Oldest Written Recipe!

From imgur.com comes an excellent picture of the oldest written recipe.  It's a Sumerian clay tablet containing a recipe for beer.  It's an excellent photograph; it's so clear that, if you can read Sumerian pictographs, you could read the recipe yourself.   You can see the picture here.

Roman Wine

Amphorae arranged for marine transport (Wikimedia Commons)

A few days ago, while reviewing the list of archaeological articles with a connection to food that appears toward the bottom of the left-hand side of this blog, I came across this article about an interesting experiment to attempt to discover what the red wines made by the ancient Romans may really have been like. This experiment is being conducted by the University of Catania in Sicily, and involves the use of grapes planted by the researchers in a vineyard near Catania that will be tended solely with tools and materials available to the ancient Romans.

That, however, is not the most interesting element of the experiment. The most interesting element of the experiment is the handling of the wine's fermentation process. Many modern wines are aged in wooden casks, often made from oak. The Catanian researchers, working from material found in Virgil and other ancient texts, are instead aging their wine in huge terracotta containers, big enough to hold a man, that have been sealed on the inside with beeswax. The containers will be buried in the ground up to their necks, but will not be sealed until the fermentation process is complete--and the grapes will be allowed to ferment naturally without the use of added fermenting agents. 

The idea that a university is attempting to reproduce ancient wines is not surprising in light of Patrick McGovern's work and Dogfish Head Brewery's reconstructions of ancient beers. What is interesting, at least to me, is that the university researchers are not the only winemakers interested in fermenting wine in terracotta containers.   This fine wine blog claims that the use of terracotta containers to ferment wine is being rediscovered by a number modern wine makers; they cite several, including one in Sicily, one in northern Italy, the other in the Republic of Georgia. Apparently the use of terracotta containers results in wines with interesting flavor notes. According to the blog:

Upon opening it is intensely tannic and grippingly mineral. Decant once. Twice. The result, if you’re patient, is a wine that has a purity and fascination that makes you want to roll it appreciatively around your mouth. Deep, rich (but not heavy) and aromatic with layers of dried peach, warm apricot and apple notes on both the nose and mid palate, a splendid Vitovska that is as bone dry as the rocks from which the vines eke out their precarious existence, yet somehow refreshing and curiously sippable with a very long finish that imparts further flavours of hazelnuts and dried fig. And interestingly different to the Vitovska that is fermented in big old barrels.

It is worth remembering that the Romans could have used wooden containers to ferment, age, store and ship their wines, but did not.  Possibly this was because it was cheaper for the Romans to manufacture the large number of clay containers than it would have been for them to make a sufficient number of containers from wood.  The wine blog post suggests, however, that there may also have been positive reasons for using terracotta amphorae for the purpose, namely, that the use of clay containers produces finished wines with more interesting and desirable qualities than wines fermented and aged in wooden barrels.  Oenophiles, take note!

EDIT: The Real Wine Fair, the blog I quoted in this post, posted a follow-up entry consisting of an interview with a wine maker from Pheasant's Tears Winery, discussing his use of terracotta containers among other things. That interview may be found here. It provides much fascinating detail about the modern use of terracotta containers in the winemaking process. One of the most interesting statements in the interview is the claim that the use of terracotta containers (not amphorae) that is discussed is based on historical Georgian practice that predates the Romans.  The process is, however, much the same as the process being followed by the researchers at the University of Catania.

EDIT (8/25/2013) to change the reference to the type of terracotta containers used by the Romans for fermenting wine, since an amphora has a particular shape and I don't know what the Romans called the (probably wider and flatter) type of container) that would have been used for wine fermenting purposes.

The Best Beer to Drink With Viking Food?

My husband recently told me about an article on Popular Mechanics' website, of all things, about another ancient brew the Dogfish Head Brewery is planning to release. That article can be found here.   Dogfish has their own article on their website here (note that you will have to input your birthdate, and that birthdate will need to be consistent with legal drinking age, in order to view the article).

