Tag Archives: Wine

Around the Table Podcast: Archaeology of Food with Crystal Dozier

By Sarah Peters Kernan

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In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory

Grape Wine Biomarkers on Pottery Sherds

Recreating Pumpkin Leather

Recreating 16th Century Wine

Making Mead

Riley Muncher (Alumnus, Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory)

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Today I’m speaking to Dr. Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and Anthropological Archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the City of Wichita. I am excited to speak to her today about her expertise in researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today.

Crystal Dozier 01:36

I’m delighted to be here.

Sarah Kernan 01:38

So, as I just mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is using archaeological approaches to studying food and foodways. Could you tell us a bit more about what those approaches are and what that can reveal about food and foodways centuries or even millennia ago?

Crystal Dozier 01:56

Of course. So, in your expertise of food history, you’re focused on the written word related to humans’ relationship with food. And archaeology is the companion science to history in this way, in that we’re telling a historical story, but we do not have always the written documentation to accompany it.

So, the archaeological record is a wealth of information that isn’t written down, but rather embodied in artifacts. So, our ability to tell the history of food in archaeology is going to the remnants of cooking practices themselves. To be explicit, this is looking at animal bones. This is the burned crust on the outside of bowls that are thousands of years old. This is looking at micro botanical remains that have been carbonized and preserved for thousands of years even. So, this is a companion to the written word in our understanding of food history by looking at what was actually practiced and what physically remains from those ancient techniques.

So, I like to think of the archaeology side of it as giving us this extra window into humans’ relationship in food that is actually far deeper and far wider than what the historical narrative can tell us. The historical narrative is, of course, relegated to those manuscripts that survive, written for people who could read them, which is a minority of humans across time and space.

So archaeology gives us these insights into all of these practices that we don’t have a written record for, or when we’re lucky enough to have a written record for, usually that’s biased or partial, and archaeology can widen this view of what was actually done in the past.

Sarah Kernan 04:04

I absolutely love the way that you phrase that, that archaeology and this history are companions in creating this narrative. And that’s an excellent segue into my next question. A lot of scholars who deal primarily with this written evidence have simply relied on the work of archaeologists to supplement or support their findings. But your research and publications really show that archaeology often reveals things that simply aren’t present in other evidence or even brings to light things when there isn’t any evidence at all in a written record. So could you talk about some more examples of your work that really highlight the value of archaeological methods in revealing previously hidden or unconsidered moments in a culture’s relationship with food?

Crystal Dozier 04:57

Yeah, I think there’s lots of different ways to attack this question. I usually, as an archaeologist, I usually actually start with the written word. So, we rely a lot on the historical narrative and ethnographies that are written. But sometimes you have to realize that those are partial or incomplete. And so I have a couple of examples I can think of, one from my work and one in archaeology more general.

To come from my work, I had done a study as part of my dissertation looking at a Native American community right before Spanish colonization in central Texas. And archaeologists called this the Toyah phase, somewhere around 1350 AD to just, you know, the colonial moment, 1600, 1650.

And what we know about this group of people is that they were non-agricultural, so they’re mobile hunters and gatherers. There’s lots of bison bones at the sites. There’s usually lots of stone tools, but one of the unique things that is found at these kind of sites is pottery.

And for non-agricultural groups that are mobile, it’s a huge question of why you would put in the time and the effort to make pottery you’re doing the same life ways that you’ve done for thousands of years, you’ve never needed pottery before. You’ve got to lug it around. It’s heavy. It’s fragile. So you have all these questions about why would you start developing a ceramic tradition? And this is a group that there is no direct written history for. We have archaeological evidence, but there was no observation by colonialists into this tradition by the time that we have a historical record in North America.

So my dissertation asked the question of why would you put so much effort into making pottery for this foraging group? And one of the things that I noticed about the kinds of sites that we see for this group of folks is that quite a number of them showed evidence of feasting, of throwing really large parties that were probably inter-ethnic.

Crystal Dozier 07:12

And the reason why I say this is that we find earth ovens, which are a form of cooking technology all over the world in which people put rocks into fire, and then use the heat in the rocks to cook other foods. Usually it’s, you dig a hole, you set a fire, you put the rocks in the hole, the rocks absorb the heat of the fire.

You let the fire burn down, but the rocks are still hot. Cover it with green material, put your food in there, cover it all tightly wrapped. You cover it back up with dirt, and it’s kind of like a crock pot. It maintains the heat and will cook it for a long time without direct fire, so it’s very safe. And looking at the earth ovens at these sites are ginormous.

They are, I have to use metric, it’s 10 meters by 10 meters. That’s 30 feet by 30 feet. This is, you know, you can lie down several people inside of this crock pot, which implies that you’re either cooking something very, very large, or you’re feeding a lot of people, or both. And so these sites that have pottery for this non-agricultural community also includes pottery from the surrounding regions.

