“Molasses is evil”:
Teaching Food History by Example (or, What Not to Do)

by

Gillian Polack

Every now and again I teach food history using the Big Headline Approach. This is different to the Interesting Cookbook Approach, or the Eat this Food, You'll Like It (really) Approach. The other day I found a bunch of notes I took from a food history course for a radio interview. I thought you might be interested in some of the history. It’s pop history, of course, as befits Big Headlines.

The “Too Much Sugar is Bad for You” incident is my starting point, always. There isn’t a book behind it: there is a photograph on a website. It’s the subject of a book (listed in the bibliography) but I’ve not managed to get hold of a copy yet, so my main understanding is through a photograph.

A block in central Boston on January 15, 1919 was flattened by molasses travelling at 35 miles an hour. I think of it as a wave of molasses, inexorably rolling down the street, killing twenty-one people, crumpling steel, knocking over a fire station. It was worse than the London Beer Flood of 1814, which killed only nine people.

The moral is obviously that sugar and beer are both bad. Stick to chocolate.

The next one is “Nero Didn’t Just Burn Rome and Cry Over His Harp.” It’s probably just as much an invention. It appears the plant silphium was entirely magic to eat. The plant looked somewhat like fennel and apparently tasted like a wildly superior form of asafoetida. Since asafoetida is commonly known as ‘devil’s dung’ this can be a misleading comparison to the uninitiated.

Think of the deep and rich flavour of a good chicken soup. Think of a green herb, in fact, that intensifies flavours and makes them more savoury. That herb was probably silphium. It was (as I understand it) wild-harvested rather than cultivated, and it only grew in a small region. It was, in short, the ultimate in luxury spice.

The Romans over-harvested it or over-grazed it and it’s now gone, forever. Or maybe until someone works out which of the many herbs that look a bit like fennel it was and it gets rediscovered.

The popular story has Nero eating the last plant with gusto. What we actually know (in a second-hand kind of a way) is that Pliny reported that the very last plant was given to Nero. So Nero was involved according to Pliny’s sources. That’s something.

I’ll give you an edition of Pliny to check out (see below), so that you can make your own deductions concerning the last moments of the most spectacular culinary herb none of us have ever tasted.

Also in Ancient Rome was a bloke called Marcus Gabius Apicius. Nicki, my editor, suggests that his heading should be “Give Me Gourmet or Give me Death.” He was the gourmand to end gourmands. The most important surviving corpus of recipes from Ancient Rome bears his name.

So why is he in my list of dramatic food failures? He committed suicide rather than face food that was even a trifle less gourmet than that he loved. Seneca reports it. Seneca in fact says that Apicius discovered that he wasn’t as wealthy as he had been and would have to cut back a bit. This was, for Apicius, the end of everything. It really shouldn’t have been. Other people face much worse food problems. Take the nineteenth century explorers, for instance.

Australians think of food and expeditions in the nineteenth century and we think of Burke and Wills. The Franklin Expedition was way more disastrous. Let’s start with Burke and Wills, though, and build up to the big stuff.

“Food and Colonalism” I shall call this. Not as dramatic as the other headlines. Perhaps I should call it “Eating Billy.” Australia was discovered during the period of Great Explorations by Europeans. This meant that Australia wasn’t just settled or colonised or invaded, it was Explored. Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills were two of the best-known of these explorers, but for all the wrong reasons. Mostly they’re associated with a very particular carving in a tree and for the fact that they almost certainly starved to death.

They left Melbourne in 1860. Those were heady days. Melbourne was the capital of the new state of Victoria and the Gold Rush was in full swing.

Burke was given charge of an expedition intended to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria. Victoria was (and is) a very rich region—full of stuff for both farms and mines. The thought of more riches just out of sight was probably tantalising, although when I was taught about it at school I was more impressed by the fact that early explorers got naming rights for where they travelled. I played ‘early explorers’ a couple of times as a child and I named the plum tree and the garden swing. The fact that they had already been named (“the plum tree” and “the swing”) was something I ignored, which was entirely in line with the practices of most of the European explorers.

