian temporarily inhabit the phenomenal, the experiential, the habitual body.

According to Western medicine, peak health was believed to be reached when humoral balance was suited to the condition, climate, and individual. It was therefore believed that when early modern Europeans left their homelands, they risked moral, customary, and physiological degeneration; a hot climatic change would cool the man’s body and heat the woman’s.[2] The overheated female body could overmenstruate, expel fetuses, and fail to purify blood into seed or breastmilk.[3] This risked the colonial project: women were required to establish a successful colony, but their reproductivity was in danger within this humoral cosmology.

In order for a medication to be successful, it must purge: the healing patient should be vomiting, bleeding, urinating, sweating, or crying. This meant the body’s proper flow was restored, needless stoppages and loose fluids ushered back into their rightful places.[4] The humoral chilly moistness of the female body rendered the woman passive and kind, but also meant that her body was dangerously subject to disease due to its porosity and permeability.[5] Much of the female body’s organization and survival was linked to her heat, blood flow, womb, and seed, and thus to her menstrual capabilities.

But how did the English understand new ingredients that may have been visually identical to their own cures contained within their recipe books back in the metropole? ‘Flow’ provides a useful starting point. As Laurence Totelin puts it, “a woman’s life is marked by fluxes, healthy or otherwise,”[6] so historians must broadly consider the use of abortifacients or emmenagogues– agents which increase blood circulation to the pelvic area and stimulate menstruation[7]–without being clouded by our modern understanding of abortion.

Perhaps ‘flow’ was on the minds of colonists when they spotted the ubiquitous and familiar fern crawling up New England stumps and rocks. Maidenhair and polypody ferns were repeated throughout their recipe books’ entries, specifically when related to flow and heat: in 1719, Mary Kettilby recommended a mixture of herbs sweetened with “Syrup of Maiden-hair” as “a cooling drink in a Fever or Pleurisie.” Midwife Jane Sharp recommended that the polypody ferns be “bruised and boyl[ed]” then drunk, as a remedy “Against the Piles or Hemorrhoids” in postpartum women, and in 1674, Susanna Packe recommended “six ounces Polipedy” to “cleans the body of sharp humor or Mullinchollly.”

The Haudenosaunee use(d) lamb’s quarters to prevent milk flow when the child is stillborn,[8] and black snakeroot to promote it when the child is healthy.[9] Kettilby recommended “Virginia snake-weed” for use “in any malignant distemper,”[10] and in 1798 Benjamin Barton called it “a valuable medicine…sometimes called Squaw-root…from its having been used as a medicine by our Indians.”[11] “Squaw-root” points to its omnipresence in Indigenous midwifery pharmacopeia for its promotion of slow labor.[12]  Jane Staveley’s 1693 recipe book recommended “A very strengthening Medicine,” including “1 Oz. of Snake root put into a Bottle of Port Wine,” while a century later and an ocean apart, Martha Ballard recalled the inclusion of Virginia snakeroot in a water used to deliver a woman of a dead child.[13]

We can turn back to the fern here, too: maidenhair is recommended by the Haudenosaunee for excessive menstruation and abortal pains. Biologist Lenore May notes that maidenhair fronds were distilled into syrups to mitigate “female disorders” by Indigenous Americans.[14] The American Adiantum pedatum variety of maidenhair was interpreted by colonists as interchangeable with the English variety, Adiantum capillus-veneris. “Maiden Hair, or Cappellus veneris verus” was recommended by John Josselyn in 1672  “For all manner of Fluxes.” In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper remarked that fern can “purge the belly” and “cause abortion.”[15] Sharp, on cures for womb ulcers that have degenerated into fistulas, recommended a “vulnerary decoction”–used to aid in the healing of wounds– of, among other ingredients, the “roots of male fern.”

