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Skull cups from Gough's Cave. Image courtesy of PLoS One.

A bone china service is a trophy for the sideboard, symbolizing the best of the best for formal entertaining in all its pinky-raising glory. The fine porcelain, with ground animal bones in the material, is prized for its strength as well as its delicacy. But there was a point in our species’ history when niceties were more or less dispensed with and human bones were deemed fit for use as serving ware. The practice is well documented in ethnographic studies and historical accounts; the Scythians, Vikings and ancient Chinese were among the cultures that practiced using skulls for bowls or drinking vessels. Archaeological evidence, on the other hand, is rare. In a new study, archaeologists and paleontologists examined remains dating some 16,600 years ago—during the upper Paleolithic era—and think they may have found the earliest examples of human skull cups.

The remains evaluated in the study hail from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England and represent at least five humans, including three adults and a child. The clustered cutting marks indicate that these craniums were expertly processed post-mortem. Shortly after death and once rigor mortis had set in, the heads were detached from the body. The head was then scalped, likely with flint tools; facial tissues and bones were removed and jagged edges were chipped and flaked until smooth. But the tipoff that these remains were used for containers is the completeness of the cranial vaults—the rounded part of your skull that protects your brain. Compared to the other, drastic modifications made to the skull, great care was taken to make sure that the vault remained intact. The case for presenting these pieces as skull cups is further bolstered by their similarities to confirmed examples.

Of course, one must remember Emily Post’s dictate regarding fine dining: “What must match is the quality of everything on the table. It would be incorrect, for example, to use heavy pottery salad plates with fine china dinner plates.” In short, a modified human cranium placed alongside your inherited set of Franciscan Desert Rose would smack of poor taste.

About a year ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a drug that gives pig farmers another way to control boar taint. Taint is a characteristic odor that develops in pork when male pigs become sexually mature. As an alternative to castrating the animals, Pfizer introduced a protein that could be injected. It suppresses the testicular function by causing a pig’s immune system to reduce levels of the two hormones responsible for the flavor: androstenone and skatole.

Impovest is not without its drawbacks. The company warns, “Accidental self injection could negatively affect reproductive physiology of both men and women.” In an apparent effort to underscore the safety of the resulting pork products—and to tout an inexpensive offal that would be made even more available by their product—they introduced a 2011 cookbook titled Recipe Book: Food Service Uses for Pork By-Products.

Corporate cookbooks have long celebrated the Chiquita banana and Shredded Wheat. They still occupy a unique place in the kitchen—and, as Pfizer’s cookbook suggest, the books exhibit corporate America’s attempt to establish societal norms. “These artifacts do tell a story,” said Deanna Pucciarelli of Ball State University, one of the cookbook’s co-authors, at a recent Cookbook Conference. “Perhaps because they are constructed simultaneously as propaganda while providing instruction, their stories are even more intriguing to me.”

The fact that there’s so little remarkable about the testicle taco (“Nestled inside corn tortillas, testicle and pork shoulder ground meat proved the perfect bed upon which to layer the remaining traditional taco fillings”) is what makes the drug company’s cookbook so remarkable.

Nicholas Appert, a Frenchman, first preserved food without refrigeration in 1810, and an English immigrant named William Underwood first brought the technology to America. He set up a condiment business on Boston’s Russia Wharf. Despite Underwood’s legacy as a purveyor of deviled ham (and a pioneer of the term “deviled,” which he reportedly trademarked in 1870, the inaugural year of the U.S. Patent Office), he initially put up seafood. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, Sue Shephard writes, “He first bottled and later canned lobster and salmon, which he exported using the label ‘Made in England,’ presumably to make the consumer feel it was a well-tried safe product from the old country and not something suspect from the ‘new.’”

By the late 19th century, Underwood had a problem—a rather disgusting problem that manifested itself as “swelling” cans of clams and lobster. These cans could be distinguished by their sound. In an 1896 paper, Underwood writes, “[U]nsound cans which have not yet swelled give a characteristic dull tone when struck.” At their worst, the dull cans spoiled without swelling. “Such cases are sometimes found in canned clams, and more frequently in lobster, in the latter case being known to the trade as ‘black lobster.’”

With the help of MIT food scientist Samuel Prescott, Underwood spent months in the lab in 1895 examining the source of spoilage. The two found a type of bacteria that formed heat-resistant spores that caused bacterial blooms; these spores could be killed by canning at 250°F for 10 minutes—a process that would transform the science and technology of canning, ushering in a world full of safe canned vegetables or meat. The canning innovation also left another lasting impression: Foods are safe only when sterilized.

