Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Joe McCormick. I would normally be joined on
Speaker 2: Mike by my co host Robert Lamb, but Rob is
Speaker 2: out on the day that we're recording this, so instead
Speaker 2: I'm being joined by a couple of friends from here
Speaker 2: in the Stuff Network. Today on the podcast, we have
Speaker 2: Annie Reese and Lauren Vogelbaum specifically well of many different projects.
Speaker 2: But I would say, in your capacity today, you are
Speaker 2: coming to us as ambassadors of the show Saver. What's
Speaker 2: going on? Annie and Lauren?
Speaker 1: Oh, I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you so much for having us on, yes,
Speaker 3: and also calling us ambassadors of Savor.
Speaker 1: That makes me feel very official like.
Speaker 2: That, I guess that makes it sound like you're like
Speaker 2: a detached representatives. You are Savor. The two of you
Speaker 2: are Savor, and that is all Safer is, along.
Speaker 1: With our super producers Dylan and Andrew. Yes. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: so we have this podcast called Save. It's about the
Speaker 1: science and history and culture of foods and drinks and
Speaker 1: other assorted materials related to those things. And yeah, so
Speaker 1: when when you asked us to come on and talk
Speaker 1: about this subject. We were like, yeah, okay, right, uh well.
Speaker 2: Wait before we get into today's topic, just just give
Speaker 2: us like the mall food court sample platter of savor.
Speaker 2: What are a couple of things you've talked about recently.
Speaker 1: Oh, good question. I jettison all of that from my
Speaker 1: brain the second that I'm done with it. We've got
Speaker 1: an episode coming out today about an early American cookbook
Speaker 1: writer by the name of Melinda Russell, whose story was
Speaker 1: almost lost to time. She was a free black woman
Speaker 1: living during the era of the Civil War, and historians
Speaker 1: recently like, on earth this cookbook that she wrote, that's
Speaker 1: really changing the way that we think about black Southern
Speaker 1: cooking in the United States during that time, because for
Speaker 1: a long time, the kind of air of thought is like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's poverty cooking, and it wasn't, or it's more nuanced
Speaker 1: and complicated than that. And so just like from this
Speaker 1: very normal human person's life, it's just an amazing gift
Speaker 1: of historical knowledge and what a great story. But you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes we're just talking about artichokes or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: The sea urchins. They wear hats show. Lauren told me about.
Speaker 2: This sea urchins wear hats.
Speaker 1: Sea urchins love wearing hats. If you give them it
Speaker 1: helps them shelter from stuff. And so if you give
Speaker 1: them a little hat, they'll put it on their head.
Speaker 2: What are their hats made of in nature?
Speaker 1: Shells? Oh, seaweed maybe? Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I will also say we've been lucky to cross
Speaker 3: over sometimes with stuff to blow your mind. Uh.
Speaker 1: We had you on for one of our food fairy
Speaker 1: tales once.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, did we talk about oh oh h
Speaker 2: the poem Goblin Market.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh right, yeah that time that I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: one of them many times and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: is this one going to get hr called on me?
Speaker 1: But it's a great poem. It's it's a little bit
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more racy than I ever remember.
Speaker 2: Well, that was a lot of fun, and I really
Speaker 2: really appreciate you all joining me today. I think this
Speaker 2: is going to be a lot of fun also. So
Speaker 2: I was thinking about what would be great to talk
Speaker 2: about with Annie and Lauren, and as a topic combining biology, literature,
Speaker 2: and food history, I thought it would be great to
Speaker 2: talk about the mysterious substance known as ambergrease and quick
Speaker 2: roadmap for the listener. In the first half of the episode,
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about what this substance is and
Speaker 2: what its biological origins are. And then in the second
Speaker 2: half of the episode, Annie and Lauren are going to
Speaker 2: take the lead on discussing this substance as food. So
Speaker 2: pronunciation note at the top of the show, because this
Speaker 2: is an audio format, the word ambergrease is spelled a
Speaker 2: M B E R g rs and it's derived from French,
Speaker 2: meaning I think it's a contraction of French, but it
Speaker 2: comes from French for gray amber. So I think to
Speaker 2: a French speaker it would be pronounced like ambergris. But
Speaker 2: in English it seems everybody says the like a soft
Speaker 2: pronunciation of the s, so it's like ambergrise or ambergrese.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm going to be saying ambergris because
Speaker 1: I can't look at the word gris and pronounce the
Speaker 1: s even though I don't know French. But for some reason,
Speaker 1: that one in particular, my brain is just like, Nope.
Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate that you'll be here to make me
Speaker 2: feel small, but yeah, I'm going to do the s
Speaker 2: as much as like, who knows, if we we pinball
Speaker 2: back and forth. But to kick things off today, I
Speaker 2: wanted to start with a bit of narrative from Moby Dick.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, comes up a lot.
Speaker 2: Moby Dick comes up a lot on Savor.
Speaker 1: Yeah surprisingly, Oh yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Does have a clam chowder chapter, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It does. Yes, we talked about that. He got up
Speaker 3: to all kinds of stuff in that book.
Speaker 1: That's accurate.
Speaker 3: You'd be surprised how many things that come up a
Speaker 3: lot in Savor that you're like, well, I wouldn't have
Speaker 3: associated this with food, but here I am.
Speaker 2: That happens a lot. Actually, we've had Mobi Dick come
Speaker 2: up several times on stuff to blow your mind. In
Speaker 2: the past year or so. We did an episode on
Speaker 2: whale spout on like what it is actually actually that
Speaker 2: is ejected from the whales blowhole and like historical ideas
Speaker 2: about that. And there's this wild chapter in Moby Dick
Speaker 2: where he talks about how like, oh yeah, if you
Speaker 2: get the whale spout on you, that'll like blind you
Speaker 2: and burn your skin off and stuff like that. This
Speaker 2: is not true or at least us, but yeah, Moby
Speaker 2: Dick is great fun. So that's where I want to
Speaker 2: start today. Herman Melville's novel, I would say, devotes not
Speaker 2: one but two chapters to the subject of ambergrease, one
Speaker 2: to its pursuit in a sort of narrative sense, and
Speaker 2: then the other to what it means. So I want
Speaker 2: to start by talking about chapter ninety one of Moby Dick,
Speaker 2: called The Peaquad Meets the Rosebud. And this chapter begins
Speaker 2: with a somewhat ominous epigraph from a seventeenth century English
Speaker 2: author named Thomas Brown, and the epigraph reads, in vain,
Speaker 2: it was to rake for amber grease in the paunch
Speaker 2: of this leviathan insufferable feater, denying that inquiry. It's like
Speaker 2: the saddest sentence I've ever read.
Speaker 1: We don't use the word feeder enough anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we truly don't, so recap. In this chapter the
Speaker 2: Whalers of the Peaquad, they cross paths on the open
Speaker 2: Sea with another whaling ship, a French vessel with a
Speaker 2: name that translates to the Rosebud, and it's ironically named
Speaker 2: because before they reach the ship, Ishmael, the narrator notes
Speaker 2: that the ship reeks of death. He says, it smells
Speaker 2: like a city that has suffered the plague, and the
Speaker 2: reason it smells so bad is that the boat is
Speaker 2: towing what Ishmael calls a blasted whale quote. That is,
Speaker 2: a whale that has died, unmolested on the sea and
Speaker 2: so floated an unappropriated corpse. So not a whale killed
Speaker 2: by the whalers, but a whale found dead on the water.
Speaker 2: And in fact, when they approach the ship they discover
Speaker 2: a second dead whale in tow quote, even more of
Speaker 2: a nosegay than the first. I had to look up
Speaker 2: that word. I think that means like a bouquet of
Speaker 2: fragrant flowers. Nosegay. Yeah, So the whale appears to the
Speaker 2: second whale especially, appears to have been shriveled by before
Speaker 2: it died, meaning that in one sense, the whaler would
Speaker 2: look at it and say this is a whale of
Speaker 2: no value, like the experienced whaler sees a shriveled whale
Speaker 2: and says there is no oil there to harvest, because
Speaker 2: oil is primarily what the whalers are looking for. However,
Speaker 2: to a different kind of whaler's experience, this does not
Speaker 2: mean it is without value. One of the mates of
Speaker 2: the peaquad, a rascally fellow named Stub goes aboard the
Speaker 2: Rosebud and scams the captain of that ship into cutting
Speaker 2: the dead whales loose by claiming that a blasted whale
Speaker 2: is a source of deadly fever to any boat that
Speaker 2: ropes it. So he scares them, they cut the whales loose,
Speaker 2: and then once the con has succeeded, the Rosebud goes
Speaker 2: its own way. And here I'm going to read from
Speaker 2: Moby Dick quote whereupon Stub quickly pulled to the floating body,
Speaker 2: and hailing the peaquad to give notice of his intentions,
Speaker 2: had once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning.
Speaker 2: Seizing his sharp boat spade, he came hinst an excavation
Speaker 2: in the body, a little behind the side fin. You
Speaker 2: would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there
Speaker 2: in the sea. And when at length his spade struck
Speaker 2: against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old
Speaker 2: Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His
Speaker 2: boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their
Speaker 2: chief and looking anxious as gold hunters, And all the
Speaker 2: time numberless fowls were diving and ducking and screaming and
Speaker 2: yelling and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed,
Speaker 2: especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly, from out
Speaker 2: of the very heart of this plague there stole a
Speaker 2: faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of
Speaker 2: bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river
Speaker 2: will flow into and then along with another, without it
Speaker 2: all blending with it. For a time, I have it,
Speaker 2: I have it, cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
Speaker 2: the sub terranean regions a purse, a purse. Dropping his spade,
Speaker 2: he thrust both hands in and drew out handfuls of
Speaker 2: something that looked like ripe windsor soap, or rich modeled
Speaker 2: old cheese, very unctuous and savory, withal you might easily
Speaker 2: dent it with your thumb. It is of a hue
Speaker 2: between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is
Speaker 2: amber grease, worth a gold guineaan ounce to any druggist.
