First Catch Your Gingerbread (The English Kitchen) - Softcover

Bilton, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190924869X ISBN 13: 9781909248694

Publisher: Prospect Books, 2021

Synopsis

Gingerbread is a lovely treat which has played a part in almost everyone's childhood. But what was gingerbread made of when it first arrived on our plates? When did treacle, dark and sticky, first become available? And why did the gingerbread man leap from the tin, and run so fast with a fox snapping at its heels? Sam Bilton examines the history of gingerbread, from ancient times down to the present day, before introducing us to a range of delicious gingerbread and ginger cake recipes that bring the story of this spicy and much loved treat to life.

About this title

About the Author

Sam Bilton is a food historian, who runs the Repast Supper Club, food events with a historical theme. She is also a food and drink writer, with articles appearing in magazines and online, with English Heritage, and she works on historical recipes, recreating them for the modern day, including an eighteenth-century recipe for a Bride Cake. Sam is a member of the Guild of Food Writers Committee, and on several panels

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter Two

Medieval to Seventeenth Century Gingerbread:
from Antidote to Confection

Would you let yourself and your children fall into the hands of a vengeful enemy and risk suffering a tortuous and barbaric death? Or would you opt for a swift and relatively painless demise by poison delivered by your own hands? It is a decision no parent would want to make, but the one faced by Mithradates VI, King of Pontus in 63 BCE as legions of Romans besieged his kingdom.

You could say poison was written into Mithradates’ destiny. When it comes to politics, poisoning has been seen throughout history as the most efficient way to rid yourself of your opponents. Mithradates’ father was killed by poison, and his own mother had tried to dispose of her son in the same fashion. A feared and powerful leader he may have been, but the threat of assassination always loomed over Mithradates’ head like the Sword of Damocles. Mithradates made it his life’s ambition to find a way to make himself immune to poison by creating the ultimate antidote. He is remembered in history as the ‘Poison King’ and his name will forever be linked to the antidote mithradatium.

Mithradatium has taken on a mythical status over the centuries. The ‘Poison King’ left no written prescription for how to make this cure-all elixir (or at least if he did, no written record of it has survived). What little we do know is based on studies made of Mithradates’ personal papers after the king had died. Pliny (AD 23/24–79) studied Mithradates’ notes and praised him for being ‘a more accomplished researcher into biology than any man before him’. Mithradates conducted numerous experiments involving poison on prisoners, courtiers and even himself, to deduce the effects these toxins would have and how they could be combated. The king soon realised that in minute quantities poisons could have a remedial affect. Mithradates’ antidote probably included spices such as cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, saffron and anise, along with substances like charcoal, curdled milk and garlic, all believed to counteract poisons. These would be combined with small amounts of toxins in an electuary (a paste made from honey) that Mithradates would take daily in the form of an almond-sized cake. Far from having any detrimental effect on his health, this quotidian elixir appeared to make Mithradates exceedingly virile and is credited for his longevity (he was almost ninety when he finally died).

Dabbling in pharmacology would ultimately backfire on Mithradates. Trapped in Pantikapion, with no hope of escape and Pompey’s soldiers about to descend, Mithradates decided to commit suicide. Fortunately, Mithradates always carried a capsule of an extremely effective poison which even his antidote could not remedy. He administered some of the poison to two of his young daughters. The effect was swift and both girls died quickly. However, when Mithradates took the remainder of the vial, the poison did not have the desired effect. He had achieved his life’s ambition – immunity to poisoning. In the end, Mithradates instructed his bodyguard to administer a fatal blow with his sword, thereby ending the king’s life.

It would be a stretch (and a very long one at that) to suggest that mithradatium was an early form of gingerbread. Clearly mithradatium and gingerbread share some of the same components in the spices and the honey used to bind them. What this tale really reveals is the reverence given by ancient civilisations to the medicinal properties of spices, which would trickle down the centuries and see them grow in importance in the culinary world. And as we will see, the mystical powers of spices would become omnipresent as more diverse uses were found for them.

