Stuff To Blow Your MindOn a mundane level, a cauldron is nothing more than a great cooking pot, but it takes on supernatural dimensions in various myths and legends. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history of cauldrons and their links to tales of witchcraft, rebirth and the mandate of heaven. (originally published 05/24/2022)
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one is part one of our series on the cauldron. Rather mundane object, but I recall we dug up a lot of interesting threads and tangents on this. So this episode originally published May twenty fourth, twenty twenty two. Let's let's jump right in and land with the splash.
Round about the cauldron. Go in the poisoned in trails. Throw toad that under cold stone days and nights has thirty one sweltered venom sleeping got boiled. Now first in the charmed pot, double double toil and traple, fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Feel it of a finny snake.
In the cauldron, boil and bake, I have newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adders, fork and blind worms, sting lizard's leg, And how let's wing for a charm of powerful trouble like a hell broth boil and bubble, double double toil and trouble, fireburn and cauldron Baba Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick. And rob why did you ask me to read from Macbeth in a witchy voice? What is that going to lead into?
Well, of course we're going to be talking about cauldrons, and certainly in Western traditions, I feel like one of the first places that one's mind goes is to go to act for a scene one of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. This is the scene that we just read from Round about the Cauldron go It's and it does bring together a number of the ideas of the cauldron that will be discussed in these episodes. And of course it's just just a fabulous scene in general, with witches doing their their witchy best to make some sort of horrific potion.
Now, obviously you have had cauldrons on the brain. What sent you down this path? How did we end up here? You know, I don't remember exactly. It was something that came up in previous research for another episode. I started noticing the cauldron and I was like, oh, well, there's a lot here we should consider coming back to it, and indeed there is quite a lot, because on one hand you have just the history of mundane but fascinating cooking technology, and then you have the different sacred and supernatural directions. This goes in as in as well. Certainly there's the Asian tradition, which we'll probably get to first, but then there's this rich Western tradition going back to Celtic traditions and so forth. And some of these are perhaps more connected with the Cauldron of Macbeth, and we'll probably discuss that in a subsequent episode. But it is you need to task usselves, like what do we think of when we think of cauldron. I know I instantly think, of course, of this scene from Macbeth, but I also instantly think back to a trio of early eighties films. I think of Beast Master, I think of Conan the Barbarian, and I also think of those both from nineteen eighty two, but I also think of nineteen eighty one's Clash of the Titans. All three of these have some sort of a cannibal stew going on, some sort of a big broth that it is revealed, has human parts within it. Now in the Clash of the Titans. There's an interesting connection because the cauldron is being tended by three Crones, the gree Sisters, who are part of the story of Perseus and Medusa, and it's hard not to notice the similarities with the Three Witch Sisters and Macbeth there.
Yeah, it's my understanding there is a connection here. These are essentially the ancient predecessors of Macbeth's which is now. As for the cannibal Stoo's, yeah, I think it's a case where I'm just guessing here. We're based on the timeline. I think they invoked it and Clash of the Titans, and then either overtly or not, the makers of Beast Master and Conan were like, oh, we need to get in on that. That's a great image. Get a cannibal stew in here.
But if that's the case, why didn't Conan have a pet mechanical owl.
I know, I know it's a flaw. It's often pointed out as a flaw of that film.
Conan needs a robot.
I think another film that people might think of would be the nineteen eighty five Disney film The Black Cauldron, based on the work of Lloyd Alexander and this of course drew from Welsh mythology, and we'll get into some of that in subsequent episodes. But I asked my ten year old son what he thought about when I mentioned the word cauldron. He has not seen well, he's seen Clash of the Titans and loves it, but he hasn't seen the other two films. When I ask him, he said, well, I think of soup, and I think of Harry Potter, the latter of which of course is also linked to Western traditions of witches and so forth. And I think the Potter books and films are probably a key modern pop culture reference regarding cauldron's You.
