The author is the author of fiction, cookbooks and volumes of poetry. The latest book is “The Dinner Table”, a collection of cookbooks
What a week for hungry ghosts: The world’s oldest wine turns up in an urn from a cave tomb in Spain, next to its owner; and 30 jars of George Washington’s own pickled cherries emerge from an 18th-century cellar beneath Mount Vernon.
The almost 300-year-old cherries are “perfectly preserved,” and the 1,700-year-old wine is “not poisonous in the slightest.”
In a fit of prepositionality, it must be said that the man was buried in his wine, not with him: nevertheless, it seems to be a lovely dry white wine. Happily, grape analysis shows that it is more like a Manzanilla sherry than anything else. So at some point in Christ’s lifetime, there was a Spaniard who enjoyed bouquets as much as anyone else: chamomile, fresh dough, almonds. Isn’t that phenomenal? If he were to come back to life today, he would understand at least one thing. Whole vast civilisations have risen and fallen since he walked the earth, but we all have a penchant for sherry.
And that, of course, is the magic of such finds. If we met this man, we would all have something in common: we would get hungry at some point and could share our food with each other. When we dig up these things, we also discover a sense of human continuity: despite all our technology and horrors, something of what we once were remains; we are still here. In this very simple way, we are connected to everyone who came before us.
About five years ago I saw a jar of pickles that has haunted me ever since. It sat in the middle of the pantry, illuminated by an estate agent’s flashlight. It almost glowed. Inside it floated ominously small pieces of pickled old carrots. The label read: Spring 1978. In the firewood basket by the fireplace, a young Prince Andrew beamed at us from his wedding carriage, the newspaper was for a fire that never came. We didn’t buy the house, but the pickles are ever-present in my mind. Who made them? Who forgot them? Who were you and what will be left of me?
This is the effect that a close encounter with the past has on us, and we are never closer to the past than when we are faced with the opportunity to break bread – or share pickles – with the dead.
So consider this the basis of a time traveller’s picnic: take your 2,000-year-old Manzanilla, your founding fathers’ preserved cherries, your 1970s pickles, and add only the choicest and most artisanal extras: honey sealed by the Pharaohs’ slaves, “bog butter” dug from Irish peat after three and a half millennia, canned fruitcake – still “almost edible” – from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition.
For cheese, there are Neolithic “quark fragments” from Croatia (which have been aged for an impressive 7,200 years). And some bread – may I tempt you with the Hercules bread? An artisan buckwheat sourdough, stamped by the manufacturer and divided into eight neat, sandwich-ready pieces. The recipe was tested and found to be impeccable by Giorgio Locatelli for the British Museum.
Recipes are always bizarrely intimate: you eat what I tell you to eat, you do what I show you. In different places and even at different times, we can perform the same sequence of movements and – ideally – achieve the same goals.
There’s this moment when Locatelli bakes the Hercules bread when it’s like the past jumps into the present and into your hands. A circular dent runs the entire circumference of the petrified bread. Archaeologists don’t know why, but Locatelli does: as he bakes it, he realizes the dent must be for a string that was wrapped around the dough and then baked in. Part handle, part measurement standard. You feel it come alive when he says it: the people of Pompeii carrying their bread home, swinging it by the standard handle. People breaking bread for breakfast two millennia ago, and just like us.