Speaker 2: Some six handfuls were obtained, but more was unavoidably lost
Speaker 2: in the sea, and still more perhaps might have been
Speaker 2: secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command to
Speaker 2: Stub to desist and come on board, else the ship
Speaker 2: would bid them goodbye.
Speaker 1: Oh Captain Ahab so impatient? Yeah he is.
Speaker 2: Really he's not very nice, is he. It's even worse
Speaker 2: later when there's a ship that comes by toward the
Speaker 2: end that's like, we've lost people overboard, will you help us?
Speaker 2: And he's like, no, you're seen Page Master.
Speaker 3: There's a whole section with Captain am and he's a
Speaker 3: real not nice guy in that. Shout out to people
Speaker 3: who've seen Page Master.
Speaker 2: I saw it when I was a kid. What was
Speaker 2: the deal with that? It was like the kid makes
Speaker 2: friends with books and one of them is like a
Speaker 2: Frankenstein and one's a pirate.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Leonard Dnimoy is the horror section with Pee Goldbergers Fantasy,
Speaker 3: Patrick Stewart's Adventure. They like are trying to get down
Speaker 3: to the library. He's trying to get a library card,
Speaker 3: but they run into Moby Dick and Captain Ahab and
Speaker 3: he justus essentially like I want this whale. I don't
Speaker 3: care what it's to all of you anyway.
Speaker 1: In character, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: In character exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, So anyway, that's the chapter where they get
Speaker 2: the ambergrease and then the next chapter ninety two is
Speaker 2: just called Ambergrease, and it's one of the narrator Ishmael's
Speaker 2: characteristic essay is on the spiritual meaning of some piece
Speaker 2: of whale anatomy, in this case, the irony that such
Speaker 2: a refined and expensive material, worth more than gold by
Speaker 2: weight in some markets, prized by the richest of the rich,
Speaker 2: would have such a revolting, carnally putrid origin. And he
Speaker 2: goes on to say at one point, quote who would
Speaker 2: think then that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
Speaker 2: themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of
Speaker 2: a sick whale? Yet so it is by some ambergrease
Speaker 2: is supposed to be the cause, and by others the
Speaker 2: effect of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure
Speaker 2: such a dyspepsia, it were hard to say, unless by
Speaker 2: administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills and
Speaker 2: then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in
Speaker 2: blasting rocks. So there's a poop joke in Moby Dick.
Speaker 2: Because Brandreth's pills. I had to look this up. Where
Speaker 2: As I suspected a nineteenth century laxative.
Speaker 3: Mm.
Speaker 2: And I don't know what the quality of laxatives in
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century was, but I imagine it was like
Speaker 2: real good stuff.
Speaker 1: Probably not subtle, I'm guessing not subtle. Yeah, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah.
Speaker 2: So the character Ishmael here is the narrator is identifying
Speaker 2: ambergrease as some kind of fecal mass or other intestinal
Speaker 2: blockage within the hindgut of the whale, which would be
Speaker 2: cleared in the same way that humans take medication to
Speaker 2: clear constipation. Interesting that Melville presents this theory of the
Speaker 2: origin of ambergresse as non controversial, even though for the
Speaker 2: past like one thousand years, that explanation would have been
Speaker 2: highly disputed. And we'll come back to the physical origins
Speaker 2: of ambergress in a bit. But one thing that this
Speaker 2: chapter gets into that is absolutely true is that high
Speaker 2: quality ambergrease is, and for hundreds of years has been
Speaker 2: extremely valuable if you can find the right buyer. It
Speaker 2: was historically known as floating gold and was sought primarily
Speaker 2: for its value in the manufacture of perfumes. But that
Speaker 2: wasn't the only thing. I had a bunch of other
Speaker 2: uses as well. Uses in medicine and in some cases
Speaker 2: as a culinary delicacy to be used in food and drink.
Speaker 2: And Annie and Lauren, that is why I wanted you
Speaker 2: to join me on the show today to talk about
Speaker 2: eating whale poop.
Speaker 1: Thank you, We are honored and we're ready.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We usually talk about much smaller poops on our show,
Speaker 1: made by bacteria and yeast, So this is a treat.
Speaker 2: Yes. Were you telling me just a minute ago you
Speaker 2: have a sound effect for like microbial poops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it goes and there's usually a little bit
Speaker 1: of an echo behind it. But yeah, bacteria poop.
Speaker 2: Anyway, here's a good place to mention a major source
Speaker 2: that I was using going into this episode. I meant
Speaker 2: to finish the book before we talked. I was actually
Speaker 2: not quite able to. But it's a very interesting book
Speaker 2: called Floating Gold, A Natural and Unnatural History of Ambergrease
Speaker 2: by Christopher Kemp from University of Chicago Press, twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: And this thing is full of fascinating anecdotes about the
Speaker 2: history of the ambergrease trade, both both long ago and
Speaker 2: much more recent, and just as one example of the
Speaker 2: ambergrease trade at a particular time, Kemp explains in the
Speaker 2: prologue of his book that at the time he was writing,
Speaker 2: ambergrease was traded on the global market at up to
Speaker 2: twenty dollars per gram, depending on the quality, and for comparison,
Speaker 2: at the same time, gold was trading at about thirty
Speaker 2: dollars per gram, so about two thirds of the price
Speaker 2: of gold by weight. Yeah, and there were times and
Speaker 2: places when ambergres was worth more than gold by weight.
Speaker 2: But even at this modern price, a chunk of high
Speaker 2: quality ambergrease weighing like fifty pounds, which is not necessarily implausible,
Speaker 2: could be worth something like half a million dollars. So
Speaker 2: given this, when people think they've got a lead on
Speaker 2: some ambergrease and they figure out what it would be
Speaker 2: worth if it were the real thing, they sometimes become
Speaker 2: extremely avaricious and territorial. And one amazing thing this book
Speaker 2: does is document various ill fated ambergrese harvesting frenzies from history.
Speaker 2: It seems that most ambergres that enters the market in
Speaker 2: the modern period is not harvested directly from the body
Speaker 2: of a dead whale, like stubbed did and moby Dick,
Speaker 2: though sometimes it is. As one example of this happening
Speaker 2: in the real world. Kemp tells the story of a
Speaker 2: man named Louis Smith from Tasmania who in the year
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety one, came across the body of a dead
Speaker 2: sperm whale floating on the water. He towed it to
Speaker 2: the beach like you do, yeah, and then collected a
Speaker 2: one hundred and eighty pound boulder of ambergrease from its intestines.
Speaker 2: He claimed aimed by literally cutting the whale open and
Speaker 2: crawling inside its digestive track to retrieve it. I would
Speaker 2: say this is not recommended behavior. I think you could
Speaker 2: easily suffocate and die doing this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, don't do that. What a way to go.
Speaker 1: Important safety tip.
Speaker 2: That's another thing in Moby Dick is like the perils
Speaker 2: of dyeing inside a whale carcass are fully explored. There's
Speaker 2: one whole part where character like falls inside a whale
Speaker 2: and the whale starts to sink. Is horrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds awful.
Speaker 2: But according to a newspaper article from the time, Louis
Speaker 2: Smith's ambergrease harvesting would have paid off because the chunk
Speaker 2: he came home with was estimated by several old whalers
Speaker 2: to be worth about ten thousand pounds. I guess I
Speaker 2: don't know what that ther relevant currency is there. If
Speaker 2: that's British pounds or Australian pounds, that'd be a separate thing.
Speaker 2: The pound whatever the pounds were used in Tasmania at
Speaker 2: the time, and that would have been the year eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety one. So this is a sizeable, very very valuable hull.
Speaker 2: But like I said, most ambergrease is not collected from
Speaker 2: a dead whale. Instead, it takes the form of flotsam,
Speaker 2: strange hunks of material that float on the surface of
Speaker 2: the ocean, sometimes for years or even decades, before eventually
Speaker 2: washing up on a beach somewhere and being found. And
Speaker 2: so a lot of these ambergrease frenzies occur when somebody
Speaker 2: finds a weird, unidentifiable mass of something on a beach
Speaker 2: and then people get the idea that it's ambergrease.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, this large rock looking thing that is
Speaker 1: kind of floaty and kind of greasy might be worth
Speaker 1: a half a million dollars. Yeah, let's find out exactly.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I was thinking it's similar to how
Speaker 2: it's similar to those daily mail articles that come up
Speaker 2: like it seems about four times a day, where it's like,
Speaker 2: somebody found a carcass of some animal on a beach,
Speaker 2: it's a sea monster. And so I think the equivalent
Speaker 2: here is somebody found a mass of some unidentified organic
Speaker 2: or inorganic material on a beach. It's ambergrease.
Speaker 1: Yeah, either monsters or ambergrese, you know.
Speaker 2: Anyway. So one example of these like frenzies is described
Speaker 2: in the very first thing in Camp's book. It's in
Speaker 2: the prologue where he talks about an event from September
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight in a place called Breaker Bay,
Speaker 2: which is near Wellington, New Zealand, where a weird off
Speaker 2: white object described as sort of the color of dirty
Speaker 2: snow and about the size of a forty four gallon
Speaker 2: drum washed up on the shore and people had different
Speaker 2: theories about what it was, but eventually a rumor started
Speaker 2: that it was ambergrease, which if true, would mean it
Speaker 2: could be worth about ten million dollars in total. Because
Speaker 2: this was a huge mass, so people started people started
Speaker 2: carving off pieces of it. They would like go home
Speaker 2: and get gardening tools and then go back to the
Speaker 2: object and hack off pieces, carry a piece away in
Speaker 2: a sling made out of a bed sheet, thinking that
Speaker 2: they were going to be rich. But within three days
Speaker 2: the mass was completely gone, and once the material was
Speaker 2: actually analyzed it turned out to be drum roll tallow
Speaker 2: aka lard. It was a large mass of animal fat
Speaker 2: that had probably somehow like fallen off of a ship
Speaker 2: or broken out of its storage drum. We don't know
Speaker 2: exactly where it came from, but it was it was
Speaker 2: like lard, and the Wellington Regional Council was begging citizens
Speaker 2: not to wash the lard down their drains, which is
Speaker 2: generally but you don't want to put animal fat down
Speaker 2: your drains at all.
