Bulgur vs Rice

On June 25, I blogged on the publication of Vefa Alexiadou's cookbook, see Food: Avoiding the Acropolis Museum. Although I wish she had received a larger spread, I was excited to see Vefa making it into the New York Times food section, see Elaine Louie, "The Temporary Vegetarian" (June 22, 2009, p. D2). It was interesting to learn from Vefa how rice overtook bulgur wheat in 1950s Greece. Today, pilaf is a staple in Greek cooking. Although rice arrived in Greece during the Hellenistic period, it was regarded a luxury good used mainly for medicinal purposes. The Arabs brought its cultivation more widely in the Mediterranean after the 7th century. Rice production spread from Egypt to Spain and Italy. Teaching at Clemson University's Historic Preservation program at Charleston, I learned a lot about rice cultivation in North America and the esteemed Carolina Gold variety. Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson smuggled rice seeds from Italy's Piedmont (introduced here in the 15th c.) and genetically improved the Carolina variety, see Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen (Columbia, 1992). For the global history of rice, see Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, ed., 1999), pp. 662-665.

Going back to Greece, one of my earliest culinary memories is a large conical pile of pilaf on my father's plate, when he would return from work. Like the frequent consumption of meat, rice entered Greek cuisine as a product of economic prosperity. Vefa teaches us that rice was too expensive for ordinary consumption and bulgur was the more common alternative. I had not idea that stuffed tomatoes, for example, were once stuffed with bulgur. When rice became cheap, it replaced bulgur precisely because of its prestige associations. Growing up in the 1970s, bulgur had almost disappeared from the lunch table. Bulgur and corn meal (bompota) were associated with the impoverished past and especially with the famine of war.

Food Architecture before Agriculture

One of the most interesting chapters in Mesolithic archaeology is the Early Natufian period (ca. 12,500-10,800 BCE) when humans stopped being hunter gatherers and settled down for the first time. Human settlement is integrally connected to the domestication of cereals in the Neolithic period. The agricultural revolution is the single most important event in the history of mankind. Another agricultural revolution occurred in the 1970s, when we began to alter the genetic make-up of food itself. My favorite article on the latter is John Seabrook, "Sowing for Apocalypse," New Yorker (August 27, 2007).

David Mithen's book After the Ice Age: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC (2003) is my favorite introduction to prehistoric archaeology. Mithen writes the following about the domestication of grain: "Recall that the principal difference is the brittleness of the [grain's] ear -- the wild strains spontaneously fall apart when ripe, scattering their seed on the ground while the domestic strains remain intact, 'waiting for the harvester'." (p. 37) Although sedentary, the Natufians were eating wild grain. In his coverage of Early Natufian culture, Mithen discusses the site of Ain Mallaha excavated in 1954, where we have evidence for decorated sickles and stone mortars. In one tomb, a puppy was also buried affectionately embraced by an old woman.

What makes the Natufian people complicated is that they returned to nomadism during the Late Natufian period, possibly due to a climatic drought; this was at the end of the Ice Age when weather was highly unstable. It was not until the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (ca. 9000 BCE) that permanent settlement was tried again and the agricultural revolution took off the ground in the Fertile Crescent. This is of particular importance to architectural historians because agriculture is a prerequisite for fixed settlement. Agriculture, in other words, presupposes the formation of states and permanent dwellings.

An excavation by Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson has produced fascinating new evidence for the existence of granaries in an Early Natufian period before the actual domestication of cereal. The excavation at Dhra' (near the Dead Sea) was published last week,"Evidence for Food Storage and Predomestication: Granaries 11,000 Years Ago in the Jordan Valley," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition, June 22, 2009). It was considered ground-breaking enough to be announced in the Economist a few days later (June 27, 2009, p. 86). Kuijt and Finlayson have unearthed the earliest known granaries located between houses and areas of vegetable processing. The granaries are circular (3 m diameter, 3 m height) and they stored wild forms of grain. They had elevated floors (to protect the grain from rodents) and holes for air circulation.