Purgation and reinstatement of proper flow are central, so the removal of a deceased fetus was also relevant. Postpartum hemorrhage, or “bloody flux” after delivery, was certainly a death sentence, to say nothing of resulting childbed fevers and infections. The Seneca practiced some form of herbal family limitation for centuries preconquest,[16] but the conflation of abortifacients used for non-abortive reproductive health purposes has led to confusion: overall, both Indigenous and English women placed emphasis on bodily flow. This emphasis in Indigenous communities is compounded by their use of sweat lodges and herb-smoking,[17] mirrored in European reproductive healthcare back to the medieval period.[18]

When we privilege “flow” as a search term, we begin to understand more about the history of colonization, and health writ large. Flow is inherent in the medium of the recipe book, too: as Wendy Wall argues, recipes represent a transitional space, the movement from “raw to cooked…nature to art, from shapeless materia to cultural product.”[19] The epistemology of the recipe book is then one predicated on flow, just as was the success of an early modern reproductive remedy.
*****
Fiona O’Brien is a second year PhD student in history at Fordham University, where she is a Loyola Distinguished Fellow and works as a writing tutor to undergraduate students. She recently completed a funded Scholarly Programs Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, during which she presented work on early modern abortion. She presented papers focused on early modern reproductive history at several conferences over the course of her first year of the PhD, including one which analyzed the medical character of late medieval fertility and birth rituals and compared them to early modern remedy. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. During this latter degree, she was supervised by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra in the completion of her thesis, entitled “Our Groans to God: The Synching of Sensory and Emotional Experience During the Early Modern Birth Process,” and worked as a graduate promotions fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies.

Works Cited
Primary Sources

Barton, Benjamin Smith. Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States. Philadelphia, 1798. The National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2542050R

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses. Edited by Diana Vowles. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009.

Herrick, James W., and Dean R. Snow. Iroquois Medical Botany. 1st ed. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Kettilby, Mary. A collection of above three hundred recipes in cookery, physick and surgery: for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses. The second edition. London: Printed for Mary Kettilby, 1719. National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov

Packe, Susanna. Cookbook of Susanna Packe [manuscript].1 674. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.215. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library

Plant Atlas 2020. Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland and UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Biological Records Center, UK. https://plantatlas2020.org/atlas/.

PLANTS Database. Natural Resources Conservation Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture, https://plants.usda.gov/

Sharp, Jane. The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered.: Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books. London: Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West End of St. Pauls, 1671. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership and digital collection Early English Books Online 2. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A93039.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Wood, William. New England’s Prospect. London, 1634. In O’Brien, Jean M. “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds. Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Kumar, Dinesh, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash. “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2011.12.039.

May, Lenore Wile. “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies.” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), pp. 491-528. Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Clarendon Press, 1998.

Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002): 1–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.

Shoemaker, Nancy.  “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women.”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. Health and Wellness in Colonial America. Health and Wellness in Daily Life. Greenwood, 2012.

Totelin, Laurence M.V. “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology.”  Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Thumiger, Chiara. Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill, 2021.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, and Martha Ballard. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991.

Volo, James and Dorothy. Family Life in Native America. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Weisser, Olivia. Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Yale University Press, 2015.

[1] William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), in Jean M. O’Brien, “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 353. Colonizing men made similar observations toward Black women in the Caribbean; for more information, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192.

[2] Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),  44.

[3] Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 133-134.

[4] Ulinka Rublack and Pamela Selwyn, “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002), 1-2.

[5] Sara Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.

[6] Laurence M.V. Totelin, “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology,” Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Chiara Thumiger, Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill (2021) 220.

[7] Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash, “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32.

[8]James W. Herrick and Dean R. Snow, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, The Iroquois and Their Neighbors, Syracuse University Press, 1995, 142

[9]  James W. Herric, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, (Syracuse University Press, 1995), 119.

[10] Kettilby. A collection, 133-134

[11] Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, (Philadelphia, 1798, The National Library of Medicine), 9.

[12] Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness in Colonial America, Health and Wellness in Daily Life, (Greenwood, 2012),  60-61.

[13] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991, 407.

[14] Lenore Wile May, “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies,” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press, 508.

[15]  Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses, edited by Diana Vowles, (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 158.

[16] Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900, eds. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 318.

[17] James and Dorothy Volo, Family Life in Native America, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), 95.

[18] Monica Helen Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine.

[19] Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),  5.

