Speaker 1: Round about the cauldron. Go in the poisoned entrails. Throw
Speaker 1: toad that under cold stone days and nights has thirty
Speaker 1: worn sweltered venom sleeping got boiled out first in the
Speaker 1: charm it pot double double toil and trouble, fire burn
Speaker 1: and cauldron bubble. Filliat of a finny snake in the
Speaker 1: cauldron boil and bake, I of newt and toe of frog,
Speaker 1: wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder's fork and
Speaker 1: blindworm's sting, lizard's leg and Howlett's wing for a charm
Speaker 1: of powerful trouble like a hell broth Boil and bubble,
Speaker 1: double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Speaker 1: Welcome to to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And Rob why did
Speaker 1: you ask me to read from Macbeth in a witchy voice?
Speaker 1: What what is that going to lead into? Well, of
Speaker 1: course we're gonna be talking about cauldrons and and certainly
Speaker 1: in Western traditions, I feel like one of the first
Speaker 1: places that one's mind goes is um is to go
Speaker 1: to act for a scene one of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is the scene that we we just read from
Speaker 1: round about the cauldron go. Uh. It's uh, and it
Speaker 1: does bring together a number of the ideas of the
Speaker 1: cauldron that will be discussed in these episodes. Uh. And
Speaker 1: of course it's just just a factuless scene in general,
Speaker 1: with which is doing their their their witchy best to
Speaker 1: make some sort of horrific potion. Now, obviously you have
Speaker 1: had cauldron's on the rain. What sent you down this path?
Speaker 1: How did we end up here? You know, I don't
Speaker 1: remember exactly. It was something that came up in previous
Speaker 1: research for another episode. I started noticing the cauldron and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, well, there's a lot here we
Speaker 1: should consider coming back to it. And indeed there there
Speaker 1: is quite a lot, because on one hand you have
Speaker 1: just the history of mundane but fascinating cooking technology, and
Speaker 1: then you have the different sacred and supernatural directions. This
Speaker 1: goes in as in as well. Uh. Certainly there's the
Speaker 1: the Asian tradition, which we'll probably get to first, but
Speaker 1: then there's this rich Western tradition going back to uh
Speaker 1: Celtic traditions and so forth. And some of these are
Speaker 1: perhaps more connected with the Cauldron of Macbeth, and we'll
Speaker 1: probably discuss that in a subsequent episode. But but it
Speaker 1: is you need to ask ourselves, like, what do we
Speaker 1: think of when we think of cauldron? Um. I know
Speaker 1: I instantly think, of course, of this scene from Macbeth,
Speaker 1: but I also instantly think back to a trio of
Speaker 1: early eighties film. As I think of beast Master, I
Speaker 1: think of Conan the Barbarian, and I also think it
Speaker 1: was both from nineteen two, but I also think of
Speaker 1: nineteen Clash of the Titans. All three of these have
Speaker 1: some sort of a cannibal stew going on some and
Speaker 1: some sort of a big broth that it is revealed,
Speaker 1: has human parts within it. Now, in the Clash of
Speaker 1: the Titans, there's an interesting connection because the cauldron is
Speaker 1: being tended by three Crones, the Green Sisters, who are
Speaker 1: part of the story of of Perseus and Medusa, and
Speaker 1: it's hard not to notice the similarities with the three
Speaker 1: which Sisters in Macbeth. There, Yeah, it's my understanding there
Speaker 1: is a connection here. These are essentially the ancient predecessors
Speaker 1: of Macbeth's which is um. Now, as for the cannibal stoos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's a case where I'm just guessing Humber
Speaker 1: based on the timeline. I think they invoked it and
Speaker 1: Clashes of the Titans, and then either overtly or not,
Speaker 1: the makers of Beast Master and Conan and we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we need to get in on that. That's that's a
Speaker 1: great get get get a cannibal stew in here. But
Speaker 1: if that's the case, why didn't Conan have a pet
Speaker 1: mechanical owl. I know, I know, it's a it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a flaw. It's often pointed out as a
Speaker 1: flaw of that film. Conan needs a robot. I think
Speaker 1: another film that people might think of would be the
Speaker 1: Disney film The Black Cauldron, based on the work of
Speaker 1: Lloyd Alexander. And this of course drew from Welsh mythology,
Speaker 1: and we'll get into some of that in subsequent episodes.
Speaker 1: But I asked my ten year old son what he
Speaker 1: thought about when I mentioned the word cauldron. H he
Speaker 1: has not seen Well, he's seen Um Clash of the
Speaker 1: Titans and loves it, but he hasn't seen the other
Speaker 1: two films. When I asked him, he said, well, I
Speaker 1: think of soup, and I think of Harry Potter, the
Speaker 1: Ladder of which of course is also linked to Western
Speaker 1: traditions of of witches and so forth. And I think
Speaker 1: the Potter books and films are probably a key modern
Speaker 1: pop culture reference regarding cauldron's You know, I started thinking
Speaker 1: about something with this word, but then started doubting myself.
