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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing
What a week for hungry ghosts: the world’s oldest wine surfaces in an urn from a cave grave in Spain, tucked up alongside its owner; and 30 jars of George Washington’s own personal preserved cherries arise from an 18th-century cellar beneath Mount Vernon.
The cherries, at a mere not-quite 300 years old, are “perfectly preserved”; the wine, 1,700 years older still, is “not in the least bit toxic”.
In a burst of prepositional accuracy, it must be said that the man was buried in, rather than with, his wine: nonetheless, it appears to be a nice dry white. Delightfully, grape analysis reveals it to be closer to a manzanilla sherry than anything else. There was a Spanish man, then, sometime in the lifetime of Christ, who enjoyed a floral bouquet as much as the next man: chamomile, new dough, almonds. Isn’t that phenomenal? If he came back to life today there would, at least, be one thing he understood. Whole vast civilisations have risen and fallen since he walked the earth, but we share a taste for sherry.
Which is, of course, the magic of finds like this. If we were to meet this man, we would all have something in common: we would eventually get hungry, and we would be able to share our food together. When we unearth these things, we unearth also a sense of human continuity: for all our technology and terrors, something remains of who we used to be; we are still here. In this very simple way, we are connected to everyone who came before.
About five years ago I saw a jar of pickled vegetables that has haunted me ever since. Lit by an estate agent’s phone flashlight, it sat squarely on the pantry shelf. It almost glowed. Inside, little pieces of preserved and ancient carrot floated menacingly. The label read: Spring, 1978. In the kindling basket next to the fireplace, a young Prince Andrew beamed up at us from his wedding carriage, the newspaper bound for a fire that never came. We did not buy the house, but the pickles remain ever-present in my mind. Who made them? Who forgot them? Who were you, and what will last of me?
Close encounters with the past will do that to you, and we’re never closer to the past than when we run up against the possibility of breaking bread — or sharing pickles — with the dead.
So consider these as the foundations of a time-traveller’s picnic: take your 2,000-year-old manzanilla, your Founding Father’s bottled cherries, your 1970s pickles and add only the most exquisite and artisan of extras: honey sealed up by the slaves of the pharaohs, “bog butter” dug out of Irish peat after three and a half millennia, tinned fruit cake — still “almost edible” — from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition.
For cheese, there’s Neolithic “curd fragments” from Croatia (aged for a punchy 7,200 years). And some bread — may I tempt you with the Herculanean loaf? An artisanal buckwheat sourdough, stamped by the maker, and pre-divided into eight neat sandwich-ready wedges, the recipe has been tested by Giorgio Locatelli for the British Museum and found to be sound.
Recipes are always bizarrely intimate: you eat what I tell you to eat, you do what I show you to do. In different places, and even different times, we can make the same series of movements and achieve — ideally — the same ends.
There is this moment, in Locatelli’s baking of the Herculanean loaf, where it’s like the past jumps out into the present, and into your hands. A circular dent runs the full circumference of the fossilised bread. Archaeologists don’t know why, but Locatelli does: he realises, while making it, that the dent must be for a string wrapped round the dough, then baked in. Part handle, part measurement standard. You feel it come alive as 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.
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