Lacquer Fantasies: Japanning as a Colonial Global Recipe

By Nur’Ain Taha

Two images frame this story of lacquer and imaginaries. The first, from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades (Ambachten en Beroepen) by Hendrik Numan (1788-1796), shows a Dutch lacquer craftsman (lakwerker) bent over a pot of varnish in a quiet workshop. The second, from Draken in Oost-Indie, Lakwerk en Papier uit China by Romeyn de Highe (published by Pieter van der Aa, Leiden, 1682-1733), depicts a crowded  Chinese atelier buzzing with figures polishing and painting lacquer onto various objects. Between these two scenes, the differences are jarring. The Dutch scene is subdued and contained, while the Chinese one is imagined and exotic. Despite the sharp contrast, both scenes reveal how early modern Europe had transformed Asian materials into a fantasy. These contrasting images, however, invite a question: what can recipes reveal about how the world was imagined, handled, and domesticated in early modern Europe? To see how distant worlds become embedded in recipes, we might start in a seventeenth-century Oxford manual that made “Asia” reproducible in decorations and on the surfaces of English furniture.

“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.

In 1688, John Stalker and George Parker published A treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), a craft manual that offers readers and aspiring makers the promise of “distant mastery” by making it possible to reproduce the gloss and sheen of the much-admired Asian varnish without ever leaving home. “Japanning,” in short, was a craft of imagination that materialised in European craft manuals. The English japanner became a kind of armchair traveller — a maker who imagined the East through the replication of textual recipes.

Chapter I from the Treatise instructs its readers on how to select the best ingredients needed for “japanning”: “To choose gum Sandrick,” “To choose Benjamin or Benzoine,” and so on.[1] Each line lists a commodity extracted from distant colonies. Benzoin, also known locally in the Malay Archipelago as kemenyan, for example, was tapped from Styrax trees in the Sumatran highlands by local resin gatherers, then traded through Batavia to Amsterdam and London. “Sandrick,” or sandarac, was drawn from the Tetraclinis articulata of North Africa. Yet, the Treatise makes no mention of these routes or the labourers who made their extraction and trading possible. Instead, the instructions reduced global exchanges to simple verbs: melt, strain, mix, and apply.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.
Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Here, between the lines of this manual, transformation is not only chemical but also conceptual. Through craft, the  empire becomes domesticated where its raw materials are melted, strained, and mixed into manageable forms. “Japanning” is the epitome of the global recipe, one where cultural entanglement, armchair exoticism and colonial dependence become condensed into a set of formulaic instructions. With each varnish layered on the glossy surface, the trace of global commodities and distant labour is progressively erased.

Global trade became transmuted into domestic craft where the processes of making varnish in English workshops indicate not just a fantasy of control and possession but also acts of erasure and forgetting.

If Stalker and Parker’s Treatise turned encounters into varnish, the Malay Kitab Tib (medical manuscripts) transformed globalised commodities such as benzoin, camphor, ambergris, and musk into fragrance and medication. Across different manuscripts, one finds recipes that domesticate exotic materials not into fantasy, but into care and healing. One recipe for a special medicine (ubat Istimewa) in Kitab Tib MSS 2515: p. 194 for example, lists several rare ingredients to treat male impotence (mati pucuk):

Firstly, take male cubebs weighing nine mas[2], javanese cinnamon weighing nine mas, nutmeg weighing nine mas, ambergris weighing nine mas, cloves weighing nine mas, musk weighing nine mas, benzoin weighing seven mas, Bengal kara-kara root weighing one mas, mustaqim weighing half a mas, and camphor weighing one mas.[3]