So, they’re in central Texas, but they’re pulling ceramics from east Texas and from west Texas. And so, I looked at the residue inside the pottery at some of these sites as part of my dissertation, with the idea that they’re probably making something important in them. And I had a bunch of different hypotheses about what kind of things they could be cooking. And one of the things I chose to explore is whether or not they were making fermented alcoholic beverages, because that’s what people do.

Crystal Dozier 09:04

When you throw a big party, a common feature internationally throughout human history is that you provide a beverage to your guests. And so I decided to include the ability to look for some biomarkers associated with grape wine, tartaric and succinic acids.

And to my delight and surprise, we did find this evidence of tartaric and succinic acids in this pottery sherd that predates Spanish expedition into North America. None of the colonial powers in North America reported grape wine as an indigenous product. But North America has a huge variety of “wild grapes” that colonial narratives emphasized how bountiful and available they were, which is probably because they were in the leftover stands that were being cultivated by Indigenous people prior to colonization.

And so this research helps open up the door to say, hey, even though Europeans didn’t see this, and I do think part of this is because the European mythos around fermentation is so strong, particularly wine. So that the idea that you have Indigenous folks producing the same things and using the same technology was previously unconsidered. And I hope this research opens that door to say, hey, even though the Spanish, the French, didn’t see it, doesn’t mean that this wasn’t being practiced. Because human beings love a good drink.

Sarah Kernan 10:53

Absolutely.

Crystal Dozier 10:56

And there’s tons of it. So that’s one example from my research of things that hadn’t been considered before, that was a hidden foodways. And the reason why it’s hidden, I think, you know, may be really multilayered. But archaeology in general, I think, provides these alternative narratives to challenge both the historical understanding and really empower the way we think about humans’ relationship with food.

And this is by clarifying the origin of various foodstuffs. You know, where do these products come from? And also giving, I think, a lot of respect to the people actually doing the cooking, the chefs, and the women, and domestic labor that’s actually providing these meals for their families and their communities.

Sarah Kernan 11:45

I love that description. That’s such a great example that you have there. On a kind of related note, you’ve mentioned some elements of this as we’ve been talking so far. But could you talk more about how using a methodology like experimental archaeology might differ depending on the cultural context that you’re working in? For example, you’ve researched some very different topics and cultures. You have researched pumpkin mats made by Indigenous groups in the North American Great Plains. And you’ve worked on recreating 16th century French wine following a recipe in Charles Estienne’s L’agriculture et maison rustique. And these are really different places and times and types of supporting evidence, other evidence to draw upon to supplement your work and research and narrative. How do you think about tackling such different projects and what type of evidence you can draw on that might be available to support an experimental approach?

Crystal Dozier 12:50

Sure. So my work in experimental archaeology is mostly to understand how do we know from the archaeological record what people were cooking and eating. So in order to do that we need to actually make things we think people were eating and then see how it decomposes, see how it is formulated, and what components of it may persist in the archaeological record, you know, for thousands of years.

And for these kind of studies we have to start with what we know about these food products. So that can either come from the historical record, which is either through recipes, written down, which are fairly constrained, or it has to come from ethnographies, which are third-party observations of this foodstuff. If you’re very, very lucky, another resource that we can use is oral traditions of people who have continued those foodway practices. All of these sources come with the same kind of recognition that they are a product of a time and a place and therefore are not a full understanding of a particular practice.

For example, I don’t think everyone in the sixteenth century was making wine in this one particular recipe that we found. Or for the pumpkin leather mats, which is a form of fruit leather made with pumpkin, we were able to find two different records of ethnographies, of observations, of watching it being made, and they follow different techniques.

Because the goal of these studies is to figure out what is left in the archaeological record when the food is complete, that means we also need to take account what are the scientific processes that we know are happening in order to record it. These experiments do look and feel very scientific. We are measuring everything, everything from how much time it takes to how much water we put in, you know, to the actual looking at these things underneath the microscope, which is my main focus. Is, from this food, what is left on the crumbs of the piece of pottery that we’re looking for, the microbotanical crumbs, so to say.

Crystal Dozier 15:17

So, we have to be very exacting with our methodologies. But the process of it is remarkably similar, even though we are looking from very different traditions and time periods, in that you start with what do we know about this practice? What do we don’t know? What is likely to survive in the archaeological record? How can we trace that through this experiment? And very often we find also through the practice of making these past foodways, all sorts of tactical knowledge you would never know without physically trying to do it yourself.

You know, how would you know that this particular food gets very sticky at this stage, or that it makes a particular sound? And that sound is probably rather than, you know, what we’re doing, the temperature checks and the pH levels, maybe it was it was probably that sound or that texture that led ancient cooks to know, oh, this is done. So in that way, it is very scientific.

But I also really appreciate the very humanistic nature that recreation of these foods gives you is that, oh, this is messy and cooking is messy, and why did no one ever tell me that you can dry pumpkin and then rehydrate it to use all year round?

