Category: Food

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I is for Ice Cream


“Ancient” American ice house,, Louisiana October 1938, Library of Congress photo by Russell Lee.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a version of this post after reading Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy’s marvelous book, which chronicles stories of individual firsts. My approach focuses globally rather than on firsts. So far we have journeyed around the world to see what humanity has created, from Siberia to Chile to Australia to Germany to Egypt and to the Fertile Crescent.

I’ve leaned into anthropology and archaeology fairly heavily, although today’s journey will be more standard history. For this particular topic, we need to stretch the boundaries of “ancient” forward a little, tiptoeing into the Middle Ages, to understand this marvelous creation. Really, it’s why probably humans learned to control fire, stand up, carry our babies with us, and build giant pyramids. We needed to develop knowledge and skills to invent Ice Cream.

The road to inventing ice cream was a bit circuitous and meandered from the ziggurat-days of Ur to the sophisticated empires of the Far East and back to Fertile Crescent. The most important part of the invention happened near the beginning. Because to make ice cream, you needed ice.

Lemon gelato in Venice. Photo by kajmeister.
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B is for Bread

2200BCE, Egypt, figurine of woman kneading bread. Statue in the Louvre.

It’s not the barley or the wheat
It’s not the oven or the heat
That makes this bread so good to eat
It’s the kneading and the sharing that makes the meal complete

Johnny Cash, “Breakin’ Bread”

I have a confession to make; I sometimes eat bread for dessert. Put a fresh-baked rustic French baguette in front of me with some aged cheddar, and I’d give you the keys to my house. And I’m not persnickety. I’ll take brioche, English muffins, black bread, rye, bagels, challah, biscuits, ciabatta, or foccaccia. It doesn’t even need yeast. I can eat naan, tortillas, lavash, or pita with the best of ’em. Not super-fond of those corn tortillas unless they’re fried with meat, but wasn’t that the point? Wonder bread is probably the only kind I don’t like and never did, otherwise, pretzels count, crackers–hey, don’t get me started on dumplings.

Humans have been making forms of bread for about 30,000 years +/-. They needed fire, but they didn’t need yeast or even organized farming. How yeast got there is its own story, and something of a controversy. They’ve been arguing for the past fifty years, about whether beer came before bread or vice versa. Let’s start without yeast and work our way forward. As with each of my A to Z ancient invention posts, the story of Bread will cover the basics:

  1. A core definition of the “thing”
  2. Where and when it happened first “around the world”
  3. How it influenced human development

As this is only my second “ancient invention” post, it’s worth noting that there is kind of a dividing line when it comes to such inventions. What we know is based on trace evidence, so if the invention depends on something organic, we may only know about it from ancient documentation. If people painted it on the walls or wrote about it stone tablets that can be read, that sets a date, even if it’s not the earliest date. We know about bread from Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but what kind of evidence would predate recorded history? You can’t exactly see bread, thousands of years later, can you?

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The Grind

Nahaul mother teaching daughter to use the metate

It may seem a stretch to go from Mesoamerican cooking techniques to Ebenezeer Scrooge and gender disparity, but bear with me. Since I am touring the west coast of Mexico, reading a book called Payback, and pondering the meaning of Christmas stories, this is top of mind. This will be a different kind of vacation post.

Hand grinder from Noguelas museum, kajmeister photo.

Metate

We were touring a museum in Nogueras, a small pueblo magico, aka a Mexican historical site, near Manzanillo. There was a thousand-year-old kitchen display showing the many types of foods prepared. Of course, many of the foods that Europe (and the North Americans) built their cuisines around originated from Mesoamerica, which you learn if you take a cooking class in Arizona or summat. Corn, squash, chiles, tomatoes, and I forget which exactly is the six but also coffee and chocolate are all native here, and not in Europe. What the Eurasians call “corn” really means a grain with a seed in it. So the Bible refers to corn, but they meant wheat or barley or farina. Corn i.e. maize (you all know that one) originated here and was exported east with the Great Extraction.

Santiago showing us the coffee “cherries” become seeds.
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