William Sitwell
Plumpton, Northamptonshire
March 2012
Unusually for a volume entitled A History of Food in 100 Recipes not every one of the ensuing chapters has an actual recipe and neither are they all eminently or indeed easily cookable. My ambition for the book is to take you on a journey where each stop gives you a colourful insight into the food scene of a particular period. Unfortunately in the early stages of this history not all the key players were as diligent in writing down their recipes as a cook might be today. As you’ll discover, for example, there are no Viking recipes, so I’ve relied on evidence from an Icelandic saga, which details the various marauding shenanigans of Grettir the Strong and his rival Atli the Red, who might not have been foodies but surely ate a lot of dried fish. Neither, indeed, is there a recipe for bread in the early stages of English history – we have to wait until the fifteenth century for that. But of course people were eating bread centuries before then, which is why you’ll have to forgive me for instead describing details of the Bayeux Tapestry to provide a glimpse into alfresco pre-battle catering from the eleventh century.
In other words, rather than give a modern interpretation of what someone might have cooked at a particular moment in history, my aim has been to provide an exact contemporary reference. And where I have dug up some ancient method of roasting beef or poaching mussels I haven’t updated it – except to ‘translate’ some of the trickier terms and old spellings – or provided a modern version of the recipe in question. I want you to simply read and enjoy the recipes as they were written down. So, perhaps uniquely, this is not a book where every recipe has been triple-tested, where the ingredients have been tweaked, changed and replaced so you can knock them out after a quick trip to your local supermarket. Denis Papin’s steam-digester-prepared mackerel from the seventeenth century will, I freely admit, be hard to reproduce at home, but then again so will Heston Blumenthal and Ashley Palmer Watts’s bang up-to-date ‘meat fruit’. This may not a recipe book that promises practical cookery, but I hope you nevertheless find it a delicious read …
1958–1913 BC
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The wall of Senet’s tomb, Luxor, Egypt
Crush the grain with sticks in a wooden container. Pass the crushed grain through a sieve to remove the husks. Using a grindstone, crush the grain still finer until you have a heap of white flour. Mix the flour with enough water to form a soft dough. Knead the dough in large jars, either by hand or by treading on it gently. Tear off pieces of the kneaded dough and shape into rounds. Either cook directly on a bed of hot ashes or place in moulds and set on a copper griddle over the hearth. Be attentive while cooking: once the bottom of the bread starts to brown, turn over and cook the other side.
On the hot, dusty sides of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, overlooking the Nile valley near the ancient city of Thebes – now Luxor – you’ll find the discreet and humble entrance to the tomb of Senet. Carved into the limestone mountain, it is one of hundreds of burial chambers in the area. The tombs were the funerary resting places of the nobles, officials who wielded power under the Pharoahs in ancient Egypt.
Painted onto the walls of their tombs are scenes from daily existence that they wished to be replicated in the afterlife. So everything that was pleasant – happy memories, experiences and rituals – is recorded in detail, giving us a clear picture of everyday life 4,000 years ago. There are scenes of hunting, fishing, the harvesting of crops and grapes, feasting and general rural life.
Almost all of the tombs were for men, but Theban tomb number TT60 is the resting place of Senet. Hers is both the only known tomb for a woman dating from Egyptian Middle Kingdom period, between 2055 and 1650, and the oldest burial chamber whose decorated walls have survived in good order. In addition to images of hunting, ploughing and sowing, there are depictions of bread-making. These are so detailed and colourful that those who have seen the wall paintings attest to their overwhelming power. ‘We are,’ wrote Egyptologist Thierry Benderitter on viewing them in the 1970s, ‘in the presence of the exceptional representations of actual cooking in the Middle Kingdom.’
But who was Senet herself? It appears that she was either the wife or mother of Antefoqer, a vizier – the most senior of men who stood between the pharaoh and his subjects – who served both King Amenemhat I and then his son Sesostris I at the start of the Twelfth Dynasty, between 1958 and 1913 BC. That she was accorded her own hypogeum, or private underground tomb, attests to Antefoqer’s importance. Yet the entrance today has no majesty. Less grand than others on the same hill, it now has a brick entrance with a simple wooden door added in 1914 by the English Egyptologist Norman Davies.
Only very few tombs are open to the public. This one is rarely visited – entry being highly restricted – and photography is banned to prevent light damage to the wall paintings. Those permitted access must first manoeuvre past the endless rubble that surrounds the entrance before removing a pile of stones that frequently blocks the actual door in a crude but effective form of security. Once opened, the door reveals a long, narrow and bleak passageway extending into the tomb, its roof descending in height and adding to a sense of compression. The passage leads to a dusty square chamber where there’s a statue of Senet herself, seated; a reconstruction, the sculpture having been found completely fragmented.
Beyond the chamber is another long passageway, but this one is bright with paintings, in colours of ochre, yellow, red and blue. The eye is drawn first to an image of Antefoqer hunting, posing majestically in a simple loincloth, his bow fully extended. Around his neck is an elaborate necklace of blue, green and white, while his wrists are adorned with matching bracelets.
There are images of greyhounds, hippos and beautifully drawn birds: geese, ducks and flamingoes in a bright, sky-blue background. Gazelles and hares are chased by dogs. Birds are netted and fish – so detailed you can tell their variety – are hauled in from a pond. And then halfway down the 20-metre passage, on the right, are scenes of cooking.
There is meat preparation, for instance. Under the cooling protection of an awning, men butcher an ox. They hang pieces of meat on ropes, while others out in the sun tenderise it, tapping it with stones. To their right a man adds a bone to a cauldron of soup with one hand while stirring it with a stick in the other. Another roasts poultry on a skewer over a raised grill, while encouraging the embers with a mezzaluna-shaped fan. It is a hive of activity.
As is a precisely drawn recipe for bread-making, summarised at the top of this chapter. The images were not of course intended to instruct the household cook, but to help the departed soul have some decent, freshly baked bread baked in the afterlife. Yet it is a foundation that has informed bread-making for thousands of years.
The images not only show how flour is prepared from grain, it also records some chatting (deciphered from hieroglyphs) between the characters, painted near some of their heads like speech bubbles. First, two men crush the grain in a wooden container. ‘Down!’ one orders as another replies, ‘I do as you wish.’ Next a woman passes the grain through a sieve to remove the husks, while her female companion grinds the grain even finer using a grindstone. In another image a girl kneads small rolls of dough in her hands, while another adds thin lines of it to some tall conical moulds. Behind the girl a man can be seen placing the