Speaker 1: No, no, not a forty four gallon drum worth all
Speaker 1: at the same time across the city. Wow. Yeah, equally gross,
Speaker 1: but way less valuable.
Speaker 2: And there were other frenzies like this. There was the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty four Ambergrease craze in a place called Billinas, California,
Speaker 2: where after people found weird masses of stuff on the beach,
Speaker 2: they started concluding that this was ambergrease. Like that there
Speaker 2: was ambergrease washing ashore. People went to go get it.
Speaker 2: And then actually they found out that these were like
Speaker 2: congealed chunks of sewage bonded with sewer cleaning chemicals. I
Speaker 2: think locally the sewers had just been cleaned out with
Speaker 2: some kind of chemical formula. It made all these like
Speaker 2: white chunks that got washed out to see and then
Speaker 2: brought in. But despite the fact that there are these
Speaker 2: crazes for these like things that are not actually ambergress,
Speaker 2: many people successfully make a lot of money by finding
Speaker 2: real ambergresse on the beach and connecting with the buyer.
Speaker 2: And documents throughout this book that a lot of people
Speaker 2: involved in the ambergrease trade are very squirrely about talking
Speaker 2: to interviewers and do not want to give away too
Speaker 2: many details about their methods. But he does end up
Speaker 2: talking to quite a few people who in the book
Speaker 2: who open up and does find out things, But early
Speaker 2: on a lot of the interviews are just like people
Speaker 2: who don't want to talk to him, and he realizes
Speaker 2: it's because, like, well, if they're people who you know,
Speaker 2: are used to combing beaches for amber grease, they don't
Speaker 2: want to like give away their good spots or they'll
Speaker 2: have other people coming in on their fines.
Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. He said in an interview with a Hakai
Speaker 1: magazine that when he brought it up quote, it was
Speaker 1: like he had farted audibly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He describes a lot of just like dead silence
Speaker 2: on the phone.
Speaker 1: Some people just hang up on him. Yeah, like oh
Speaker 1: I'm getting another call. Click.
Speaker 2: So at this point I would say, like, I want
Speaker 2: to be able to picture a piece of ambergrease. We
Speaker 2: got a brief description in Moby dick Ishmael says it
Speaker 2: looks like ripe windsor soap, or like rich modeled old cheese.
Speaker 2: But one thing that I think is really interesting is
Speaker 2: that if you read through real world descriptions of ambergres,
Speaker 2: you will start to realize that different ambigris specimens are
Speaker 2: radically different in description, in terms of all different of
Speaker 2: all the senses. Basically, they look different, they feel different,
Speaker 2: they smell different. So ambergres can apparently be a huge,
Speaker 2: sticky black mass with overwhelming aromas of sheep dung, or
Speaker 2: ambergrease can be a pale, waxy green or yellow rock,
Speaker 2: or kind of be like a large piece of white soap,
Speaker 2: smelling sweet and fragrant in a way that is exceedingly
Speaker 2: hard to describe. So on one hand, I'd be like,
Speaker 2: how can this even be the same substance if it
Speaker 2: sounds like you're describing completely diametrically opposite physical characteristics of
Speaker 2: this thing. But from what I can tell, the difference
Speaker 2: in a appearance is largely due to a kind of
Speaker 2: seasoning process that takes place as ambergrease floats in the
Speaker 2: ocean over years and even decades, being exposed to solar
Speaker 2: radiation and other forms of physical weathering and chemical reactions,
Speaker 2: becoming gradually transformed, as Kim says, one molecule at a time,
Speaker 2: into something somewhat different than it originally was. And it
Speaker 2: is this more seasoned version, the kind that's been weathered
Speaker 2: at sea for a long time, that seems to be
Speaker 2: the more desirable, high quality ambergrease that like the highest
Speaker 2: end buyers will pay top dollar for. However, with like
Speaker 2: physical characteristics so wildly divergent, I would have to wonder, like,
Speaker 2: how are you even supposed to know whether a random
Speaker 2: chunk of something you find on the beach is actually
Speaker 2: amber grease? And there are some tests apparently experienced ambergrease
Speaker 2: buyers do certain tests. A famous one is called the
Speaker 2: hot needle test. You heat up a needle in a fire,
Speaker 2: you poke it into the mass, and if it's actually ambergrease,
Speaker 2: this should cause it to leak out an oily fluid
Speaker 2: the color of dark chocolate, with a specific bouquet of
Speaker 2: aromas that an experienced ambergrease dealer will recognize. And then
Speaker 2: beyond that you can do like actual chemical analysis with
Speaker 2: modern lab techniques and stuff if you want. But then
Speaker 2: there are other cruder tests. For example, does it float?
Speaker 2: Ambergresse apparently should float. If it sinks, it's probably not ambergrease.
Speaker 2: Another thing is is it full of squid beaks? And
Speaker 2: the answer should be yes, definitely. But I like that
Speaker 2: because it gives you a little hint before we fully
Speaker 2: look at it, like what ambergrease actually is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so right, So so far we know that
Speaker 1: it is in the guts of whales and it's full
Speaker 1: of squid beaks, right, and it smells either really bad
Speaker 1: or really.
Speaker 2: Nice exactly, Yeah, And it looks like either like poop
Speaker 2: or like a rock.
Speaker 3: And people want it, they pay a lot of money
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 2: Well, here's a good question before we get into like
Speaker 2: the biological origins of ambergrease or discussed its use, and
Speaker 2: I'm very excited to hear what y'all are gonna have
Speaker 2: to say about it's use in cookery. I wanted to
Speaker 2: briefly talk about its use in perfume, which is one
Speaker 2: of the main ways in which there's been market demand
Speaker 2: for ambergrease over the years.
Speaker 1: Which which I should say, like like, perfume and cookery
Speaker 1: are very intertwined, especially historically but today still like a
Speaker 1: lot of the earliest recipe books were at least partially
Speaker 1: medicinal in nature, and lots of things that we would
Speaker 1: consider perfume me today were used as seasonings in the past,
Speaker 1: like musk. Some still are today in some cuisines, like
Speaker 1: rose water. And on the flip side, some of our
Speaker 1: modern seasonings have been and or still are really posh
Speaker 1: perfume ingredients like vanilla.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's really interesting rosewater. Do y'all ever watch
Speaker 2: Great British Baking Show or whatever it's called Great britsh
Speaker 2: Bake Off.
Speaker 1: I haven't that often, but I'm aware that it's a thing.
Speaker 2: Well it's a British you know, like it's the most
Speaker 2: pleasant cooking contest show ever. But when I've watched it before.
Speaker 2: There's a thing where like contestants will always want to
Speaker 2: use rose water, but they like they can very easily
Speaker 2: use too much rose water, and that's just like an
Speaker 2: unforgivable sin. It's like too much rose water and this
Speaker 2: is absolutely ruined. It becomes disgusting. I don't even know
Speaker 2: what that would smell slash taste like, because I'm not
Speaker 2: really very familiar with rosewater, but I know it's like
Speaker 2: a sensitive ingredient. There's like some amount of desire for it.
Speaker 2: It seems like maybe kind of a sign of confidence
Speaker 2: or like a risky thing to use that could be
Speaker 2: a big payoff, but if you use too much of it,
Speaker 2: it's just it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's well, I mean, if you've ever smelled a
Speaker 1: rose it tastes like that, which can be either delightful
Speaker 1: or if you go too hard, it's soap.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, And a lot of us associate it
Speaker 3: going back to perfume, with perfumes that our grandmothers may
Speaker 3: be war or something. So it became sort of a
Speaker 3: like you can see our episode for more about this.
Speaker 3: We didn't episode in rosewater, but it became sort of
Speaker 3: a like, oh, that's.
Speaker 1: Old people very Yeah, exactly. I still think it's delightful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too.
Speaker 2: I would just imagine that a lot of things that
Speaker 2: would be used in perfumes that would be prized for
Speaker 2: their like really noticeable scent, might be like that in cookery,
Speaker 2: where it's like it's very delightful in small quantities, but
Speaker 2: you could easily use too much and then it ruins
Speaker 2: the food.
Speaker 3: M hm.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I've done that with garlic.
Speaker 2: I've put garlic perfume.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's because you're a vampire, Laurie.
Speaker 2: What no, sh I love the smell and taste of
Speaker 2: vanilla in foods. But one time when I was working
Speaker 2: at an ice cream store, I was making our waffle cones,
Speaker 2: that's you know, that was my job, and uh do
Speaker 2: you put You put a certain amount of vanilla in
Speaker 2: the mix. And I put more vanilla in than I
Speaker 2: was supposed to, and I was like, well, I like vanilla,
Speaker 2: what's this going to be like horrible, absolutely disgusting, just
Speaker 2: like uh, bitter and inedible, Like you don't want to
Speaker 2: use too much vanilla?
Speaker 3: No, no, which vanilla was the replacement for rosewater in
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 1: This is you know, it's all cyclical.
Speaker 3: But yeah, if you go overboard with those kinds of
Speaker 3: very fragrant ingredients, gonna be in trouble.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, yeah, totally. And I think another thing is
Speaker 2: that a lot of them, like there's a disconnect between
Speaker 2: we prize them for their smell and a lot of
Speaker 2: what we like about experiencing them in the food is
Speaker 2: the smell, but if you actually have like an amount
Speaker 2: in there that you can taste with your tongue, the
Speaker 2: taste is overwhelming bitterness.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also interestingly, a lot of them, like rosewater specifically
Speaker 3: was used for coloring as well.