Like the English recipe for varnish, recipes in various Kitab Tib manuscripts constituted commodities and incorporated rare ingredients transported across the oceans. The use of ambergris (ambar, or muntah ikan) reveals how non-European traditions also absorbed global commodities into local systems of healing and knowledge. Unlike Stalker and Parker, whose 1688 Treatise of Japanning detached resins and other global commodities from their geographical sources, Kitab Tib mapped its ingredients to known worlds: “javanese cinnamon (kulit manis Jawa),” “Bengal kara-kara root (akar kara-kara Benggala),” “Chinese galangal (lengkuas Cina),” and “nutmeg flower from Penang (bunga pala Pulau Pinang).”[4] These names turned trade into routes, marking a world already known to Malay healers and setting the ground for how global matter was embodied in local traditional healing practices.  In Malay medical manuals, global trade was neither exoticised nor imagined—it was rooted in the regional networks and embodied within local medicinal knowledge. The Kitab Tib transformed distant commodities into medicine and created scent that transformed the body’s balance. Where the English Treatise staged “Asia” at a distance, the Malay recipes absorbed it. Read together, these manuals show that early modern recipes were never just technical guides; they were ways of reimagining and embodying worlds, near and far. As Daniela Bleichmar observes for European processes of appropriation, “the expeditions’ selective efforts to make the empire visible always involved rendering parts of it invisible.”[5] The same applies to japanning: on every varnished surface, its sheen is not just beauty, but colonial possession that is made visible and invisible all at once by erasing the hands and landscapes that produced global commodities.

*****
Nur’Ain Taha is a PhD candidate in Art History at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her research project, Crossing Worlds: The Global Materiality of “Netherlandish Objects” in the Early Modern Period, 1600-1800, examines the visible and invisible global origins of materials, techniques, and makers behind early modern “Dutch objects”. By tracing their trajectories, she reveals how cross-cultural exchanges shaped their creation and meaning, uncovering the interconnected worlds of production, influence, and knowledge beyond Europe.

FURTHER READING

Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Mat Piah, Harun. Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019.

Stalker, John, and George Parker. A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing. Oxford, 1688. Digitized edition via Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/treatisejapanin00Stal/mode/2up.

 


[1] John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford: 1688), 2–3.

[2] 1 mas ≈ 3.4 grams; recipes in old Malay manuscripts use early modern Malay measurement systems.

[3] Malay translation: Pertama ambil kemukus Jantan berat sembiln emas dan kulit manis Jawa berat Sembilan emas dan buah pala berat Sembilan emas dan ambar berat Sembilan emas dan cengkih berat Sembilan emas dan kesturi berat Sembilan emas dan kemenyan berat tujuh emas dan akar kara-kara Benggala berat seemas dan mustaqim berat tiga emas dan kapur barus berat seemas. From Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu, ed. Harun Mat Piah (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102.

[4] Many other examples also appear throughout Kitab Tib MSS 2515, p. 194. See Harun Mat Piah, Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102-104.

[5] Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 151. On the thorny connections between visibility and invisibility, specifically in colonial Latin American visual culture, see Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.

 

Recipes for Sacred Porridge in Post-Earthquake Turkey

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.

The Little Mermaid and The RP

By Melissa Reynolds

Disney’s animated The Little Mermaid (1989) is the first movie I remember going to see at the theater. In case you’re wondering, that makes me two things: 1) old and 2) the target demographic for the 2023 live-action remake of the animated classic. Not only do I have fond-but-hazy memories of hearing “Kiss the Girl” and “Part of Your World” for the first time, lo those many years ago, I also now have a daughter through whom I can experience that magic all over again. The movie industry may be selling nostalgia these days, but as it turns out, I’m buying.

Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (2023).

All of this is to say: it should come as no surprise that I loved every minute of the live-action The Little Mermaid, released in theaters this past May. Can we talk about Halle Bailey for a minute? That voice! Her gorgeous face! The athleticism required to appear as if she was actually swirling, floating, and diving underwater! She was magnificent, as was the whole world conjured in the film. Somehow, Halle and the wizards behind the computers at Disney studios made mermaids, sea witches, and singing crabs feel real.

When I began thinking about The Little Mermaid and its relationship to the RP, my first inclination was to highlight our many posts on love magic. After all, love spells like this one from eighteenth-century Russia or this one in a sixteenth-century English manuscript aren’t so very different from the spell Ursula weaves for Ariel. True, neither of these magical recipes requires a mermaid to give up her voice in exchange for legs, but grinding the heart of a snake into powder to sprinkle in a woman’s food as a love potion isn’t so very far removed from Ursula’s oeuvre.

https://youtu.be/Y0JoW27fxUw
Ursula’s love magic seems to require a tongue of some kind, the winds of the Caspian Sea, and of course, Ariel’s voice. Scene from Disney’s animated The Little Mermaid (1989).

