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FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author is the author of novels, cookbooks, and poetry, and her latest work is “The Dinner Table,” a collection of writings about cooking.
It's been a strange week for hungry ghosts. The world's oldest wine was discovered in a Spanish cave tomb, in a jar hidden next to its owner, and 30 jars of cherries, belonging to George Washington, were found in an 18th-century crypt beneath Mount Vernon.
The cherries, which are just under 300 years old, are “perfectly preserved” and the 1,700-year-old wine is “not in the slightest bit toxic.”
In a sudden display of prepositional accuracy, I am forced to say that this man was buried not with wine, but in it. The wine, however, appears to be a fine dry white. To my delight, analysis of the grapes reveals that it is closer to Manzanilla sherry than anything else. Isn't this amazing? At one time during Christ's lifetime, there was a Spaniard who enjoyed a bouquet of flowers more than anyone else: chamomile, new dough, almonds. If he were to return to life today, he would understand at least one thing. Entire vast civilizations have risen and fallen since his birth, but the taste of sherry is common to us.
Of course, that's the magic of discoveries like this: if we met this man, we would have something in common. We would eventually get hungry, and we could share a meal together. Unearthing these things also reveals the continuity of humanity. Even with all the technology and fear, there remains a trace of who we once were. We are still here. In this way, we are connected to our ancestors.
About five years ago, I saw a jar of pickles, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head ever since. Illuminated by the flashlight on my real estate agent's phone, the jar sat perfectly flush against a shelf in the pantry. It almost glowed. Small pieces of preserved old carrots floated eerily in the jar. The label read, “Spring 1978.” In a firewood basket next to the fireplace, a young Prince Andrew stared up from his wedding carriage. The newspapers were carried to the fire, but never caught fire. We didn't buy the house, but the pickles have stayed in my heart forever. Who made them? Who forgot? Who you were? And what will remain of me?
Proximity to the past makes you do that, and we never get closer to the past than when we are faced with the possibility of sharing bread or pickles with the dead.
Think of these as the foundations of a time traveller's picnic: 2,000-year-old Manzanilla, Founding Fathers' bottled cherries, and 1970s pickles, with only the most exquisite, artisanal additions: honey sealed by a Pharaoh's slaves, 3,500-year-old “bog butter” dug from Irish peat, and tinned fruitcake from Scott's failed Antarctic expedition (still “mostly edible”).
The cheese is a Croatian Neolithic “fragment of curd” (aged 7,200 years). There's also some bread – may I tempt you with a Herculanean Loaf? Artisanal buckwheat sourdough, stamped by its maker and pre-portioned into eight sandwich-perfect wedges. The recipe has been tested and validated by Giorgio Locatelli at the British Museum.
Recipes are always oddly intimate: You eat what I tell you to eat, do what I instruct you to do, and even if you're in a different place, at a different time, you can still follow the same series of movements and, ideally, achieve the same result.
As Locatelli bakes the bread of Hercules, there's a moment when the past leaps into the present and into your hands. A circular indentation runs all around the perimeter of the fossilized bread. Archaeologists don't know why, but Locatelli does: as he was baking the bread, he realized the indentation must be for a string that was wrapped around the dough and baked. Part handle, part measurement standard. It comes alive when he tells us: people in Pompeii swinging their loaves by a standard handle to carry them home; people 2,000 years ago, and people who, like us, break bread for breakfast.