Know, I started thinking about something with this word, but then started doubting myself. I'll see what you think about this, So I don't know if there's already an established term for this type of phenomenon. But I was thinking about how cauldron is something you might call like a charged variant of a concept, a word that has extremely mundane literal synonyms, like literally a cauldron is just a large pot or a big pot. I think, perhaps one that is especially used over an open flame, more so than in like an indoor cook top setting and yet the word suggests a world of associations that it's literal synonyms do not. Like in English, large pot does not have any special magic swirling about it, but cauldron does. Anytime you say the word cauldron, it suggests, you know, this is trollish sorcery, something is going on. But then again, maybe it's not that remarkable because I guess you can think of other things associated with magic, Like I think the word wand literally just means like a rod or a stick, but in modern English it is pretty much always associated with magic.
Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting to think about this because with the cauldron, you could sort of go cauldron, pot, crock pot, instant pot, and the closer you get to instant, Like, the instant pot does not have really any nefarious or magical connotations. It's thoroughly modern, nothing to fear. And I feel like though, the further back through the terminology you go, yes, the stranger things get because even pot is more intimidating than crockpot.
Well, I wonder if there's generally a thing in languages where there's like an archaic synonym for a word that loses its mundane associations like one one synonym maintains the mundanity through the ages, and the other one only retains usage in magically charged scenarios.
Yeah, I mean I think that's the case. I'm not sure if we're going to end up keeping the third witch's bit from the opening here, but there is a line in that where the where the witch rhymes children with cauldron, children being this old term for like entrails. But I didn't do a deep dive into this terminology, if it's my understanding like that that was already an archaic term when Shakespeare used it, or you know, and or a more specified term. But you do what you have to do when you need to rhyme something with cauldron.
Yeah, what else fits in there? Squadron? Not really?
I mean you can make it work wire which is going to be talking about squadrons?
How about how about how about Godson cauldron?
That's kind of a maybe maybe I think you got to.
Put some spin on the pronunciation though that's like an M and M style style.
Yeah, you got to be a pro to make that work. So all in all, there is a rich tradition of cauldrons overflowing with powers of death, creation, domination, torment, and divination. But Before we get into all of this properly, we have to back up. We have to really talk about the mundane world of cauldrons as well, and so we're gonna have to talk about, you know, the origins of soup technology, which I've been super excited about all weekend, and I think my family is sick of hearing about it.
You've been talking about soup a lot. Did you make soup this.
No, it's too hot for soup, that's the thing. Oh yeah, I mean we could have made a spot show, I guess, but but no, I haven't been having any soup. But just reading about the traditions of soup, it's made me respected all the more. I need a cold snap so I can get back into it. So first and foremost, as we've been discussing, a cauldron is simply a large pot used to boil liquid over a fire. So in function, it's really no different from any pot you have in your kitchen. It's just generally considered a bigger pot. Now, long before the advent of metal pots, we had bowls. We had pots of pottery, as well as presumably ones made of wood and leather, though such artifacts don't always stand the test of time here as well. But one question that's interesting to get into is, Okay, well, we were talking about cauldrons, we're inevitably talking about about soups in many cases. But do you need a pot, or you need a metal pot, or do you need a pot at all in order to make soup? I would have thought so, there was a time where I would have thought so as well, But it turns out it's not necessary because a hole in the ground is nature's cauldron, and this is something that can be made water tight via the use of animal hides, and then one may fill this hole with water and of course food your various ingredients, which will of course eventually come together in a hot soup. But where's the heat going to come from?
Good question, Yeah, because you can't put a fire under it if it's a hole in the ground and then a hide.
I mean, I guess there might be specialized situations where you could depend on geothermal heat, but in this example, geothermal heat is not available, so you're going to have to create something with fire. The answer is, you have an adjacent fire, get it nice and hot, and then you have hot stones heated up in that fire, and then those hot stones are transferred from the fire to the soup, and that is how you heat the soup in the hole.
Nice, Okay, the hot stone goes in, then you got a stew gooing.
Yeah. Now, other perishable above ground bowls and pots apparently were also used in different cultures with this technique, which is generally referred to as stone boiling. In these cases you would often have like a wet bark or hide scenario to create the vessel. But stone boiling has been traced to pre pottery culinary traditions of Native American tribes, Paleolithic Chinese groups, and even Neanderthals. And on a quick note about Chinese culture, I know when we talk about cooking with stones and cooking soup with stones, you instantly think about the story of Stone Soup, which I believe in most tellings has no relation to to to stone boiling. However, Chinese American author Ying Chang Compostein adapted the classic story but with the twist, first of all Chinese twist, setting it in ancient China, but also incorporating a stone boiling motif. In this book called the Real Story of Stone Soup.
