Tag Archives: HEAT!

Tales From the Archives: A Recipe for Disaster: How Not to Distill Turpentine

In September 2018, The Recipes Project will be six years old. There’s been a lot of blogging on this platform, and we are so grateful to all our wonderful contributors. But with so much material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. So, the editors have decided that, once a month, we’ll pull something out of the archives to share with our readers anew.

This month, I have chosen a piece written by Tillamann Taape. In this post, first published in July 2013, Tillmann writes vividly about alchemical disasters. Heat, unsurprisingly, comes into play. Enjoy!

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By Tillmann Taape

When sifting through early modern alchemical recipes, I am often struck by their inherent dangers which would make modern-day health and safety officers pull their hair out. Renaissance practitioners were remarkably unfazed by temperatures high enough to melt glass and metal, and they frequently recommended heating volatile and flammable liquid in sealed glass vessels which, by their own admission, had a tendency to crack if not handled with the utmost care. Surely these exploits must have gone wrong a lot of the time, resulting in burnt fingers or a faceful of boiling alcohol?

If we look at the stereotype of the alchemist in contemporary satirical literature, it seems that accidents came with the job. In his Ship of Fools (1494), German humanist and satirist Sebastian Brant echoes themes from medieval poetry in his depiction of the alchemist: a greedy and reckless fool whose dangerous and fruitless exploits leave him scarred, financially ruined and even blind. [1] As a source of historical information, satirical genres should of course be taken with a generous pinch of salt. It is significant to note, though, that early modern people saw alchemy as a potentially dangerous thing to do, even in times long before anything like today’s health and safety standards.

More direct evidence of alchemical disasters is, unfortunately, fairly rare. I would of course be delighted to be persuaded otherwise by readers of this blog, but to me it seems that while adepts of alchemy frequently wrote down instructions which sound like they might well blow up, they were frustratingly silent on whether this actually happened. I was quite thrilled, therefore, when I finally stumbled upon a first-hand account of an alchemical disaster: exploding stills, knocked-out practitioners and all. In his 700-page tome entitled Liber de arte distillandi de compositis or Large book of distillation, first published in 1512, my favourite surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (introduced here and here) includes the following cautionary tale.

Brunschwig was distilling turpentine to separate the watery fraction from the valuable oil, and when nearly all of the water had come out, he was interrupted.

 I was called away to a patient, so the oil went into the water, and when I came back, a layer of oil was sitting on top of the water. I didn’t have the sense to simply decant off the oil, so I poured the lot into a new flask and thought I’d just extract the water by distillation. But I was called away again, and in the meantime the water evaporated from the oil, and some of it condensed on the side of the flask and dripped back into the oil, which rose inside the flask with a great tumult, and fumes erupted from the flask, blowing off the alembic. [2]

 A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation. © Wellcome Images

A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation.
© Wellcome Images

Things got worse when Brunschwig came back late at night and went to investigate the accident, telling his servant to bring along a light:

When the light arrived, the fumes touched it, and fire burst forth all around, and in the blink of an eye went out again, nevertheless burning off mine and my servant’s hair, clothes and eyebrows. We fell to the ground and did not know where we were, but before long we got up again and fetched a closed lantern so the same thing would not happen again, and threw ashes in the furnace to smother the fire. [2]

And this, dear readers of the Large book of distillation, is how you do NOT distill turpentine! Once the initial excitement about this truly adventurous tale had worn off, I realised that, to the historian, there was more to this anecdote than merely the satisfying confirmation that some procedures which look so precarious on paper did indeed go up in fire and smoke. In his description of this extraordinary incident, Brunschwig also reveals a number of interesting details about his everyday life and work. We get a glimpse of what it meant for an early modern practitioner to have multiple vocations. Juggling his alchemical activities with his duties as an apothecary and surgeon, it seems that Brunschwig could be called away to the aid of a patient at a moment’s notice, even at night. We also learn that he had at least one servant, and we can surmise that he did his distillations in an enclosed workshop, since a buildup of explosive fumes would be unlikely in the open air. Perhaps most importantly of all, this anecdote provides strong evidence that Brunschwig was actively performing many of the procedures he describes in his works, rather than just copying and compiling them for publication.

