Category Archives: Global Exchange

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

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

07/11/2024 Melissa Reynolds 1 Comment

«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.

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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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 2023, British Studies, Global Exchange, Posts

A Recipe for Brown Stew

24/10/2023 Jess Clark Leave a comment

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 2022, Culinary History, Food and Drink, Global Exchange, Posts, Primary Source Highlight, Series: Chocolate

A ‘recipe’ for chocolate on a 19th-century cup

16/10/2022 Amanda Herbert 1 Comment

Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

By Frederick Fossey-Warren

This porcelain hot chocolate cup from the early 19^th century seems decidedly Ottoman. Gilded with gold and over-glazed with an intricate red pattern, the cup is designed to follow the “Egyptian style” that proved immensely popular with colonial Ottoman officials at the turn of the century. In fact the cup is so extravagant that it’s possible it was never actually intended for use, but purchased as a display piece, a succinct symbol of both status and wealth, by a member of the Ottoman elite.

Given its appearance, one could reasonably expect to trace the cup’s origins to a Turkish city such as Istanbul or Ankara. Upon closer inspection, however, the presence of different languages written onto the cup complicate its provenance. While the cup was bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, its origins lie elsewhere. In fact, the cup was constructed in none other than…Paris? So, how did we get here?

After its arrival in the so-called “Old World” in the early 16^th century, chocolate slowly but surely became a new court favourite across Europe and, by the end of the 17^th century, had become a mainstay in aristocratic circles. It wasn’t long before chocolate began to spread into Asia and Africa, truly becoming one of the world’s first global commodities. As in Europe, given its scarcity and price, in the Ottoman Empire chocolate was initially largely restricted to the nobility, as much a status symbol as a foodstuff.

Initially enjoyed primarily as a drink, chocolate was seen as not only a nourishing treat, but a superfood, a sobering source of energy able to cure or prevent most common ailments. Many saw potential in its import as a commodity, and through its arrival it often contributed to the development of industry and revenue. Given its initial scarcity – chocolate had to be harvested in the Americas, loaded onto ships, and sailed across the Atlantic in a journey that routinely lasted three months – chocolate stayed in high demand, and markets soon opened not just for cacao, but for chocolate ‘accessories.’ These included such objects as chocolatera for dissolving together chocolate paste and sugar, molinillo for frothing hot chocolate, and, of course, cups for drinking, which brings us back to our porcelain cup.

When people consider the movement of luxury goods in the long nineteenth century, it is often taken for granted or assumed that goods primarily moved out of the peripheries of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and into the imperial core of Western Europe. This cup, however, challenges this understanding. From the date and manufacturers mark on the underside of the object, we can tell that this cup, saucer and lid collection was constructed in Paris in 1809. Given its design, it was likely always intended for sale within the Ottoman market.

In the early 19^th century, the Ottoman Empire remained a powerful and, importantly, wealthy force in Eastern Europe, and an attractive market for many across Europe. When, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire expanded to encompass much of the Middle East and North Africa, the tastes of Ottoman elites changed, adopting the styles and fashions of many of their newly incorporated colonial subjects. This chocolate cup was ingeniously crafted to capitalise on these trends, part of an aesthetic and cultural movement that historian Ussama Makdisi has called ‘Ottoman Orientalism’.

Inscription detail. Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

So what were the design features that made this chocolate cup an example of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’? The underside of the saucer features a series of seemingly random Chinese characters. In relation to the cup’s purpose, these four characters, 李唐宋官, roughly translate to ‘Li Tang, Song dynasty official’. While there was a Li Tang in the Song dynasty, and in fact he was an accomplished landscape painter, he had nonetheless died almost seven hundred years prior to the time of this cup’s creation, and almost six hundred years before chocolate’s arrival in China. So why were these Chinese characters included? Simple: to make the cup seem more appealing to prospective buyers, and hence more likely to sell. The inclusion of these Chinese characters, presumably merely copied wholesale from another source, both fed into the intended exoticism of the piece, and attempted capitalise on a long existing market for Chinese porcelain in the Ottoman Empire.

The story of this cup does not, however, merely end with its creation and sale. Just as with the saucer, on the underside of the cup is another short sentence, this time, however, in Urdu. Unlike the Chinese characters, this writing was added after the cup was purchased and offers us a perplexingly poetic phase. The cryptic writing roughly translates to ‘That same diminished consciousness; This same deep target’ and is attributed to one Jannatī, likely a pen-name, meaning ‘the heavenly’. Whoever this Jannatī was, they clearly had some affection for the cup; not only did they write an inscription on its underside, but there is evidence of attempts at restoration, with the gold on the lid having been re-gilded.

When taken together, the elaborate and varied inscriptions on this cup act, in some sense, as a recipe. If a recipe is a set of instructions allowing you to, hopefully, produce something far greater than the sum of its parts, then, for a historian, the cup’s inscriptions act as an invaluable recipe in allowing us to gain a far deeper understanding not only commerce in the early 19^th century, but also of chocolate, and its role as one of the world’s first truly global commodities. From South America to France, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire and even China, this porcelain cup combines facets of many different cultures and civilisations in both its purpose and construction. While both the maker of this cup and its first owners are by now long dead, this object they left behind lives on, and continues to tell us much about the world in which they lived.