Speaker 1: I'll see what you what you think about this, So
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's already in a ablished term
Speaker 1: for this type of phenomenon, But I was thinking about
Speaker 1: how cauldron is something you might call like a charged
Speaker 1: variant of a concept, a word that has extremely mundane
Speaker 1: literal synonyms, like literally literally, a cauldron is just a
Speaker 1: large pot or a big pot, I think, perhaps one
Speaker 1: that is especially used over an open flame, more so
Speaker 1: than in like an indoor cook top setting. Uh. And
Speaker 1: yet the word suggests a world of associations that it's
Speaker 1: literal synonyms do not. Like in English, large pot does
Speaker 1: not have any special magic swirling about it, but cauldron does.
Speaker 1: Anytime you say the word cauldron, it suggests, you know,
Speaker 1: this is trollish sorcery, something is going on. But then again,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not that remarkable because I guess you can
Speaker 1: think of other things associated with magic, like I think
Speaker 1: the word wand literally just means like a rod or
Speaker 1: a stick, but in modern English it is pretty much
Speaker 1: always associated with magic. Yea. It is interesting to think
Speaker 1: about this because with the with the cauldron, you could
Speaker 1: sort of go cauldron, pot, croc pot, instant pot, and
Speaker 1: and the closer you get the instant. Like the the
Speaker 1: instant pot, it does not have really any nefarious or
Speaker 1: magical connotations. It's thoroughly modern um, nothing to fear. And
Speaker 1: I feel like the further back through the terminology you go, yes,
Speaker 1: the stranger things get um because even pot is more
Speaker 1: intimidating than croc pot. Well, I wonder if there's generally
Speaker 1: a thing in languages where there's like an archaic synonym
Speaker 1: for a word that loses its mundane associations, like one
Speaker 1: one synonym maintains the mundanity through the ages and the
Speaker 1: other one only retains usage in magically charged scenarios. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's the case. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if we're gonna end up keeping the third which is
Speaker 1: bit from the the opening here, but there is a
Speaker 1: line in that where the um where the wid rhymes
Speaker 1: children with cauldron children being uh, this old term for
Speaker 1: like in trails. But I didn't do a deep dive
Speaker 1: into this terminology, but it's my understanding like that was
Speaker 1: that was already an archaic term, uh when Shakespeare used
Speaker 1: it or or you know, or and or a more
Speaker 1: specified term. But you do what you have to do
Speaker 1: when you need a rhyme something with cauldron. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: else fits in their squadron? Not really? I mean, you
Speaker 1: can make it work, but why are which is going
Speaker 1: to be talking about squadrons? How about? How about how
Speaker 1: about Godson cauldron? That's kind of a maybe maybe I
Speaker 1: think you gotta put some spin on the pronunciation though
Speaker 1: that's like an eminem style style. Yeah, you gotta be
Speaker 1: a pro to make that work. So all in all,
Speaker 1: there is a rich tradition of cauldron's overflowing with powers
Speaker 1: of death, creation, domination, torment, and divination. But before we
Speaker 1: get into all of this properly, we have to back up.
Speaker 1: We have to really talk about the mundane world of
Speaker 1: cauldrons as well, And so we're gonna have to talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, the origins of soup technology, which I've been
Speaker 1: super excited about all weekend and um, I think my
Speaker 1: family is sick of hearing about it. You've been talking
Speaker 1: about souper lot. Did you make soup? No, it's too
Speaker 1: hot for soup, that's the thing. Oh yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we could have made a spato, I guess, but but no,
Speaker 1: I haven't been having any soup. But just reading about
Speaker 1: the traditions of soup, it's made me respected all the more.
Speaker 1: I need a cold snap so I can get back
Speaker 1: into it. So, first and foremost, as we've been discussing,
Speaker 1: a cauldron is simply a large pot used to boil
Speaker 1: liquid over a fire. So in function, it's it's really
Speaker 1: no different from any pot you have in your kitchen.
Speaker 1: It's just generally considered a bigger pot. Now, long before
Speaker 1: the advent of metal pots, we had bowls. We had
Speaker 1: pots of pottery as well as presumably ones made of
Speaker 1: wood and leather, though such artifacts don't always stand the
Speaker 1: test of time. Near as well. But one one question
Speaker 1: that's interesting to get into is, Okay, well we're talking
Speaker 1: about cauldron's, were inevitably talked thinking about about soups in
Speaker 1: many cases, But do you need a pot or you
Speaker 1: need a metal potter? Do you need a pot at
Speaker 1: all in order to make soup. I would have thought so. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a time where I would have thought so
Speaker 1: as well, But it turns out it's not necessary because
Speaker 1: a hole in the ground is nature's cauldron, um, and
Speaker 1: this is something that can be made watertight via the
Speaker 1: use of animal hides, and then one may fill this
Speaker 1: hole with water and of course food materials. You're various
Speaker 1: ingredients which will of course eventually come together in a
Speaker 1: hot soup. But where's the heat going to come from?