The rise of the “tin can civilization,” Shephard writes, “relegated most traditional food preservation to quaint practices of undeveloped regions.” In this light, it’s worth remembering what canning does not preserve: The microbial biodiversity that once gave rise to the domesticated species we now use to leaven breads and brew beers. That, too, is worth preserving.

Sliced bread. Image courtesy of Flickr user MikeNeilson.

If you were to point to the most marvelous product kicking around in your pantry right now, would it be your loaf of bread? It is one of the most mundane staple foods, but as Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows in his book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, the lowly loaf is so much more than the sum of its simple parts. In American culture, bread is a status symbol, and the book provides a fascinating look at how store-bought white bread rose and fell in prominence. The book also answers the big question: Why do we have pre-sliced bread, and why it was the greatest thing to hit grocery store shelves?

To understand sliced bread, one must first understand the dramatic shift in bread making habits in America. In 1890, about 90 percent of bread was baked at home, but by 1930, factories usurped the home baker. Considering that bread making had been a part of domestic life for millennia, this is a fairly rapid change. In the early 20th century, Americans were highly concerned with the purity of their food supply. In the case of bread, hand-kneading was suddenly seen as a possible source of contamination, and yeast—those mystical, microscopic organisms that causes dough to rise—were viewed with suspicion. “Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ because millions of these little worms have been born and have died,” Eugene Christian wrote in his 1904 book Raw Foods and How to Use Them. “And from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog of any other animal.” Images like this hardly make someone want to do business with the local baker.

Mass-produced bread, on the other hand, seemed safe. It was made in shining factories, mechanically mixed, government regulated. It was individually wrapped. It was a product of modern science that left nothing to chance. It was also convenient, sparing women hours in the kitchen to prepare a daily staple. Factory loaves also had an attractive, streamlined aesthetic, dispensing with the “unsightly” irregularities of homemade bread. Americans fed on factory bread because the bread companies were able to feed on consumer fear.

But factory breads were also incredibly soft. Buying pre-wrapped bread, consumers were forced to evaluate a product under sensory deprivation—it’s next to impossible to effectively see, touch and smell bread through a wrapper. “Softness,” Borrow-Strain writes, “had become customers’ proxy for freshness, and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves. As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home.” The solution had to be mechanical slicing.

Factory-sliced bread was born on July 6, 1928 at Missouri’s Chillicothe Baking Company. While retailers would slice bread at the point of sale, the idea of pre-sliced bread was a novelty. “The housewife can well experience a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows,” a reporter said of the sliced bread. “So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.” The bakery saw a 2,000 percent increase in sales, and mechanical slicing quickly swept the nation. With Americans all agog at the wonders of the mechanical age, sliced bread was a beacon of the amazing things the future might hold. At least that was the mindset. “Technology,” Bobrow-Strain says, “would usher in good society by conquering and taming the fickle nature of food provisioning.”

Diagram of Grado ship relic/Antiquité

If you’re like me, the last post on the convoluted origins of our favorite fermented condiment—ketchup—probably left you wondering: What is the difference between Roman garum than modern Thai fish sauce?

What little I know comes from an experiment performed by Sally Grainger, author of Cooking Apicus, recounted in the book Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods. Grainger is a British chef and an experimental archeologist. She looked at studies on fish sauce amphorae (ceramic vessels) from archeological sites in Spain and North Africa. One of her more fascinating sources comes from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck discovered off the coast of Grado, Italy. The ship was full of fish—maybe even live ones. Italian researchers found that the vessel contained what amounts to a giant fish tank—a hydraulic system capable of transporting 440 pounds of live parrotfish (Scarus ssp.) from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The wreck also contains 600 amphorae, some with well-preserved fish sauce inside.

Using these studies and a recipe from Geoponica, a 10th century collection of agricultural lore, as a guide, Grainger added salted sardines (Pilchardus sardines) and sprats (Sprattus sprattus) to barrels, put the barrels in a greenhouse, and covered the tops with cardboard. Then she waited two months. What’s surprising, Grainger found, was that the recreated ancient fish sauce appeared to be a lot less salty than its modern Southeast Asian counterparts, with just as much protein. Salt slows down the enzymatic process, so industrial-scale fish sauces today—what you might otherwise think of cheaply made “fast” food—actually take longer to make than the ancient brews. In other words, this old, “slow food” fermented faster.

On one final note, for those of you interested in doing some fishy home-brewing, Ken Albaba, author of the forthcoming Lost Arts of Hearth and Home, told me he made a batch last year. Albaba said it was fun and, moreover, “Not stinky in the least. Almost pure umami in fact.”