More Prehistoric Porridge

From Malta comes a new archaeological find suggestive of the making of porridge.  The find belongs to the Bronze Age, between 2500 BCE and 700 BCE.  A news article about the find appears via the link at the beginning of the previous sentence of this post.  

Archaeologists examined residue found inside pottery remains at a site called Il-Qlejgħa tal-Baħrija.  Analysis found that the pottery bore remnants of a mixture of bovine milk and cereals--a combination suggesting that they had been used to make and/or eat porridge.  Storage jars found on the site bore traces of proteins indicative of wheat while others had traces of proteins associated with barley.  The fact that so many large jars and food bowls were located at the site suggests that the community stored and distributed their food from a central location, a phenomenon also noted at some prehistoric sites on the island of Sicily.  

Interestingly, broad shallow bowls on the site were found to contain fragments of cow's milk, as well. These containers were decorated with angular motifs resembling basket weaving.  The research team believes that these bowls were used to make cheese, but I wonder; could the bowls indicate that the Bronze Age Maltese originally made their porridge in baskets, as the indigenous Americans did?  Stay tuned! We are learning more about prehistoric life all the time from archaeology and chemical analyses.

The Universality of Porridge

This blog has noted before that porridge, a hot dish consisting of boiled or stewed grains, with various flavorings added, shows up in many cultures.  It was discovered early, and continues to be eaten today.  The Romans and Carthaginians both had their own versions of it.

Last week, I discovered a web article indicating that the indigenous Americans (i.e., the peoples that were once called "American Indian") also made porridge, even though they did not have metal pots to heat it in.  Instead, they heated rocks, and put the heated rocks in thick baskets, along with water and acorn flour--i.e., pounded acorns.  The resulting hot food was called Wiiwish, or "acorn mush."  

Many thanks to the Researching Food History--Cooking and Dining blog, for its illustrated article about acorn mush.  The page on which the article about acorn mush appears includes a listing of virtual talks about early American food, both indigenous and otherwise.  

The Importance of Porridge

It is known that in early historical times various peoples enjoyed eating porridges--stewed grains of various types, flavored with spices and additions such as onions, fruit, or small amounts of meat. For example, it is said that the Roman legions objected strenuously if their favorite meal of porridge was not available.  

But the eating of porridges and other boiled starch sources go much farther back in human history, according to archaeologists.  Research has revealed that the development of porridge happened early in human history.  It was also critically important, as it enabled humans to obtain glucose--the human body's fundamental fuel--from plants.

Dr. Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist and associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, heads a project called HARVEST, which is researching why and how early humans ate plant material.    Horizon magazine recently published an article about the research by HARVEST and by a different project called HIDDEN FOODS; that article can be read here.  

Contrary to some moderns' beliefs about the "paleo" diet, paleolithic people ate tubers and grains--they needed whatever calorie sources they could find.  According to the Horizon article, the earliest plant material eaten included wild tubers, such as water lily tubers, and wild grains.  Grains might have been eaten young (and raw) sometimes, but tubers are often poisonous unless cooked, and there is some archaeological evidence that at least some foods were boiled before being eaten.  Archaeologists can tell whether a plant was eaten raw or cooked by examining starch grains in the dental calculus (i.e., plaque) on the teeth of human skeletal remains.  In addition, cooked tuber remains have been found in the remains of a fireplace in South Africa that is over 100,000 years old.  The use of flour made by grinding up things like acorns, wild oats, and legumes goes back at least 30,000 years, according to evidence found in Russia, the Czech Republic, and Italy.  

What is important about this evidence is that it confirms the date of the fundamental discovery that boiling starchy plant matter such as tubers and grains makes it possible for the human body to use the glucose they contain.   Of course, paleolithic people didn't know about glucose, but they surely knew that after boiling, plant matter often became filling, perhaps even palatable.  

Today, many people turn up their noses at boiled root vegetables and porridge.  But the discovery that tubers and grain could be eaten once boiled was critical to human survival--it made a new source of glucose available and enabled people to survive longer and breed more.  It is a key development in the history of food.