Speaker 1: It was like, oh, ads, this tint to it.
Speaker 3: So there's a you know, a lot going on when
Speaker 3: we add these ingredients to foods, for sure.
Speaker 2: So as you are saying, I think there's going to
Speaker 2: be some overlap with the appeal of ambergresse as perfume
Speaker 2: and as food, but specifically in perfumery, it seems ambergresse
Speaker 2: has been prized for two different things, both for its
Speaker 2: own intrinsic fragrance and then also as what's called a fixative.
Speaker 2: I didn't know what that meant originally, so I had
Speaker 2: to look it up, and that means it is an
Speaker 2: element of a perfume that helps the whole fragrance last
Speaker 2: longer on the skin or on whatever you spray it on.
Speaker 2: I think sometimes people would actually apply perfumes to like
Speaker 2: articles of clothing and stuff, like to their gloves or something,
Speaker 2: and it would help fix the scent to either the
Speaker 2: body or to whatever surface it was applied to. According
Speaker 2: to a paper I'm going to get to in just
Speaker 2: a minute, Robert Clark's History of Ambergrease, many perfume chemists
Speaker 2: consider ambergris the best known fixative in nature. Quote, it
Speaker 2: preserves the note of a perfume after the perfume itself
Speaker 2: has departed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a in terms of the chemistry of ambergris,
Speaker 1: there's a compound in there that's a fixative called ambrian,
Speaker 1: which is a precursor of the scent compounds such as
Speaker 1: ambroxide and ambernall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way I understood it as I was reading
Speaker 2: from Kemp's book, it seems like the ambrian is sort
Speaker 2: of like the grandparent compound of the aroma compounds in ambergrise,
Speaker 2: and so like that molecule, while being fairly fairly unscented
Speaker 2: itself breaks down into a bunch of chains of other things.
Speaker 2: These downstream products of it all have their own interesting aromas,
Speaker 2: and that blend is what gives rise to the aroma
Speaker 2: of ambergrease.
Speaker 1: Which is part of why when it's just floating on
Speaker 1: the ocean for a while, it starts developing these better
Speaker 1: sense in some cases better.
Speaker 2: That would make sense. Yeah, in fact, to go into
Speaker 2: that specifically, So in the book, Kemp talks to a
Speaker 2: person named doctor Charles Cell, who is a researcher with
Speaker 2: a company called Givauden or I'm not sure how you
Speaker 2: say that, as giv A U D A N which
Speaker 2: is a large flavor and fragrance manufacturer. And Cell is
Speaker 2: talking about exactly this like breakdown chain. Who says that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this core ambergrease molecule, the one you were talking about, Lauren,
Speaker 2: is like a terpenoid. It breaks down into these other
Speaker 2: complex aroma molecules. And so like one decay product smells
Speaker 2: like tobacco, another one smells like quote ocean. It's that
Speaker 2: like briny ocean scent. Another one smells like mold feces,
Speaker 2: and animals like mammals. But then it gets to there's
Speaker 2: a really unique breakdown compound there called naphtho furine, which
Speaker 2: I've never heard of before, obviously, but Cell says, quote,
Speaker 2: if you look at the descriptions that people give, one
Speaker 2: of the breakdown products is described as brineozone, another one
Speaker 2: will be described as tobacco like, But the naphtho furine,
Speaker 2: the only label we can put on it is ambergrease
Speaker 2: because there's nothing else quite like it. And this is
Speaker 2: interesting because this section of the book gets into people
Speaker 2: who have experienced with ambergrease talking about the difficulty of
Speaker 2: describing these unique aroma compounds that just don't really smell
Speaker 2: like anything else. And it's not like a it's not
Speaker 2: there's like a disnalogy with other types of sense data,
Speaker 2: like say a shade of a color, where you could say, well,
Speaker 2: it's like a lighter shade of red, you know, or
Speaker 2: you could say, like it's a darker shade of orange
Speaker 2: or something. There's there are no degrees like that along
Speaker 2: a spectrum. With smells, they're just kind of like each
Speaker 2: you know, molecule hits the old factory bulb and produces
Speaker 2: a different pattern in the brain, and so like some
Speaker 2: molecules just smell totally unique and there's nothing you can
Speaker 2: compare them to, And I thought that was quite interesting.
Speaker 2: And so today there are synthetic compounds that are used
Speaker 2: in perfumery that are designed to mimic ambergresse under trade
Speaker 2: names like like am brocs and stuff. But from what
Speaker 2: I understand, like some perfumers think that they're good, other
Speaker 2: perfumers don't like them as much. There seems to be
Speaker 2: a there are some people who are like sort of
Speaker 2: think of themselves as natural perfumers. They want to use
Speaker 2: like traditional ingredients and less like synthetic ingredients, and they
Speaker 2: think that that natural ambergrease is just like sort of
Speaker 2: unbeatable in its qualities. I can't really comment on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have some familiarity with ambergris as a as
Speaker 1: a perfume ingredient, like the artificial stuff I'm assuming. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming that none of the like twenty dollars bottles of
Speaker 1: perfume that I've purchased in my life contained actual ambergris.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's usually kind of shorthand in perfumery for
Speaker 1: like a like a sort of musky, sweet woody note,
Speaker 1: I guess, And I've quite enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that list you gave it that overlaps with what
Speaker 2: I've read, like the wood woody sort of elements, but
Speaker 2: also the tobacco, also the strong kind of animal smell
Speaker 2: and the sweetness. I don't know, it's hard to imagine.
Speaker 2: It's funny to talk about with me just having no
Speaker 2: idea what this smell's like and reading the descriptions and
Speaker 2: just saying like this doesn't add up, Like my brain
Speaker 2: isn't making sense of what's being described.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I very nearly. I had this thought last night.
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, I should go find one of
Speaker 1: my perfumes that has some of it in it. We're
Speaker 1: we're on the internet right now. I can't show you
Speaker 1: a perfume. Oh no on this video call. So I
Speaker 1: didn't do that.
Speaker 2: Well, that's okay. I almost kind of am cherishing my
Speaker 2: own ignorance here. Something about it is making the subject
Speaker 2: all the more mysterious and fun to me. I guess
Speaker 2: this leads us to the next question, which is, like,
Speaker 2: what is Ambergresse actually like? How is it actually formed?
Speaker 2: So I think next we should do like the biological
Speaker 2: origins of Ambergresse, and then we can talk about ambergrese
Speaker 2: as food.
Speaker 1: Right, once we get good and grossed out, then talk
Speaker 1: about it exactly, smell strange biological origins. Hmm, let's eat it.
Speaker 2: It seemed like the right order to me. So the
Speaker 2: most detailed scientific study of ambergress and the most detailed
Speaker 2: history of the formation theories that I could find, was
Speaker 2: a two thousand and six paper by the British biologist
Speaker 2: Robert Clark. Clark actually passed away several years back, but
Speaker 2: he seems to have been the world's foremost scientific authority
Speaker 2: on ambergrease. It seems this is something that actually not
Speaker 2: that many people studied. And Kemp talks about this in
Speaker 2: his book that he tried to talk to a lot
Speaker 2: of scientists and marine biologists about ambergrese and a lot
Speaker 2: of them were just like, yeah, I have no idea,
Speaker 2: so yeah. This paper is called the Origins of Ambergrease
Speaker 2: in the Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six by Robert Clark, and Clark begins by
Speaker 2: quoting an ambergrease dealer named Beauville, who explained in the
Speaker 2: year nineteen fifty four that quote, not many people know
Speaker 2: what ambergrease is, but those who do know it is
Speaker 2: not the feces of a whale. And I don't know
Speaker 2: what it is, but we know what it's not. And
Speaker 2: Clark says to the contrary, after decades of study of
Speaker 2: this mysterious subce, he is prepared to argue that it
Speaker 2: is indeed the feces of a whale, or, to be
Speaker 2: a bit more nuanced, a sort of complex quote fecal
Speaker 2: product of the sperm whale. So, before he explains is
Speaker 2: the modern theory, Clark does a delightful recounting of the many,
Speaker 2: many historical hypotheses about what ambergrease is and where it
Speaker 2: comes from. Suffice to say, it has long been, in
Speaker 2: the words of Herman Melville quote, a problem to the learned.
Speaker 2: He says that in the seventeenth century there was speculation
Speaker 2: about the origins of ambergreese, and it was like a
Speaker 2: pretty popular subject. Is so popular, in fact, that in
Speaker 2: the year sixteen seventy or sixteen sixty seven, sorry, there's
Speaker 2: an author named Klobius. I think this was Eustace Fetus Clobius,
Speaker 2: who recorded eighteen such ideas known at the time. So
Speaker 2: a lot of people speculating about where it comes from.
Speaker 2: Here are a few examples. There's an author named Fuskius
Speaker 2: who claimed that ambergris was a human made fake that
Speaker 2: was like a composite made out of multiple other components,
Speaker 2: including a labdanum, which is the resin of a rock
Speaker 2: rose plant, but also aloe wood and the musk of
Speaker 2: a mammal called the civet. I think we were talking
Speaker 2: about the civet earlier either before we were either off micron,
Speaker 2: but yeah, the civet is sort of a cat like mammal,
Speaker 2: a carnivoor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which right? You get musk from? Sure? Or you could.
Speaker 1: I don't personally.
Speaker 2: There was one seventeenth century encyclopedist who claimed that it
Speaker 2: was simply dried sea foam. Okay, it's hard to see
Speaker 2: how that happens, but okay. Another said it was dried
Speaker 2: foam from seals. Seal foam presumably, I guess from their mouths.
