--Gary Giroux
Primordial Soup and Other Ancient Recipes is our new book.
It is currently being pitched and queried. Don't hesitate to drop a note if you have interest in this work in progress.
The writing of the book has been like an interactive game. Gary loves history and word play and we both love eating. The book started with bits of history that stimulated fun words or arrangements of words. Then the idea arose, that if there were recipes we should try them out. We had great fun trying many of the recipes on our neighbors, Jim and Shirley. Jim is an amateur gourmet chief. He and Shirley have been a great help in making this book’s recipes more eatable.
We’ve learned so much as we traveled through time learning what was being eaten, why and how it was prepared. The book is by no means complete, but fun, informative and offers many tasty recipes. We hope you will have as much fun reading, and eating our offerings as we did writing them. Don’t forget to share your comments.
Visit us often as we add more bits of food trivia and fun facts, along with recipes.
Gary and Naomi
Excerpts from Primodial Soup
Food Fans
It’s no baloney; if you want to be the top banana or be considered a big cheese, never clam up when challenged by a crab with a bitter remark, no matter how corny. Instead, it may be fruitful to cream the turkey, make mincemeat out of him, or eat him for breakfast; he’s probably a nut anyhow, with a brain the size of a pea. Certainly his approach is piggish and ham-handed, but he’s chicken deep down; his knees will turn to jelly if you challenge him. Ignore the rhubarb, and milk the opportunity. He may relish a fight, but a sage and salty remark can sometimes squash that peppery shrimp’s zest for argument.
-Martin Elkort
Long live impudence.
Albert Einstein
It is very a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
-Oscar Wilde
Scientists are to science what masons are to cathedrals. … Scientists by and large are too modest to be prophets, to easily bored to be philosophers, and too trusting to be politicians. … The power of science comes not from scientists but from the method. Its stature arises from its cumulative nature.
-Edward O. Wilson
The food was stunning, original, precise, provocative, and very delicious. These are the five things we ask of modern cooking, aren’t they?
Jeffrey Steingarten
Martin Elkort has no shame—our kind of guy. But he is a food fan, as are we. This book is loaded with food facts, mainly historical and roughly in chronological order. Not only potentially delicious, food is fun and we like playing with our food. Part of the plan is to hit the ground punning.
Food and cooking predate civilization, while settled agriculture is at the dawn of civilization. We begin here, with a little history and lots of speculation on how cooking started and how things were prepared. Farming led to writing—there is a direct connection; with written records, the evidence improves. Food choices and recipes increase. Cultured humans liked their food. Bags of gold and silver could miraculously be turned into sumptuous banquets.
Lots of modern food choices go back almost to the dawn of civilization: porridge, beer, bread, honey, meat and milk from the local pasture; wine, pasta, and assorted fruits and vegetables would soon follow. Remember, this was still the Stone Age. Writing and copper tools would have to wait a few millennia. We discuss these with wonder and speculate about how these discoveries came about and how meals would actually be prepared—everything beyond two hands had to be invented or discovered.
Once writing was invented some 6,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, authoritative statements were easier to come by. Authorities could be found for almost everything: the first food critic and the first beer advertisement show up about 4000 B.C., roughly the dawn of written records. Expert testimony became widespread; some was even true. Herodotus, the 5th century B.C. Greek writer and father of history, was often the earliest source on food facts; however, reliability was problematic. He was gullible and probably was offered bridges across the Nile and Tigris at great prices.
The ancient Roman cookbook attributed to the gruesome gourmet Apicius (particularly infamous for his stuffed dormice recipe, followed by larks’ tongue) exists, as do several from the Middle Ages. Experts are still making authoritative statements on everything historical from the origin of ice cream to the first French restaurant. Sources often disagree and trying to sort that out is part of the fun. For example, it seems that Marco Polo is given credit for half the products introduced into Europe during the Middle Ages—great stories and probably occasionally true. Same deal for Columbus; he is often given credit for discovering all the New World food. He seems to have brought a bunch of stuff back to Spain, just not gold. The Columbus stories are mainly true.
Food history—and conjecture—does not end with Columbus. New foods, meals, beverages, and sweets progressed through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and modern business and technology. For us, the evolution of munchies machinery is as interesting as the first bowl of primeval chowder or chowing down at Louis XIV’s Versailles court. We try to do justice to all and have some fun along the way.