I look forward to including Dhra' in my survey of architectural history next semester at Franklin and Marshall. The granary fits well with the discussion of Catal Huyuk,the Neolithic settlement (excavated by Ian Hodder) that I cover in the first week of class. Lancaster has a wonderful community of locavores and food activists. Members of F&M's art history department are leaders in community action and I'll be honored to join them this Fall. Lancaster County has some beautiful old silos, the descendents of the Natufian granaries. On the topic of food and architecture, I should briefly note a 2007 book, The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste published in Basel, Germany. Petra Hagen and Rolf Toyka have collected an eclectic set of essays. Although in English, the book is a German project and was not widely distributed in the U.S. It's worth requesting through Interlibrary Loan. I thank my student Katherine Chabla for recommending the book during our seminar on domestic architecture.

The abandonment of settlements and the return to nomadism during the Late Natufian period resonates with the recent phenomenon of eco-migration, the displacement of peoples as a result of global warming. The International Organization for Migration predicts that by 2050, some 200 million will become migrant in search of water. The United Nations University, CARE and Columbia University have produced a new study on eco-migration, "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Displacement and Migration." In the same issue reporting the Dhra' excavations, the Economist also published an article discussing this grave global problem, "A New (Under) Class of Travellers" (June 27, 2009, pp. 67-68). Sadly, the Natufians are becoming relevant today.

Food: Avoiding the Acropolis Museum

While everyone else is obsessing over the opening of the Acropolis Museum, I turn my attention to another touristic matter, Greek food. Satellite TV, a staple of every immigrant home, has brought low-end pop culture inside every Greek American living room. The cast of characters includes Vefa Alexiadou (left), the culinary consultant in Antenna's morning show, Πρωινός Καφές (Morning Coffee). Back in 2005, Phaidon Press published an English translation of the classic 1950 Italian cookbook, Il cuchiaio d'argento. The marketing idea behind The Silver Spoon was to introduce English-speaking audiences to contemporary cookbooks used by native households. In May 2009, Phaidon hoped to make the same impact with Greek cuisine by publishing Alexiadou's Vefa's Kitchen. Friends that are expert in Italian cooking swear by the Silver Spoon; I have only tried the classic 1960s recipe for vodka-tuna pasta sauce. I hope that Vefa's Kitchen has the same impact as the Silver Spoon. See some earlier thoughts on Greek cookbooks, Mediterranean Cooking (Aug. 20, 2008)

While I'm a great supporter of culinary fusion and experimentation, I must air some complaints about a dessert variation I had in Greece. Loukoumades (fried dough balls soaked in honey and cinnamon) is a well known Turkish/Greek/Arabic dessert. Kamena Vourla, a summer resort town, is famous for its loukoumades. My sister, brother-in-law, nephew, niece and I stopped at Kamena Vourla this summer on our way back from visiting relatives in Lamia. Evoking our childhood memories, my sister and I insisted on having some loukoumades. On the menu, we noticed a variation of chocolate-covered loukoumades. My sweet-toothed 5-year-old niece was thrilled by the combination as was my Swedish brother-in-law, who argued that anything covered by chocolate must be an improvement to the original. My sister and I stuck to the traditional version. Once our order appeared, we realized that the chocolate lovers had a plate of loukoumades smeared with Nutella. They didn't complain. I had a try and found the combination deeply unacceptable. It was like shoving Vienna into Istanbul. The next weekend, I found myself on an archaeological project in Dilessi, where I was informed that the chocolate loukoumades had made an appearance there, too. The American students (who had never tried loukoumades before), moreover, were fond of the chocolated fare. As much as I support fusion and taste combinations (see Peasant Food Fusion posting), I must resist this innovation. My brother-in-law thinks that my sister and I are forever imprisoned inside our childhood memories of pure loukoumades. To a certain extent, he is right. Nevertheless, some combinations should be rejected despite their popularity. Although I would never endorse any kind of culinary essentialism mandated by a foodie police, I like to set a few firm limits: no chocolate should interfere with honey-dripped loukoumades.