Speaker 2: It doesn't say what seal foam that he's talking about.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 2: Another popular idea was that it was the excrement of
Speaker 2: a particular species of bird found in the Maldives, locally
Speaker 2: called the ooh. And I'm gonna try my best of
Speaker 2: this word the a knackungree pasqui, which lived on a
Speaker 2: diet of fragrant herbs. So I guess if it eats
Speaker 2: fragrant herbs and then it poops, and that would explain
Speaker 2: why the poop is so fragrant. Some wrote that it
Speaker 2: was a form of lizard musk which was secreted from
Speaker 2: the sexual organs and throat glands of crocodiles. Another idea
Speaker 2: was that it was a honeycomb, as in like from
Speaker 2: a bee colony which fell into the sea and then
Speaker 2: was crystallized by exposure to the elements.
Speaker 1: Oh, I like that one.
Speaker 2: I like that too. Unfortunately it's not true. Another idea
Speaker 2: was that it's just a rock, Like it's just a
Speaker 2: rock or a type of like clod of earth of
Speaker 2: a particular sort. And in fact there would be if
Speaker 2: we could go out and find them, boulders and even
Speaker 2: entire islands made of this type of rock, where like
Speaker 2: the ground was ambergris, and these were just like the
Speaker 2: chunks that broke off and floated away. The author of
Speaker 2: a of a ninth century Arabic text mentions that ambergris
Speaker 2: was a fungus that grew in the dark at the
Speaker 2: bottom of the ocean and could be ripped up from
Speaker 2: the bottom by ocean currents and then floated around, and
Speaker 2: this idea was held by many subsequent thinkers. The tenth
Speaker 2: to eleventh century Islamic physician and polymath Ibn Sina, also
Speaker 2: known as Avicenna, sort of stuck to the idea that
Speaker 2: it was fungus, but thought instead that it was like
Speaker 2: a terrestrial fungus that grew on rocks and then fell
Speaker 2: into the water from land based rocks and then floated around,
Speaker 2: rather than originating on the seafloor. Some writers seem to
Speaker 2: think it's a type of fruit. The seventeenth century natural
Speaker 2: philosopher Robert Boyle published a text containing the idea that
Speaker 2: it was gum exuded from the roots of a seaside tree.
Speaker 2: And then another idea favored by many later authors was
Speaker 2: that ambergrease was a form of bitumen exuded from vince
Speaker 2: on the seafloor. And bitumen is this like dense, thick,
Speaker 2: black mixture of hydrocarbons that is a natural product of petroleum,
Speaker 2: So you can think basically tar. So my idea from
Speaker 2: like looking at this wide range of options is like
Speaker 2: it just gives you a sense of how baffling this
Speaker 2: substance found than the seashorts was. It was a hot commodity,
Speaker 2: but like its properties are so elusive that it could
Speaker 2: be anything from bird dung to honeycomb to fungus to
Speaker 2: a petroleum constituent.
Speaker 1: It's got a lot of mystique.
Speaker 3: It definitely, like even now it's pretty recent that there's
Speaker 3: been more information about it, but it was certainly Yeah,
Speaker 3: just the range of explanations of what it could be,
Speaker 3: the tails behind it, the range of smells, like this
Speaker 3: is something that people are like, I don't know, yeah,
Speaker 3: And I will say that historically, like there were a
Speaker 3: lot of tall tails told about other precious spices and substances,
Speaker 3: like because people didn't want you to horn in on
Speaker 3: their on their product, right, so you know, like like
Speaker 3: like like Arab traders would be like, oh, yeah, that
Speaker 3: comes from a dragon on this one island. Don't go
Speaker 3: looking for it, man, like dragons, dude, And so some
Speaker 3: of these stories might have a little bit of that
Speaker 3: flavor to it as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: That's a very good point, I mean, and it sort
Speaker 2: of connects with the idea that even in the even
Speaker 2: in the modern day, A lot of people who are
Speaker 2: involved in the ambergris trade like don't want to talk
Speaker 2: about it, you know, with with outsiders. They're not interested
Speaker 2: in sharing details of what this stuff is and how
Speaker 2: it works. So yeah, you can imagine that similar confusions
Speaker 2: could have arisen in centuries past for similar reasons that, like,
Speaker 2: you know, people did not particularly want to share the
Speaker 2: details of how they made their money in this trade
Speaker 2: and thus just deliberately confused outsiders with maybe false details
Speaker 2: or other things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's also interesting considering the legality too, which well,
Speaker 3: I know we'll get into later. That's probably not what
Speaker 3: what's at play here, but I just think that that's
Speaker 3: a fascinating part of this is sort of like, yeah,
Speaker 3: find this thing we don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, you're saying that's another reason, like people
Speaker 2: are hesitant to talk about it because yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like maybe let's just not discuss this, let's just
Speaker 3: see it as it is.
Speaker 1: Doesn't smell let's go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay. One last common confusion before we get to
Speaker 2: the main modern theory is that lots of authors in
Speaker 2: history thought that ambergris, which we now know is in
Speaker 2: fact a biological product of the sperm whale. They thought
Speaker 2: that it was actually the same thing as an in reality,
Speaker 2: completely different, unrelated biological product of the sperm whale, the
Speaker 2: waxy substance known as spermaceti, which is found in the
Speaker 2: whale's head and was the primary product sought by whalers
Speaker 2: like the crew of Peaquad. You know, that was the
Speaker 2: whale oil that whalers were trying to extract, and that
Speaker 2: tragically led to the you know, the great reduction in
Speaker 2: the populations of sperm whales around the world. Even in
Speaker 2: some cases where ambergrease was found inside sperm whales, it
Speaker 2: was sometimes thought that it was not actually something made
Speaker 2: by the whale's body, but something that the sperm whale
Speaker 2: had come across in the ocean and devoured. So, as
Speaker 2: I stated earlier, Clark here thinks that the best theory
Speaker 2: of ambergrease is that it is a sperm whale coprolith
Speaker 2: aka a mass of feces hardened into a rock like consistency.
Speaker 2: Clark traces this idea back to an eighteenth century author
Speaker 2: and named schved Diaver. I don't know if you say
Speaker 2: those ws like vs. Either schwed Diover or Shiddaver.
Speaker 1: Great name either way.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. There have been some competing modern theories, such
Speaker 2: as the notion that it is primarily a concretion of
Speaker 2: bile from the whaless digi estive system, or that it's
Speaker 2: a secretion of whale like sexual glands, but Clark argues
Speaker 2: that these don't really fit with the evidence. So here's
Speaker 2: I'm going to work here from Kemp's synthesis of Clark's
Speaker 2: favorite copperlith theory. And this does seem to be, from
Speaker 2: what I can tell, the explanation that is currently the
Speaker 2: most widely accepted by cytologists and other relevant experts. So,
Speaker 2: the average sperm whale eats a lot of squid. You know,
Speaker 2: sperm whale life is like it's diving down to meet
Speaker 2: its metabolic needs. It has to eat like a ton
Speaker 2: of squid every day. Oh yeah, that's a lot. And
Speaker 2: so it hunts for squid by diving deep into the
Speaker 2: dark the mesoplagic zone and hunting with the help of echolocation,
Speaker 2: the acoustic clicks that it can emit with the help
Speaker 2: of its giant box head. So the whale swim down
Speaker 2: and they hunt, and they eat lots of squid. The
Speaker 2: sperm whale's got four different stomachs, and it digests its
Speaker 2: prey in different stages. Here you got the soft, liquefied
Speaker 2: parts of the prey animals that they pass on through
Speaker 2: the stomachs to the intestine, while the small number of
Speaker 2: indigestible hard parts and squid. You're primarily talking about beaks there,
Speaker 2: because squid have you know, their mouth is a beak
Speaker 2: that is in many ways morphologically similar to a bird beak.
Speaker 2: It's like a parrot's beak sort of. But they've also
Speaker 2: got a hard part that's an internal organ that's a
Speaker 2: quill like hard part called a pin. These things gather
Speaker 2: in the sperm whale stomachs and then eventually, when there's
Speaker 2: too many of them sperm whales like who, and it
Speaker 2: vomits them up. Yep, Yeah, this is not ambergris. This
Speaker 2: is just whale vomit. And it's mostly squid beaks. For
Speaker 2: some reason, sometimes a massive beaks fails to be vomited
Speaker 2: up and instead goes in the other direction. And here
Speaker 2: Kemp quotes from Clark, and this section is very good,
Speaker 2: so I must quote from Clark as well. So these
Speaker 2: are Clark's word here. Quote now, once in the Antarctic.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty eight, on board a boat called the
Speaker 2: Southern Harvester, I examined a sperm whale whose cylindrical last
Speaker 2: stomach was entirely filled with a compacted mass of squid beaks,
Speaker 2: squid pins, and nematode worms. The mass was one point
Speaker 2: two meters in length and zero point four meters in diameter.
Speaker 2: This last stomach is normally empty except for a few
Speaker 2: small beaks, pins, and nematode cuticles. We have only to
Speaker 2: imagine an imperfect valve, a leaky sphincter between this last
Speaker 2: stomach and the intestine. When all conditions are set for
Speaker 2: a train of events which should result in ambergrease. And
Speaker 2: I think the metaphor of a tray in there is
Speaker 2: perfect because it's like plowing down the intestinal tract. So
Speaker 2: here what happens is like this tangled wad of beaks
Speaker 2: passes into the intestine, which is not evolved to pass solids.