This book required research, research, research, metaphorically eating our own words, literally eating our own recipes, trying new foods, and finding great restaurants. This was the really exciting part. The challenge was to avoid gaining 50 pounds each.
Like much of Gary’s cooking, food writing can be rather dry. Fortunately, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and various modern writers and many other sources are around to spice things up. We struggle to take French terminology with due seriousness. For some reason, we have to play around with haute cuisine and sous-chef. However, Gary is considering changing his resume to include his considerable experience as an escuelerie, rather than a dishwasher. Obviously we did not learn the fine points of culinary culture at the Culinary Institute of America (we’d rather make fun of the hats; oh, that’s right, the toque, created perhaps by Antonin Carême). James Beard may be the father of American gastronomy but, so far, Gary has only been able to master the gas part.
Apologies to Stanley Miller and Harold Urey
Any business successful enough to have a history will be,
by its nature, more interested in the future than in the past.
Tim Richardson
Scientists are to science what masons are to cathedrals. … Scientists by and large are too modest to be prophets, to easily bored to be philosophers, and too trusting to be politicians. … The power of science comes not from scientists but from the method. Its stature arises from its cumulative nature.
Edward O. Wilson
In 1953 Stanley Miller was a University of Chicago graduate student in Harold Urey’s lab testing the primordial soup hypothesis. An electric current was sent through a container with the expected primordial soup on the early earth: methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water. The result was organic compounds, including a dozen or so amino acids, the building blocks of life. Thus, life could have arisen from materials and conditions present in early Earth history, perhaps some four billion years ago. Miller would get his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954. The relative merits of primordial soup as the source of life on earth have been debated ever since.
We have our own primordial soup recipe, but it is based on our best guess of Stone Age tech. It has absolutely nothing to do with the brilliant work of Miller and Urey. There is only limited scientific evidence on our soup, little beyond the meager archaeological finds and generalizing from anthropological studies of existing Stone Age cultures. Since we have no Nobel scientist like Harold Urey to direct us, conjecture is our main ingredient.
I. Primarily Primordial: The Ancient and Medieval World
Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscape and the composition of its flora and fauna.
Michael Pollan
Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.
Fannie Farmer
We can begin with the key discovery of green history: Civilization was purchased by the betrayal of Nature. The Neolithic revolution, comprising the invention of agriculture and villages, fed on Nature’s bounty.
Edward O Wilson
Scientists and historians think they know a lot about cavemen and the Ancient world of Greece and Rome. Not necessarily. We have literally millions of years of human evolution, with little evidence except the fossil record. Plenty of raw data to pontificate and speculate about, but limited amounts of real evidence. Following this trend, we’ll add our own conspicuous assumptions. By the way, most ancient humans didn’t live in caves. Some did and these are more likely sites to find bones, stone tools, and other evidence of human habitation.
Civilization starts about 12,000 years ago, again based on the archaeological record and limited corroborating evidence. Stating the earliest evidence of, say, agriculture is problematic at best. There are real finds that can roughly pinpoint dates, but are these really the earliest? Who knows, until earlier archaeological sites are found. This is a continuing process. Whatever we write based on recent evidence found in the media or appropriate web pages is likely to become out of date after the next major find. We do our best, and hopefully, provide an abundant number of weasel words and eat a bit of humble pie.
How do we know what we know? Here are the basic sources, according to Brothwell and Brothwell (1998, p. 18):
1. Artistic representations of plants and animals in caves, rock-shelters, tombs, monuments, etc.
2. Direct evidence of food remains on living-floors, refuse pits, middens and habitation sites.
3. Written evidence.
4. Analysis of ‘stomach’ contents in mummies and bog bodies, or coprolites (dried feces).
5. A study of the habits of modern aboriginal populations (by inference).
Even with all these caveats it is an amazing story—the incredible advance of civilization. Agriculture is central to the story from the start and remains relevant to the history of the world now. The Fertile Crescent, Athens, and Rome all relied and prospered on aggie technology. Ditto today. Much of civilization including food culture was lost during the European Middle Ages and had to be rediscovered. Speculation is equally interesting here, trying to imagine with the limited evidence available what it was like to be an 8th century peasant or knight. Life might be different in the 14th century, seemingly much improved for the knight, not so great for the peasant—but appearing miserable by today’s standards of technology.
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