Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. I would normally be joined on Mike by my co host Robert Lamb, but Rob is out on the day that we're recording this, so instead I'm being joined by a couple of friends from here in the Stuff Network. Today on the podcast, we have Annie Reese and Lauren Vogelbaum specifically well of many different projects. But I would say, in your capacity today, you are coming to us as ambassadors of the show Saver. What's
going on? Annie and Lauren?
Oh, I have no idea.
Well, thank you so much for having us on, yes, and also calling us ambassadors of Savor.
That makes me feel very official like.
That, I guess that makes it sound like you're like a detached representatives. You are Savor. The two of you are Savor, and that is all Safer is, along.
With our super producers Dylan and Andrew. Yes. But but yeah, so we have this podcast called Save. It's about the science and history and culture of foods and drinks and other assorted materials related to those things. And yeah, so when when you asked us to come on and talk about this subject. We were like, yeah, okay, right, uh well.
Wait before we get into today's topic, just just give us like the mall food court sample platter of savor. What are a couple of things you've talked about recently.
Oh, good question. I jettison all of that from my brain the second that I'm done with it. We've got an episode coming out today about an early American cookbook writer by the name of Melinda Russell, whose story was
almost lost to time. She was a free black woman living during the era of the Civil War, and historians recently like, on earth this cookbook that she wrote, that's really changing the way that we think about black Southern cooking in the United States during that time, because for a long time, the kind of air of thought is like, oh, that's poverty cooking, and it wasn't, or it's more nuanced
and complicated than that. And so just like from this very normal human person's life, it's just an amazing gift of historical knowledge and what a great story. But you know, sometimes we're just talking about artichokes or whatever it is.
The sea urchins. They wear hats show. Lauren told me about.
This sea urchins wear hats.
Sea urchins love wearing hats. If you give them it helps them shelter from stuff. And so if you give them a little hat, they'll put it on their head.
What are their hats made of in nature?
Shells? Oh, seaweed maybe? Yeah.
But I will also say we've been lucky to cross over sometimes with stuff to blow your mind. Uh.
We had you on for one of our food fairy tales once.
So yeah, yeah, did we talk about oh oh h the poem Goblin Market.
Yeah, oh right, yeah that time that I was like, oh, one of them many times and I was like, oh, is this one going to get hr called on me? But it's a great poem. It's it's a little bit it's a little bit more racy than I ever remember.
Well, that was a lot of fun, and I really really appreciate you all joining me today. I think this is going to be a lot of fun also. So I was thinking about what would be great to talk about with Annie and Lauren, and as a topic combining biology, literature, and food history, I thought it would be great to talk about the mysterious substance known as ambergrease and quick roadmap for the listener. In the first half of the episode, I'm going to talk about what this substance is and
what its biological origins are. And then in the second half of the episode, Annie and Lauren are going to take the lead on discussing this substance as food. So pronunciation note at the top of the show, because this is an audio format, the word ambergrease is spelled a M B E R g rs and it's derived from French, meaning I think it's a contraction of French, but it comes from French for gray amber. So I think to
a French speaker it would be pronounced like ambergris. But in English it seems everybody says the like a soft pronunciation of the s, so it's like ambergrise or ambergrese.
I feel like I'm going to be saying ambergris because I can't look at the word gris and pronounce the s even though I don't know French. But for some reason, that one in particular, my brain is just like, Nope.
Well, I appreciate that you'll be here to make me feel small, but yeah, I'm going to do the s as much as like, who knows, if we we pinball back and forth. But to kick things off today, I wanted to start with a bit of narrative from Moby Dick.
Oh yeah, comes up a lot.
Moby Dick comes up a lot on Savor.
Yeah surprisingly, Oh yeah, it.
Does have a clam chowder chapter, doesn't it.
It does. Yes, we talked about that. He got up to all kinds of stuff in that book.
That's accurate.
You'd be surprised how many things that come up a lot in Savor that you're like, well, I wouldn't have associated this with food, but here I am.