Speaker 2: It's only for liquid matter is supposed to be going
Speaker 2: into the sperm whales intestine. The hard beaks irritate the
Speaker 2: intestinal lining as they pass. Eventually this massive beaks and
Speaker 2: compacted fecal matter, it becomes stuck and it obstructs the rectum,
Speaker 2: and fecal matter builds up behind the mass. And then,
Speaker 2: to quote from Campire quote, the whales gastro intestinal system
Speaker 2: responds by increasing water absorption from the lower intestines, and
Speaker 2: gradually the feces saturating. The compacted mass of squid beaks
Speaker 2: become like cement, binding the slurry together permanently. It becomes
Speaker 2: a concretion, a smooth and striated boulder, so it's like
Speaker 2: forming a cement like solid, hardened rock like mass here
Speaker 2: and at various points the feces will sort of be
Speaker 2: able to pass by. But over time the massive beaks
Speaker 2: and fecal matter becomes harder and harder and denser and
Speaker 2: more solid, and new layers are added to it, like
Speaker 2: the rings of a tree trunk, and eventually, somehow the
Speaker 2: mass leaves the whale, either because the whale is actually
Speaker 2: able to pass it, it's unclear how often this happens,
Speaker 2: if ever, or because the whale dies and its body
Speaker 2: is subject to scavenging and decomposition, and eventually the chunk
Speaker 2: of fresh ambergrease is separated from the rest of the
Speaker 2: remains floats away through the water, and then it is
Speaker 2: acted upon and transformed by the elements for who knows
Speaker 2: how long, maybe decades before it either washes up on
Speaker 2: a beach and is found or decomposes completely in the ocean.
Speaker 2: And the process here is apparently quite rare. Clark estimates
Speaker 2: that it only happens in roughly one out of every
Speaker 2: one hundred sperm whales, and of course, sperm whale populations
Speaker 2: worldwide were greatly reduced by commercial whaling from roughly like
Speaker 2: eighteen hundred till the nineteen eighties or so, and populations
Speaker 2: are probably recovering now but still reduced from where they were.
Speaker 2: So ambergrease has probably always been a pretty rare nature fact,
Speaker 2: and it's probably even much rarer now than it was
Speaker 2: hundreds of years ago.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing. And I think there's some speculation that
Speaker 1: the ambergrease is actually what winds up killing the whale
Speaker 1: in yeah, a lot of these instances, because it has
Speaker 1: this intestinal blockage that eventually right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is speculated to be the case, that
Speaker 2: it builds up until finally nothing gets around it and
Speaker 2: the whale dies from it. And that would go again
Speaker 2: to like the observer and no, this is just a
Speaker 2: fictional novel, so, and it's from the nineteenth century, so
Speaker 2: very likely to be wrong. But it kind of fits
Speaker 2: with like Melville's observation that it was like a sick,
Speaker 2: emaciated whale in which it was found.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm really impressed by I feel like that is
Speaker 1: like score one one out of like thousands for Melville
Speaker 1: being scientifically correct about anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of stuff is wrong in Moby Dick,
Speaker 2: but it's always wrong in an interesting way.
Speaker 1: You're making me want to revisit mobi deck for the
Speaker 1: first time in my entire life.
Speaker 2: Oh well, you know, do as you will. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I agree, there's a lot of interest to be found
Speaker 2: in it. And it's not just the chowder. But speaking
Speaker 2: of chowder, hey, I want y'all to tell me about
Speaker 2: ambergres as food because one of the most shocking things
Speaker 2: to me after learning about the substance is not only
Speaker 2: was it used in these small quantities as like a
Speaker 2: fixative and perfumes, not only was it used as many
Speaker 2: natural materials are as a as a medicine of various sorts,
Speaker 2: or as like a potency enhancer for people, it was
Speaker 2: also just used as a culinary item.
Speaker 1: Yep, yepper's squidbeaks and intestinal leakage. Yeah, that's, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, has a lot of culinary uses throughout history.
Speaker 1: So I would like to start by actually quoting from
Speaker 1: Kemp because he wrote in his book about using ambergris
Speaker 1: as a seasoning and okay, so he reports it crumbles
Speaker 1: like truffle. I fold it carefully into the eggs with
Speaker 1: a fork, rising and mingling with curls of steam from
Speaker 1: the eggs, the familiar odor of ambergris begins to fill
Speaker 1: and clog my throat, a thick and unmistakable smell that
Speaker 1: I can taste. It inhabits the back of my throat
Speaker 1: and fills my sinuses. It is aromatic, both woody and floral.
Speaker 1: The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest
Speaker 1: floor and of the delicate really undersides of mushrooms that
Speaker 1: grow in damp and shaded places.
Speaker 2: I want to cry, tears streaming down my face with
Speaker 2: the beauty of eating this whale poop, like I'd like
Speaker 2: the how, even knowing what, knowing what we know, and
Speaker 2: knowing that he knows what we know, because he also
Speaker 2: writes about it in his book of like where this
Speaker 2: comes from the description of it, like filling his throat
Speaker 2: like that in the same way that it folds up
Speaker 2: to clog the intestine rectum of the whale.
Speaker 1: It's a very specific kind of poetry. Yeah. Yeah. A
Speaker 1: writer for Gourmet magazine reported in two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: that eggs cooked with ambergris are are good. Uh, don't
Speaker 1: go well with bacon, but we're good with toast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't go well with bacon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, interesting.
Speaker 2: Wonder why, Like, I is it sort of too meaty
Speaker 2: on its own?
Speaker 1: Maybe they were puzzled as well. They were kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't It didn't go well with the bacon, but
Speaker 1: the toast was fine. I feel like when.
Speaker 3: You eat bacon, though, you're kind of there for the bacon,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, Like the bacon is a
Speaker 3: big part of what why you got whatever you're eating. Yea,
Speaker 3: So maybe it's just like it was a distraction from
Speaker 3: the bacon.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Bacon is kind of a perfume of its own, and
Speaker 2: so maybe bacon, because it has those like smoky complex
Speaker 2: sweet aromas, doesn't play well with other very strong aromas.
Speaker 1: Do you think that in the case yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because, yeah, like the smell of bacon is so distinct.
Speaker 3: I can see it again, never having smell ambergris, I
Speaker 3: can imagine that it kind of it messes up with
Speaker 3: the smell of the ambergris.
Speaker 1: It messes up the smell of bacon. So it kind
Speaker 1: of clashes. You've got too many different kinds of mammal
Speaker 1: smell coming at you. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: So so y'all mentioned that one of the things that
Speaker 2: might be affecting people's willingness to talk about ambergris or
Speaker 2: ambergris is is the fact of its legality, So, like,
Speaker 2: what's going on with that, right?
Speaker 1: So, Okay, in international law, I think it's technically it's
Speaker 1: like it's like legal to the point that it's up
Speaker 1: to individual countries to regulate for or against it, as
Speaker 1: with any other protected animal product, any product that comes
Speaker 1: from a protected animal species. Okay. So yes, it is
Speaker 1: illegal in the United States as a clause in the
Speaker 1: Marine Mammal Protection Act of nineteen seventy two, but it's
Speaker 1: not really prosecuted. Apparently, there have only been like nine
Speaker 1: reports of people, like like nine reported instances of people
Speaker 1: collecting ambergers in the US in the past ten years
Speaker 1: or so, and none of them come to actual prosecution.
Speaker 1: But yeah, laws vary by country. There have been recent
Speaker 1: arrests for its possession in India, but that its technical
Speaker 1: illegality does not prevent it from showing up on American menus,
Speaker 1: for example, in like posh bars, as an ingredient in
Speaker 1: hot chocolate or snazzy cocktails. This one bartender working with
Speaker 1: it in Chicago back in twenty sixteen told Food fifty
Speaker 1: two it smells like a tide pool in your grandmother's
Speaker 1: basement in a good way. Apparently, yeah. There the cocktail
Speaker 1: they were using it in was like it was like
Speaker 1: a three rum blend with some pineapple kind of drink
Speaker 1: and and and apparently yeah, the ambergris added a hint
Speaker 1: of the ocean.
Speaker 2: Okay, tidepool in your grandmother's basement. I can see that
Speaker 2: how that connects to like the decay or the decomposition
Speaker 2: molecules we talked about earlier, because it's like one in
Speaker 2: one sense smells like the ocean. It's kind of briny,
Speaker 2: but in the other sense of your grandmother's basement. I
Speaker 2: think one of the compounds was said to smell like
Speaker 2: mold or like feces, and so maybe the mold is
Speaker 2: the basement part.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but then that floral wood note might be the
Speaker 1: grandma Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, not the grandma's house, right.
Speaker 1: Right, yes, definitely, yes, yes, but okay, all right, how
Speaker 1: did we at here? So older records are scant, But
Speaker 1: let's start with this Egyptian cookbook from thirteen hundreds that
Speaker 1: has a whole bunch of different medicinal like perfume, incense
Speaker 1: kind of recipes that list ambergris, but also does include
Speaker 1: a recipe for a dried apricot compote made with floral
Speaker 1: essences pomegranate, juice, and mint, and that you then put
Speaker 1: in a vessel quote infused with smoke of ambergris. And
Speaker 1: because ambergris was often used as an incense, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: that fumigation might have been a popular way to flavored
Speaker 1: dishes with the stuff. Yeah, by smoking it kind of
Speaker 1: like smoking meat in it or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh okay, that's interesting. So I guess when I
Speaker 2: imagined it being used in food, I would have primarily
Speaker 2: thought just like directly adding it to the food. But
Speaker 2: you're saying, like, like the thing where you'd add the
Speaker 2: smoke of it in an enclosed container to like sort
Speaker 2: of I don't know, to perfume the food with the
Speaker 2: aroma of it, but you're not actually like chewing on
Speaker 2: pieces of it in this case, in.
Speaker 1: That particular well, in that particular case, no, but certainly
Speaker 1: just chunks of it were being used. Okay. Another cook
Speaker 1: book right around fifteen hundred from India that had a
Speaker 1: lot of Persian influence. It was written for the Sultan
Speaker 1: who is famous for his eccentric devotion to pleasure. Okay,
Speaker 1: this cookbook included a recipe for making these skiers of
Speaker 1: stewed meat that you would then rub down with saffron,
Speaker 1: white ambergris and rose water, and then cook again with rice, ginger, salt,
Speaker 1: and onions and serve with a good gravy whatever that means.