"Behold the Greek Nacho," Mark Bittman's Minimalist column in today's New York Times, rekindled the militant state of mind I first noticed in Kamena Vourla. First, I do not abhor nachos the way that Bittman does (watch related video), and second, I find his recipe totally silly. Call it some ad hoc Californian concoction, and I might eat it. But call it "Greek" and I'll revolt. I have clipped the recipe and will certainly try it.

I cannot leave the topic of Greek food without pointing out two discoveries from my trip to Greece, a bookstore and a newspaper dedicated to culinary matters. The bookstore is called Chef in Love and is located on Em. Benaki 17, Athens; it holds the largest selection of Greek cook books I have ever seen. I was particularly intrigued by a selection of monastic cookbooks, including Τα μήλα του μάγειρα: Παράδοση της μονηστηριακής τράπεζας, 4th ed. (Indiktos, 2009). The new monthly culinary newspaper is called I Cook Greek. Free copies are available in major bookstores and on line. Last night, I tried out a stuffed tomatoes recipe, which turned out OK but was not as good as the recipe in my benchmark, Diane Kochilas' The Food and Wines of Greece (1990). Although not available in English, the newspaper has interesting and unexpected articles. My favorite is, "Τα γλυκά των 70ς" (May 2009, pp. 14-15), where Christina Tsamoura decodes the complex semiotics of Greek sweets in the 1970s. This was a golden decade of Greek desserts from a fusion perspective. Social events as simple as name days involved negotiating a whole mess of pressures, old and new, Greek and non-Greek, high and low, urban and suburban. American desserts were caught in a similar maelstrom of rapid modernization in the 70s, but Greece was under additional pressures springing from nearby European capitals. Although it embraced laxities of comfort, the Athenian middle class retained some formalities, such as always bringing sweets to house visits. These old bourgeois traditions, interestingly enough, were rather new for many new Athenians. Remember, the city's population boomed in the 70s, while "Paris of the Balkans" (as Athens was described in the 30s) became transformed into a concrete nightmare.

Perhaps, I write about food because I'm compulsively avoiding the hype over the New Acropolis Museum that opened its doors last Saturday. Christopher Hitchens, "A Home for the Marbles" (New York Times op-ed, June 19, 2009) and "The Lovely Stones," (Vanity Fair, July 2009, pp. 44-47) are typical in the media's obsession over the Elgin marbles. Bernard Tschumi's building needs to be considered in its own right. But more importantly, it needs to be related to Tschumi's architectural corpus and the fiasco surrounding the architectural competition(s) over the last 19 years. If nothing else, a Tschumi building in Greece should elevate theoretical discourse to the altitudes of Foucault and Deleuze. Tschumi is meaningless without the theoretical armature, see Architecture and Disjunction (New York, 1996). Shouldn't Deconstructivism annul the banalities of "patrimony"?

The museum competition(s) took many turns. Tracing the consecutive victories and annulments over the last two decades tells an interesting story about architecture and politics in Greece. Calatrava's Olympic stadium was an equally botched up job. On the occasion of the momentous opening, I've pulled out the journal Tefchos 5 (1991) that documents the results of the first competition in 1990. Articles such as "The 'Landscape' of an Architectural Competition" by Yorgos Simeforidis illustrate Greek architectural culture at its highest. Tschumi's museum is definitely an interesting building, but general readers might never know why. Hitchens certainly does not understand it. In all fairness, I have not been inside the building; I've only seen the exterior. For the time being, I should just stick to my area of LEAST expertise, cooking.

House Stories: Fred Flintstone Ain't Got Nothing on Me

House Stories is a collection of personal narratives, a teaching experiment in History of Domestic Architecture (Wesleyan ARTS 637). See Introduction, and Table of Contents.