That happens a lot. Actually, we've had Mobi Dick come up several times on stuff to blow your mind. In the past year or so. We did an episode on whale spout on like what it is actually actually that is ejected from the whales blowhole and like historical ideas about that. And there's this wild chapter in Moby Dick where he talks about how like, oh yeah, if you get the whale spout on you, that'll like blind you
and burn your skin off and stuff like that. This is not true or at least us, but yeah, Moby Dick is great fun. So that's where I want to start today. Herman Melville's novel, I would say, devotes not one but two chapters to the subject of ambergrease, one to its pursuit in a sort of narrative sense, and then the other to what it means. So I want to start by talking about chapter ninety one of Moby Dick,
called The Peaquad Meets the Rosebud. And this chapter begins with a somewhat ominous epigraph from a seventeenth century English author named Thomas Brown, and the epigraph reads, in vain, it was to rake for amber grease in the paunch of this leviathan insufferable feater, denying that inquiry. It's like the saddest sentence I've ever read.
We don't use the word feeder enough anymore.
Yeah, we truly don't, so recap. In this chapter the Whalers of the Peaquad, they cross paths on the open Sea with another whaling ship, a French vessel with a name that translates to the Rosebud, and it's ironically named because before they reach the ship, Ishmael, the narrator notes that the ship reeks of death. He says, it smells like a city that has suffered the plague, and the reason it smells so bad is that the boat is
towing what Ishmael calls a blasted whale quote. That is, a whale that has died, unmolested on the sea and so floated an unappropriated corpse. So not a whale killed by the whalers, but a whale found dead on the water. And in fact, when they approach the ship they discover a second dead whale in tow quote, even more of a nosegay than the first. I had to look up that word. I think that means like a bouquet of
fragrant flowers. Nosegay. Yeah, So the whale appears to the second whale especially, appears to have been shriveled by before it died, meaning that in one sense, the whaler would look at it and say this is a whale of no value, like the experienced whaler sees a shriveled whale and says there is no oil there to harvest, because oil is primarily what the whalers are looking for. However, to a different kind of whaler's experience, this does not
mean it is without value. One of the mates of the peaquad, a rascally fellow named Stub goes aboard the Rosebud and scams the captain of that ship into cutting the dead whales loose by claiming that a blasted whale is a source of deadly fever to any boat that ropes it. So he scares them, they cut the whales loose, and then once the con has succeeded, the Rosebud goes
its own way. And here I'm going to read from Moby Dick quote whereupon Stub quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the peaquad to give notice of his intentions, had once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat spade, he came hinst an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea. And when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old
Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief and looking anxious as gold hunters, And all the time numberless fowls were diving and ducking and screaming and
yelling and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly, from out of the very heart of this plague there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without it all blending with it. For a time, I have it, I have it, cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
the sub terranean regions a purse, a purse. Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe windsor soap, or rich modeled old cheese, very unctuous and savory, withal you might easily dent it with your thumb. It is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is amber grease, worth a gold guineaan ounce to any druggist.
Some six handfuls were obtained, but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more perhaps might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command to Stub to desist and come on board, else the ship would bid them goodbye.
Oh Captain Ahab so impatient? Yeah he is.
Really he's not very nice, is he. It's even worse later when there's a ship that comes by toward the end that's like, we've lost people overboard, will you help us? And he's like, no, you're seen Page Master.
There's a whole section with Captain am and he's a real not nice guy in that. Shout out to people who've seen Page Master.
I saw it when I was a kid. What was the deal with that? It was like the kid makes friends with books and one of them is like a Frankenstein and one's a pirate.
Yeah. Leonard Dnimoy is the horror section with Pee Goldbergers Fantasy, Patrick Stewart's Adventure. They like are trying to get down to the library. He's trying to get a library card, but they run into Moby Dick and Captain Ahab and he justus essentially like I want this whale. I don't care what it's to all of you anyway.
In character, yeah, yeah.
In character exactly.
Yeah.
All right, So anyway, that's the chapter where they get the ambergrease and then the next chapter ninety two is just called Ambergrease, and it's one of the narrator Ishmael's characteristic essay is on the spiritual meaning of some piece of whale anatomy, in this case, the irony that such a refined and expensive material, worth more than gold by weight in some markets, prized by the richest of the rich,
would have such a revolting, carnally putrid origin. And he goes on to say at one point, quote who would think then that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale? Yet so it is by some ambergrease is supposed to be the cause, and by others the
effect of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia, it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks. So there's a poop joke in Moby Dick. Because Brandreth's pills. I had to look this up. Where As I suspected a nineteenth century laxative.