Speaker 1: Good question, Yeah, because you can't put a fire under
Speaker 1: it if it's a hole in the ground, and to
Speaker 1: hide I mean, I guess there might be specialized situations
Speaker 1: where you could depend on geothermal heat, but in this example,
Speaker 1: geothermal heat is not available, so you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: create something with fire. The answer is you have an
Speaker 1: adjacent fire, get it nice and hot, and then you
Speaker 1: have hot stones heated up in that fire, and then
Speaker 1: those hot stones are transferred from the fire to the soup,
Speaker 1: and that is how you heat the soup in the
Speaker 1: whole nice Okay, the hot stone goes in, then you've
Speaker 1: got a stew going. Yeah. Now, other perishable above ground
Speaker 1: bowls and pots apparently We're also used in different cultures
Speaker 1: with this technique UM, which is generally referred to as
Speaker 1: stone boiling UM. And in in these cases you would
Speaker 1: often have like a wet bark or hide scenario to
Speaker 1: create the vessel. But stone boiling has been traced to
Speaker 1: pre pottery culinary traditions of Native American tribes, Paleolithic Chinese groups,
Speaker 1: and even neander Dolls. And on a quick note about
Speaker 1: about the Chinese culture, Um, I know when we talk
Speaker 1: about the cooking with stones and cooking soup with stones,
Speaker 1: you destually think about the story of stone soup, which
Speaker 1: I believe in most tellings has no relation to to
Speaker 1: to to stone boiling. However, Chinese American author Yan Cheng
Speaker 1: Compostine acted the classic story but with with the twist uh,
Speaker 1: first of all Chinese twist, setting it in um in
Speaker 1: ancient China, but also incorporating a stone boiling motif in
Speaker 1: this book called the Real Story of Stone Soup. Well, Rob,
Speaker 1: I know, I know you said everybody knows the story,
Speaker 1: but maybe some people don't. What's a quick version of
Speaker 1: the stone soup? Well, the classic stone soup, say tail
Speaker 1: is that you know you have some some individual generally
Speaker 1: there's sort of a you know, a rogueish type character. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's actually a great adaptation of this with some additional
Speaker 1: elements in Jim Hinson's The Storyteller series. But here's this, uh,
Speaker 1: this man and he's he's cooking up some some water
Speaker 1: and he asked somebody passing by, excuse me, I'm making
Speaker 1: some some soup. Could you help me. I just need
Speaker 1: a nice stone And they're, you know, like, what, what
Speaker 1: do you need a stone for it? And then like,
Speaker 1: I'm making stone soup? And so they agree. They bring
Speaker 1: this individual a stone and in many cases, you know,
Speaker 1: the the would be chef here sniffs it, maybe licks
Speaker 1: the stone, and it's like, okay, this is a good one.
Speaker 1: Plunks it in and so now now people are beginning
Speaker 1: to get interested. Other passers buyers stop and they're like,
Speaker 1: what's he doing? He's cooking stone soup. Uh. They asked him, well,
Speaker 1: how does it taste when he samples it? And he's like, well,
Speaker 1: it needs a little salt, So he doesn't have salt,
Speaker 1: but somebody is is now they're now invested in this process,
Speaker 1: and so someone brings some salt, but then he chased
Speaker 1: it again. Knowing these little peppers, So someone brings some
Speaker 1: pepper before along. Of course, it needs some celery and
Speaker 1: needs some potatoes, It needs all these other ingredients, and
Speaker 1: at the end of the process, uh, there is this
Speaker 1: great big bowl of soup, and I think in most
Speaker 1: tellings it is then communally enjoyed. Oh well, that's a
Speaker 1: great story and sort of an idea about how you
Speaker 1: can you can like hype bootstrap nothing into something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a wonderful tail um. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, in this this adaptation, it takes the stone
Speaker 1: boiling technique and factors it in, which is which I
Speaker 1: found was pretty clever. Now you might wonder what kind
Speaker 1: of evidence is there for stone soup um. So according
Speaker 1: to a few different sources I was looking at, basically
Speaker 1: it comes down to pits that are that are found
Speaker 1: in the archaeological record that have stones in them. Stones
Speaker 1: that are cracked from heat, often referred to as thermally
Speaker 1: cracked rocks. Uh. So this is this indicates that these
Speaker 1: rocks were heated to a high temperature and then added
Speaker 1: to this broth or added to water to help make
Speaker 1: this broth. And we also tend to see this and
Speaker 1: pit cooking kind of loop together into a combined earth
Speaker 1: oven cooking tradition. Oh yeah, okay, so this wouldn't even
Speaker 1: necessarily always be something like soup. Like I know that
Speaker 1: there's some methods for like roasting meat, I think Mesoamerican
Speaker 1: culinary traditions where you'd like wrap some meat in um
Speaker 1: in leaves like wet leaves or something, and then cook
Speaker 1: it in a pit in the ground with hot coals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think it does certainly speak to human innovation,
Speaker 1: Like if the if the hole in the ground is
Speaker 1: your level of cooking technology, it doesn't mean you're not
Speaker 1: coming up with with new and ingenious ways to tinker
Speaker 1: with that four am at, such as as you know,
Speaker 1: eventually developing a wet cooking technology. And I guess we
Speaker 1: can come back to this in a minute, but I
Speaker 1: think there are real advantages to so called wet cooking
Speaker 1: technologies that they like, they have some miserable benefits that
Speaker 1: some other types of cooking do not, Right, I mean,
Speaker 1: so it obviously wet cooking sticks with us, and wet
Speaker 1: cooking survives the use of of of of stone boiling.
