apples

Book Review: Fruit from the Sands by Robert Spengler (2019)

/ passtheflamingo / 1 Comment

Since my last post, I’m excited to announce that I’ve been working on a series of food history videos with my friend, nutritionist and food vlogger Fiorella DiCarlo. But in the meantime, University of California Press graciously asked me to review a newly-published book on food history. Check it out below, and stay tuned for updates!

“As American as apple pie,” runs the old adage, even though apple pie was first baked on the other side of the Atlantic, in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands. Food travels with the people who eat it, and apple pie has traveled far; though not so far as the apple itself. But the story of this ubiquitous fruit doesn’t start with Snow White, or with the golden grove of the Hesperides in Greek myth. It doesn’t even start with Adam and Eve (whose forbidden fruit, by the way, is never specified in the Bible and probably wasn’t an apple to begin with). The apple may be beloved across the world today, but it was born in Kazakhstan. Like many other plants with useful and pleasing qualities, it was dispersed in ancient times, bought and sold along the extensive trade routes that tied humanity together long before airplanes and express shipping.

Robert Spengler‘s Fruit from the Sands (2019) follows the ancient journeys of the apple and a variety of other important crops along the legendary Silk Road, overland trade routes that linked ancient Europe and Asia. As Spengler informs us early on, some historians prefer the plural Silk Roads as a more accurate reflection of the complexity of this commercial web. Most historians mark the beginning of the Silk Road as occurring during the second century BC, but Spengler draws on archaeological evidence indicating the movement of material culture as far back as the late 3rd millennium BC. 

Though the Silk Road(s) have no clear beginning or end, they do have a focal point: Central Asia, a region that gets precious little attention in modern times. I’ve long been interested in Central Asia, and I appreciated the spotlight it receives in this book. When most people think of Central Asia today (if they think of it at all!) they tend to picture empty plains where horse-mounted nomads roam, but Spengler demonstrates that there were already advanced, settled civilizations here more than two or even three thousand years ago, cultivating fruits, flowers, vegetables and grains and selling them to more famous peoples like the Persians, Arabs and Chinese.

Spengler is the Paleoethnobotany Lab Director at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, and the majority of the evidence he draws on is of the material, archaeobotanical sort: physical remains of plants that ancient peoples stored, discarded, or even placed in tombs to accompany the dead to the next world. Through this evidence he is able to trace the point or points of origin for each plant. For the most part, the names of individuals responsible for these ancient migrations are unknown, so it is the plants themselves who become the central characters in Spengler’s narrative. We meet major players like apple and barley as well as less-familiar faces, plants that have fallen into obscurity but were valuable to our ancestors: skirret, sea buckthorn, dragon’s head, gold-of-pleasure, and a type of millet called “panic” (ah, the endless possibilities for wordplay). Botanical genetics and morphology can get a little dry at times without cultural references to balance them, although this is more evident in some chapters than others. In particular, Spengler provides a lot of great literary and art historical references to two plant-based beverages that humans have never run out of words to describe: wine and tea.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it, in particular about how humans influence the genetic development of our crops not only consciously, but unconsciously. For example, Spengler describes how differing grain-harvesting techniques in Asia and pre-Colombian North America produced differing evolutionary pressures on the grain, resulting in divergent development of the grain’s features. Some of the plants Spengler describes have been heavily modified by humans through selective breeding; others occupy a space somewhere between tame and wild, growing and presenting their useful features with minimal intervention.

The relationship between plant and animal, including the human animal, is a delicate balance of push and pull, adapt and adjust. Spengler identifies the direct human dispersal of plants via commercial activity with the inadvertent seed dispersal practiced by animals, who eat a tasty fruit and carry its seeds inside them to a new location. In this mutually beneficial relationship, one wonders which side is truly in control.

If you’ve ever been curious about the history of agriculture or the true origins of the fruits and vegetables at your local market, this is the book for you.

Holidays: Yo, Saturnalia! (Roman, unknown – 5th century CE)

/ passtheflamingo / 2 Comments

“Saturnalia, the very best of days!”
~ Gaius Valerius Catullus, Catullus 14, 1st century BCE

Saturnalia dice-players in a wall-painting from Pompeii.

From the 17th to the 23rd of December, Romans greeted each other with a hearty “Io Saturnalia!” (pronounced yo). It was the most important Roman holiday, a time of feasting and fun when the normal order of things was upended and social divides temporarily erased. During Saturnalia, people dressed in clashing colors that would have been laughed at any other time of year. Gambling, usually outlawed, was practiced openly, as revelers bet on games of dice and trivia and went bobbing for corks in tubs of water. Masters waited on their slaves, and everyone wore the felt cap that usually distinguished freedmen (former slaves) from born citizens. Friends and family exchanged gifts, including toys for children, gag gifts between close friends (the famed poet Catullus once received a book of “the worst poems of all time”), and sigillariae, wooden or clay luck charms in the form of tiny faces. Saturnalia is sometimes called the Ancient Roman Christmas, although Christmas itself was first-celebrated in 4th-century Rome. Saturnalia continued to exist as a secular holiday alongside Christmas for at least another century, until the new religion gradually eclipsed the older and adopted some of its traditions, just as Saturnalia had adopted elements of earlier Greek and Roman festivals.