Sarah Kernan 16:38

You’ve worked on such a variety of really interesting projects. Do you have any favorites or is there anything you’re really excited to research soon?

Crystal Dozier 16:48

Yeah. I’ll tell you maybe the highlights of the experimental archaeology is when the food turns out really good. There’s also when the food does not turn out really good. So, my most “successful” experiment, in that it turned out delicious, is probably, I made mead, honey wine. And the goal of that experiment was to figure out if the pollen in the honey survived the fermentation process. Because pollen survives for a long period of time, we know that people often add honey to all sorts of fermented beverages. And so it was a very straightforward experiment of, does that pollen, does that remain through the fermentation? And that was probably my most delicious experiment to date.

The pumpkin mat also is a very delicious experiment. So, in that, which I kind of referenced, is dried pumpkin leather, like fruit leather, that is woven into a mat, like a, think like a table mat, but not that you would put stuff on, just for storage. And that is an incredible piece of technology. That we did the experiment three years ago and it’s still hanging in my lab. It is completely still edible. And every six months, we like take out a pair of scissors and cut off a piece and dunk it in hot water and be like, is it done? Do we need to take it down? Nope, this is still pumpkin-y.

Sarah Kernan 18:32

Wow.

Crystal Dozier 18:33

So that’s the really exciting, when you’re like, wow, this really works, and it’s delicious, and it continues. Every once in a while though, you realize how much we don’t know from ancient cooks and that they knew ways to make things delicious that were not written down and we do not have access to.

So recently, one of my graduate students completed an experiment looking at mesquite bean pods. So you probably know mesquite, the little bushy tree people use its wood a lot for smoking, but the beans themselves you can grind into flour. You can make all sorts of things with that. You can make bread, you can make cakes. We were particularly interested in making beer. In South America it’s very common, it’s called algarroba. And we wanted to recreate this knowing that in North America people were probably doing it as well. And I must say, missing a written record certainly missed something for us, because the experiment was successful in that we got really great data and being able to understand if or when people might have been making this in the past, based on starch residue. But it kind of tasted like dirt.

Sarah Kernan 19:50

Oh. I’m sorry that one didn’t work out.

Crystal Dozier 19:53

That one, I mean, it fermented, it was two and a half, almost 3 percent alcohol by volume. So, a light sessionable beer, but it was pretty acidic to modern tastes. So it’s one of those things of like, okay, we’ll be able to tell this, but we need more research into what ancient people were doing because they probably knew better than we do how to make this actually delicious.

Sarah Kernan 20:19

Wow. Well, I guess you might have to have another graduate student down the line work on that one again.

Crystal Dozier 20:23

Exactly.

Sarah Kernan 20:26

If we could turn a little bit toward teaching and public engagement. Food is such an incredible way to draw in people, get them interested in all kinds of topics and fields of study that maybe they normally wouldn’t be all that engaged with. And your institution, Wichita State University, has a really incredible resource, the Archaeology of Food Laboratory. Could you talk a bit about how the lab functions and how it works with and engages students of all levels and ages, and how the lab interacts with the public and non-academics?

Crystal Dozier 21:07

Sure. So the Archaeology of Food Lab is something that I established shortly after arriving at Wichita State as a way to not only formalize a lot of these research questions that I’ve had in the basis of my research, but also explicitly to be the avenue to support not only students, but the public at large. And so the way that the lab functions is really in two different components.

The first of which is that the lab actually serves as a contract archaeology research lab. In that I take research contracts from mostly private archaeological firms with very particular questions about the foodways that they’re researching. Most of these firms work in what’s called cultural resource management, which is a compliance-based field that ensures that when development is happening, that roads, airports, anything with federal funding isn’t destroying the archaeological record as part of that development. And as those firms ensure the safety of our historical record, they encounter things that they don’t know what to do with and that very few people have expertise in.

And so my lab actually accepts samples from all over North America. And we perform the residue analysis for different areas, looking for those residues of what was being cooked in the past. We’re one of the very few labs that is able to take these as contract samples. Otherwise, you have to usually have like a personal relationship with an academic, which is complicated with university systems.

Crystal Dozier 22:56

The benefit of doing this is not only that we get to know more about the archaeological record, but I employ students to work with me on these projects. So, students, we have undergraduates and Master’s students who work, are employed in the lab, who are paid to do this research. And this is a companion to the kind of work that they’re doing as part of their educational journey. Right. So they’re learning it in the classroom and do a lot of independent studies.

All of my Master’s students have an independent thesis or research project that may or may not, you know, intersect here. But this allows us to support their work better and aid our understanding of the history. In turn, this allows the lab to be stocked for those student projects. And so almost all of these experiments that I’ve spoken about have included students. So, the pumpkin man experiment was the work of an entire class, that we took it on as a class project. I mentioned Riley Muncher is the Master’s student who worked on the Mesquite bean pod beer. So, this affords the lab the ability to do these experiments on the academic side as well. And this in turn is something that we want to ensure is available to the public.