Speaker 1: Now stone boiling, it does eventually lose out to other techniques,
Speaker 1: especially container based cooking with pottery, etcetera. Because ultimately stone
Speaker 1: boiling requires more maintenance and it isn't nearly as passive
Speaker 1: a technique. So you know, if you're adding those hot
Speaker 1: stones and you have to keep adding new hot stones
Speaker 1: taking out the old stones, Um, you can't just well,
Speaker 1: let's put the let's put the soup on, and then
Speaker 1: go do these other things required to present the meal.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, nutrition and taste aside. That's another great thing
Speaker 1: about wet cooking. So if you just like put some
Speaker 1: food items in a pot with water and then let
Speaker 1: it boil, you can just or it for a long
Speaker 1: time and it's not gonna burn or anything because there's
Speaker 1: enough water content in there that that that's gonna be fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of another source I was looking at, there's
Speaker 1: a paper titled stone boiling, firecrack Rock and nut Oil
Speaker 1: published in the Wisconsin Archaeologists in two thousand nine by
Speaker 1: James Skibow and uh Skibo points out that the whole
Speaker 1: process of adding and removing hot stones during the production
Speaker 1: of nut oil would have resulted in the loss of
Speaker 1: that precious nut oil that was being produced. So that's
Speaker 1: another thing to think about It's like, not only is it,
Speaker 1: you know, not a very passive technique, but if you're
Speaker 1: having to keep you know, reaching in there with some
Speaker 1: sort of implement and removing rocks, adding new rocks, you're
Speaker 1: going to lose some of of what you're actually brewing up.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, I can see that it was like
Speaker 1: sticking to the rocks and stuff. Yeah. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: then I should also point out though there there is
Speaker 1: apparently evidence of stone boiling surviving into the advent of pottery,
Speaker 1: with the stones added to water inside of vessels, um
Speaker 1: so um. And then I also I believe examples of
Speaker 1: of stone boiling that is also taking place in some
Speaker 1: sort of above ground scenario, some sort of like say
Speaker 1: a wet high bag or a wet bark container. So there,
Speaker 1: it didn't have to happen in the ground. But I
Speaker 1: think the most certainly to modern or modern understanding of
Speaker 1: of culinary technologies, I think the hole in the ground
Speaker 1: stone boiling scenario is perhaps the most amazing and the
Speaker 1: most removed from what we seem to be doing. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we might not know exactly when the first human
Speaker 1: boiled something, but we do have a pretty clear picture
Speaker 1: that wet cooking or boiling, simmering, whatever you wanna call it,
Speaker 1: cooking something in water is a technique that comes along
Speaker 1: later in the history of cooking, because, like fire, goes
Speaker 1: back a long time before, and pretty clearly humans were
Speaker 1: maybe say, roasting things over an open flame before they
Speaker 1: had wet cooking techniques. So where do these wet cooking
Speaker 1: techniques come from? Do we think? Well? I found a
Speaker 1: source discussing this. This is from John D. Speth in
Speaker 1: When Did Humans Learn to Boil? Two thousand fifteen, paleo
Speaker 1: Anthropology Society. I'm and read a quote from this paper. Quote.
Speaker 1: Pits that would have been suitable for stone boiling are
Speaker 1: equally scarce until the Upper Paleolithic, although the evidence for
Speaker 1: subsurface features of this sort may have been obscured or
Speaker 1: erased by post taphonomic processes. Not surprisingly, therefore, because of
Speaker 1: the late appearance of heated stones and potential boiling pits,
Speaker 1: archaeologists almost without exception, have come to the logical conclusion
Speaker 1: that wet cooking is a late addition to human culinary practices,
Speaker 1: another of a long list of technological achievements which we
Speaker 1: owe to the enhanced cognitive powers of fully modern humans. Okay,
Speaker 1: so cooking maybe older, but we think wet cooking is
Speaker 1: probably something that comes about in the Upper Paleolithic, which
Speaker 1: I think is generally like between something like fifty thousand,
Speaker 1: like twelve off thousand years ago than now. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: I think we've pointed this out before, but it's still
Speaker 1: It's one of those facts that I think can can
Speaker 1: can can be very stimulating, is that pottery predates agriculture,
Speaker 1: and according to Brian Fagan and Bill Sillar, very little
Speaker 1: of the oldest pottery remains are actually charted by fire,
Speaker 1: suggesting that these were more prestigious items for displaying food
Speaker 1: than for something you would actually use to cook food.