Although it evolved over time, Saturnalia remained at its core a celebration of the harvest. Saturn, the festival’s namesake, was a deity associated so strongly with agriculture that the hollow ivory statue in his temple in Rome was filled with olive oil. Saturn was said to have ruled on earth in the distant past during a “Golden Age,” when food came freely from the land without labor and everyone lived in peace. The abundance and license of Saturnalia was meant to imitate the utopian conditions of the kingdom of Saturn.

THE SATURNALIA FEAST

We don’t know of specific dishes unique to Saturnalia, but we do know that eating was an important part of the festival, rooted as it was in the agricultural calendar. In general, ancient people followed seasonal eating patterns out of necessity. Based on our knowledge of the festival and the Roman winter diet, we can guess what the menu of a Saturnalia feast may have looked like:

  • Wheat bread was served at every meal, for Romans of every social status. The Roman government often distributed free bread to the people on holidays like Saturnalia. Most Romans did not have an oven at home, and would either buy fresh bread from bakeries or bake homemade dough in communal ovens. For religious holidays and festivals, Roman bakers shaped their wares into a variety of forms: animals, people, gods, even human genitalia (for good luck).

    Lares and Genius. Fragment. Sacrifice of a pig. Fresco from Pompeii (insula VIII, 2, lararium). Fourth style. 69—79 CE. Inv. No. 8905. Naples, National Archaeological Museum

    Sacrifice of a pig in a fresco from Pompeii. Photo by S. Sosnovskiy (2008).

  • Pork was the favorite Roman meat, and in the words of the poet Martial, “a pig will make you a good Saturnalia.” Live pigs and pork sausage were given as gifts during Saturnalia, and pigs were the traditional sacrifice offered to Saturn and other “chthonic” deities (gods of the earth and Underworld). Sacrifice in Roman times was a bit of a racket. The buyer of a sacrificial animal would share the meat with the temple priests who performed the sacrifice, and priests would examine the animal’s entrails for omens, a practice called extispicy (yes, that’s a real English word). If the extispicy showed ill fortune, a new sacrifice would have to be provided; at the buyer’s expense, of course.
    A Roman heading home from the Temple of Saturn with their share of fresh pork would have had many options for preparing it. They might stew it with apricots, roast it with figs on a bed of barley, or boil it in milk.
  • Winter vegetables like leeks, turnips, onions and beets, as well as pickles, formed an important part of the Roman diet, especially for the many who could not afford a sacrificial pig. Parsnips and carrots were fried in oil and drizzled in a savory, salty wine sauce (check out my recreation of this recipe here).

    A still-life of fruit from the home of a Pompeiian woman named Julia Felix.

  • The final course of the meal, dubbed secunda mensa (second plate), consisted of honeyed desserts and seasonal fruit. Desserts might include savillum, a cheesecake topped with poppy seeds, or crunchy candy made from honey and nuts. Affluent Romans enjoyed fried dough drizzled with honey and dusted with imported black pepper. As for fruit, apples were a Roman favorite, served at the end of meals so frequently that the expression ab ovo usque ad mala, “from eggs to apples,” was used to mean “from start to finish” (compare English “soup to nuts”). Pears were also very popular; the natural historian Pliny described 40 different cultivars in the 2nd century CE. Just like people today, Romans sometimes cooked their fruit. Apicius gives a recipe for a baked pudding (patina) of mashed pears with cumin, honey and a sweet raisin wine called passum.
  • Nothing is better on a cold December day than hot mulled wine, and the Romans boiled leftover wine with honey, dates and spices to make a beverage similar to the modern one. Wine in general was an important part of the Saturnalia atmosphere; unless you happened to be Pliny, who describes himself retreating Scrooge-like to his private rooms “during the Saturnalia, when the rest of the house is noisy with the license of the holiday and festive cries. This way I don’t hamper the games of my people and they don’t hinder my work or studies.”

Roman holidays like Saturnalia served an important social function. Relaxing social boundaries released social tension, enabling the Romans themselves to relax; sharing food reminded them to be thankful to the gods, and conjured up a vision of Saturn’s lost paradise that would sustain them through the hardships of winter. So don’t be a Pliny this holiday season. Remember the Romans, and how they made December merry. Io!

D92C7CB2-D936-4A24-8363-2A34A5466F37

This mulled wine is made using Roman ingredients: honey, grains of paradise (known to the Romans as “African pepper”), long pepper, and mastic (a kind of pine resin). Being a Sagittarius myself, I thought it would be fitting to drink it out of my battered-but-still-serviceable Sagittarius mug, and place it on a coaster made out of zebra hide.