[Sca-cooks] Assumptions in modern scholarship

[Terry Decker]

I know what you mean.  I keep hitting academics misstating facts about 
Solanum tuberosum (the white potato).  And every few years, I have to 
rewrite my lecture paper on potatoes thanks to some of those same academics. 
For myself, I use the best available information and stand ready to shift my 
stance with better information or sources.  I also try to follow the basic 
rule that any statement of fact without reference or source is questionable 
and if it is pertinent to your studies--question it.  Once I find a 
questionable fact that challenges (or I want to incorporate into) my work, I 
start trying back-tracking to the original source.

One of the fun ones I ran down is Trager's statement that the first bananas 
sold in London was in a grocery in 1633.  First, the story is inaccurate, 
there was a plantain (the Elizabethan banana) found in 1999 during the 
excavation of a mid-16th Century midden in London, which immediately 
suggests that some bananas were being sold in London prior to 1633.  Second, 
Thomas Johnson, the grocer who completed the 1633 edition of Gerard's 
Herbal, received a live banana plant with fruit from the Bahamas.  He 
displayed the plant in his shop and sold the fruit.  Bananas don't show up 
again in the literature until they started being imported in the early 20th 
Century.  One of the people who found the Tudor banana is supposedly writing 
a paper on the Tudor London fruit market.

For your particular problem, you will probably want to check out Pliny's 
Natural Histories Book 18 Chapter 29 on Alica.  One of the methods of making 
false alica is pretty much the method of preparing bulgur wheat.  While 
Pliny equates the origin of alica to around the time of Pompey the Great, 
the Greeks had a similar dish, but I have been unable to locate a 
contemporary reference.

There are a number of references in papers on Neolithic archeology to 
parching cereals (to separate the hull from the grain), which would 
constitute pre-cooking, after which the grain was used either whole or 
crushed to be cooked or formed into bread .   The wheats commonly associated 
with these sites are einkorn and spelt, which along with emmer are tightly 
hulled and require additional processing beyond threshing to remove the 
glumes.  A later process of softening the hulls by soaking (or parboiling), 
then abrading or cracking the grain to remove the hull is more difficult 
place, but it may be the origin of the process to make bulgur wheat.  I can 
place that to the 17th Century and it's probably earlier, but how much 
earlier I have no idea.  The process is used modernly to clean oats.

Bear





Many of you know that I’ve been studying non-bread wheat-based foods for
the past couple of years. I’ve recently bumped my head against something
frustrating in the modern scholarship of the field. As best as I can
tell, nobody has discovered any solid data to indicate how such things
as bulgur or similar cracked wheat foods were made, either in antiquity
or the medieval period. Rather, the scholarly consensus appears to
assume that the way it’s done in contemporary rural villages in the
modern Near East is the way it was done hundreds or even thousands of
years ago. I have thus far seen almost no evidence cited to support this
assumption; nevertheless, it appears to be held in one form or another
nearly universally.



I’d like to know whether any in the food and cooking community have run
into anything similar in your research, and what (if anything) you did
to get beyond such assumptions. I’d be especially interested in hearing
from others who might have studied grains and cereals.



-- Galefridus
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