We do a fair amount of events with our more public facing parts of the university. This is everything from public lectures. I was invited down last year, down to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, who is the ancestral population to a lot of the archaeological work I’m doing here in Kansas now. And they asked me to speak about what are the foodways of the Wichita and the archaeological record before the modern moment. And so I think those are really important conversations to have about what are traditional food ways, what are the forgotten food products that have really complex interactions with health and well-being.

And so, this is something I do in the classroom, but also to the public, whether it’s school groups coming to visit, or working with our art museum on campus about how do artists interact with food and what do we know about the history of it. I like to support as much of this public facing as possible and do it through avenues like this podcast and open access publishing. We talk about how hard it is in the ivory tower to get our research out there. And so whenever it’s possible, I try to make sure that our research is available freely to the public, like the pumpkin leather mat article is open online for anyone to read anywhere all over the world.

Sarah Kernan 25:54

I love how all of this feeds into itself. And you’re really supporting, through this lab, all these different really important groups and constituencies, and it’s all serving this greater purpose of both researching and garnering interest from students and the public, as well as other academics. I think that’s just so important and really great that there’s this locus on your campus for that sort of activity.

I have a final question. Let’s say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they’re thinking, oh my goodness, I would absolutely love to use all these different archaeological methods to learn more about foods in the past, but I have no idea where to start. What do you recommend, whether they’re an undergraduate student who’s maybe looking for a major, or they’re an interpreter at a historic site, or a scholar at an institution who is looking to incorporate archaeology into their bag of research tricks? What would you recommend?

Crystal Dozier 27:04

Right. So, I’ll start this with a piece of advice I love to start when talking with the general public. And it’s that our relationship with food as human beings has so dramatically changed in the last 20 years, the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the last 1,000 years. So, one technique or avenue or trick that I really enjoy is when you are sitting down to a meal or if you’re in the grocery store, try to identify or look up, just real quickly, you can just Google it, where does that food come from? Where is its origins? And I think a lot of folks don’t realize the complex histories of so many of these food products.

You know, we think of tomatoes as an essential part of pasta sauce in Italian cuisine. But tomatoes come from Mesoamerica and were considered very questionable to European tastes in the early colonial period. And not only looking at where is it, where is the origin of this food, but also what did it look like prior to domestication? Over 90% of the food we eat today has been fully domesticated and managed under human horticultural and agricultural practices.

Again, a quick Google will show you what is the archaeological record of what did this food start as? And it’s absolutely mind boggling. Look up bananas. Wild. Humans did things to these foods that has absolutely changed the landscape of our globe. And I think if you start there, of what did this food actually look like and how have humans transformed it? And you know, you can then apply that if you’re working in a particular context.

What does this narrative actually look like? What would have meant to do the dishes in this society? How would you have cleaned them? Something as simple as that. It’s not going in the dishwasher. Are you using a brush? What is the brush made out of? This kind of exploration and imagination, I think, is really crucial to the archaeological process. You really have to push yourself into what are the boundaries of what we know about the food. And there’s always more to know.

Sarah Kernan 29:34

Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today and for talking a bit about the archaeology of food.

Crystal Dozier 29:41

Of course, anytime.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

Of Wine and Chocolate in Anne Dormer’s Letters

By Daphna Oren-Magidor

“I drink chocolate when my soul is sad to death.”

This statement echoes through time – who among us has not used chocolate as a temporary cure for the blues? –  but it was written in 1687 by Anne Dormer (c. 1648–1695), in a letter to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull.

Dormer had every reason to feel “sad to death.” Her husband was extremely abusive and controlling, her beloved sister had left England to travel with her diplomat husband, and she suffered from insomnia and melancholy. She described her use of medicinals to treat these conditions throughout her correspondence, including multiple mentions of her use of chocolate and its beneficial impact on her health and her mood.

Painting representing a woman in 18th-century dress sat at a small table. On the table there is a tray with a chocolate pot, a cup and other implements used in the consumption of hot chocolate.
A Lady Pouring Chocolate by Jean-Étienne Liotard (1744). Wikimedia.

In September 1687 she wrote: “when I have great want of sleepe and no company but a sick maide and a most preverss unreasonable Husband, I then divert myself with my two sweete children, think of all my kind friends and take a dish of chocolate which I find the greatest cordiall and reviveing in the world.” Six months later, in April 1688, she even went as far as claiming that she drank chocolate every day during the winter, which she credited with the substantial improvement in her health.[1]

By the late seventeenth-century, chocolate was fairly well established in England. It had first been introduced around 1640, with efforts made to promote its medical benefits. By 1652 it was possible for a writer to claim (albeit with some exaggeration) that chocolate was “thirsted after by people of all Degrees (especially those of the Female sex) either for the Pleasure therein naturally Residing, to Cure, and divert Diseases.”[2] Initially, chocolate’s medicinal properties were questioned, as it didn’t fit well into the categories of Galenic medicine. By the late seventeenth-century, however, it was often described as a type of panacea.[3]

So it’s not very surprising that Anne Dormer, a gentlewoman with some ties to the Continent (where chocolate consumption had begun earlier), was drinking chocolate on a regular basis in the 1680s. What is more interesting is her juxtaposition of chocolate to another substance which was consumed for both medicine and pleasure: wine.