Mm.
And I don't know what the quality of laxatives in the nineteenth century was, but I imagine it was like real good stuff.
Probably not subtle, I'm guessing not subtle. Yeah, uh yeah, so yeah.
So the character Ishmael here is the narrator is identifying ambergrease as some kind of fecal mass or other intestinal blockage within the hindgut of the whale, which would be cleared in the same way that humans take medication to clear constipation. Interesting that Melville presents this theory of the origin of ambergresse as non controversial, even though for the past like one thousand years, that explanation would have been highly disputed. And we'll come back to the physical origins
of ambergress in a bit. But one thing that this chapter gets into that is absolutely true is that high quality ambergrease is, and for hundreds of years has been extremely valuable if you can find the right buyer. It was historically known as floating gold and was sought primarily for its value in the manufacture of perfumes. But that wasn't the only thing. I had a bunch of other uses as well. Uses in medicine and in some cases as a culinary delicacy to be used in food and drink.
And Annie and Lauren, that is why I wanted you to join me on the show today to talk about eating whale poop.
Thank you, We are honored and we're ready.
Yeah.
We usually talk about much smaller poops on our show, made by bacteria and yeast, So this is a treat.
Yes. Were you telling me just a minute ago you have a sound effect for like microbial poops.
Yeah, yeah, it goes and there's usually a little bit of an echo behind it. But yeah, bacteria poop.
Anyway, here's a good place to mention a major source that I was using going into this episode. I meant to finish the book before we talked. I was actually not quite able to. But it's a very interesting book called Floating Gold, A Natural and Unnatural History of Ambergrease by Christopher Kemp from University of Chicago Press, twenty twelve.
And this thing is full of fascinating anecdotes about the history of the ambergrease trade, both both long ago and much more recent, and just as one example of the ambergrease trade at a particular time, Kemp explains in the prologue of his book that at the time he was writing, ambergrease was traded on the global market at up to twenty dollars per gram, depending on the quality, and for comparison, at the same time, gold was trading at about thirty
dollars per gram, so about two thirds of the price of gold by weight. Yeah, and there were times and places when ambergres was worth more than gold by weight. But even at this modern price, a chunk of high quality ambergrease weighing like fifty pounds, which is not necessarily implausible,
could be worth something like half a million dollars. So given this, when people think they've got a lead on some ambergrease and they figure out what it would be worth if it were the real thing, they sometimes become extremely avaricious and territorial. And one amazing thing this book does is document various ill fated ambergrese harvesting frenzies from history.
It seems that most ambergres that enters the market in the modern period is not harvested directly from the body of a dead whale, like stubbed did and moby Dick, though sometimes it is. As one example of this happening in the real world. Kemp tells the story of a man named Louis Smith from Tasmania who in the year eighteen ninety one, came across the body of a dead
sperm whale floating on the water. He towed it to the beach like you do, yeah, and then collected a one hundred and eighty pound boulder of ambergrease from its intestines. He claimed aimed by literally cutting the whale open and crawling inside its digestive track to retrieve it. I would say this is not recommended behavior. I think you could easily suffocate and die doing this.
Yeah. No, don't do that. What a way to go. Important safety tip.
That's another thing in Moby Dick is like the perils of dyeing inside a whale carcass are fully explored. There's one whole part where character like falls inside a whale and the whale starts to sink. Is horrifying.
Yeah, that sounds awful.
But according to a newspaper article from the time, Louis Smith's ambergrease harvesting would have paid off because the chunk he came home with was estimated by several old whalers to be worth about ten thousand pounds. I guess I don't know what that ther relevant currency is there. If that's British pounds or Australian pounds, that'd be a separate thing. The pound whatever the pounds were used in Tasmania at the time, and that would have been the year eighteen
ninety one. So this is a sizeable, very very valuable hull. But like I said, most ambergrease is not collected from a dead whale. Instead, it takes the form of flotsam, strange hunks of material that float on the surface of the ocean, sometimes for years or even decades, before eventually
washing up on a beach somewhere and being found. And so a lot of these ambergrease frenzies occur when somebody finds a weird, unidentifiable mass of something on a beach and then people get the idea that it's ambergrease.