Technically (to be fair) the expedition was a scientific one. Seven men died, however, and the science that was gathered was negligible. The leader (Burke) had a lot of solid army experience and had done some police work since his migration to Victoria, but had no background in exploration. He also seems to have not respected the scientists. Burke’s aim was not to astonish the world with understanding, but simply to be the first to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The expedition members were all instructed in how to use a rifle and how to care for a camel. On the first day of travel, they made a full four miles. It went downhill from there and only one explorer (John King) returned. (To be honest, some men returned because Burke hired and sacked willy-nilly en route, but ‘only one returned’ is the official story I was taught in school.) And so it went. They progressed. They argued. They named places.

For the final stage of the journey, they left some men at a staging place with instructions to wait three months (Burke) and four (Wills) and then to assume that the expedition had failed and to go home. The continuing party reached the Gulf of Carpentaria, just.

Their doomed expedition is an important part of Australian history. The key nineteenth century documents and quite a bit of modern explanation has been put together in an online archive.

But why am I talking about it here?  The Burke and Wills Expedition (its official name among Australian school students) is also an important part of Australian food history. Food was a major concern for all the explorers, but with the Burke and Wills expedition, it was a matter of life and death. When things got bad, they even ate Burke’s favourite horse, Billy.

The crucial food moment came when Burke and his party returned to the place they had left their fellows, four months and five days later. All they found was a tree with “Dig” on it. They dug and there were provisions and a note. The rest of the party had left that same day. Could Burke and his colleagues catch up?

That decision and its consequences and that tree became the focus of the party’s efforts to survive. As both groups of the divided expedition came and went, several notes were left under it, along with food and indications of who was where. The problem was that the divided party, either looking for or returning with supplies, managed to miss each other and didn’t always think to dig to see if there was anything new. They each simply looked and thought “No-one has been here except us. The others are lost.” I can’t work out if this Keystone Cops set of mishaps was due to a lack of intelligence, a deep confusion about the processes of exploration, or because everyone assumed that where they were  was the centre of the expedition and that is where everyone else should be goddam it, so if they were missing, they must be dead. For the sake of this article, I’m putting the level of confusion down to hunger.

The Burke and Wills side of the team survived for a while with the help of the locals, living on fish and nardoo (a local grass seed). A relief expedition was sent and the combination of food and help saved King. For the rest, it was too late.

Compared with the food situation on the Franklin Expedition (“Tinned Food and its Secret Link to Cannibalism”), however, Burke and Wills did rather well, despite the fact that Franklin knew what he was doing and Burke, frankly, did not. Franklin had undertaken previous explorations and had even been Governor of Tasmania (which is not relevant, but it means that there are Australian places named after him and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin).

The Franklin Expedition tried to map out the North-West Passage from Europe to Asia 1845-59 and to fill in the last unexplored bits of coast in that region. They had five years of food supplies, including 8,000 tins of meat, vegetables, and soup, using the latest tin technology. Alas, someone cost-cut and the solder used in the tins became . . . a problem.

Owen Beattie and John Geiger argued in their 1987 book that the tins were sealed improperly, with lead solder running down the inside of each tin. Lead can be quite poisonous, so when the metal probably seeped into the crews’ food, there were problems. In other words, lead poisoning may well have been a major factor in the expedition being a complete and absolute failure, with everyone dying (134 sailors, plus the officers). The rest of the Franklin tale includes cannibalism and getting lost and having the very best equipment and the latest of everything. The death toll rose when people went out hunting the missing expedition and also died, but that wasn’t the fault of the tinned food and does not seem to have included cannibalism, so it belongs in a different article (and one I may write one day—that expedition fascinates me).

The dire ending was almost impossible to predict. The Franklin Expedition was well-equipped, knew what they were doing, and set out with the best intentions and with the best in modern food technology.

All this goes to show that food can be unreliable—but historically significant—in the most surprising ways.

Books mentioned in this column:
Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices by Andrew Dalby, (UC Press, 2002).
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo (Beacon Press, 2004)
Frozen In Time: The Fate of The Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger (Greystone Books, 2004)
The Natural History by Pliny the Elder (XIX:15 and XXII:100-106)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.