Well, Rob, I know you said, everybody knows the story, but maybe some people don't. What's the quick version of the stone soup?
Well, the classic stone soup says tail is that, you know, you have some individual generally there's sort of a you know, a roguish type character. There's that a great adaptation of this with some additional elements in Jim Henson's The Storyteller series. But here's this this man and he's he's cooking up some water and he asks somebody passing by, excuse me, I'm making some soup. Could you help me? I just need a nice stone And they're, you know, like what, what do you need a stone for it? And they're like, well, I'm making stone soup. And so they agree. They bring this individual a stone, and in many cases, you know, the the would be chef here sniffs it, maybe licks the stone, and it's like, okay, this is a good one. Plunks it in and so now now people are begin to get interested. Other passer buyers stop and they're like, what's he doing. He's cooking stone soup. They ask him, well, how does it taste? When he samples it, He's like, well, needs a little salt. So he doesn't have salt, but somebody is now they're now invested in this process, and so someone brings some salt, but then he chases it again. No, needs a little pepper, So someone brings some pepper before along. Of course, it needs some celery, it needs some potatoes, it needs all these other ingredients, and at the end of the process there is this great, big bowl of soup. And I think in most tellings it is then communally enjoyed.
Oh well, that's a great story. And to sort of an idea about how you can you can like hype bootstrap nothing into something.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a wonderful tail. But but yeah. In this adaptation, it takes the stone boiling technique and factors it in, which which I found was pretty clever. Now, you might wonder what kind of evidence is there for stone soup. So, according to a few different sources I was looking at, basically it comes down to pits that are that are found in the archaeological record that have stones in them. Stones that are cracked from heat often referred to as thermally cracked rocks. So this is this indicates that these rocks were heated to a high temperature and then added to this broth or added to water to help make this broth. And we also tend to see this and pit cooking kind of loop together into a combined and earth oven cooking tradition.
Oh yeah, okay, so this wouldn't even necessarily always be something like soup. Like I know that there are some methods for like roasting meat, I think Mesoamerican culinary traditions where you'd like wrap some meat in leaves, like wet leaves or something and then cook it in a pit in the ground with hot coals.
Yeah, so I think it does certainly speak to human innovation, like the if the hole in the ground is your level of cooking technology, it doesn't mean you're not coming up with new and ingenious ways to tinker with that format, such as as you know, eventually developing a wet cooking technology.
And I guess we can come back to this in a minute, but I think there are real advantages to so called wet cooking technologies that they like, they have some measurable benefits that some other types of cooking do not.
Right, I mean, so it obviously wet cooking sticks with us, and wet cooking survives the use of stone boiling now stone boiling. Yeah, it does eventually lose out to other techniques, especially container based cooking with pottery, et cetera, because ultimately stone boiling requires more maintenance and it isn't nearly as passive a technique. So you know, if you're adding those hot stones, then you have to keep adding new hot stones taking out the old stones. You can't just well, let's put the let's put the soup on, and then go do these other things required to present the meal.
Oh yeah, nutrition and taste aside. That's another great thing about wet cooking. So if you just like put some food items in a pot with water and then let it boil, you can just ignore it for a long time and it's not going to burn or anything because there's enough water content in there that that's going to be fine.
Yeah. So one another source I was looking at, there's a paper titled stone boiling, Firecracked Rock and nut Oil published in The Wisconsin Archaeologist in two thousand and nine by James Skibo, and Skibe points out that the whole process of adding and removing hot stones during the production of nut oil would have resulted in the loss of that precious nut oil that was being produced. So that's another thing to think about it. It's like, not only is it, you know, not a very passive technique, but if you're having to keep you know, reaching in there with some sort of implement and removing rocks, adding new rocks, you're going to lose some of what you're actually brewing up.
Oh yeah, okay, I can see that, like sticking to the rocks and stuff.