Frederick Fossey-Warren is a scholar interested in the role of race and ethnicity in modern East African politics. He participated in Durham’s Undergraduate Research Internship (UGRI) programme to conduct research on chocolate in the Durham University collections. He currently studying towards a Master’s in History at Durham.

Global Exchange, Knowledge Transmission, Medicine, Plants and Herbs, Posts

The Power of Peony

12/05/2022 juliafine 1 Comment

By Ashley Buchanan

The Secret Ingredient

In 1735, a Viennese baroness wrote to the last Medici princess, Anna Maria Luisa de Medici (1669—1743), to thank her for sending a miraculous infant convulsion powder. Anna Maria Luisa’s recipe for infant convulsion powder contained a precipitation of a human skull (of “a man who died violently but was never buried”), a precipitation of “Oriental pearls,” a precipitation of red coral and white coral, as well as yellow amber and peony roots and seeds. While the more outrageous ingredients—the skull and Oriental pearls—stand out, it was actually the use of peony that made Anna Maria Luisa’s powder effective.

In her letter to Anna Maria Luisa, the baroness praised the powder’s effectiveness, stating that the children she treated with it had been so violently taken by convulsions that the attending physicians had “given up on them.” Not only had the “miraculous powder” cured the children, but they remained in perfect health several months later. Well known for her miraculous powder, Anna Maria Luisa strategically distributed it to influential individuals and courts across Europe. As a result, she created valuable socio-political alliances to protect The Grand Duchy of Tuscany as the end of the Medici dynasty neared.

Handwritten recipe in Italian. — Recipe for infant convulsion powder featuring peony. Image Credit: Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Miscellanea Medicea (MM) 1, ins. 2, fol. 186r. Photo by Ashley Buchanan.

The Popularity of Peonies

Peonies are not typically associated with medicine, since they have long been coveted for their beauty. In fact, peonies were first cultivated for their attractiveness and fragrance in China more than 1,400 years ago and became especially popular under the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). In the Tang imperial gardens, tree (or moutan) peonies reigned as the “king of flowers” and symbolized happiness, wealth, and prosperity. We can see the association of peonies with wealth and class in a rare Tang scroll painting that depicts five ladies of the court and one maidservant. The rank and prestige of each lady is shown by their scale relative to one another as well as by the lavish peonies that adorn their hair. As the popularity of peonies grew in China, so too did their varieties, as horticulturalists selected, hybridized, bred, and eventually grafted peonies for their fragrance, petal color, petal number, and size.

The center of imperial peony cultivation was in Luoyang, where there were peony festivals and competitions, gardens devoted solely to peonies, and even a peony research center. This led to a plethora of ornamental peony cultivars as peony breeding became an artform. More than 200 peony cultivars were described during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE); today, China has more than 1,000 cultivars.

Botanical painting of peony — Ming herbal (painting): Chinese herbaceous peony. Image Credit: Wellcome Collection

While peonies have a long history of appreciation and cultivation as ornamental garden plants in Chinese as well as Islamic gardens, in western Europe they mainly were valued for their utility. Over the course of the sixteenth century that changed, when Ottoman floriculture introduced numerous ornamental flowers to the gardens of Europe, including hyacinths, narcissi, peonies, and most famously, tulips. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Europeans would begin intensively breeding ornamental peonies.

In 1789, famed British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks acquired a “moutan peony tree” (Paeonia lactiflora) from Canton, China, through his connections with the British East India Company. Surviving the arduous journey to Britain, it was planted in the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. Other peonies from China soon followed, ushering in something of a peony craze in Europe as, thanks to centuries of cultivation, Chinese peonies were larger, fuller, and more fragrant than native European varieties. Peonies became increasingly popular as French, English, and American horticulturists began developing ornamental varieties of their own from these exotic imported peony cultivars.

As a Chinese botanical export, eastern ornamental peonies, as well as the new herbaceous and tree hybrids created from them in Europe, carried connotations of the “exotic Orient” and became a popular subject in nineteenth-century art. The depiction of peonies in nineteenth-century French paintings, however, does more than simply signify the exotic or differentiate Occident and Orient. For example, in Frédéric Bazille’s Young Woman with Peonies (see below), the foreign provenance of ornamental peonies is emphasized by the Black model who arranges the blooms in an “Oriental” vase. Notably, Bazille pairs the peonies with irises, France’s national flower. Once new and exotic, ornamental peony cultivars had become a product of cultural hybridity, simultaneously signaling the plant’s eastern origin as well as the new varieties that were being developed in France.

Today, peonies remain one of the most sought-after ornamental flowers in the world. Thanks to their abundant delicate petals, peonies often adorn gardens and homes, and are popular for wedding bouquets and floral arrangements. While peonies have long been, and continue to be, a coveted ornamental plant, what may surprise you is that they also have an equally long history—over two millennia—as a powerful medicinal therapeutic.

Read the full narrative on the Plant Humanities Lab

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