The four sheep turned on their spits, wafting out rich aromas over
the bleached Turkish landscape. Nearby, I stirred a vast potful of
lentil stew over an open fire, lashed by smoke and sunlight. A long
table in the yard was already laden with dishes: handmade hummus and
fava bean paste, whole honeycombs, stacks of tandoor-baked bread and
piles of pomegranates. Beyond it loomed the great burial mound of a
ruler of the Phrygian kingdom who had died here in the eighth
century BC — thought to be a historical King Midas or his father.
Aided by a team of Turkish cooks and food experts, I was doing my best
to recreate his funeral feast.
This wasn’t an idle exercise. In the 1950s, archaeologists from the
Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania had excavated the tomb,
near the old Phrygian capital at Gordion. Although this King Midas was
not the mythical man with the golden touch, they still found a treasure
trove of bronze cauldrons, drinking bowls and clay pots in his burial
chamber, including the largest Iron Age drinking set ever discovered.
The vessels contained the physical remnants of a banquet the mourners
had shared, but it was about 40 years before advances in science
permitted chemical analysis of the residues. This was done in the late
1990s by experts from the Penn Museum, led by Patrick McGovern, scientific director of its Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health, and author of Ancient Brews: Rediscovered & Re-created.
Using modern techniques such as infrared spectroscopy, liquid and gas
chromatography and mass spectrometry, McGovern and his team examined
the vestiges of both food and drink found in the bronze vessels. The
mourners, they concluded, had shared an unusual brew made from a mixture
of honey, grapes and barley — a sort of cocktail of mead, wine and
beer. And although the researchers couldn’t be sure, they suspected it
had also contained saffron because of the intense yellow colour of the
residue (and because some of the finest saffron of the ancient world was
produced in what is now Turkey).
The
chemical detective work on the brown clumps of food matter showed these
were the leftovers of a great stew made from lamb or goat that had
first been seared over fire to produce caramelisation, then simmered
with some kind of pulse (probably lentils) along with ingredients such
as honey, wine, olive oil, fennel or anise and other herbs and spices.
-------------------------------------------
The remains of the feast at Gordion are
among numerous ancient foods and drinks scattered throughout the
collections of museums all over the world. Many have been retrieved from
graves, store cupboards and shipwrecks; others were collected by
19th-century European explorers during their expeditions to the
non-western world.
A recent exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Last Supper in Pompeii,
included carbonised bread and solidified olive oil dating from AD79,
the year Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the city. Desiccated pastries
dating back to the Tang dynasty (AD618-907), now in the British Museum,
were found in the Astana tombs in western China, as was a bowlful of jiaozi dumplings: totally dried out but otherwise much like those you might eat in northern China today.
More appetisingly, the preserved soyabeans with ginger from the
Mawangdui tombs in China’s Hunan province, interred about 2,200 years
ago, appear no different from those sold in any modern Chinese
supermarket.
At the first virtual Oxford Food Symposium
last month, Dutch food historian Linda Roodenburg displayed a
photograph of a 19th-century reindeer-milk cheese from the city’s Pitt
Rivers Museum: it looked hard and mouldy but otherwise intact.
Roodenburg, the founder of a virtual food museum,
is compiling a cookbook based on the assortment of comestible treasures
in the Pitt Rivers collection, which also include wild potato bread
from Japan and dried bird’s nest from Sumatra.
Food
objects were collected and shipped to European museums in the 19th
century “because food was considered an important part of a culture,
especially when it was related to specific rituals”, Roodenburg says.
But as modern anthropology took shape, the focus shifted from these
physical relics and towards analysing and interpreting the social
structures of “primitive” societies. “With this disengagement from
natural science, organic and edible objects became irrelevant for
anthropological research,” she continues.
The neglect of food relics did have one benefit, however: their
survival. “Without any meddling of museum conservators, the contents
fermented, dried, moulded or evaporated: a process of slow museum
preservation that is still going on,” says Roodenburg.
We
had eaten something that was older than Christianity and the Chinese
empire. And still the siren scent of saffron was singing to us, like
pure gold, untarnished by the passage of time
Edible objects in museums have a low status today, she adds,
perhaps because “nowadays ethnological museums prefer presenting their
objects as ‘art’ instead of ethnographic artefacts. In this context, a
piece of old reindeer cheese or a glass jar with mouldy sea cucumbers is
less aesthetic than spectacular masks and sculptures.” The Tang dynasty
pastries in the British Museum now lurk mostly unseen by visitors in
the bowels of the institution, where they are known affectionately by
staff as “the jam tarts”.
The archaeological finds at the Mawangdui tombs in China included not
only opulent woven silks, gorgeous lacquerware and medical manuscripts,
but plenty of food, such as desiccated grains, eggs, millet cakes and
the bones of beasts and fowl. A nobleman’s wife had even been buried
with a kind of last supper: a lacquer tray laid with bowls of food
and wine and a clutch of skewered kebabs. These relics have revealed as
much about the food and drink of the upper classes in Han-dynasty China
as textual evidence.
Aside from their historical and scientific importance, food relics
tend to fascinate museum visitors, says Liz Wilding, who is working with
Roodenburg on the Pitt Rivers cookbook. “There is, of course, the
pleasure of the unexpected, due to the obvious rarity of actual food in
museums. Beyond this, food has an emotional and intimate power to engage
people by evoking strong reactions of pleasure and disgust.” She cites
visitors sniffing the pungent smell of ancient fermented milk in a gourd
at the Pitt Rivers Museum as an example that “has repelled some
but provoked them to engage with the object’s background in more
depth”.