Photo of a silver wine cup.
A silver wine cup, ca. 1660, made in Boston. Currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image on Open Access.

Wine was considered a standard medical substance in the early modern period, and while it was to be consumed in moderation, it was a part of most diets, certainly for the upper classes, and was also a key ingredient in many medical recipes. Even at the height of Puritan fervor in the mid-seventeenth-century, drunkenness was criticized but the moderate consumption of wine was not seen as moral problem and was taken for granted. Movements calling for complete abstinence from alcohol emerged much later. Yet for Dormer wine appeared to be a risk, and she used it with extreme caution.

Part of Dormer’s concern was the strength of the wine and its impact on her body, which had never properly recovered from childbirth. In the letter from September she noted that she was “weary of sack [cheaper wine from Spain, Portugal, and their Atlantic colonies]”, but she found French wine was “too rakeing for my carcase which grows still leaner.” Dormer rarely drank wine, and when she did the quantity “never exceeds six spoonfulls.” In a later letter she even mentioned that she had “a little dish” for the purpose of measuring drink, which “holds just three spoonfulls which is my usuall dosse”.

Photo of an elaborate silver cholocate pot.
Silver chocolate pot made in 1697-98 by Isaac Dighton, London. Currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image on Open Access.

Beyond her concern about wine’s physical affects, however, Dormer was preoccupied with wine’s potential for addiction, and perhaps even for moral corruption. While not avoiding wine altogether, she felt wine drinking was risky, especially if done in solitude. “I am sure there is no danger I should ever love wine to sitt and sip by my self,” she wrote, “…w[h]ich is a greate content to my mind, for did I love it, I would never touch a dropp.” She also noted that she consumed her medicinal sherry in the presence of her husband, after dinner, echoing the advice that appeared much later in Benjamin Rush’s exploration of liquor and its effects published in 1790. Rush suggested that wine gave “cheerfulness and strength”, but only when consumed in moderation during mealtimes. Chocolate, on the other hand, was a safe alternative. It gave her “spirits and strength”, which she would never have gotten successfully from wine, since consuming it in any large quantities would have been “a continuall torment to my mind.”

It is unclear why Dormer was concerned about “loving” wine. It’s possible she had previous episodes of drunkenness, as she noted that drinking wine in front of her husband might lead to him almost believing “I may be trusted with it.” Given her husband’s general abusive control of her, however, it’s quite possible that he claimed he couldn’t trust her around wine with no relation to her own actions.  Whatever the reason for her worries about wine, Dormer’s letters offer an interesting example of the everyday use of chocolate as a medication, as well as of the suggestion that chocolate might be a better alternative – morally as well as medically – to the consumption of alcohol.


[1] BL Add MS 72516, ff. 163-163v., 167v., 177-177v.

[2] Quoted in Kate Loveman, “The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers, 1640–1730,” Journal of Social History 47:1 (2013): 27-46.

[3] Ken Albala, “The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in 17th Century Medical Theory,” Food and Foodways, 15:1-2 (2007): 53-74.

 

Bibulous Erasmus

Brian Cummings

"The fower quarters of the yeare: Autumne," (London, 1643) ART 232- 608.3, Folger Shakespeare Library.
“The fower quarters of the yeare: Autumne,” (London, 1643) ART 232- 608.3, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Ars longa, vita brevis, as you hear every day in the tearoom at the Folger Shakespeare Library. This Christmas at the Folger I made a discovery which made me feel young: Erasmus’s favourite wine! The thought had been with me since I heard a disputation at the British Academy, years ago, between Eamon Duffy and Diarmaid MacCulloch. All of a sudden, for once they agreed on something: that the Reformation was essentially a quarrel between beer-drinkers and wine-drinkers. You will be glad to know that the new Encyclopaedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation (New York, 2017) has a learned entry on Beer. And as Duffy and MacCulloch wound down into post-symposium revelries, already an Erasmian colloquium was forming in my mind, on whether Erasmus was a beer-drinker or a wine-drinker. After all, he was born in Holland, one of the great beer-drinking countries of the world, which even invented the world’s best drinking snack, bitterballen, precisely to go with monastic ales.