Yeah, but I should also point out though there is apparently evidence of stone boiling surviving into the advent of pottery, with the stones added to water inside of vessels. So and then I also I believe examples of stone boiling that is also taking place in some sort of above ground scenario, some sort of like say a wet high bag or a wet bark container. So there, it didn't have to happen in the ground. But I think the most certainly to modern are modern understanding of culinary technologies. I think the hole in the ground stone boiling scenario is perhaps the most amazing and the most removed from what we seem to be doing.
Okay, so we might not know exactly when the first human boiled something, but we do have a pretty clear picture that wet cooking or boiling, simmering, whatever you want to call it, cooking something in water is a technique that comes along later in the history of cooking, because like fire, goes back a long time before, and pretty clearly humans were maybe say, roasting things over an open flame before they had wet cooking techniques. So where do these wet cooking techniques come from? Do we think?
Well? I found a source discussing this. This is from John D. Speth in When Did Humans Learn to Boil? Twenty fifteen, paleo Anthropology Society. I'm going to read a quote from this paper. Quote. Pits that would have been suitable for stone boiling are equally scarce until the Upper Paleolithic, although the evidence for subsurface features of this sort may have been obscured or erased by post taphonomic processes. Not surprisingly, they're because of the late appearance of heated stones and potential boiling pits. Archaeologists almost without exception, have come to the logical conclusion that wet cooking is a late addition to human culinary practices, another of a long list of technological achievements which we owe to the enhanced cognitive powers of fully modern humans.
Okay, so cooking maybe older, but we think wet cooking is probably something that comes about in the Upper Paleolithic, which I think is generally like between something like fifty thousand, like twelve thousand years ago.
Now, interestingly enough, I think we've pointed this out before, but it's still It's one of those facts that I think can be very stimulating is that pottery predates agriculture, and according to Brian Fagan and Bill Sillar, very little of the oldest pottery remains are actually charred by fire, suggesting that these were more prestigious items for displaying food than for something you would actually use to cook food. So while foragers made use of pottery, we also have to remember that this was also the pottery is fragile, and it's perhaps not ideal for people who are traveling around. So this is quite interesting that Fagan and so I to bring up here is that the usefulness of pottery, paired with its fragility, might have been a contributing factor for some groups that had pottery to settle down, Like to make full use of the pottery, you might have to stop moving around at least a bit and have more of a base of operations, where your pottery has less chance of becoming fragmented and shattered, and can be used to store things as well as present things and so forth. Now some of our earliest pottery fragments. It depends where you are in the timeline of discoveries. So when Fagan and s Silo we're writing this is from the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, they were pointing to fourteen thousand BCE in Japan as being the oldiest oldest known pottery discovery. However, after the publication of that book, a twenty twelve paper revealed that Chenrin Cave in eastern China was found to contain charred pottery fragments dating back twenty thousand years.
Yeah. I was looking around at these questions about what is the earliest evidence of pottery or pots in general, And the earliest pots would be pottery, they would be ceramics of some kind, fired out of clay or other earthen materials, not metal. Metal cooking vessels would come much later, So the earliest pottery vessels used for cooking. I was looking what's the evidence for that? And I came across a paper from twenty thirteen published in Nature by Oliver Craig at All called earliest evidence for the use of pottery, and I also was looking at a write up of this in Science by Sid Perkins called first Evidence of Pottery used for Cooking, and at the time this was considered some of the earliest direct evidence for pottery used explicitly for cooking. And my immediate question was, well, what were they cooking in it? Do we have any idea? Actually, yes, this paper looks directly into that question what they were cooking and helps give us a picture of the way of life of the people who use this pottery. So the authors of this paper argue that the evidence indicates pottery technology emerged in East Asia between twelve thousand and twenty thousand years before the present, and it was an innovation among hunter gatherers. Rob you mentioned that a minute ago, but I think it's worth sitting with that for a minute. It's a strange thing. You might assume pottery only arises among people who have adopted farming in an agricultural, settled way of life that allows them to have fixed homes and you know, forges and so forth. This kind of industry of creating earthenware vessels would arise from that setting, but no, it does appear to arise before people settled down and started farming. But this raises the question why was pottery invented? We were getting an idea of when and where it was invented, but why, what was driving it? What was the role it played in people's lives? Well, the authors of this paper argue that for the hunter gatherers who first started making these pots, and this is looking at late place to scene pottery from Japan, a total of one hundred and one charred deposits from thirteen different sites all over the Japanese islands, and these would be pots associated with the Joman culture. The JN. Craig and co authors here argue that what would have caused people to uptake pottery in this context is if the pottery provided people with new ways to process and consume foods. This would be the driving technological advantage, But we don't know exactly how these earliest pots were used. So this study did a chemical analysis on the residue left on these charred deposits on pottery from all over prehistoric Japan, and one thing worth noting is that many of these sites that the pottery shards were recovered from were near inland rivers or lakes, and so they were not necessarily by the coast. The author's right. We demonstrate that lipids can be recovered reliably from charred surface deposits adhering to pottery dating from about fifteen thousand to eleven eight hundred calibrated years before present, and that's again the incipient Jomon period, continuing the oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in most cases these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing fresh water and marine organisms. So at the time of the paper, it seemed like some of the earliest pots ever used for cooking were being used for cooking seafood, though I guess actually I don't know. Is it still seafood if it's freshwater fish, I'm not sure.