Speaker 1: So while foragers made use of pottery, we also have
Speaker 1: to remember that this was also the pottery is is
Speaker 1: fragile and it's perhaps not ideal for people who are
Speaker 1: traveling around. Uh So, uh this is this is quite
Speaker 1: interesting that that Fagan and Stiler bring up here, is
Speaker 1: that the usefulness of pottery, paired with its fragility, might
Speaker 1: have been a contributing factor for some group that had
Speaker 1: pottery to settle down, Like to to make full use
Speaker 1: of the pottery, you might have to stop moving around
Speaker 1: at least a bit and have more of a base
Speaker 1: of operations where your pottery has less chance of becoming
Speaker 1: fragmented and shattered and can be used to store things
Speaker 1: as well as present things and so forth. Now some
Speaker 1: of our earliest pottery fragments. It depends where you are
Speaker 1: in the timeline of discoveries. Uh So, when Fagan and
Speaker 1: Silo we're writing this is from the seventy grade Inventions
Speaker 1: of the ancient World, they were pointing to fourteen thousand
Speaker 1: b c. In Japan as being the the eliest oldest
Speaker 1: known pottery discovery. However, after the publication of that book,
Speaker 1: a two thousand twelve paper um revealed that chin Rin
Speaker 1: Cave in eastern China was found to contain charred pottery
Speaker 1: fragments dating back twenty thousand years. Yeah, I was looking
Speaker 1: around at these questions about what is the earliest evidence
Speaker 1: of pottery or pots in general, And the earliest pots
Speaker 1: would be pottery. They would be ceramics of some kind
Speaker 1: fired out of clay or other earthen materials, not metal metal.
Speaker 1: Metal cooking vessels would come much later. So the earliest
Speaker 1: pottery vessels used for cooking. I was looking what's the
Speaker 1: evidence for that? And I came across a paper from
Speaker 1: published in Nature by Oliver Craig at All called Earliest
Speaker 1: Evidence for the use of Pottery and uh. I also
Speaker 1: was looking at a write up of this in Science
Speaker 1: by Sid Perkins called first Evidence of Pottery used for
Speaker 1: Cooking um And at the time this was considered some
Speaker 1: of the earliest direct evidence for pottery used explicitly for cooking.
Speaker 1: And my immediate question was, well, what were they cooking
Speaker 1: in it? Do we have any idea? Actually? Yes, this
Speaker 1: paper looks directly into that question what they were cooking
Speaker 1: and helps give us a picture of the way of
Speaker 1: life of the people who use this pottery. So the
Speaker 1: authors of this paper argue that the evidence indicates pottery
Speaker 1: technology emerged in East Asia between twelve thousand and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand years before the present, and it was an innovation
Speaker 1: among hunter gatherers. Rob you mentioned that a minute ago,
Speaker 1: but I think it's worth sitting with that for a minute.
Speaker 1: It's a strange thing. You might You might assume pottery
Speaker 1: only arises among people who have adopted farming and an agricultural,
Speaker 1: settled way of life that allows them to have fixed homes,
Speaker 1: and uh, and you know forges and so forth, that
Speaker 1: this kind of industry of of creating earthenware vessels would
Speaker 1: arise from that setting. But no, it does appear to
Speaker 1: arise before people settled down and started farming. But this
Speaker 1: raises the question why was pottery invented? We were getting
Speaker 1: an idea of when and where it was invented, but why,
Speaker 1: what was driving it? What was the role it played
Speaker 1: in people's lives? Well, the authors of this paper argue
Speaker 1: that for the hunter gatherers who first started making these pots,
Speaker 1: and this is looking at um late Pleistocene pottery from Japan,
Speaker 1: a total of a hundred and one charred deposits from
Speaker 1: thirteen different sites all over the Japanese islands, and these
Speaker 1: would be pots associated with the Joeman culture that j. O. M. O. N.
Speaker 1: Craig and co authors here argue that what would have
Speaker 1: caused people to to uptake pottery in this context is
Speaker 1: if the pottery provided people with new ways to process
Speaker 1: and consume foods. This would be the driving technological advantage.
Speaker 1: But we don't know exactly how these earliest pots were used.
Speaker 1: So this study did a chemical analysis on the residue
Speaker 1: left on the these charred deposits on pottery from all
Speaker 1: over prehistoric Japan. And one thing worth noting is that
Speaker 1: many of these sites that the pottery shards were recovered
Speaker 1: from were near inland rivers or or lakes, and so
Speaker 1: they were not necessarily by the coast. The author's right.
Speaker 1: We demonstrate eight that lipids can be recovered reliably from
Speaker 1: charred surface deposits adhering to pottery dating from about fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand to eleven thousand, eight hundred calibrated years before present,
Speaker 1: and that that's again the incipient Joeman period, continuing the
Speaker 1: oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in most cases
Speaker 1: these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing freshwater and
Speaker 1: marine organisms. So at the time of this paper, it
Speaker 1: seemed like the some of the earliest pots ever used
Speaker 1: for cooking, we're being used for cooking seafood. Uh though
Speaker 1: I guess actually I don't know. Is it still seafood
Speaker 1: if it's freshwater fish. I'm not sure that's a quandary.
Speaker 1: As well, More than three quarters of the charred deposits
Speaker 1: indicated quote high trophic level aquatic food. High trophic level
Speaker 1: means high up the food chain, so primary producers like
Speaker 1: plants are at the bottom, and then you'd have herbivores
Speaker 1: above them, and then you have carnivores above them, and
Speaker 1: then you'd have the top carnivores about above them. And
Speaker 1: I assume high trophic level aquatic food means they were
Speaker 1: not only eating seafood, they were eating aquatic carnivores. The
Speaker 1: paper draws attention to the possibility that a lot of
Speaker 1: this was salmon, that these pots have fatty acids left
Speaker 1: by prehistoric cooking of salmon which travel upstream for spawning,
Speaker 1: which could explain these uh, these highly nutritious seafoods uh
Speaker 1: near these inland lakes and rivers, not necessarily by the shore.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating because you have the first place my mind
Speaker 1: went was, okay, perhaps boiling some sort of crustaceans and
Speaker 1: so forth, because sometimes that's that's the best way to
Speaker 1: to get at these organisms and turn them into something
Speaker 1: you can you can you can eat. Uh. But but salmon.