Yeah, they're like, this large rock looking thing that is kind of floaty and kind of greasy might be worth a half a million dollars. Yeah, let's find out exactly.
Well, you know, I was thinking it's similar to how it's similar to those daily mail articles that come up like it seems about four times a day, where it's like, somebody found a carcass of some animal on a beach, it's a sea monster. And so I think the equivalent here is somebody found a mass of some unidentified organic or inorganic material on a beach. It's ambergrease.
Yeah, either monsters or ambergrese, you know.
Anyway. So one example of these like frenzies is described
in the very first thing in Camp's book. It's in the prologue where he talks about an event from September two thousand and eight in a place called Breaker Bay, which is near Wellington, New Zealand, where a weird off white object described as sort of the color of dirty snow and about the size of a forty four gallon drum washed up on the shore and people had different theories about what it was, but eventually a rumor started that it was ambergrease, which if true, would mean it
could be worth about ten million dollars in total. Because this was a huge mass, so people started people started carving off pieces of it. They would like go home and get gardening tools and then go back to the object and hack off pieces, carry a piece away in a sling made out of a bed sheet, thinking that they were going to be rich. But within three days the mass was completely gone, and once the material was actually analyzed it turned out to be drum roll tallow
aka lard. It was a large mass of animal fat that had probably somehow like fallen off of a ship or broken out of its storage drum. We don't know exactly where it came from, but it was it was like lard, and the Wellington Regional Council was begging citizens not to wash the lard down their drains, which is generally but you don't want to put animal fat down your drains at all.
No, no, not a forty four gallon drum worth all at the same time across the city. Wow. Yeah, equally gross, but way less valuable.
And there were other frenzies like this. There was the nineteen thirty four Ambergrease craze in a place called Billinas, California, where after people found weird masses of stuff on the beach, they started concluding that this was ambergrease. Like that there was ambergrease washing ashore. People went to go get it. And then actually they found out that these were like congealed chunks of sewage bonded with sewer cleaning chemicals. I think locally the sewers had just been cleaned out with
some kind of chemical formula. It made all these like white chunks that got washed out to see and then brought in. But despite the fact that there are these crazes for these like things that are not actually ambergress, many people successfully make a lot of money by finding real ambergresse on the beach and connecting with the buyer.
And documents throughout this book that a lot of people involved in the ambergrease trade are very squirrely about talking to interviewers and do not want to give away too
many details about their methods. But he does end up talking to quite a few people who in the book who open up and does find out things, But early on a lot of the interviews are just like people who don't want to talk to him, and he realizes it's because, like, well, if they're people who you know, are used to combing beaches for amber grease, they don't want to like give away their good spots or they'll have other people coming in on their fines.
Sure. Yeah. He said in an interview with a Hakai magazine that when he brought it up quote, it was like he had farted audibly.
Yeah. He describes a lot of just like dead silence on the phone.
Some people just hang up on him. Yeah, like oh I'm getting another call. Click.