Speaker 1: And that sounds delicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to eat this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very expensive, like saffron was and still is one
Speaker 1: of the most expensive things on the planet that people
Speaker 1: insist upon eating, and rose water would have been pricey
Speaker 1: at the time too, So this is truly a feast
Speaker 1: of pleasure. And that's just one example. There are dozens
Speaker 1: of recipes in the books Sweet and Savory Plus for
Speaker 1: perfumes that include ambergris.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there were decadent persons shurbets sarbets once called
Speaker 3: they once called for ambergris as an ingredient alongside water
Speaker 3: and lemon And that's been a theme coming up in
Speaker 3: like ice cream or some kind of similar dessert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ambergris. Yeah. It might have spread to Europe through
Speaker 1: these kind of Arab Indian cultural exchange roots along the
Speaker 1: spice routes, and so by the fifteen hundreds, Ish cooks
Speaker 1: in the Italian courts were flavoring stuff like piscatti and
Speaker 1: other desserts with it, often paired with musk, like musk
Speaker 1: and ambergris in these baked goods and other sugary things.
Speaker 1: By the sixteen hundreds, France had picked this combination up
Speaker 1: musk and ambergris, and a famed chef and cookbook author
Speaker 1: of Francois Pierre de lave Rene had a bunch of
Speaker 1: recipes calling for ambergris in this book of sweets that
Speaker 1: he published in Candied Fruits in Marzapan, in creams, in lemonade,
Speaker 1: and in wine.
Speaker 3: Right, and beginning around sixteen sixty, English cooks started publishing
Speaker 3: recipes utilizing ambergris The English especially enjoyed cooking with it
Speaker 3: because it was rare and therefore luxurious. This is one
Speaker 3: of my favorite things, and we do topics like this.
Speaker 3: There's a part of me that wonders if there's like
Speaker 3: a willful surely it didn't come from a whales rectum, or.
Speaker 1: If it even matters. It's rare.
Speaker 3: Therefore we want it in our recipes to show that
Speaker 3: we can afford it. And a lot of these recipes
Speaker 3: were for desserts or something otherwise very fancy. Baked puddings
Speaker 3: made with bread or ground almonds were some of the
Speaker 3: most popular ways to use ambergris as a food ingredient,
Speaker 3: mostly sweet in the sweet variety, and ambergris also started
Speaker 3: showing up in medicinal drinks, alcoholic drinks like posset and punch, candies,
Speaker 3: and gelatines.
Speaker 1: It was often again paired with musk or things like
Speaker 1: rose or orange flower water and with some warm spices,
Speaker 1: so especially considering how expensive sugar still was at this time,
Speaker 1: these were all like really show off kind of kind
Speaker 1: of recipes. It also showed up in possibly the first
Speaker 1: English recipe for ice cream, dating from around sixteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: which listed as suggested flavorings either mace or orange flower
Speaker 1: water or ambergreen.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's something I had seen this association with
Speaker 2: this early ice cream recipe. I have a question if
Speaker 2: ambergris if ambergrease works as a as a fixative, Like
Speaker 2: it's really good at making smells stick to surfaces and
Speaker 2: linger there, even smells of things that are mixed with it,
Speaker 2: not necessarily just its own smell. I wonder how that
Speaker 2: would affect its use in food, Like do you do
Speaker 2: you want? I don't know. Is there some sense in
Speaker 2: which food pleasure could be enhanced by aromas being kind
Speaker 2: of like sticky year to surfaces even maybe including I
Speaker 2: don't know, the plate, the utensils, the inside of the
Speaker 2: mouth and things like that. Or is that an undesirable
Speaker 2: thing in food? I haven't haven't fully figured that out,
Speaker 2: but it seems like this fixative quality could affect its
Speaker 2: appeal as food as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if it would maybe help stick around
Speaker 1: in a food some of the some of the scents
Speaker 1: and flavors that would otherwise kind of gas off and
Speaker 1: get lost to time, Like if you bake it into bread,
Speaker 1: that fresh bread smell might stick with the bread.
Speaker 2: I don't know, seems possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like that they would be a much
Speaker 3: like the less the better, and a lot of spices
Speaker 3: at the time were that way, Like you want that
Speaker 3: kind of fragrance, but if you use too much then
Speaker 3: it gets overpowering. So I can see, I can see
Speaker 3: that ambergris would be valuable in that case of like
Speaker 3: I want the smell, but it sticks, so it kind.
Speaker 1: Of less of whatever you're trying to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, show up, which apparently could have led to a death.
Speaker 3: Oh intrigue, I have to bring the intrigue. Allegedly, King
Speaker 3: Charles the Second of England died by poisoning via his
Speaker 3: favorite breakfast, which was eggs and ambergris in sixteen eighty five,
Speaker 3: and some speculate that the ambergris may have hidden the
Speaker 3: taste of the poison. So also, a poisoning agent potentially
Speaker 3: will to kill someone.
Speaker 2: Because it like it's so because the aroma is so strong,
Speaker 2: it would like mask other things.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you're just like soaking up that ambergris smell,
Speaker 3: You're not thinking about any poisons and then that's the end.
Speaker 2: Wait, but his favorite breakfast was eggs and ambergres. So again,
Speaker 2: I'm wondering, is this just like big just chunks of
Speaker 2: it cut up in the eggs.
Speaker 1: Or it's like it's like a shaving maybe maybe like
Speaker 1: shaving a little bit of it into the eggs the
Speaker 1: way that Camp was kind of talking about in the passage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he was inspired by Charles the
Speaker 1: Second Urn. Not here we are, okay, all right, moving
Speaker 1: from intrigue to Milton. We have to talk about paradise regained.
Speaker 1: So so this was first published in sixteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: and in it Milton describes a feast worthy of royalty
Speaker 1: that the passage begins, a table richly spread in regal mode,
Speaker 1: with dishes piled and meats of noblest sort and savor,
Speaker 1: beasts of chase or foul of game, and pastry built
Speaker 1: or from the spit or boiled gris amber steamed. Ah.
Speaker 2: Okay, so grease amber. There would just be another name
Speaker 2: for amber, grease, a sort of yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: People think that he probably just just transposed it because
Speaker 1: of for the for the meter, but yeah, partially because
Speaker 1: it is transposed like that. Future annotated editions of the
Speaker 1: work really like to remark on this. Also because people
Speaker 1: are just fascinated by ambergris. One note from seventeen fifty
Speaker 1: three has this really long passage about recent and contemporary
Speaker 1: culinary use of ambergris uh the annatyite. The annotators cite
Speaker 1: it to a curious lady, which I think is rad
Speaker 1: If if anyone ever forgets my name, feel free to
Speaker 1: just be like, oh, some curious lady.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you file that under l or c or
Speaker 2: lady kama a curious.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's a style guide question that h. But okay,
Speaker 1: So this curious lady uh says that it was previously
Speaker 1: the oh I can't French that the halgu of Queen
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's court, the how gut the posh, the posh in
Speaker 1: popular culinary thing that that word yeah, like a main
Speaker 1: ingredient in every course of a banquet, but especially on
Speaker 1: all manner of meats, and furthermore used to excess by
Speaker 1: the notorious Cardinal Wolsey of King Henry the eighths Court.
Speaker 1: He was the one who like couldn't get his marriage
Speaker 1: and old so he was yeah anyway, And this curious
Speaker 1: lady furthermore reported that she had had it herself as
Speaker 1: a seasoning on a baked pudding, and of all of
Speaker 1: what she just said, I believe that part for sure.
Speaker 2: That's a baked pudding. Putting in this context, did that
Speaker 2: mean like a like a dessert just generally some kind
Speaker 2: of dessert.
Speaker 1: Share probably with probably the kind of thing that that
Speaker 1: Annie was talking about, something with like like eggs and
Speaker 1: cream and maybe bread or ground almonds as a kind
Speaker 1: of thickening base, and then and then baked until it's
Speaker 1: basically like a custard. Yeah. A lot of these, a
Speaker 1: lot of these recipes from these times, especially when when
Speaker 1: I got to England, were for like cream based or
Speaker 1: egg based things.
Speaker 2: Can I fill in a piece of context about Paradise regained?
Speaker 1: I would love you too, Yes, yeah, okay, So this is.
Speaker 2: Of course, you know, sequel to Paradise Loss. So I
Speaker 2: was wondering in this story, like who's who's gonna eat
Speaker 2: the grease amber steamed? Like who's this feast?
Speaker 3: For?
Speaker 2: It is for Jesus, it's Satan. It's in the temptation
Speaker 2: and the wilderness scene from like the Gospels, So like
Speaker 2: after Jesus gets baptized, he goes out in the wilderness
Speaker 2: to fast for I think it's forty days and and
Speaker 2: Satan comes up to him and tries to tempt him, like, hey,
Speaker 2: stop fasting, eat this feast I've set out before you,
Speaker 2: And Jesus says, no, I judge these treats to be tricks.
Speaker 1: Wow, just tricks.
Speaker 2: After all, it seems funny that Satan would be like,
Speaker 2: what would Jesus really like? And He's like, yeah, Ambergrease,
Speaker 2: I've got it.
Speaker 1: But right, but again Milton is talking about like like
Speaker 1: specifically Satan was steaming these meats with the ambergreas. Mmm.
Speaker 2: Oh oh okay, I see your Yeah, I read that wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so it's it's like perfuming the meats.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But also there could have been a layer of temptation
Speaker 3: here because another fun sound effect we have on our show.
Speaker 3: It comes up every time a food is an aphrodisiac,
Speaker 3: and this one was, at least according to Italian author,
Speaker 3: amongst a lot of other stuff Casanova, who allegedly added
Speaker 3: it to chocolate moose to use it as an afrodisiac
Speaker 3: in the seventeen hundred, So you know, could have been
Speaker 3: something else going on as well.
Speaker 2: Have y'all noticed on Savor, like, is there a pattern
Speaker 2: to the types of food ingredients that are believed to
Speaker 2: be to have afrodiziak qualities. Is it kind of random
Speaker 2: or is it more like delicacies and luxury items or
Speaker 2: strange foods that are considered strange in a certain time
Speaker 2: and place, Like, what is there a pattern at all?