Speaker 1: Now it makes sense as well, especially if you're imagining
Speaker 1: a scenario where it's like the spawning situation and you
Speaker 1: have sort of a sudden uh glut of Santa at
Speaker 1: your disposal. What are you gonna do with them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these people were apparently massively successful at exploiting the
Speaker 1: food resources available at the water's edge. I've read multiple
Speaker 1: sources alluding to the idea that apparently just prehistoric Japan
Speaker 1: was a great place to be a hunter gatherer. There
Speaker 1: were just a lot of available food resources in the
Speaker 1: natural environment. Then you could you could create a lot
Speaker 1: of calories for your society without having to farm. But
Speaker 1: I also wanted to discuss a few notes on what
Speaker 1: this type of pottery was. So again, this would have
Speaker 1: been the incipient Joeman culture uh Joe Mont. The Joeman
Speaker 1: people actually get their archaeological reference name from the from
Speaker 1: a descriptor of their pottery. Joeman means something something having
Speaker 1: to do with the idea of ropes, and so the
Speaker 1: pottery they made is noted for having decorations where while
Speaker 1: the clay was still wet, impressions were made in the
Speaker 1: clay with the ropes. So if you look up joem
Speaker 1: On pottery, you'll see all these kind of strange looking
Speaker 1: fiber textures on the outside of it. So I guess
Speaker 1: they would press ropes into it and then they would
Speaker 1: fire it to set the textures in the clay. But
Speaker 1: there are some other very notable characteristics of these these
Speaker 1: early pots. First of all, they tend to be very small,
Speaker 1: and second they have round bottoms. Robb I attached a
Speaker 1: picture of one of these round bottom pots for you
Speaker 1: to look at, and uh, it sort of goes against
Speaker 1: what you would assume about nearly any pot you would
Speaker 1: come across today. What's the bottom of a pot gotta
Speaker 1: be like it needs to be flat so it can
Speaker 1: sit on a table around the floor. Right, Yeah, these
Speaker 1: are not flat. You could not sit these on a table.
Speaker 1: They would roll over, can't stand up by itself on
Speaker 1: the flat surface. That's kind of odd and it makes
Speaker 1: you think about We'll wait a minute, then, how were
Speaker 1: they using these pots later? Joeman pottery shows increases in size,
Speaker 1: so bigger pots and tend to innovate a flat bottom.
Speaker 1: So it seems like the later pots would have been
Speaker 1: able to stand on the table or on the ground.
Speaker 1: These earlier pots no, And this has been interpreted as
Speaker 1: an evolution of the context in which the pottery was
Speaker 1: primarily used. So perhaps the earliest use of these pots
Speaker 1: was exclusively for cooking by hunter gatherers, and the round
Speaker 1: bottom could be the kind of thing that you would
Speaker 1: settle into the coals of a fire save a fire
Speaker 1: burning the round bottom you just kind of push it
Speaker 1: down into all the stuff that's burning, and it'll sit
Speaker 1: up by itself that way. And I wonder, and this
Speaker 1: is a question I don't know the answer to, dangerous
Speaker 1: question to ask um. I wonder if the small size
Speaker 1: of the bowls has to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: the smaller the vessel, the quicker the cook time for
Speaker 1: the contents, and therefore you're maybe risking the cracking of
Speaker 1: the bowl by the heat a little less, because that
Speaker 1: ends up being I think, one of the factors, and
Speaker 1: eventually moving onto metal based cooking technologies, as you don't
Speaker 1: have to really worry about them cracking the way you
Speaker 1: would have to worry about high temperature cracks and pottery.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting idea. I don't know. I didn't read
Speaker 1: anything about that, but that seems possible to me. One
Speaker 1: thing I did read is simply that the smaller size
Speaker 1: of these earliest cooking pots has to do with the
Speaker 1: nomadic lifestyle of the people who probably use them. If
Speaker 1: you're like moving around a lot and you need to
Speaker 1: take a pot from one place to another. Obviously it's
Speaker 1: better for that pot to be smaller. It's less likely
Speaker 1: it's going to be easier to move, less likely to break.
Speaker 1: And it seems again like the pot's got larger and
Speaker 1: had flatter bottoms once people started switching more to an
Speaker 1: agricultural lifestyle. Yeah, I mean otherwise, like, how many flat
Speaker 1: surfaces are you really dealing with? Certainly and certainly not
Speaker 1: within the context of the campfire. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's the right answer, because the other thing is like,
Speaker 1: you could also have a flat bottomed pot that could
Speaker 1: sit in the campfire. So there's no reason and I
Speaker 1: can think of why to use them in a fire.