So at this point I would say, like, I want to be able to picture a piece of ambergrease. We got a brief description in Moby dick Ishmael says it looks like ripe windsor soap, or like rich modeled old cheese. But one thing that I think is really interesting is that if you read through real world descriptions of ambergres, you will start to realize that different ambigris specimens are radically different in description, in terms of all different of
all the senses. Basically, they look different, they feel different, they smell different. So ambergres can apparently be a huge, sticky black mass with overwhelming aromas of sheep dung, or ambergrease can be a pale, waxy green or yellow rock, or kind of be like a large piece of white soap, smelling sweet and fragrant in a way that is exceedingly
hard to describe. So on one hand, I'd be like, how can this even be the same substance if it sounds like you're describing completely diametrically opposite physical characteristics of
this thing. But from what I can tell, the difference in a appearance is largely due to a kind of seasoning process that takes place as ambergrease floats in the ocean over years and even decades, being exposed to solar radiation and other forms of physical weathering and chemical reactions, becoming gradually transformed, as Kim says, one molecule at a time,
into something somewhat different than it originally was. And it is this more seasoned version, the kind that's been weathered at sea for a long time, that seems to be the more desirable, high quality ambergrease that like the highest end buyers will pay top dollar for. However, with like physical characteristics so wildly divergent, I would have to wonder, like, how are you even supposed to know whether a random chunk of something you find on the beach is actually
amber grease? And there are some tests apparently experienced ambergrease buyers do certain tests. A famous one is called the hot needle test. You heat up a needle in a fire, you poke it into the mass, and if it's actually ambergrease, this should cause it to leak out an oily fluid the color of dark chocolate, with a specific bouquet of aromas that an experienced ambergrease dealer will recognize. And then beyond that you can do like actual chemical analysis with
modern lab techniques and stuff if you want. But then there are other cruder tests. For example, does it float? Ambergresse apparently should float. If it sinks, it's probably not ambergrease. Another thing is is it full of squid beaks? And the answer should be yes, definitely. But I like that because it gives you a little hint before we fully look at it, like what ambergrease actually is?
Yeah, okay, so right, So so far we know that it is in the guts of whales and it's full of squid beaks, right, and it smells either really bad or really.
Nice exactly, Yeah, And it looks like either like poop or like a rock.
And people want it, they pay a lot of money for it.
Well, here's a good question before we get into like the biological origins of ambergrease or discussed its use, and I'm very excited to hear what y'all are gonna have to say about it's use in cookery. I wanted to briefly talk about its use in perfume, which is one of the main ways in which there's been market demand for ambergrease over the years.
Which which I should say, like like, perfume and cookery are very intertwined, especially historically but today still like a lot of the earliest recipe books were at least partially medicinal in nature, and lots of things that we would consider perfume me today were used as seasonings in the past, like musk. Some still are today in some cuisines, like rose water. And on the flip side, some of our modern seasonings have been and or still are really posh perfume ingredients like vanilla.
Oh yeah, it's really interesting rosewater. Do y'all ever watch Great British Baking Show or whatever it's called Great britsh Bake Off.
I haven't that often, but I'm aware that it's a thing.
Well it's a British you know, like it's the most pleasant cooking contest show ever. But when I've watched it before. There's a thing where like contestants will always want to use rose water, but they like they can very easily use too much rose water, and that's just like an unforgivable sin. It's like too much rose water and this
is absolutely ruined. It becomes disgusting. I don't even know what that would smell slash taste like, because I'm not really very familiar with rosewater, but I know it's like a sensitive ingredient. There's like some amount of desire for it. It seems like maybe kind of a sign of confidence or like a risky thing to use that could be a big payoff, but if you use too much of it, it's just it's dangerous.
Yeah, it's well, I mean, if you've ever smelled a rose it tastes like that, which can be either delightful or if you go too hard, it's soap.
So yeah, yeah, And a lot of us associate it going back to perfume, with perfumes that our grandmothers may be war or something. So it became sort of a like you can see our episode for more about this. We didn't episode in rosewater, but it became sort of a like, oh, that's.
Old people very Yeah, exactly. I still think it's delightful. Yeah, me too.
I would just imagine that a lot of things that would be used in perfumes that would be prized for their like really noticeable scent, might be like that in cookery, where it's like it's very delightful in small quantities, but you could easily use too much and then it ruins the food.
M hm.
Oh yeah, I've done that with garlic.
I've put garlic perfume.
Yeah, it's because you're a vampire, Laurie.
What no, sh I love the smell and taste of vanilla in foods. But one time when I was working at an ice cream store, I was making our waffle cones, that's you know, that was my job, and uh do you put You put a certain amount of vanilla in the mix. And I put more vanilla in than I was supposed to, and I was like, well, I like vanilla, what's this going to be like horrible, absolutely disgusting, just like uh, bitter and inedible, Like you don't want to use too much vanilla?
No, no, which vanilla was the replacement for rosewater in the US.
This is you know, it's all cyclical.
But yeah, if you go overboard with those kinds of very fragrant ingredients, gonna be in trouble.