FRED FLINTSTONE AIN'T GOT NOTHING ON ME
by Allison DeMartino

I have never owned a house. I have never gone house-hunting or ever had to set up a mortgage. I have lived in two houses, one dorm, and two apartments. All of which have never belonged to me. I was carried home to one, driven reluctantly to the next, flown nearly 350 miles to the third, celebrated the fourth in dramatic fashion, and become a grown-up in the last. I was the child, and now, the less than one year college graduate playing house and learning that washing dishes and scrubbing toilets is not all it is cracked up to be. My memory of a house is one of a child’s. Everything was gigantic. Walking from the family room up the stairs and into my bedroom was a pilgrimage I rarely felt like taking. A house was a structure, complete with the perfect hiding spots, convenient nooks, and a series of plateaus that when scaled carried you, and your army of action figures to the highest point of the house. A house, to my five-year-old self, was my imaginary and mischievous world.

The house I remember best is not the spot of my first kiss, or the spot of my first driving lesson, or even the spot I signed my college acceptance letter. The house I remember best is the house I first was brought home to and the one I truly left my mark on. Brooklyn NY is one of the largest residential areas in the country and one of the most diverse. You could walk for five minutes and have spanned the countries of Italy, Puerto Rico, and Korea. Yet, something uniquely American can be found in each of the neighborhoods you past. This, here in the Marine Park Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn, was my first encounter with a house.
1828 East 29th Street was attached to 1826 and shared a driveway with 1830. It had a small but seemingly vital front stoop, which upon entry would lead you into the living room—the place I took my first steps, watched my first football game, and opened presents of Christmas Day. The next room was the dining room. I don’t remember much, except for cake. Yes, cake. And loud Italian aunts. This is where we celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and, most importantly ate cake. Last, at the back of the house was the kitchen—or since we had no fireplace—the hearth. This is where mom cooked. This is where I ate salads—well cucumbers, croutons, olives and a large helping of balsamic vinegar—before dinnertime every night. These rooms would prove increasingly important to my branding of the 1828 household. You see, the way this house was build and the way my family grew to operate in the morning, my journey from the kitchen table to the front door to then walk the eight blocks to school became somewhat of an adventure; or a mischievous maneuver to avoid my consumption of the orange and grape flavored Flintstones Vitamins given to me at the kitchen table.

For many years parents, especially mine, tired to get me to eat healthy. Despite my nightly bouts with my lettuce-less salads, I was a genuine picky eater and the one thing I hated more then eating yucky food was eating yucky vitamins. Each morning before I set out to school my mom would open the dreaded vitamin cabinet and place Fred Flintstone into my hand. Without hesitation, I would eat the cherry flavored ones, but two-thirds of those bottles contained the worst of the worst flavors imaginable: orange and grape. Five out of seven days I was practically guaranteed a disgusting taste on my tongue. This had to end. Luckily, I soon learned that my mom was far to busy with my little sister Dana to keep a stern eye on me as I walked from the kitchen through the dining room and across the living room to the front door: “You’re five now, you can meet Jen outside to walk to school.” Okay. So my independence from mom and Fred Flintstone began.

1828 was built in the early 1900s. It had cathedral-like windows lining the front of the house and an old-fashion radiator just to the side of the front door. A cream colored metal encasement lined with what seemed like hundreds of holes hid the gurgling heater. Holes large enough for one Fred Flintstone. Each morning after strategically placing Fred on my tongue and refusing to breath as to negate the nastiness of the taste, I would drop him drop through the hole and into the heater. I did this every school day for nearly two years.