Frans Huys, Magnus ille Erasmus Roterodamus... (n.d.) ART Vol. a11 no.105, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Frans Huys, Magnus ille Erasmus Roterodamus… (n.d.) ART Vol. a11 no.105, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[Guide gastronomique [1]: De Jopenkerk, a converted church, Haarlem, NL – try “Malle Babbe”]

On the other hand, I felt sure that Erasmus preferred wine, just as, despite espousing reform, and flirting with the young Luther, he remained a life-long Catholic. Familiaria colloquia (1522) – where else – provides a definitive answer. It comes in the Convivium profanum, a dialogue between a variety of characters (chiefly Augustinus, Christianus, and Erasmius), who vie with each other in gluttony, and in describing foods and wines beloved of gourmets (or else people who just eat a lot). There are jokes at the expense of Stoics and other moralists, and worst of all, Diogenes the Cynic, who lived off raw vegetables and clear water. Kale, quinoa, and mesclun, are definitely off the menu at this particular feast.

Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum... (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum… (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy of the author.

[Guide gastronomique [2]: sweetgreen, 221, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, all-day kale]

At this point, Christianus asks what his friend likes to drink with a meal: does he prefer red or white (rubrum an candidum)? Augustinus replies: “The colour’s no hindrance provided the taste’s agreeable” (a classic wino’s quip). But something else is going on: how do we use words to describe sensory things? Verbal discrimination is deliberately elided by Erasmus into distinctions of taste, since food – and especially wine – is famously hard to put into apt words, at least without resorting to absurd metaphor. Christianus comments: “Yet there are famous gourmets who deny that wine deserves approval unless it pleases the four senses: the eyes by its colour, the nostrils by its fragrance, the palate by its taste, the ears by its name and fame.” Now he drops his foodie bombshell: Tantum, ut multi non stupidi palati vehementer probarint villum Louanio vernaculum quum crederent, esse Belnense. Many people with “not stupid palates” can’t tell a wine from Louvain from one of Beaune in Burgundy.

Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum... (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Desiderius Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum… (Basil, 1533) 189- 464q, Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy of the author.

This is the joke that got me salivating. At first I thought it was a beer gag: because in Louvain these days you will not find Belgian wine (the very idea is an oxymoron) but plenty of Belgian beer, including Bourgogne de Flandres (which sounds like an Erasmian trope). But in the fifteenth century, the Dukes of Burgundy planted vines in their territories at Brussels, Namur, Mons, and Louvain. Still, the thought brings a sneer to the nose of Erasmus: who could make such a terrible mistake? And there is a theological joke, too: Louvain is home to the nastiest scholastics.

[Guide gastronomique [3]: Le troubadour, Louvain (nr. KU) – mussels with Bourgogne de Flandres]

So, is Beaune Erasmus’s favourite wine? Here I digress into a visite du vignoble via P.S. Allen’s great edition of Erasmus’s letters. Epistola 1342 to Marcus Laurinus is one of the most extraordinary in the 3000 letters that survive. Half of it is a defence of his position on the Luther affair, which was convulsing Europe; the other half is an itinerary of his odyssey around Europe in 1521, especially an uncomfortable stay in Constance and a long convalescence in Basel. In Constance he was very ill with fever and the gallstone, and nearly died (before we feel too sorry, remember that Erasmus is always nearly dying of something). But on return to Basel he is sent a half-cask of red Burgundy by Nikolaus von Diesbach, dean and bishop-designate. Erasmus makes a miraculous recovery: he felt reborn, renatus in alium hominem. Is this a sly dig at Luther, in a letter which is all about Luther’s evangelical doctrines, and how they are worse than any disease? Especially when he now claims that red Burgundy has had a direct medicinal benefit observed by the doctors, who say that his stone has disappeared. Happy is the name of Burgundy, he raptures: O felicem vel hoc nomine Burgundiam! In another letter he calls the wine a deus ex machina. He might move to France tomorrow, except that with fresh supplies he will not need to, as he reports in Ep. 1510, a year later: “I have done a deal with the vintner for three half-casks, one of old wine and two of new”.

[Guide gastronomique [4]: Domaine Albert Morot, négociant at Ave. Jaffelin, Beaune: several 1ercrus]

Can we locate what particular wine might have brought such magical results? Here we encounter a great aporia in epicurean history, which is that the technological revolutions of the eighteenth century – in bottling and especially in corks – mean that we judge wine by completely different standards. Beaune, with its beautiful coloured rooftops, is now the commercial centre of a multi-million-Euro industry. Wine is a science (oenology, a word Erasmus surely must have invented) which went from France to California and back again, transforming an everyday drink into the wine-tasting superlatives of today. Red Burgundy, some connoisseurs say, has typical aromas of horseshit [sic] and blackberry jam. What would Erasmus have made of that? I think he would have loved it, and cited it in De copia, his great book which makes a philosophical marriage between all the possible words, and all possible things in the world. But what did he taste? There are three references in the letters to a wine from Beaune, which seems to be the one he liked best; it “was of a most agreeable colour – you might call it ruby-red”; the taste was “neither sweet nor dry”, “neither cold nor fiery”, and so kind to the digestion that “it did very little harm” – even when taken in quantity.