In Praise of Porridge

Millet flour porridges from Senegal:
 rouy (smooth infant porridge) and fondé (rolled pellets and milk).
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

It is fascinating to see how universal the humble porridge (grains that are boiled and/or simmered) is.  To illustrate the point, here are a variety of links about porridges from different cultures and times.   Most involve recipes for recreating them in your kitchen.

A blog called Pass the Garum featured a redaction, or modern conversion, of a porridge recipe attributed to the Carthaginians that can be made from semolina.  A Roman version may be found here. (Pass the Garum is in the process of moving, so these links to the old blog are here courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)

The Ribe Viking Center's food page provides a plausible recipe for Viking-style porridge here.  It uses millet, though barley would be plausible as well.

The Gode Cookery page serves up this late medieval barley porridge, or "gruel", as it was called at the time.  This 17th century recipe, also from the Gode Cookery site, is, except for the rose-water flavoring, very close to modern non-instant oatmeal.  

Plimoth Plantation provides us with an Amerind recipe for a maize porridge called "nasaump" here.  The Food Timeline notes that porridges made with maize, quinoa, amaranth, and other New World grains were eaten in Mesoamerica by the Aztecs and other peoples, but does not provide a recipe.  The Food Timeline's write-up about Mesoamerican porridge and other foods may be found here.

Porridges are eaten in Asia too, where they are typically rice-based.  The Chinese version is sometimes called congee. Here is a recipe for a similar, savory porridge, called arroz caldo, that is eaten in the Philippines.  Africa also has its porridges, as shown in the picture above featuring two different porridge types from Senegal.

Finally, Wikipedia has a page dedicated to listing porridges from all over the world, with their local names and a brief description of how they are made.  It probably is not complete, but it gives a good idea of how universal the concept of eating stewed grains is.  You can find that page here.

Most modern Western porridges are sweet, but savory porridges have been common throughout history.  There seems to be an attempt to make them popular again today, if this page of savory porridge recipes from the Huffington Post is any indication.  If I attempt to make such a recipe, modern or otherwise, I will blog about it here.

Two Quick Food Experiments--Punic Porridge and Posca

About six weeks ago, I decided to make two of the recipes featured on the Pass the Garum website, namely, "Punic Porridge" and posca.

Punic Porridge is a recipe Cato attributed to the Carthaginians.  It is a blend of wheat groats, cheese, and egg, sweetened with honey and flavored, only a bit speculatively, with cinnamon.  Pass the Garum recommended bulgar wheat or semolina and ricotta cheese (which predated the Romans), I used buckwheat groats and part-skim milk ricotta in my porridge.

The resulting porridge was soupy rather than creamy, with the groats still a bit chewy.  It was slightly sweet, but mostly bland.  If I make it again, I'll probably use more groats, even though doing so would abandon the 3-to-1 ratio of cheese to groats found in Cato's recipe.  Other possibilities include: 1) I used too much water; 2) I did not cook the groats for long enough. I can experiment with changing those variables another time.

Posca, the archetypal non-alcoholic drink of the Roman legionary, was something I'd been tempted to try for a while now.  Pass the Garum's blog included three possible recipes:  just water with vinegar; vinegar water with a bit of honey added; and vinegar water with honey and cardamom seeds added.  I opted for the vinegar and honey without other seasonings.  Pass the Garum's recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but apple cider vinegar was what I had available, so I used that.

My first problem with the recipe was in getting room-temperature honey to diffuse through cold water.  My honey was in a plastic jar that couldn't be microwaved, but microwaving the mug containing the posca itself helped a bit.  I didn't want to microwave it too much, though, because I didn't want the resulting beverage to be warm or hot.  Unlike the author of Pass the Garum, I couldn't taste any sweetness in the resulting liquid; it was very sharp.  The sharpness was not unpleasant at first, but it became increasingly hard to tolerate by the time I had finished the cup.  I will try making posca again with wine vinegar sometime; that may be less sharp than the cider vinegar.  In addition (or instead), I might also halve the amount of vinegar while leaving the amount of honey the same, and see whether I find the resulting flavor more appealing.

If any of my readers has tried either of these recipes, or has experimented with posca, please feel free to tell me about your results in the comments.