Spices have long been revered for their aromatic properties. They were used by many ancient civilisations as part of the embalming process following death (peppercorns were found in the nose of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II who lived between 1279 and 1213 BCE). The ancient Greeks imported spices primarily to make perfumes and perfumed oils, medicines, and to give aroma to their drinks. Cinnamon in particular was used for divine sacrifice, funerals and in perfumed oils for the hair and body. Spices in general were not utilised to a great extent to flavour the food of the ancient Greeks, although wine could be infused with them. In his work On Odours, Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE) declared: ‘One might wonder why exotic and other fragrances improve the taste of wines when, so far from having that effect on foods – whether cooked or uncooked – they invariably ruin them.’ It took some time before the spicing of food became commonplace in Greece, but by the Byzantine era it was the accepted norm.

The cookery manuscripts named after Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius (AD 14-37) indicate that spices, especially pepper, were used extensively in the cooking of that era. Pepper was also used as a currency. The Romans used two routes to import spices, both starting in the Red Sea ports of Egypt. The first travelled down the African coast stopping at various towns until the traders reached Mozambique. However, the favoured route by which most of the spices reached Europe was across the ocean towards India. ‘They arrive with gold and depart with pepper’, wrote Tamil poet Tāyan-Kannanār speaking of Roman traders seen at the port of Muziris in southern India, which even sported a temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus. Initially, long pepper (Piper longum) was favoured by the Romans, although in time they would begin to import the cheaper round pepper (Piper nigrum). After the kingdom of Egypt was annexed by the Romans in 30 BCE – and Rome had acquired control of the Red Sea ports and worked out how to optimise the monsoon winds – the trade route to India became much easier.

Ginger did not garner as much culinary favour with the Romans as pepper. Ginger (Zingiber officinale) is domesticated in India, South East Asia and South China. In its dried form, ginger had reached Western Europe by the first century, although it was also preserved and converted into an oil. The Greek for ginger, zingiberi is thought to be derived from the Pali, singivera, a language used in Sri Lanka in Roman times. It was not widely used in Roman cookery at this time. Only three per cent of the dishes in Apicius contain ginger compared to eighty-one per cent containing pepper. Even so, Greek pharmacist Dioscorides declared in his De materia medica that ginger ‘is very nice to eat; it is eaten pickle and all’, so perhaps it was enjoyed more as a condiment than as a culinary ingredient.

Ginger was prized in both the eastern and western worlds for its medicinal qualities, which possibility explains why it was one of the ingredients in Mithradates’ antidote. In China it has enjoyed a reputation for maintaining health and well-being since ancient times (it is said Confucius always had ginger when he ate). Ginger had many therapeutic uses. Its ‘hot’ properties meant that it could be used to remedy the symptoms of colds, flu and headache. It was also used to treat flatulence, indigestion and even roundworms, and was even believed to enhance sexual prowess and fertility.

In terms of gingerbreads, the spicing element is critical to separate them from other cakes and biscuits. When looking for the origins of this confection we need to disregard spices for the moment and look towards the early forms of cake.

If ancient civilisations were slow to embrace certain spices like ginger and cinnamon in their diet, they were not so reticent when it came to sweeteners like honey. Like spices, honey was prized for its medicinal properties but was also used in cooking as ‘the universal sweetener of the ancient world’. The Greeks and Romans particularly valued honey from the thyme-covered slopes of mount Hymettus outside Athens, as it was considered the best in the known world (thyme was believed to give the best aroma to honey). Both of these civilisations subscribed to the theory of the four humours – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – and their influence on the body and its emotions. The food and drink you consumed could have a considerable impact on your humoral balance. Honey (and latterly sugar), alcohol (such as wine), and spices were all considered to be hot ingredients. For this reason, spiced honey wines, like the Roman mulsum, were served before a meal as their potential ill effects could be balanced out with cold foods, like fish, served afterwards.

There is limited information and few recipes for cakes from the ancient world. Despite covering a wide range of recipes for vegetables, meat and fish, Apicius does not include a book on cakes or sweets although there are a few recipes for homemade sweets in Book Seven for ‘The Gourmet’:

Dulcia piperata: mittis mel meruim passam rutam, eo mittis nucleos nuces alicam elixatum. Concisas nucas auellanas tostas adicies et inferes.

Peppered sweets: pound pepper; add honey, wine, passum, and rue. Add to the mixture pine nuts, nuts and boiled alica. Add chopped roasted nuts and serve.

Rather than being an oversight on the part of the original author it has been suggested the book on cakes from the Apicius collection has been lost. The knowledge we have of the sweet things eaten by the ancient Greeks and Romans is based on texts from that period such as Cato’s On Agriculture, as well as comedies and poems. From these descriptions we know that cakes, sweets and nuts were served at the end of the meal with wine. These were known as the tragémata, ‘what one chews alongside wine’. Paintings on vases found in archeological digs also show pyramid-shaped cakes being served at feasts.