Thomas Trevilian, Detail of grapes from the Trevelyon Miscellany (1608), V.b.232, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Thomas Trevilian, Detail of grapes from the Trevelyon Miscellany (1608), V.b.232, Folger Shakespeare Library.

[Guide gastronomique [4]: Chez Jeannette, Fixin, boeuf bourgignon; Beaune 1ercru «Les Cent Vignes»]

The mythology of French wine is based on a holy trinity of values: the grape; the vintage; and most mystical of all, le terroir. This untranslateable word means something like “all the best wine comes from France”. White wine in Burgundy is now dominated by the Chardonnay grape, which in unoaked form is still perhaps the most opulently elegant white in the world; but in Erasmus’s time almost certainly the whites of Burgundy were made from the Fromenteau grape, perhaps equivalent to Pinot Gris. As for reds, on the other hand, we have documentation: on 6 August 1395, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, made the political decision of his life in banning the “vile and disloyal Gamay”, and giving precedence to the Noirien, a less high-yielding grape. This is the ancestor of the modern Pinot Noir, that most quixotic and awkward of grapes. For those who love it, it is the cutest grape in history, but it is very hard to grow in abundance, and likes poor soil, cool climates, and fairly steep hills. Since these are also the conditions that wipe out harvests in bad years, the Pinot Noir is a cruel mistress, although it has found renewed success in chillier areas such as Oregon, New Zealand, and Alpine Italy, as well as its native Burgundy. However, good red Burgundy also needs a bit of age in the bottle to develop its flavours, and nothing about wine storage in Erasmus’s time was much suited to ageing. He describes liking wine with a bit of age (perhaps two years), but after four he says most of the flavour has disappeared.

We are left with terroir. The intensity of the modern wine trade is such that individual parcels of land perhaps 30 metres wide are prized as having such a particularity of flavour that they are considered quite distinct from others only a hundred metres away. It is possible that for Erasmus “Beaune” meant nothing like that. Belnense might be a generic name for wine of the whole region, somewhat like “Bordeaux” or “Sonoma”. But it is also possible that Erasmus does mean the name of this particular village. So could we find his wine on a map? It got me thinking, and indeed googling, looking at wine maps, which have always given me a special kind of pleasure. There is something cartographically exciting about a wine map: all of those tiny parcels of land, and weird names, coloured in crimson for red wine, or yellow-green for white; in the case of Burgundy, with darker shading, the better the wine. So I googled this.

Screen capture courtesy of https://burgmap.com/regions/beaune/.
Screen capture courtesy of https://burgmap.com/regions/beaune/.

And it got me thinking: if any of these vineyards are really old, they will be close to the town but not part of it; for instance, those near the cemetery. The cemetery will always have been in the same place. And here I was excited, because there on the map, at just that point, were some vineyards I knew the names of: “Toussaints”, “les Bressandes”, “les Cent Vignes”. Not really expensive wines – but of a price which a father, shall we say my own father, might buy his son for his 40th birthday.

The last bottle from my father's gift.  Image courtesy of the author.
The last bottle from my father’s gift. Image courtesy of the author.

For here the strands of my story had become personal. My father, who was a complicated man, was always happiest when opening a bottle of red Burgundy with his own family. He discovered Burgundy, place and wine, when I was in my teens. We used to stay at an unpretentious hotel in one of the smaller villages, Fixin – Beaune even then was hopelessly expensive and chic. The hôtel was called (as almost all nice Logis de France are, at least in the memory) Chez Jeannette, and we would stay for a week, and each night my father would buy a slightly better wine. He wasn’t buying the most expensive stuff, and Burgundy was then still quite a backwater for most travellers, nothing like the Côte d’Azur. In memory of these trips, when I was 40, he did indeed buy me 12 bottles of Beaune, “Les Cent Vignes”, made by Albert Morot, an extremely traditional negociant.

How did these vineyards get such beautiful names? Originally, the story goes, it was “Sans Vignes”, because no wine was made there; then they planted vines and changed the name. “Les Bressandes” is either named after the 13th century canon, Johannis Bressand – or else after the women of Bresse. “Les Marconnets” perhaps refers to an ancient gallic tribe conquered by the Romans.

[Guide gastronomique [5]: Le Diplomate, 14th St, NW, DC, Beaune 2006 Domaine Maillard.]

Such etymologies are very Erasmian. It would be nice to believe in an Erasmian vineyard. It is not impossible – for it was the Benedictines from Cluny who first began cultivating wines on a large scale, and the Cistercians who first walled off individual vineyards and prized the difference between small parcels of terroir. They were doing this in the 14th century. But the oldest map of Burgundian wine, to my knowledge, is 18th century. It offers nothing at this level of detail, consisting of a range of small mountains and the names of the main villages.