Love magic we’ve got a-plenty in our archives, but that wasn’t what stood out in my viewing of the live-action The Little Mermaid. For me, the thrill of the remake came from seeing Ariel’s underwater existence come to vivid, three-dimensional life. We live in an entertainment era chock-a-block full of CGI effects, and even still, I found myself agog at the visuals in the film. How did they make Ariel’s hair swirl like that? The visual effects actually changed how I thought about a story I know by heart. Because Ariel’s CGI-conjured world felt both real and fantastical, her deep desire to give it all up for the mundanity of carriage rides and dinner conversation (or lack thereof) came into sharper focus for me.

In the Disney version, Ariel’s choice to leave the water comes with consequences: she has to give up her voice to grow legs. She can’t be what she was underwater when on dry land.

In that respect, she’s kind of like coral—or, at least, she’s kind of like coral as premodern philosophers understood it. As Laurence Totelin wrote in her 2016 post, The Coral and the Seal: Ancient Amulets Against All Ills, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that naturalists discovered that coral was in fact an animal—or, more precisely, thousands of marine animals whose secreted exoskeletons form the structures we call coral. Before then, natural philosophers believed that coral began its life underwater as a plant and then transformed into stone when it came into contact with air. Like Ariel, coral became wholly different when it crossed from the underwater world into our own.

Because it transformed from plant into stone, premodern people believed that coral had transformative properties when used as a medicinal or magical ingredient. Totelin wrote about ancient recipes in which coral was used to staunch blood, to whiten teeth, or to protect against all manner of evils. Other posts in the RP archives show coral being used in recipes centuries later: in the medieval French Livre de simple médicines, in recipe collections from early modern Austria, and in published recipe books from seventeenth-century England, to name just a few. The prevalence of coral in recipes spanning from the ancient to the early modern world points to its perceived power as a transformative ingredient. Like a singing mermaid, coral was precious because it was that rare object that could cross from the watery world into our own. The very fact of its presence on land suggested a wondrous metamorphosis.

Illustration of a cabinet filled with medical ingredients, including coral (second row, right). Livre des simples médecines, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS n.a. fr. 6593, fol. 12322.

The worldview that brought us mermaids and medicinal coral may be long gone, but in so many ways we remain fascinated and mystified by the creatures of the deep—and for good reason! Every day scientists discover new life lurking in the depths, some of it nearly as fantastical as singing mer-people (though not, perhaps, as photogenic as Halle Bailey). Who knows? Maybe somewhere in those depths is an organism with powerful, transformative properties of the kind premodern philosophers could only imagine for coral.

A small selection of deep sea creatures from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. I’m told none have the singing voice of Halle Bailey.

But just as Ariel was up against Ursula’s deadline in The Little Mermaid, we have our own deadline to meet when it comes to marine life. At the rate our oceans have warmed this summer, we may lose the world’s coral reefs within a few years. Early modern naturalists would be appalled—as should we. Deep sea creatures we can only imagine may become extinct before we have a chance to discover them.

So, if there’s one lesson I think we should take from this summer’s excitement for The Little Mermaid and premodern philosophers’ misapprehensions about coral, it’s this: the ocean may be inhospitable to humans and filled with creatures beyond our wildest imagination, but, in the lightly edited words of our marine heroine, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a “part of [our] world” worth saving.


In the spirit of remembering those who have been “part of our world,” I’d like to take this opportunity to offer enormous thanks to our co-editor, Clare Gordon Bettencourt, who is stepping down from our editorial board. Clare first joined the RP team with me in 2019 as a social media coordinator. If you’ve enjoyed our Twitter feed over the past few years or felt buoyed by the RP’s community online, it’s because of Clare’s work amplifying new scholarship, celebrating accomplishments, and bringing people together in ways that made us all stronger. Of course, Clare is also a researcher and scholar in her own right, and we were lucky to feature her post on “Food Identity Standards and Recipes as Legislation,” based on her dissertation research, in 2021. We are so grateful for her contributions and wish her well in her new career at Santa Clara University.