My mom is one to clean a lot. She would scrub the bathroom and sweep the floors. But it wasn’t until my parents placed a “For Sale” sign on the front stoop that I would succumb to what would happen next. It was a cloudless June day. A day where you just couldn’t wait to get home just to run back outside and get dirty. I ran up the front stairs, past the chrysanthemum bushes and the “Sold” sticker and threw open the front screen door. And there standing in a baggy old shirt, yellow dishwashing gloves, and flip-flops was my mom. She was not smiling. She was not ready to dig in the sandbox with me. She was staring at me with her hands on her hips and that scary little Italian women expression covering her face. Then she pointed at the radiator. The cream-colored casing was nowhere to be found. Stuck to the radiator and the carpet and the wallpaper was an orange and purple mound nearly a foot high of indistinguishable Fred Flintstones. And Dana sitting in her diaper shouting “Yabba Dabba Do!”
_____

Allison DeMartion is a graduate student at Wesleyan University's Graduate Program in Liberal Studies and a Pre-K teacher in Middlefield, Conn.

More Trahanas

In an earlier post, Peasant Food Fusion (Dec. 22, 200), I expressed my excitement (and bizarre need to experiment) with the Greek staple of trahanas. Since that posting, I've received many emails from Greek friends with stories and personal memories about trahanas, confirming the magical place it holds in the Modern Greek consciousness. It is the grain that best encapsulates Greece's unique process of urbanization. Rural Greeks of the 1960s migrated to Athens en mass, but they never left the village; they returned for holidays, voting, etc. In the same way, Greek immigrants maintained an emotional connection to their homeland that few ethnic groups have sustained in the United States. A large number of Greek immigrants of the 1900-1920s even returned to the homeland, see Theodore Saloutos, They Remember America: The Story of Repatriated Greek-Americans (Berkeley, 1956).

I remain optimistic about the survival of Greece's culinary tradition into the 21st century without it becoming elitist, the way that French and Italian (but not Spanish or Central European) cuisines have been commodified. Greece has been rediscovering its culinary past that was twice flattened in the 1920s and in the 1950s. The first suppresion began in 1910 with Nikolaos Tselementes' publication of the first cookbook written for an audience of urbanized housewives. This is typical to the genre internationally; cookbooks become important only after the oral transmission from generation to generation is under threat. Down to this day, the word "tselementes" in Greeks means "cookbook." Like the linguistic katharevousa, Tselementes purified Greek cooking from traces of Ottomaness by injecting Frenchness. Mousaka and pastitsio came into being, dishes lavishly covered with the uber-French bechamel cream sauce. The second flattening occurred in the 1950s with mass tourism and the need to export a manufactured Greek essence. Tourists arrived with specific dishes in mind, and Greek restauranters (many of whom only served foreign crowds) provided in unitary flare. The wave of culinary rediscovery can be seen in the revival of ouzeries, accompanied by a new focus on Greek wines, and oinothekes. The Greek wine craze seems to have evern caught up in the United States, see Eric Azimov, "Wines of the Times: Crisp, Refreshing and Greek," New York Times (Aug. 6, 2008). Food writers Aglaia Kremezi and Diane Kochilas are the best guides for the Greek food renaissance that Tselementes and tourism once suppresed. Kochilas, a Greek American, shows the cultural depth of the Greek omogeneia.

Going back to trahanas, I would like to share a comment that Nassos Papalexandrou sent to me via email. I know Nassos through Amy Papalexandrou (a fellow classicist-Byzantinist plus trans-national couple). It was by great surprise to learn last summer that Nassos' maternal family is from the same region as my paternal family. In other words, we are symptatriotes. Nassos is a professor of Classics at UT Austin and has just written a wonderful essay on a Cypriot mosque, see "Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2008) 251-281. Bill Caraher's blog brought this article to my attention.

From Nassos Papalexandrou
papalex@mail.utexas.edu
January 2, 2009

"Re. Trahanas: your piece brought up lots of my childhood memories: in my mother's place, also in Fthiotis (now: Pelasgia formerly Gardiki Kremastis Larissis), the annual making of Trahanas was a communal undertaking (precisely like making soap or chilopittes), with several women getting together, sharing labor, tools (e.g. the cauldron, "kazani"), materials, and the end product: I relished the still wet pieces, creamy and very tasteful, as they were laid out to dry and very often I earned my samplings by playing guard against cats and other interested predators. In my father's place, in Bardounia of Lakedaimon (Petrina, also known for its Paleologan tower-"o pyrgos tou Koutoupi" with which I presume you are very familiar) , they make a different king of Trahana: they fry it so that it makes a pudding-like substance (like deep fried beans) which is sweet and sour at the same time. The Stereoelladitiko makes great soup (my mom still calls it "chelos"), especially when cooked with chicken or in chicken stock instead of water--do try it with a bit of tomato (my mother's version of "comfort food") !!!!"