Claude Arnoux, "Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne..." (London, 1728). Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon.
Claude Arnoux, “Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne…” (London, 1728). Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon.

It is appended to the first ever book on Burgundy, by Claude Arnoux: Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne, et sur les vins qu’elle produit (1728). He mentions four vineyards in Beaune, St Desiré, la Montée, les Grèves, and la Fontaine de Marconney. Traces of all these can still be found – the last is now Les Marconnets, above. Arnoux favours even more the wines of Volnet (now Volnay) and Pommard. Wines from Beaune, he says, much as Erasmus does, do not do well after two years of age. Volnay, he says, has the colour of l’oeil de perdrix – the eye of a partridge – and goes on: “il est plein de feu, de montant, & de legereté; il est presque tout esprit” (“it is full of fire, of flavour, and of lightness; it is almost all spirit”). Just like in Erasmus, Arnoux presents us with the problem of copia: how to represent things in words. Word is added to word, to express through variety of language the abundance of matter. Wine, like language, is a cornucopia. And so, as we continue to try, and fail, to give expression to sense perception through metaphor, there is nothing for it but to open another bottle, and wonder if it might be, as for Erasmus, a cure for life’s ills or even a deus ex machina.

[According to the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015-2020,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture, moderate drinking is up to 1 drink per day for women and up to 2 drinks per day for men.]

Brian Cummings FBA is Anniversary Professor at the University of York in the Department of English and Related Literature. His books include Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (OUP, 2013), and an edition of The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, which appeared in Oxford Worlds Classics in 2013. In 2012 he gave the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University on ‘Bibliophobia’, and in 2014 the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Library, coinciding with a NEH-sponsored conference on Shakespeare’s Biography. With Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) he is leading the project “Remembering the Reformation”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2016 to 2019. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

In vino sanitas

By Jane Draycott

A well-known fresco from the household shrine of the House of the Centenary at Pompeii shows Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, standing at the foot of Vesuvius. This, in conjunction with the substantial amount of archaeological evidence for viticulture in the Campania region, gives us an insight into the importance of wine in ancient Roman culture and society, not to mention the ancient Roman economy. For those in possession of agricultural estates, wine was relatively easy to make and store, and for those who were not, it was readily available to buy. Wine could be drunk at all hours of the day and night, and depending on the occasion could be mixed with honey (mulsum) or spices (conditum), or diluted (either with water or with snow, depending on your budget). However, the Roman appreciation of wine went beyond its role as a beverage, whether taken in conjunction with a meal, or on its own.

Household Shrine, Bacchus and Vesuvius Fresco. Credit: Carole Raddato, Wikimedia Commons.
Household Shrine, Bacchus and Vesuvius Fresco. Credit: Carole Raddato, Wikimedia Commons.

Pliny the Elder, writing shortly before his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, stated that ‘grapes hold such an important place among [medicines] that they act as remedies in themselves, merely by supplying wine’ (Natural History 14.3.19). Recipes for wine that survive from the ancient world indicate that certain types were specifically designed to serve as medicaments, whether taken internally as potions, and externally as lotions, and, interestingly, these recipes are not only found in straightforwardly medical treatises, such as Oribasius’ Medical Collections (c. 325-400 CE).

Cato the Elder’s On Agriculture (c. 160 BCE) makes the importance of viticulture in the Italian economy clear, going so far as to state that, in Cato’s opinion, a vineyard was the best sort of agricultural estate to possess (1.7). It contains a number of recipes for different types of wine, and many of these are explicitly medicinal, designed to deal with common medical problems that might arise on an isolated farmstead, such as constipation, retention of urine, indigestion, colic, and internal parasites, by utilising accessible plants as ingredients, such as hellebore, juniper, and myrtle.

Columella’s On Agriculture (first century CE) also recommends myrtle wine for a wide range of complaints, and states that, in Columella’s opinion, it is the type of wine most beneficial to health (12.38.7). Additionally, horehound, squill, and pennyroyal wines are recommended for coughs (12.32, 33, 35) – in fact, an amphora once containing horehound wine has been recovered from the Roman fort at Carpow in Scotland, and it was perhaps used by soldiers for its medicinal properties in order to treat the colds they acquired while serving in the damp province.

Drunken old woman statue, a first century CE Roman copy of a third century BCE Hellenistic original. Credit: Bockschuss, Flickr.

However, while the Romans appreciated that certain types of wine could be beneficial to health, they also recognised that too much of any type of wine could be detrimental to health. Lucretius asked: ‘why, when the sharp power of wine has penetrated into a man … does heaviness come upon the limbs, do his legs impede him as he staggers, does his speech become slurred, his mind become soaked, his eyes swim?’ (On the Nature of Things 3.476-82, early first century BCE). Excessive drinking and drunkenness were frowned upon in both men and women, and just as hellebore could be added to wine to make a purgative, it was also believed to cure the madness brought on by excessive drinking…