This time, the brewery has made a putative early Scandinavian brew, which will be put on sale this fall. Named Kvasir, after the "first human in Norse mythology", the brew, based on finds in a Danish tomb dating to 3,300 B.C.E., is made from bog myrtle, honey, lingonberries, and bog cranberries. After my sad experience with other Dogfish historical brews, I doubt I'll be taste-testing this one personally, but beer connoisseurs may want to check Kvasir out, either alone or as part of a Viking or early Scandinavian food experiment. 

Another Historical Experiment, of Sorts

Tonight, an adventurous friend of mine who loves beer gave me the opportunity to taste two recreations of historic brews that were discussed in Patrick McGovern's book "Uncorking the Past": Chateau Jiahu, a no-hops brew based on archaeological reconstruction of a Chinese brew from 9,000 years ago, and Midas' Touch, a similar reconstruction based on a 2,700 year old find in Turkey presumed to be the tomb of King Midas, of the "golden touch" legend.

Sadly, I could discern no meaningful difference between them. Despite the absence of hops from both beverages (the use of hops in beer was a surprisingly late development), both early brews simply tasted like beer to me--and beer (as opposed to wine, for example) has never been a beverage of which I've been very fond. Since beer has been so significant in the development of civilization, I regret that I am so incapable of seeing what people find desirable about it (other than the raw pleasure of getting drunk, that is).

New Old Brews

Serendipitously, I ran across this article from Scientific American today, after blogging about Patrick McGovern's book on the prehistory of alcoholic beverages just a few days ago.

The article discusses three beverages that are about to hit the market. The first is called Chateau Jiahu, which is a reconstruction of a Neolithic brew from approximately 9,000 years ago. McGovern discusses it in some detail in Uncorking the Past, because it is based upon his group's archaeological discoveries in China. It's a cross between a wine and a beer. A number of the early beers incorporated fruit in order to make certain that the brew would have a high enough sugar content to guarantee fermentation. The resulting beverage tends to have attributes of both a beer and a wine (McGovern refers to Chateau Jiahu as a "beer-wine" in the book).

The second beverage is called Sah’tea, and it is described in the Scientific American article as "a modern update on a ninth-century Finnish beverage", which makes me very curious indeed--and I don't drink alcohol. The article goes on to describe the brewing process for this gem a bit more closely:

In short, brewmasters carmelize wort on white hot river rocks, ferment it with German Weizen yeast, then toss on Finnish berries and a blend of spices to jazz up this rye-based beverage. Reviewers at the BeerAdvocate universally praised Sah'tea, comparing it to a fruity hefeweizen.

Finally, the third beverage is a cocoa-based brew from South America called Theobroma. This formula was deduced from residues found on 3,200 year-old pottery shards from the Ulua Valley in Honduras, a site described in the article as "the Cradle of Chocolate." Apparently the Ulua Valley find is rewriting the history of chocolate somewhat, pushing back the earliest date for evidence of human use of cacao by about 600 years. I don't think I'd enjoy this one, though; it's described as both excessively sweet and gooey.

If any of my readers have adventurous palates and decide to try any of these beverages for themselves, please, comment about them here! I'm tempted by the first two of them, even though I am a teetotaler for health, not moral reasons, and it would be unfortunate if I tasted any of these items and found them extremely appealing.

Uncorking the Past

In my copious spare time, I have been reading an interesting book I picked up from a dealer at a science-fiction convention about two months ago. The citation is:

McGovern, Patrick E. Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. (University of California Press 2009).

Professor McGovern is actually affiliated with an institution near me, namely, the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, but he has traveled widely in pursuit of information about the development, manufacture, and use of alcoholic beverages in prehistory. It is proving to be a fascinating read, not only because of the information about beer, wine, and crossover beverages that partake of characteristics of both, but because McGovern describes how he and his colleagues have used archaeological information to piece together portions of the prehistory of alcoholic drinks. I may write more about his discoveries after I finish, but in the meantime I recommend the book heartily.

I was also pleased that McGovern notes a detail I've been aware of for awhile--namely, that you don't have to be human to appreciate the pleasures of getting drunk. I learned this as a child from personal observation. We lived in a home that had a small grape arbor, and sometimes the grapes would fall before we could pick them, and would start to ferment on the ground. The butterflies and bees would sip at the decaying fruit and begin to fly in entertainingly crooked ways. It was then that I understood that homo sapiens is not alone in indulging in the fruit of the grape.