On a later email communication, Nassos also passed on his mother's special recipe

From Nassos Papalexandrou
papalex@mail.utexas.edu
January 13, 2009

"you saute some finely chopped onions in olive oil, you add some freshly pulped tomato (crushed or puree would do), you bring to a boil, add trahans, salt and pepper, and hten you let it boil till it becomes thick (να χιλώσει). It also works well if you add trahanas on the stock of kotopoulo kokkinisto."

Peasant Food Fusion

My friend Jennie U. called me from Titan Foods, "America's largest Greek specialty food store," located in Astoria, NY. She wanted to know if there was anything Greek that I may have been craving. Trachanas was the first thing that came to mind (but also bucatini pasta for pastitsio). A few weeks earlier, I had been perusing through the Portuguese section of my local supermarket in Middletown, CT. Something called "Milho Para Cachupa," or Yellow Samp caught my attention; it looked a little like corn but was otherwise totally foreign. After some research, I realized that samp is hominy, or maize kernels. According to the Oxford Companion to Food (by Alan Davidson, 1999, p. 383), hominy was one of the first foods that Europeans accepted from Native Americans. The Portuguese-American connection, thus, makes sense. Hominy is peasant food, or at least in the lower scale of economic value, similar to grits in the American South or polenta in the European South. The Joy of Cooking (1997 edition, p. 250) instructed me in the preparation of hominy, which involved soaking overnight and boiling for 2-hours.The end result (baked with tomato) was fantastic. I appreciate this kind of taste, a thoroughly deep and nourishing state of pleasure that only peasant staple offers. If one had to assign a taste to survival, it would be the taste of such grains. Like garbanzo beans, hominy expands. Since I was eager to use up the 2-lbs of samp that came in the bag, I prepared a massive quantity with lots and lots of left over.

Then the trachanas came in the mail. Trachanas has an almost magical value in Greek cuisine. It is the food of shepherds, a grain infused with milk or yogurt. As dry food, it does not spoil, it is light, making it transportable and ideal to trans-humance. Once the shepherd builds a fire and boils the grain, the dairy is released. Protein-infused carbohydrates provide sustenance to the nomad. Although trachana is basic food for most village Greeks, it is snubbed by metropolitan society, so it's rarely available. I remember my father would reach nirvana with the smell of trachana, reminiscent of his youth herding sheep after school in Leukada, a small village in Fthiotis, the home of Achiles. To read more than the Wikipedia entry on trachana (or tarhana in Turkish), I recommend Stephen Hill's and Anthony Bryer's "Byzantine Porridge: Tracta, Trachanas, and Trahana", in Food in Antiquity (Exeter, 1995). Needless to say, I cooked the trachana the moment as it arrived. The house was filled with the smell of goat milk, transporting me to my father's village but also driving my vegetarian wife practically out of the house.

Noting the left-over hominy in the refrigerator, I couldn't resist throwing it into the trachana soup. The end result, a fusion of Greek and Native American foods, was refreshingly good. The probability of native American food--translated into Portugese cuisine--mixing with an equally obscure shepherd dish from Greece is so low, that I think my combination might be totally original. Perhaps, I have invented a new dish.