Anecdotes like these, then, are more than just an entertaining read and a well-earned reward for ploughing through hundreds of pages of Brunschwig’s Alsatian dialect with its erratic spelling. Descriptions of extraordinary events also grant us a glimpse into the reality of practicing alchemy, and into practitioners’ everyday life.

[1] On the stereotypes and changing ‘personae’ of early modern alchemists, see Tara Nummedal,  Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, Ch. 2.

[2] Brunschwig, Hieronymus. Liber de arte distillandi de compositis […]. Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1512.

 

Boiling hot oil: on the assessment of temperature in late medieval processing of linseed oil

By Indra Kneepkens

Indra Kneepkens is a technical art historian, specializing in the materials and techniques of late medieval panel painting. She is currently finalizing her dissertation, which is focused on the use of processed linseed oils and paint additives in the painting practice of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

Raw linseed – the basis for linseed oil

From art technological sources, such as recipes and manuals for the preparation of paints, and from the analysis of paint samples, we know that late medieval and early modern craftsmen heated oils for use as a binding medium in paints, as well as for the preparation of varnishes. As a technical art historian, I research and reconstruct these oils and varnishes, to be able to establish the effects they have on paints. My aim is to understand how the development and use of these materials influenced the painting process and the final appearance of art works. Unfortunately, 14th-  to 17th-century art technological sources that include heat-treatment of oil typically do not give absolute temperature indications. This is no surprise, because thermometers were developed in different stages between the late 16th and early 18th century. Therefore, craftsmen had to rely on their senses for the assessment of temperature.

Cennini’s handbook has been transcribed an translated repeatedly, most recently by Lara Broecke in 2015

That controlling temperature was important to late medieval craftsmen is illustrated by a remark in the Libro dell’arte (ca. 1390), that was written by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini. In his recipe for a heat-treated oil the writer almost personifies fire, warning us that it would willingly burn down the house if it got a chance to reach into the pan.[1] And indeed, it seems likely that the temperature of oil was sometimes raised pretty high, to the point where potentially explosive gasses form. So how did pre-thermometer craftsmen determine the temperature of their oils?

Even if not in absolute terms, early modern sources do contain clues about the kind of temperatures that were considered useful in oil processing. In most cases, oils were heated over fire, in ceramic, bronze or copper vessels. As wood or peat fires can easily reach temperatures over 500°C, and the vessels were able to withstand these, it was clearly possible to reach the auto-ignition point of linseed oil (ca. 343°C). Most likely, temperature would have varied from case to case, depending on factors like fuel type and the distance between the vessel and the heating source.[2]

Sometimes sources mention a strong reduction of the oil, or they describe the texture of the end result, comparing it to fluid honey for example. In varnish recipes a string-test reoccurs, in which a finger is dipped into, and then lifted from a cooled drop of the mixture of boiled oil and resins, to see if a thread is formed.[3]My own experiments have shown that to reach a sufficient thickening of an oil or varnish, and to dissolve most resins, the materials must be heated for quite some time and at a fairly high temperature. Finally, empirical tests that remind us of everyday cooking may have been used to keep an eye on the temperature of oils. In Arte de la Pintura (1649), Pacheco describes how bread, garlic and feathers were stuck in boiling oil; if they appeared browned or scorched, the cooking process was completed.[4]

During my experiments over the past few years, it has become evident that one can make a reasonably accurate temperature assessment based on how the oil behaves during heat-treatment. A swirling movement for example, was noticed in oils from a temperature of ca. 90°C, while repugnant fumes typically started to develop around 200°C.

Figure 1. Foam developing on oil heated in a ceramic vessel

I also realized that the development of foam, which is commonly mentioned in recipes, may have been a clear indication of temperature. But it is also closely related to the type of cooking vessel that was used. I did not see any foam until I exchanged my glass laboratory beakers for a glazed ceramic pot. Foam appeared when the oil reached a temperature of 100°C. It must have been caused by water evaporating from the clay body, as I had rinsed the vessel before use. Bubbles also formed when garlic and bread were boiled in oil, from ca. 61 and 80°C respectively, with a high point again around 100°C. Although the garlic started to darken earlier, both bread and garlic clearly browned around 180°C, and completely blackened between 230 and 240°C.