Hmm. That's a quandary as well.
More than three quarters of the charred deposits indicated quote high trophic level aquatic food. Now, high trophic level means high up the food chain, so primary producers like plants are at the bottom, and then you'd have herbivores above them, and then you'd have carnivores above them, and then you'd have the top carnivores above them. And I assume high trophic level aquatic food means they were not only eating seafood, they were eating aquatic carnivores. The paper draws attention to the possibility that a lot of this was salmon, That these pots have fatty acids left by prehistoric cooking of salmon which travel upstream for spawning, which could explain these the these highly nutritious seafoods near these inland lakes and rivers, not necessarily by the shore.
That's fascinating, because, yeah, the first place in my mind went was, okay, perhaps boiling some sort of crustaceans and so forth, because sometimes that's that's the best way to get at these organisms and turn them into something you can you can eat. But salmon it makes sense as well, especially if you're imagining a scenario where it's like the spawning situation and you have sort of a sudden glut of salmon at your disposal. What are you going to do with them?
Yeah, and these people were apparently massively successful at exploiting the food resources available at the water's edge. I've read multiple sources, alluding to the idea that apparently just prehistoric Japan was a great place to be a hunter gatherer. There were just a lot of available food resources in the natural environment. Then you could you could create a lot of calories for your society without having to farm. But I also want to discuss a few notes on what this type of pottery was. So again, this would have been the incipient Joman culture. The Joemon people actually get their archaeological reference name from from a descriptor of their pottery. Joeman means something something having to do with the idea of ropes, and so the pottery they made is noted for having decorations where while the clay was still wet, impressions were made in the clay with ropes. So if you look up Joemon pottery, you'll see all these kind of strange looking fiber textures on the outside of it. So I guess they would press ropes into it and then they would fire it to set the textures in the clay. But there are some other very notable characteristics of these early pots. First of all, they tend to be very small, and second they have round bottoms. Rabbi attached a picture of one of these round bottom pots for you to look at, and it sort of goes against what you would assume about nearly any pot you would come across today. What's the bottom of a pot got to be? Like it needs to be flat so it can sit on a table or on the floor, right, h yeah, yeah, these are not flat. You could not sit these on a table. They would roll over, can't stand up by itself on a flat surface. That's kind of odd and it makes you think about, well, wait a minute, then, how were they using these pots? Later? Jomon pottery shows increases in size, so bigger pots, and they tend to innovate a flat bottom, So it seems like the later pots would have been able to stand on a table or on the ground these earlier pots know and this has been interpreted as an evolution of the context in which the pottery was primarily used. So perhaps the earliest use of these pots was exclusively for cooking by hunter gatherers, and the round bottom could be the kind of thing that you would settle into the coals of a fire. Save a fire burning round bottom you just kind of push it down into all the stuff that's burning and it'll sit up by itself that way.