Speaker 1: The bottom would have to be round like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's a reason anybody is aware of
Speaker 1: that they would have to be round like this. I
Speaker 1: just think it's funny that these earliest pots wouldn't stand
Speaker 1: up by themselves unless maybe they were used with some
Speaker 1: kind of stand Maybe they you know, people built things
Speaker 1: that didn't survive as much, like a holder of some kind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or or also it could have to do I'm guessing here,
Speaker 1: what with making it more durable impacable for people on
Speaker 1: the move. You know, thinking roughly about against like if
Speaker 1: you're going to if you're going to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: create the walls of a castle to withstand battering rams
Speaker 1: and so forth. You don't want you don't you don't
Speaker 1: want a sharp right angle. You want to have a smooth,
Speaker 1: rounded corner. Uh. So, So I don't know, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that has anything to do with the design
Speaker 1: of these pots. Were not. Oh yeah, the bottom does
Speaker 1: kind of look like an egg eggs or eggs are
Speaker 1: good DESI line, right, yeah, yeah, thank oh, But I
Speaker 1: guess we should talk for a minute again about like
Speaker 1: what what is the benefit of a pot for cooking?
Speaker 1: Pot is not the only way to cook you can.
Speaker 1: So let's say you catch this salmon in the river
Speaker 1: and oh boy, you know delicious, you know, nice fatty meat.
Speaker 1: It's great. You could put it on a big old
Speaker 1: stick and just roasted over the an open flame. What
Speaker 1: kind of advantage does cooking it in a pot with
Speaker 1: water bring? Well? One one important factor that has brought
Speaker 1: up in the literature is that boiling allows for faster
Speaker 1: and more thorough cooking of ingredients. Uh. And it also
Speaker 1: creates a tasty broth. Uh. Later on, this is also
Speaker 1: going to be important with with starches. Starches are going
Speaker 1: to thicken up everything, so boiling is vital to subsequent
Speaker 1: traditions of rice, ultimately noodles and so much more. Right,
Speaker 1: But boiling also I would say helps keep maximum new
Speaker 1: trition available to eat because it all stays in the
Speaker 1: pot when you're boiling, or I mean, I guess some
Speaker 1: gets out, there's some splatter and lost their steam and
Speaker 1: all that, but it's minimal. When you're cooking over an
Speaker 1: open fire, you just think about a lot of nutrition
Speaker 1: is probably dripping right off of your food, and that's
Speaker 1: precious food energy that's just sizzling in the fire down below.
Speaker 1: In a soup, everything stays in the pot. It all
Speaker 1: becomes part of a nutritious broth and you can have
Speaker 1: every last drop. This reminds me of We did an
Speaker 1: episode of the show where we talked about what gravy. Gravy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like gravy is essentially the legacy of of meat drippings
Speaker 1: and so forth, the precious drippings. Oh yeah, we were
Speaker 1: I don't remember the name of the people, but they were.
Speaker 1: They were a group that lived in the region that
Speaker 1: is today Finland, and these people had some religious traditions
Speaker 1: of like of like rituals involving cooking bear meat and
Speaker 1: the gravy made from the bear Yeah. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: of course we get into this a little bit in
Speaker 1: the event an episode on Ketchup where you're also dealing
Speaker 1: with kind of a dripping based condiment, that is that
Speaker 1: isn't used as a way to transform other dishes. I
Speaker 1: believe also with with boiling your there's an advantage in
Speaker 1: just how you're heating, say a chunk of fish, right,
Speaker 1: like the way that the heat is applied to the flesh. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that's true. I mean, you certainly can boil
Speaker 1: foods until they're very overdone, like to a to a
Speaker 1: person with sensitive taste, but it's harder to like burn
Speaker 1: foods if you're boiling them in water. They will just
Speaker 1: continue to leach. I mean, the the like meat that
Speaker 1: gets boiled may become very tough and lose a lot
Speaker 1: of flavor, but the flavor is getting lost again into
Speaker 1: the broth, which you can drink. Now, there were there
Speaker 1: were certainly you do you do see mentioned in the
Speaker 1: literature of quote unquote ceramic cauldrons, which were simply larger
Speaker 1: ceramic pots that could be used over an open fire.
Speaker 1: But of course there are material limits. Even with modern ceramics. Uh,
Speaker 1: it can warp and crack in ways that metal does not.