In another experiment thirteen feathers, of different size and from various birds, were dipped in hot linseed oil until they started to curl. Surprisingly, all feathers curled within a range of 27°C, between 237 and 264°C. These experiments not only support the relative accuracy of these empirical methods, but also indicates that temperatures of ca. 100 and 200-250°C were meaningful to early practitioners.

Figure 2. Raw linseed oil (far left) heated at 150 (1-4 hours, jars 2-5 from the left), 200 (8 hours, larger jar) and 300 degrees C (1-4 hours, jars 7-10 from the left).

In more systematic tests, linseed oil was heated to 150 and 300°C, for one, two, three, and four hours. Interestingly, the color and thickness of the oils that were heated at 150°C appeared more or less unaltered after the experiment. In tests where these oils were mixed into paints, they behaved very similar to raw linseed oil. At 300°C the oils thickened and darkened considerably. They affected paints in a very significant way, causing them to level, and making it possible to create smooth glossy films without any visible imprint of the brush. Paints with these oils were also less prone to yellowing. An oil that was heated at 200°C for eight hours however, still made paints level perfectly, but it also caused extreme yellowing.

So knowing how to assess temperature and balancing it over time must have been crucial skills for those who prepared heat-treated oils and varnishes. Experiments have shown that knowledgeable individuals would have been able to make a fairly accurate assessment of temperature, using their senses. They could note changes in the appearance and behavior of oil and indicator materials, and manually test its viscosity. Although there are several indications that temperatures of 200°C and higher were preferred, it makes sense that craftspeople would adapt the temperature to the materials at hand and the desired end result. The lack of unambiguous temperature indications in oil processing recipes reflects this adaptive use of temperature and a reliance on the senses that was expected of craftspeople before the invention of thermometers.

[1]Broecke, Lara. Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’ Arte: A new English translation and commentary with Italian transcription.London: Archetype, 2015, 127, chapter 91.

[2]Aldeias, Vera, Harold L. Dibble, Dennis Sandgathe , Paul Goldberg, and Shannon J.P. McPherron . “ How heat alters underlying deposits and implications for archaeological fire features: A controlled experiment” Journal of Archaeological Science67 (2016): 66.

[3]Broecke 2015, 127. Neven, Sylvie. The Strasbourg Manuscript. A Medieval Tradition of Artists’ Recipe Collections (1400-1570). London: Archetype, 2016: 132-135, no. 92-94.

Heat and Women’s Fertility in Medieval Recipes

It seems rather ironic to be writing about ‘heat’ in the middle of a heatwave. I’m not sure anyone in Britain at the moment is keen to increase their level of heat any further! However, according to humoral theory, which underpinned many medical recipes throughout the medieval and early modern periods, heat could be a very good thing when men and women wanted to reproduce.  Heat, in the humoral sense, was believed to aid both sexual performance and fertility, and ‘hot’ foods and medicines were recommended as aphrodisiacs and fertility aids in many ancient, medieval and early modern medical texts.  Jennifer Evans has set this out very nicely for the early modern period – see her book and her post on the Recipes blog from 2013.  But heat wasn’t always a good thing: in some circumstances too much heat could also be a problem for fertility, and in that situation ‘cold’ foods and medicines might be suggested.

In my own work on the medical recipe books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then, I would expect to find a range of recipes to aid conception which include ingredients designed to raise or reduce a person’s heat. Although recipes were written in less complex language than Latin medical texts, and focused on treatment rather than theory, the recipes in these collections were often drawn from longer Latin medical works and so were often based on humoral theory even when this was not made explicit.  Nevertheless, my initial survey of recipe manuscripts in the Wellcome Library, British Library and Cambridge University Library suggests that the picture was more diverse than this.  I haven’t made a comprehensive search – and, given the number of unpublished medieval recipe manuscripts, I probably won’t be able to – but the recipes to aid conception that I’ve found so far work on a variety of principles.