And I wonder, and this is a question I don't know the answer to, dangerous question to ask. I wonder if the small size of the bowls has to do with the fact that if the smaller the vessel, the quicker the cook time for the contents, and therefore you're maybe risking the cracking of the bowl by the heat a little less, because that ends up being I think, one of the factors in eventually moving on to metal based cooking technologies, as you don't have to really worry about them cracking the way you would have to worry about high temperature cracks and pottery.
That's an interesting idea. I don't know. I didn't read anything about that, but that seems possible to me. One thing I did read is simply that the smaller size of these earliest cooking pots has to do with the nomadic lifestyle of the people who probably use them. If you're like moving around a lot and you need to take a pot from one place to another, obviously it's better for that pot to be smaller. It's less likely it's going to be easier to move, less likely to break. And it seems again like the pots got larger and had flatter bottoms once people started switching more to an agricultural lifestyle.
Yeah, I mean otherwise, like, how many flat surfaces are you really dealing with? Certainly and certainly not within the context of the campfire.
I don't know if that's the right answer, because the other thing is like, you could also have a flat bottomed pot that could sit in the campfire. So there's no reason I can think of why to use them in a fire. The bottom would have to be round like that. I don't know if there is a reason anybody's aware of that they would have to be round like this. I just think it's funny that these earliest pots wouldn't stand up by themselves unless maybe they were used with some kind of stand Maybe they know, people built things that didn't survive as much, like a holder of some kind.
Yeah, or also it could have to do I'm guessing here, what with making it more durable and pack for people on the move, you know, thinking roughly about against like if you're going to, if you're going to, you know, create the walls of a castle to withstand battering rams and so forth. You don't want you don't want a sharp right angle. You want to have a smooth, rounded corner. So I don't know, I don't know if that has anything to do with the design of these pots or not.
Oh yeah, the bottom does kind of look like an egg. Eggs or eggs are good design, right yeah, yeah, Oh, but I guess we should talk for a minute again about like, what what is the benefit of a pot for cooking? Pot is not the only way to cook you can. So let's say you catch the salmon in the river and oh boy, you know delicious, you know, nice fatty meat. It's great. You could put it on a big old stick and just roast it over then open flame. What kind of advantage does cooking it in a pot with water bring?
Well, One important factor that is brought up in the literature is that boiling allows for faster and more thorough cooking of ingredients, and it also creates a tasty broth. Later on, this is also going to be important with starches. Starches are going to thicken up everything, so boiling is vital to subsequent traditions of rice, ultimately noodles and so much more.
Right, But boiling also I would say, helps keep maximum nutrition available to eat because it all stays in the pot when you're boiling, or I mean, I guess some gets out. There's some splatter and lost through steam and all that, but it's minimal. When you're cooking over an open fire, you just think about a lot of nutrition is probably dripping right off of your food, and that's precious food energy that's just sizzling in the fire down below. In a soup, everything stays in the pot. It all becomes part of a nutritious broth and you can have every last drop.
Oh, this reminds me of it. We didn't have episode of the show where we talked about what gravy A bit gravy. Yeah, gravy is essentially the legacy of meat drippings and so forth, the precious drippings.
Oh yeah, we were talking. I don't remember the name of the people, but they were a group that lived in the region that is today Finland, and these people had some religious traditions, like of like rituals involving cooking bear meat and the gravy made from the bear.
Yeah. Yeah. And then of course we get into this a little bit in the Invention episode on Ketchup, where you're also dealing with kind of the dripping based condiment that is then used as a way to transform other dishes. I believe also with boiling, there's an advantage in just how you're heating, say a chunk of fish, right like the way that the heat is applied to the flesh.
Well, yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, you certainly can boil foods until they're very overdone to his person with sensitive taste. But it's harder to burn foods if you're boiling them in water. They will just continue to leach. I mean, the meat that gets boiled may become very tough and lose a lot of flavor, but the flavor is getting lost again into the broth, which you can drink right now.