Speaker 1: No, it's all foods. It's all foods ever have been
Speaker 1: by someone at some point considered an afrodisiac.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we only have we found one instance where something
Speaker 3: was considered not so far, we still have a lot
Speaker 3: of topics to come.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it let us right, and it was let
Speaker 1: us but lettuce Hold your laughter, Joe, because lettuce also
Speaker 1: has been cited as an aphrodisiac. So, okay, I don't
Speaker 1: know what we're to take from this. I think it
Speaker 1: might have been a joke.
Speaker 3: I think it was kind of satire, those like fourteen
Speaker 3: hundred jokes I can't really pick up on.
Speaker 1: So he could have just been choking. Okay, Oh yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I believe that there's been some sign topic inquiry into
Speaker 1: this in modern times concerning not lettuce, but uh but
Speaker 1: ambergris Uh. I feel like I kept reading, I didn't
Speaker 1: look into it, so I didn't like find the scientific paper,
Speaker 1: but I saw in a lot of places people refer
Speaker 1: to some study that had been done in rats where
Speaker 1: it made them randy. Yeah, so I don't.
Speaker 3: Know, Okay, Yeah, I feel like a lot of the
Speaker 3: big ones we talk about are usually meat somehow like
Speaker 3: animal related.
Speaker 1: But it is everything, Lauren is correct.
Speaker 3: It is like pretty much every episode like oh yeah,
Speaker 3: at some point.
Speaker 1: Someone thought this was an aftertas gag. Okay, going back
Speaker 1: to our amber grease is food timeline, okay. So so
Speaker 1: some of these recipes even eventually made it to America.
Speaker 1: Amelia Simmons, who we talk about a lot on Savre,
Speaker 1: included in her seventeen ninety six book American Cookery, which
Speaker 1: was the first American cookbook actually published in America, a
Speaker 1: recipe for a kind of like whipped cream and egg
Speaker 1: white foam dessert sweetened with sugar and flavored with wine, lemon, peel,
Speaker 1: and musk or ambergris termed their amber gum, which stemmed
Speaker 1: from earlier English recipes for similar dishes.
Speaker 3: In eighteen twenty six, influential and instrumental French chef billiat
Speaker 3: Severan recommended people mix about a shillings worth of ambergris
Speaker 3: in a mixture of sugar and chocolate for a tonic
Speaker 3: that was in the vein of coffee but wouldn't leave
Speaker 3: you over caffeinated.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He described this hot chocolate as the chocolate of
Speaker 1: the afflicted. He recommended this mixture to quote any man
Speaker 1: who is drunk too deeply of the cup of pleasure,
Speaker 1: who finds his wit temporarily losing its edge, or who
Speaker 1: is tortured by a fixed idea. Oh wow, that's very Richard,
Speaker 1: by a fixed idea. Wow. Oh, I like that. We're
Speaker 1: bringing back the laxative concept. Together. It all goes around.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, get that idea out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In the aforementioned Moby Dick, published in eighteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: Melville does talk about culinary uses of ambergris or ishmael
Speaker 1: I should say really in like sugar medicine drops in
Speaker 1: Turkish cooking, and as a flavoring in claret wine specifically
Speaker 1: so Yeah. As with many other flavorings, it mostly fell
Speaker 1: out of fashion when tropical spices and seasonings like cinnamon
Speaker 1: and vanilla became more available and less expensive. By the
Speaker 1: time chemists synthesized one of those scent compounds in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen hundreds, Amberger was pretty much relegated to perfume.
Speaker 3: Yes, but as Lauren said, there are people doing stuff
Speaker 3: with it still, like in cocktails. I especially saw lot
Speaker 3: of like beverage applications, so it is still around, but yeah,
Speaker 3: not very common.
Speaker 2: I would say, are the two of you interested in
Speaker 2: trying ambergree flavored foods or if you have? If you have,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know what the like the
Speaker 2: ethical issues with ambergris are that would make it, like
Speaker 2: why it is subject to you know, being a controlled
Speaker 2: animal product in some ways, I would assume that has
Speaker 2: something to do with like trying to discourage poaching or
Speaker 2: or harming of sperm whales, even though it does seem
Speaker 2: to be from what I can tell, generally collected not
Speaker 2: by killing the whale in a modern sense, but just
Speaker 2: like found on a beach. But but yeah, so like
Speaker 2: if you put those concerns aside, whatever ethical concerns you have, like,
Speaker 2: would you be interested in trying it in food?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? I will, I will say I do have.
Speaker 3: I'd like I'm ready to try anything, but I am
Speaker 3: sensitive to really bad smells. Like one of the only
Speaker 3: times I've almost vomited in high school during our anatomy
Speaker 3: class was the smell of the al pellet. I didn't
Speaker 3: care about anything else. It sounds like ambergreen will be fine,
Speaker 3: but that's my only concern. I want to try it.
Speaker 3: I don't know how the smell go. I'm also the
Speaker 3: same with Darian, which we have long been waiting to
Speaker 3: try the smell. I don't know, but I want to
Speaker 3: try it.
Speaker 1: How about you?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm super intrigued. I mean, I think I
Speaker 2: would want to figure out first, like what is the
Speaker 2: deal with like why is it illegal and discouraged and
Speaker 2: all that is? Like, you know, if you were to
Speaker 2: actually buy some of it, is there a chance this
Speaker 2: is being like actually, like is a sperm whale being
Speaker 2: killed in order to retrieve this or something?
Speaker 1: I think it really is what you were saying earlier.
Speaker 1: Where does people? Where does illegal people? Just or the
Speaker 1: government entity wants to discourage people from killing whims, which
Speaker 1: is cool, which is great. I'm super into that. But
Speaker 1: that's why an or national law. It's basically like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's up to you.
Speaker 3: Isn't it Also like not in a lot of places
Speaker 3: it's not. There aren't laws about it as a food
Speaker 3: because they don't necessarily consider it as a food. I
Speaker 3: think there's a lot of places where they don't even
Speaker 3: they haven't even thought.
Speaker 1: Of that part. The FDA has generally recognized it. It's
Speaker 1: safe though, So yes.
Speaker 2: Well in that case, yeah, I mean this, this poop
Speaker 2: is mighty, mighty interesting to me, and I would I
Speaker 2: would taste of the copper lith absolutely. Now I wonder
Speaker 2: when you get it. From what I understand, I think
Speaker 2: more often it would be sold maybe this is more
Speaker 2: in the in the sense of a perfumery, but more
Speaker 2: often it would be sold like as a tincture or
Speaker 2: something like that. I don't know how easy it is
Speaker 2: to just like get a hunk of it too, as
Speaker 2: as you were talking about in Kemp's story, like shave
Speaker 2: off pieces like it's like it's a truffle that might
Speaker 2: be harder to get. I'm not quite sure.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sure either. I didn't really look into it.
Speaker 1: I read some stories where people were talking about receiving
Speaker 1: it as a tincture and some stories where people had
Speaker 1: like a rock of it, And so I'm not without
Speaker 1: without doing more research, I can't. I can't tell you.
Speaker 2: Well, Lauren, Annie, I have so greatly enjoyed you joining
Speaker 2: me on the show today, and I'm really really grateful
Speaker 2: that you took time out of your busy schedules to
Speaker 2: join us here today. I know, I know, we're all
Speaker 2: very busy around here, so it really means a lot.
Speaker 2: I greatly appreciate it. And hey, where where can people
Speaker 2: find your work to hear more of what you do?
Speaker 3: Oh, you can find us on the Savor Podcast, where
Speaker 3: we do cover a bunch of things that I think
Speaker 3: are just in line with stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 3: including fictional foods. Any kind of marine biology is always
Speaker 3: interesting when we talk about like scallops, what's going on there?
Speaker 1: Lobsters low so, what is going on there?
Speaker 2: What's going on exactly?
Speaker 1: They're so cool?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yes, yes, we have a lot of topics
Speaker 3: that I think have great crossovers. So you can find
Speaker 3: us there, and we are on all the social media's related.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Speaker 1: Instagram at saver pod. As we say at the end
Speaker 1: of every episode, which is why that was so sang
Speaker 1: song you and I just said it. But yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: also right, yeah, Annie's on a show on a show
Speaker 1: called a Stuff Mom never told you. That's a podcast
Speaker 1: about like intersectional feminism. And I've got a short form
Speaker 1: show called brain Stuff with general science and history that
Speaker 1: Joe used to write for the YouTube version of back
Speaker 1: in the days when we did that.
Speaker 2: That was some time ago. That was an that was
Speaker 2: an Ambergris seasoning lifetime ago. Absolutely well, once again, I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you joining me today and it has been
Speaker 2: such pleasure talking to you as always, you know.
Speaker 1: This was thank you any any any time we can
Speaker 1: talk about squid beaks and whale poop.
Speaker 2: Yep, we're there, all right, let's see to wrap things
Speaker 2: up here. Hey, if you're new to the show, Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, kind
Speaker 2: of science and culture intersecting topics, where core episodes publish
Speaker 2: every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday of each
Speaker 2: week we read back listener mail and I'll give you
Speaker 2: the email address if you want to get in touch
Speaker 2: in just a moment. On Wednesdays, we run a short
Speaker 2: scripted episode called The Artifact or the Monster Fact or
Speaker 2: even new forms of short scripted episodes are emerging. On Fridays,
Speaker 2: we do a show called Weird House Cinema where my
Speaker 2: co host Robert Lamb and I just watch weird movies
Speaker 2: and talk about them, well known or obscure, good or bad,
Speaker 2: all types of movies, as long as there's something strange
Speaker 2: about them, Let's see huge. Thanks as always to our
Speaker 2: excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to
Speaker 2: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 2: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 2: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 2: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Speaker 1: Plant is with Rat Rat Rat Rat