Roasting Innovations

The success of Starbucks has been explained in sociological terms. More than selling coffee, Starbucks has constructed a new social environment, “a third space” that is neither home nor office, a place ideal for introspective mental activities like reading, writing, surfing the web. Consistent quality control from the decorative palette to the audio selections are superior to other offerings and strictly enforced. The choice of music, for instance, is neither too popular nor too weird, maintaining a culturally interesting middle ground. Appropriately, Starbucks (Barnes and Noble) and its old cousin, Seattle’s Best (Border’s) dominate bookstore caffeination. Ultimately, however, the success of Starbucks and the rise of the $2 coffee is the product. Elite coffees have displaced dominant household brands like Maxwell House or Folgers because they use a Arabica beans rather than Robusta beans, the two are considered as different species.

On a couple of occasions this last month, I was served inferior Robusta coffee at friends houses (even elite coffee drinkers go with the Robusta beans when serving a big party) and didn’t seem to mind them. Faced with fierce competition, they are improving. Folders continues to dominate the household coffee market, but it wants to gain back its lost elite customers. For the last few years, Folgers has been developing a new roasting technique, “the biggest innovation since the launch of decaf.” See Douglas Quenqua, “Folgers Markets a New Coffee to Cost-Cutting Home Brewers,” NYT (Sept. 19, 2008), p. C10. To do so, Folgers has overhauled its factory in New Orleans, while it’s changing ownership; Procter & Gamble has just sold Folgers to J. M. Smucker (the peanut butter and jam makers). Most importantly, they need to change popular perception. So, they are launching a new television ad campaign, designed by the infamous Saatchi & Saatchi agency. In the circles of art, Saatchi is more of a household name than Folgers. Charles Saastchi is a major art collector. It was his 1997 Sensation exhibition that caused not only a sensation but launched the career of Damien Hirst.

Folgers is realistic about its goals in dissuading a snob coffee drinker like myself, who will pay the price for organic and fair-trade. But I will give a try. I suppose, I’m a little old-school about some things. I cannot stand the new plastic coffee cans. This summer, we bought a grill. I was looking for a good-old-coffee can to turn into a cylinder for lighting charcoal to no avail. The good old metal can that you could recycle into multiple household uses has expired as a product of the 20th century. Newly wed couples will not be able to tie up a gigantic Folgers coffee tub behind their “Just Married” automobiles. The metal can warded off evil spirits on its way to a new household. The Saatchi and Saatchi TV aspires to strike some domestic chords through sound (drawers opening, spoons rolling in a coffee mug, the slippers of a man in pajamas squeak), but I don’t think it will succeed in the apotropeic magical qualities of pre-Starbucks Folgers.

Mediterranean Cooking

This September, I'll be teaching a seminar in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University, "Multiculturalism in the Art and Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean." I'm very excited to return to this topic. Last time I taught this class, at Swarthmore College in Spring 2003, I used cooking to introduce the complexities of the topic. In the absence of a textbook form pan-Mediterranean art, we read excerpts (and recipes) from Clifford Wright's, The Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice and the Barbary Corsairs (New York, 1999). Class specimens included cannolis procured from Philadelphia's Italian Market. I truly believe that the cannoli is the best example for medieval interactions in Sicily, the marriage of local shepherds (cheese) and the introduction of sugar by the Arabs. During my time at Monte Polizzo, the Stanford Excavation in western Sicily, I witnessed a further multi-cultural creation: the granita con vodka. Imagine, delicious hand-shaven granita with an American alcoholic spin. The bars of Salemi accommodated this cocktail beautifully.

I am happy to see some new publications on medieval cuisine since 2003, most notably Lilia Zaouli's Medieval Cuisine in the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes (Berkeley, 2007). This is a great addition to English bibliography, the volume had already been available in French and Italian. The preface is written by the Islamic cuisine historian Charles Perry, who among many things has written “The Taste for Layered Bread among the Nomadic Turks and the Central Asian Origins of Baklava,” in Culinary Cultures of the Middle East ed. S. Zubaida and R. Tapper (London 1994), pp. 88-91. Another new book is Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, 2008) by Yale historian Paul Freedman. See also the interview on The Splendid Table (NPR, July 12, 2008). Freedman dispels many of the myths about medieval spices (such as its function of keeping food from spoiling) and connects their allure to religious and social practices.