There were certainly, you do see mentioned in the literature of quote unquote ceramic cauldrons, which were simply larger ceramic pots that could be used over an open fire. But of course there are material limits. Even with modern ceramics, it can warp and crack in ways that metal does not. But of course we didn't just go straight from pottery to cast iron cauldrons. There's this whole metallurgical evolution involving copper, bronze, brass, gold, and silver. I think we've discussed the broad dates on these innovations before, but in the Old world it tends to go like copper eighth millennium BCE, copper smelting by six, bronze by the third, and brass by the final centuries. B wrought iron by the third millennium BCE, cast iron in the ninth century BCE. He treated steel in crucible steel during the first millennium BCE.
I gotta say that's a great luxury of the modern era. I appreciate being able to cook in steel vessels or metal vessels generally, and not having to try to cook in earthenware pots. Now this is sort of tangential to the subject, but when I think about soup, I necessarily think about seasoning, you know, casting all your little spells of flavor on the cauldron as it bubbles. And so I did want to mention briefly that I came across a paper about early evidence for the use of spices in cooking, wet cooking, soup, cooking in clay pottery. There was a paper published called Phytoliths in Pottery Reveal the use of spice in European prehistoric culture. This was by Hailey Soall at All published in Plus one in August twenty thirteen. And this study actually did analysis of what are called phyto that literally means plant rocks or plant stones, which are these tiny mineral structures that you can find inside plants, which are made out generally out of silica that is taken up from the soil. Minerals get taken up from the roots into the plant's tissues and creates these little mineral deposits. And these mineral deposits can of course survive for a long time and can tell you things about ancient plants. So in this paper they looked at phytoliths that were left behind in what they call carbonized food deposits on prehistoric pottery. I think these would be kind of like the charred patches that we were looking at in that other paper. They say these are from quote, the Western Baltic dating from six thousand, one hundred calibrated years before present to five seven hundred and fifty before present. Now, these clay cooking pots were found at the Neolithic sites in I believe modern day Denmark and Germany. And so they analyze the fytoliths in these pots to determine what these prehistoric people were seasoning their food with, and they found out that it was a modern garlic mustard seed. I didn't know those terms could be combined that way, but modern garlic mustard seed or Aliaria petiolata. They write, quote as this seed has a strong flavor, little nutritional value, and the fidalists are found in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues. These findings are the first direct evidence for the spicing of food in European prehistoric cuisine.
Wow, that's incredible.
They also say that this suggests a much greater antiquity for the spicing of foods than you can tell from any other previous physical records. So that's pretty impressive to me, because again, these are people probably from before the age of agriculture, or if they are practicing agriculture, it's early sort of proto agricultures. You have either hunter gatherers or early farmers putting putting spices into their food because they just got to have more flavor.
Yeah, I mean, I mean it makes sense, right, I mean, you're by necessity, you have to figure out what in your surrounding environment is useful as food. Also what has some sort of medicinal property or some other property that's worth knowing, that's even some poisonous property. And then you get into this area, well, okay, this is this is maybe a little too potent to be consumed outright, but of course it can be added to food, and we can add it to this broth that we're preparing. This reminds me too of how in Chinese traditions it's often described that like the earliest tea traditions were not that we're not necessarily the consumption of tea as a drink the way we think of it now, but more as a soup, as this thing that is prepared thusly. So this ties in with so much we're going to be discussing about, like what what is the cauldron? What is the bowl of heated liquid? It is a place of transfer. It can take, you know, that which is inedible and make it edible. It can take it can combine elements and create something entirely new out of them. And this transformative nature of the cauldron is key to these these various, even far flung traditions that involve the supernatural in the divine.
Oh yeah, so we're coming back with cauldrons, right.
Yeah, So we're going to be back in the next episode talking about cauldron traditions, particularly in Chinese mythology. Chinese traditions, there's a lot of wonderful stuff in there that gets gets very divine but also highly infernal.
Love an evil cauldron.
Yeah, all right, so we'll be back in the next episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What are your thoughts about soup and soup cooking technology. I know that some of you out there have have written in about various sort of older, you know, ancient practice that have been either revitalized or just you know, just explored as an exercise. So I would be very interested if anyone out there has done any any stone boiling and if you have any tidbits you'd like to share about that experience, because I find the whole process fascinating, So right in with any of that. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the core episodes published Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed On Mondays, we usually do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we usually do an artifact or a monster Fact episode that's a short form episode, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
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