Scientific advances have highlighted the value of preserving the
vestiges of ancient food and drink. Some years ago, when I was
seeking information about food remains in a Chinese tomb, museum staff
told me they had been cleaned out of the excavated vessels and
discarded, like dust or sand. But today, according to McGovern,
archaeologists and curators take enormous care to preserve such
materials.
-------------------------------------------
My own initiation into the wonders of
ancient food and drink, at the Gordion tomb, started 20 years ago
when a television company hired McGovern as a scientific consultant for a
documentary, King Midas’ Feast.
They invited me, a recently published food writer with some experience
of Turkey, to recreate the feast, guided by the evidence and the advice
of local experts, including food and drink journalist Aylin Öney Tan.
McGovern had already collaborated with a winemaker to recreate the
funeral beverage: a gorgeous golden elixir fermented from barley,
grapes and honey. The golden colour came from saffron, which they used
guided more by a hunch than any solid proof of its presence in the
original brew (a craft brewery in the US still produces a beer inspired by this).
As I pondered the possibilities for a historically accurate menu, I
began to wonder what the residues from the tomb would taste like and how
it would feel to eat something that had been cooked more than 2,500
years ago. I was astounded that McGovern and his colleagues had never
tasted the residues themselves: this would have been my first impulse —
which is probably why I’m not an archaeologist. Would it be possible to
try some? I asked McGovern, cheekily. I can’t remember his reply. In any
case, it seemed unlikely he would agree.
After intense discussions, Tan and I came up with a menu we reckoned
could have been made with the produce and techniques of Iron Age Phrygia
— long before the appearance in Turkey of modern ingredients such as
tomatoes, lemons, chillies and even sugar.
On the eve of the feast, we marinated the sheep in salt, onion, wild thyme, honey, pekmez
(grape syrup) and wine, ready for the spits and the sheep-dung fires.
We made a rudimentary hummus, seasoned with sumac and vinegar rather
than lemon juice, and a fava bean paste enlivened by dill. The following
morning, I cooked the lentil stew according to McGovern’s advice,
flavouring it with onion, sheep-tail fat, garlic, fennel seeds and pekmez.
McGovern and the winemaker poured their recreated funeral beverage into
magnificent copper cauldrons: replicas of the bronze vessels found in
the tomb that had been made for us by the copper merchants of Ankara.
That afternoon, a hundred or so invited guests, including journalists
and diplomats, arrived for the feast, along with 200 curious
passers-by. The roasted lamb was carved off into the lentil stew, and we
fed everybody in the golden light of the sun. Along with the visiting
dignitaries, McGovern, Tan and I, happily exhausted after our labours,
quaffed the amber brew from copper bowls.
We
put the grainy crumbs in our mouths. Our faces lit up with
amazement. For there it was: the taste of saffron, bright, pure and
unmistakable
Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, McGovern
took me aside and told me he had brought some of the residue from
one of the pots, a sample of the remains of the mead-like beverage.
The two of us sneaked off, leaving the crowd and the drifting smoke
from the fires, and took refuge in a secluded arbour where we sat
down on a wooden bench. He removed a tiny plastic phial from his
pocket and divided the contents between us. For a moment I
just looked at the grainy crumbs in the palm of my hand, awestruck.
Then we looked at each other and put them in our mouths.
Our faces lit up with amazement. For there it was: the taste of
saffron, bright, pure and unmistakable. I couldn’t believe it. I had
expected to get an emotional kick out of eating the residue but not
to taste anything. Yet after more than two millennia in the tomb,
the flame-coloured pistils had lost none of their potency. The
mystery was solved — at least, that is what I thought.
“So now you know,” I said to McGovern, elated, “it was saffron after
all!” He, ever the meticulous scientist, was cautious, pointing out that
the world was going to demand more proof than the assurances of two
people who had tasted the residue at a party on a summer’s afternoon. It
gave the revelation a bittersweet edge, knowing both that we had tasted
saffron and that others might doubt it.
Though in a physical sense we were just eating grit, consuming it was
one of the most extraordinary, and pleasurable, gastronomic experiences
of my life — a reminder that eating is always a matter of psychology as
well as physiology. McGovern and I, sitting in that arbour as the sun
set, full of spit-roasted lamb stew and figs and hummus, mellowed by
mead, were almost literally sharing a feast with the mourners of an Iron
Age Phrygian king. We had eaten something that was older than
Christianity and the Chinese empire. And still the siren scent of
saffron was singing to us, like pure gold, untarnished by the passage of
time.
Later, McGovern and I corresponded by email, and I asked him about
the ethics of eating archaeological evidence. Was what we did, at my
instigation, justified? Sure, we had consumed mere specks of residue,
but did this count as the wanton destruction of a valuable sample? He
replied that while he wouldn’t normally recommend eating the evidence,
this case had been special. Pounds of the residues had been recovered,
more than he had seen at any other site, and the chemical analyses had
been completed. Nineteenth-century chemists had not shied away from
sensory tests, so why shouldn’t a modern scientist have a taste, once in
a while, if it might prove enlightening?
Since that unforgettable evening in Anatolia, I have looked at the
saffron in my kitchen cupboard with a new respect. I had long suspected
my Chinese preserved beans would keep for about two millennia in an
airtight jar (or tomb). But now I know that the saffron, with a bit of
luck, might last even longer. Put that on your sell-by date.
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