‘In his book, On Cakes, Iastokles makes mention on khoirinai and what are called pyramous, which he says are no different from what people call pyramis. For these are made from toasted wheat soaked in honey. They are served to those who have stayed up all night for religious festivals.’ (From The Partying Professors by Athenaeus)

Where cakes are mentioned they usually include honey. Athens was particularly renowned for its oven baked cakes and bread which were often soaked in honey. Perhaps the most renowned from this period is the Greek plakous (known as placenta to the Romans ) which was a type of cake made with thin pastry sheets and filled with sheep’s cheese and honey. There has been some debate whether cakes were used purely for ceremonial purposes at temples or were specifically designed for feasts. Athenaeus describes a cheesecake called amphiphon offered to the Roman goddess of hunting, Diana (Artemis in Greek mythology), which was served with ‘figures of lighted torches round it’. One type of honey-drenched cheesecake from Argos was presented to the bridegroom by his bride for his friends to eat. Another cheesecake from Sparta was shaped like a breast and carried by the female friends of the bride as they sang a song praising her virtues. Even the Celts, who were viewed by the Romans as barbarians – in part due to their penchant for dairy products – ate honey cakes. In Irish Mythology the ‘Champion’s Portion’ awarded to the best warrior at Bricriu’s Feast concludes with ‘five-score wheaten cakes made with honey’.

Cakes from these periods were most likely flat and dense rather than the fluffy sponge creations we favour today. Whilst no mention is made by Athenaeus or similar authors of spices in these cakes, their compact form survived into the medieval period in the form of gingerbread made from compressed breadcrumbs and honey. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when spices were added to the honey cake mixture to create something we would recognise as gingerbread. The Dictionnaire de Trévoux (originally published in 1704) identifies gingerbread as panis mellitos: ‘The ancients called it panis mellitos; they also called it panis nauticus or Alexandrinus, the sea biscuit.’ Although panis mellitos was certainly used to describe a ‘honey bread’ in the medieval period, earlier references to this phrase have been impossible to trace. Chauney has concluded that the modern-day gingerbread of France, pain d’épice, is descended from the tenth century honey bread from China, called Mi-Kong.

Honey (mi or fêng-mi) is not mentioned in Chinese literature until the third century BCE. It is believed the honey used in China at that time came from the west via Samarkand. It was exchanged for silk and precious stones providing some indication of its value. Like Mithradates, the Chinese used honey as a medicine rather than a cooking ingredient. The Chinese believed honey could promote longevity and included it in their tonics. Like the Romans, the Chinese did use honey in savoury and sweet dishes, and it was a highly regarded ingredient for Han feasts.

Foreign food – particularly steamed or fried cakes, described as ‘the gold of the T’ang dinner table’ – became popular at aristocratic banquets from the eighth century onwards. The most popular cakes were made from wheat or rice. Shih-mi were small cakes which included honey and milk, and were produced along the Yangtze basin from Szechwan to Hangchow Bay. Foreign cakes (hu) from the west, quite often in the form of steamed or fried breads containing sesame seeds, were particularly popular. As Edward Shafer has observed, ‘Some of these fancy pastries that enriched the T’ang cuisine, many of them newly introduced from abroad, were distinguished by their incorporation of foreign ingredients, especially spices and other aromatic substances, while others were based on foreign recipes, although the ingredients might be readily available in China.’

Based on this evidence, perhaps the origins of gingerbread lie a little closer to western Europe. There is some indication that wheat-based ‘foreign’ cakes topped with sesame seeds were sold on the streets of Chang’an (modern Xi’an) by Iranians. As the major trade routes for silk and spices crossed Persia it is easy to see how spice would eventually find its way into a sweetened bread or cake.

Islamic ambassadors from Rum (formerly known as Rumieh under the Romans) were recorded as presenting the T’ang emperor with a gift of mithradatium in AD 667. Meanwhile, rulers across Europe from Charlemagne to Elizabeth I consumed mithradatium every day in the hopes of achieving the same immunity afforded to The Poison King. But as we shall see, the medicinal value of spices extended beyond general well-being.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 190924869X
• ISBN 13: 9781909248694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250