Mediterranean cooking made a large appearance on a recent Martha Stewart Show devoted to international chefs. Among the guests were my favorite hipster Jamie Oliver, who prepared a Sicilian squid linguine. A couple of years ago, Oliver toured Italy in his VW camper, connected with the people, and collected recipes (mostly from southern Italy) for his book Jamie's Italy (New York, 2005). Oliver is by far the most relaxed cook and it was great to see him make mistakes on live TV (I hope they weren't staged).

Another guest was the much less known Jim Botsacos, who prepared roasted jumbo prawns. Botsacos is the chef of Molyvos, a well-established Greek restaurant on Seventh Avenue, just below Central Park in New York. I cannot help but associate this restaurant with Eleni Gage (author of North of Ithaka, New York, 2005) who first took me there in 2006. Jim Botsacos has co-authored The New Greek Cuisine (New York, 2006), which is based on his recipes for Molyvos. I will always associate Molyvos with the fabulous Greek-American writer Eleni N. Gage, whose memoir North of Ithaka (2005) has rejuvenated Nicholas Gage's Eleni (1983) into a second generation. When I first met Eleni, she was still working for People Magazine and we met around the corner from her office at Molyvos. We had some mezedes, we couldn't afford the entrees. That same year, my mother-in-law (an expert chef) got the Molyvos cook book, having no idea that we had actually been to the restaurant.

Salty Peloponnesos

The Acts of the Third International Congress of Peloponnesian Studies, Kalamata, 8-15 September 1985 (Athens, 1987-1988) contain all kinds of neat papers spanning from antiquity to modernity. Angelike Panopoulou's article (in Greek) "Salt Works and the Production of Salt in the Peloponnese Based on the Grimani Archive (1698-1700)," (v. 3, pp. 305-329) is one such paper. Panopoulou presents the historical evidence for salt works in the Peloponnese. It's difficult to imagine such an obscure yet fascinating topic appearing in a mainstream academic journal. One has to love these Greek conference proceedings. I came across it only while searching for a different article by Drandakes on rock-cut chapels.

Cyprus seems to have been the dominant source of salt for Venice and its global markets until 1570-1571, when the island was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Crete filled the salt gap at the end of the 16th c. and first half of the 17th c., but the wars of 1645-1669 and the consequent loss to the Ottomans, as well, terminated supplies. As other European nations shouldered Venice out of her commercial primacy, the Venetian authorities compensated by exploiting salt production from their newly-acquired Peloponnesian colony. The Grimani archive illustrates that salt production was concentrated in Thermisio (Corinthia), Pyrgos, Lechaina (Eleia), Kamenitsa (Achaia), Methoni, and Coroni (Messenia). The salt of Thermisio was of best quality; the industrial installation employed about 600 workmen. The salt of Pyrgos was popular for local markets but too poor for export. Salt had been produced in Methoni and Coroni since the 13th c. and continued to be exploited. I would be curious to know if there is any archaeological evidence on salt works. There is none that I know from Pyrgos, Lechaina, and Kamenitsa. I must asked Bill Caraher about Thermisio. The Corinthia seems prime for early industrial activities housing, for example, Washingtonia, an American company town that is almost completely forgotten. I cannot wait for EKAS to publish this site.

Panopoulou raises issues of labor. A large workforce had to be conscripted from the mountainous hinterland. Some coercion had to be exercised since most locals preferred agricultural work to the miserable industrial conditions of salt. Panopoulou offers hard data on production quantities and qualities. Although this is a 20-year old article, its obscurity makes it an exciting discovery, and a veritable thirst-quencher.

Food has been on my mind while I prepare a seminar on the Medieval Mediterranean for Wesleyan University. See future postings on medieval food. For a global history of salt, a popular work (now in paperback) hits the spot, Mark Kurlanskry, Salt: A World History (New York, 2002). I've seen it in stock at most Border's and Barnes and Nobles bookstores.