Speaker 1: But of course we didn't just go straight from pottery
Speaker 1: to cast iron cauldrons. There's this whole metallurgical evolution involving copper, bronze, brass, gold,
Speaker 1: and silver. I think we've discussed the broad dates on
Speaker 1: these innovations before, but in the old world it tends
Speaker 1: to go like copper eighth millennium BC, copper smelting by six,
Speaker 1: bronze by the third and brass by the final centuries
Speaker 1: b C. Wrought iron by the third millennium BC, cast
Speaker 1: iron in the ninth century BC. He treated steel in
Speaker 1: crucible steel during the first millennium BC. I gotta say
Speaker 1: that's a great luxury of the modern era. I appreciate
Speaker 1: being able to cook in in steel vessels or metal
Speaker 1: vessels generally, and not having to try to cook in
Speaker 1: earthenware pots. Now this is sort of tangential to the subject,
Speaker 1: but when I think about soup, I necessarily think about seasoning,
Speaker 1: you know, casting all your little spells of flavor on
Speaker 1: the on the cauldron as it bubbles, And so I
Speaker 1: did want to mention briefly that I came across the
Speaker 1: paper about early evidence for the use of spices in cooking, cooking,
Speaker 1: wet cooking, soup cooking in clay pottery. There was a
Speaker 1: paper published called Phytoliths in Pottery Reveal the Use of
Speaker 1: Spice in European prehistoric culture. This was by Hailey saul
Speaker 1: at All published in Plus one in August, and this
Speaker 1: study actually did analysis of what are called phytoliths that
Speaker 1: literally means plant rocks or plant stones, which are these tiny, uh,
Speaker 1: mineral structures that you can find inside plants, which are
Speaker 1: made out generally out of silica that is like taken
Speaker 1: up from the soils and minerals get taken up from
Speaker 1: the roots into the plant's tissues and creates these little
Speaker 1: mineral deposits. And these mineral deposits can of course survive
Speaker 1: for a long time and can tell you things about
Speaker 1: ancient plants. So in this paper they looked at finaliths
Speaker 1: that were left behind in what they call carbonized food
Speaker 1: deposits on prehistoric pottery. I think these would be kind
Speaker 1: of like the charred patches that we were looking at
Speaker 1: in that other paper. They say these are from quote
Speaker 1: the Western Baltic dating from six thousand, one hundred calibrated
Speaker 1: years before present to five thousand, seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: before present. Now, these clay cooking pots were found at
Speaker 1: uh the Neolithic sites in I believe modern day Denmark
Speaker 1: in Germany. And so they analyze the finaliths in these
Speaker 1: pots to determine what these prehistoric people were seasoning their
Speaker 1: food with, and they found out that it was a
Speaker 1: modern garlic mustard seed. I didn't know those terms could
Speaker 1: be combined that way, but modern garlic mustard seed or
Speaker 1: alliaria petio latta, they write, quote as this seed has
Speaker 1: a strong flavor, little nutritional value, and the finalists are
Speaker 1: found in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues.
Speaker 1: These findings are the first direct evidence for the spice
Speaker 1: of food in European prehistoric cuisine. Wow, that's that's incredible.
Speaker 1: They also say that this suggests a much greater antiquity
Speaker 1: for the spicing of foods than you can tell from
Speaker 1: any other previous physical records. So that's pretty impressive to me,
Speaker 1: because again, these are people, uh probably from before the
Speaker 1: age of agriculture, or if they are practicing agriculture. It's
Speaker 1: early sort of proto agriculture. So you have either hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers or early farmers already putting putting spices into their
Speaker 1: food because they just gotta have more flavor. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense, right. I mean, you're by
Speaker 1: necessity you have to figure out what in your surrounding
Speaker 1: environment is useful as food. Also, what has some sort
Speaker 1: of medicinal property or some other property that is worth
Speaker 1: knowing about, even some poisonous property. And then you get
Speaker 1: into this area, well, okay, this is this is maybe
Speaker 1: a little too potent to be consumed outright, but of
Speaker 1: course it can be added to food, and we can
Speaker 1: add it to this broth that we're preparing. Um it.
Speaker 1: This reminds me too of how in Chinese traditions, it's
Speaker 1: often described that like the the earliest tea traditions were
Speaker 1: not the we're not were not necessarily the consumption of
Speaker 1: tea as a drink the way we think of it now,
Speaker 1: but more as a soup, um as this thing that
Speaker 1: is prepared thusly. Uh So this ties in with so
Speaker 1: much we're going to be discussing about, like what what
Speaker 1: is the cauldron? What is the bowl of heated liquid.
Speaker 1: It is a place of transformation. It can take um,
Speaker 1: you know, that which is inedible and make it edible.
Speaker 1: It can take uh, it can combine elements and create
Speaker 1: something entirely new out of them. And this transformative nature
Speaker 1: of the cauldron is key to these these various even
Speaker 1: far flung traditions, uh that involve the supernatural in the divine. Oh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're coming back with cauldron's right. Yeah, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna be back uh in the next episode talking about
Speaker 1: cauldron traditions, particularly in Chinese mythology, Chinese traditions. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of wonderful stuff in there that gets gets
Speaker 1: very divine but also highly infernal love and evil cauldron. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, So we'll be back in the next episode.
Speaker 1: But we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What
Speaker 1: are your thoughts about soup and soup cooking technology. UM.
Speaker 1: I know that some of you out there have have
Speaker 1: written in about various sort of older ancient practices that
Speaker 1: have been you know, either revitalized or just you know,
Speaker 1: just explored as a as an as an exercise. So
Speaker 1: I would be very interested if anyone out there has
Speaker 1: done any any stone boiling and if you have any
Speaker 1: any tidbits you'd like to share about that experience, because
Speaker 1: I find the whole process fascinating, so right in with
Speaker 1: any of that. Uh. In the meantime, if you want
Speaker 1: to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: the core episodes published two days and Thursdays and the
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. On Monday's we
Speaker 1: usually do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we usually do an
Speaker 1: artifact or monster fact episode, which short form episode, and
Speaker 1: then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
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