Some do seek to adjust a person’s heat in order to correct a perceived humoral imbalance. For example, a series of recipes in Latin in Wellcome Library MS 541, a fifteenth-century medical miscellany of unknown provenance, is explicit about this.

A page from Wellcome Library MS 541. Credit: Wellcome Library.

In a chapter on ‘Impediment of Conception’ it includes recipes for:

If the sterility is because of cold humours… (Si sterilitas fuerit propter humores frigidos…)

If conception is impeded because of too much moisture… (Quod si propter nimiam humiditatem conceptio impediatur…)

If there is a distemper of heat or dryness in the woman which impedes conception… (Quod si caliditate aut siccitate fuerit distemperancia in muliere impediens conceptionem…)

In each case the first stage is to purge the excess humours, and then a selection of baths, plant remedies and suppositories is recommended. (Wellcome Library MS 541, ff. 137r-v)

The whole manuscript is digitized on the Wellcome Library website here.

Similarly British Library MS Harley 2378, quoted by Henslow in an edition of fourteenth-century medical recipes, also mentioned lack of heat as a cause of women’s infertility and suggested a cure to raise her heat:

‘For a womman þat may not bere no chyld for colde blode: Take and let hire blode, and take trisandali and diapendion, and take and ley þem to-gedere with hony, and ete iche day þer-of, and haue blode bothe hote and gode.’ (G. Henslow, Medical Works of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1899). p. 104.)

However, in many other cases the recipes found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts are not obviously heat-related. Instead many of them require the man, woman or both to ingest animal parts, particularly genitalia.  These recipes work on another theoretical framework with a long history going back to the ancient world: the idea that certain substances were able to stimulate the reproductive organs because of a certain sympathy with them.  For example several fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Liber de Diversis Medicinis, a collection of recipes in English, include a series of recipes involving animal genitalia. To help a woman conceive a male child, ingredients such as the womb and vagina of a hare; the testicles of a hare; and the liver and eyes of a pig (see Catherine Rider, ‘Men’s Responses to Infertility in Late Medieval England’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History, ed. Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran (Basingstoke, 2017), p. 281).

All of these recipes derive – directly or indirectly – from the Trotula, the twelfth-century Latin compendium of women’s medicine edited by Monica Green, although there were some changes in the process of transmission: the Trotula recommends the liver and testicles of the pig, rather than liver and eyes (see p. 77 in Green).  These recipes from the Trotula appear frequently in recipe collections from medieval England: the pig’s testicles appear again in Wellcome Library MS 407 (f. 61r), ‘Against sterility’.

As Green has shown, numerous manuscripts of the Trotula circulated in England, and the treatise had several Middle English translations, so perhaps it is not surprising that its remedies turn up frequently in recipe collections. Recipes based on animal parts have also featured on the recipes blog before: to take just one example, Laurence Totelin mentioned the use of a deer’s penis as an aphrodisiac in ancient Greece back in 2015.  The Trotula did also discuss the ways in which too much or too little heat might make men or women infertile (see Green’s translation, pp. 85-7). Nevertheless, its influence and the popularity of its genitalia-related remedies means that treatments based on heat and humoral theory were not the only fertility aids available to readers of medieval English recipe collections.  In the future I’m hoping to look in more detail at which aids to conception were particularly popular in English medical texts, and what that might tell us about the transmission of information from earlier Latin medical works.  But at the moment the picture – as regards heat – is looking rather diverse.

Banishing the Armpit Goats: Body Odor in Ancient Rome

By Cari Casteel

Cari Casteel is currently working on a manuscript on the social and cultural history of deodorant, based on her dissertation, “The Odor of Things: Deodorant, Gender, and Olfaction in the United States.”Beginning in the fall she will be joining the history department at the University at Buffalo as a Clinical Assistant Professor. You can find her on twitter @thedeodorantone.

Figure 1: Advertisement for Mum deodorant illustrated by Don Herold. Esquire April 1939, 166.

“Remember that night in 1933, Ed Snootz came to the Club Dance with that cave-man aroma? … Just let a man forget himself for one evening and come to a party with a slight case of perspiration fumes and his name is Mr. Goat.” This selection from a 1939 advertisement for Mum—the first commercially available deodorant—reprimanded the fictional Snootz for his body odor.

Many early deodorant advertisements actively shamed consumers into purchasing their product. Men and women were told that if they did not wear a deodorant it would lead to other failures: in love, friendship, and business. In the case of “Mr. Goat” his faux pas was so egregious that women were talking about it 6 years later.

As I write this from the comfort of my airconditioned office, the outside temperature is 90°F. The moment I venture outside, my body will begin to perspire in order to regulate its temperature. One unpleasant side effect of this perspiration is underarm odor. No need to worry, however, because in the 21stcentury, we have a vast array of deodorants and antiperspirants created to banish body odor.

A commonly held refrain about deodorant use is that because of these scolding advertisements consumers were duped into buying a product to hide perspiration and the accompanying offensive odor. While this is not entirely untrue, it is not the whole story. Mum deodorant was not the first—or even the hundredth—attempt to tone down the “cave-man aroma” described by the ad. As long as people have existed, they have worried about their appearance and smell. While the custom of wearing a commercially produced deodorant is rather new—about 130 years—attempting to combat fetid odor is as old as mankind.

Figure 2: Statue of Barberini Faun located in the Glyptothek Munich. Image credit Wikimedia Commons

The Romans particularly worried about foul body odor and worked fastidiously to keep their bodies clean and smelling pleasant. Just as the Mum advertisement shamed Ed Snootz for his lack of deodorant use, Roman playwrights and poets rebuked and joked about malodorous men and women. This can be seen –and smelled—in an epigram by Catullus:

Rufus, you are being hurt by an ugly rumor which asserts

that beneath your armpits dwells a ferocious goat.

This the women fear, and no wonder; for it’s a right rank

beast that no pretty girl will go to bed with.

So either get rid of this painful affront to the nostrils

or cease to wonder why the ladies flee. (Carmina 69)

Rufus—much like his 20th-century counterpart Mr. Snootz—had failed to practice proper hygiene and as a result could not find a female companion. Throughout Roman texts, foul body odor was described as goaty (hircus) and connotatively undesirable. Roman citizens took pride in their appearance and viewed their perceived cleanliness as a mark of superiority over other civilizations.

In a scene from Plautus’ Pseudolus, two characters gossip about a newcomer from Greece.

Pseudolus: But this servant, who is come here from Carystus, does he smell of anything?

Charinus: Yes, of the goat under his armpits.

Pseudolous: It befits the fellow, then, to have a tunic with long sleeves (2.4.46-49)

Much in the same way that 20th-century deodorant advertisements sought to correct a behavior, Roman prose and poems—such as those by Catullas and Plautus—used satire to poke fun at foul odors, but also as a way to educate and encourage cleanliness. Ovid, in The Art of Love, cautioned readers against offensive underarm odor, writing “I warn you that no rude goat find its way beneath your arms” (3.193). Ovid continued by recommending removing underarm hair and using powders to keep the body free from odor.

The Romans had countless remedies for dealing with perspiration odor. For example, In Natural History,Plinyrecorded a number of solutions for dealing with goats under the armpits. One method for combating body odor was a combination of rue, aloe, and rose oil boiled together and then dabbed on the offending areas (20.51). Another—slightly more fitting—recipe was a concoction made from the ashes of goats’ horns mixed with oil of myrtle, and then rubbed all over the body (28.79). While these solutions might not have checked perspiration, the scented oils would have helped mask the goaty odor.

Most significantly, when it comes to halting foul odors in the 21stcentury, the Romans recorded some of the earliest instances of applying alumen—the main ingredient in many antiperspirants today—as a deodorizer. Roman recipes for alumen as a preparation for halting armpit odor range from, bathing in a mixture of two parts honey and one part alumen, to placing unadulterated alumen stones in the armpits until the odor disappeared (35:52).

For over 2000 years, foul body odor has been a topic of conversation, a location for shame, and a way to assert superiority. Whether in ancient Rome or the present-day United States, dealing with goaty armpits has been a priority for many men and women. If you wear an antiperspirant, next time you apply it, you can thank the Romans.