Mm hmm, yeah, totally. And I think another thing is that a lot of them, like there's a disconnect between we prize them for their smell and a lot of what we like about experiencing them in the food is the smell, but if you actually have like an amount in there that you can taste with your tongue, the taste is overwhelming bitterness.
Yeah.
And also interestingly, a lot of them, like rosewater specifically was used for coloring as well.
It was like, oh, ads, this tint to it.
So there's a you know, a lot going on when we add these ingredients to foods, for sure.
So as you are saying, I think there's going to be some overlap with the appeal of ambergresse as perfume and as food, but specifically in perfumery, it seems ambergresse has been prized for two different things, both for its own intrinsic fragrance and then also as what's called a fixative. I didn't know what that meant originally, so I had to look it up, and that means it is an element of a perfume that helps the whole fragrance last longer on the skin or on whatever you spray it on.
I think sometimes people would actually apply perfumes to like articles of clothing and stuff, like to their gloves or something, and it would help fix the scent to either the body or to whatever surface it was applied to. According to a paper I'm going to get to in just a minute, Robert Clark's History of Ambergrease, many perfume chemists consider ambergris the best known fixative in nature. Quote, it preserves the note of a perfume after the perfume itself has departed.
Yeah, and there's a in terms of the chemistry of ambergris, there's a compound in there that's a fixative called ambrian, which is a precursor of the scent compounds such as ambroxide and ambernall.
Yeah, the way I understood it as I was reading from Kemp's book, it seems like the ambrian is sort of like the grandparent compound of the aroma compounds in ambergrise, and so like that molecule, while being fairly fairly unscented itself breaks down into a bunch of chains of other things. These downstream products of it all have their own interesting aromas, and that blend is what gives rise to the aroma of ambergrease.
Which is part of why when it's just floating on the ocean for a while, it starts developing these better sense in some cases better.
That would make sense. Yeah, in fact, to go into that specifically, So in the book, Kemp talks to a person named doctor Charles Cell, who is a researcher with a company called Givauden or I'm not sure how you say that, as giv A U D A N which is a large flavor and fragrance manufacturer. And Cell is talking about exactly this like breakdown chain. Who says that, Yeah, this core ambergrease molecule, the one you were talking about, Lauren, is like a terpenoid. It breaks down into these other
complex aroma molecules. And so like one decay product smells like tobacco, another one smells like quote ocean. It's that like briny ocean scent. Another one smells like mold feces,
and animals like mammals. But then it gets to there's a really unique breakdown compound there called naphtho furine, which I've never heard of before, obviously, but Cell says, quote, if you look at the descriptions that people give, one of the breakdown products is described as brineozone, another one will be described as tobacco like, But the naphtho furine, the only label we can put on it is ambergrease
because there's nothing else quite like it. And this is interesting because this section of the book gets into people who have experienced with ambergrease talking about the difficulty of describing these unique aroma compounds that just don't really smell
like anything else. And it's not like a it's not there's like a disnalogy with other types of sense data, like say a shade of a color, where you could say, well, it's like a lighter shade of red, you know, or you could say, like it's a darker shade of orange or something. There's there are no degrees like that along
a spectrum. With smells, they're just kind of like each you know, molecule hits the old factory bulb and produces a different pattern in the brain, and so like some molecules just smell totally unique and there's nothing you can compare them to, And I thought that was quite interesting. And so today there are synthetic compounds that are used in perfumery that are designed to mimic ambergresse under trade
names like like am brocs and stuff. But from what I understand, like some perfumers think that they're good, other perfumers don't like them as much. There seems to be a there are some people who are like sort of think of themselves as natural perfumers. They want to use like traditional ingredients and less like synthetic ingredients, and they think that that natural ambergrease is just like sort of unbeatable in its qualities. I can't really comment on that.
Yeah, I have some familiarity with ambergris as a as a perfume ingredient, like the artificial stuff I'm assuming. I'm assuming that none of the like twenty dollars bottles of perfume that I've purchased in my life contained actual ambergris. But yeah, it's usually kind of shorthand in perfumery for like a like a sort of musky, sweet woody note, I guess, And I've quite enjoyed it.
Yeah, that list you gave it that overlaps with what I've read, like the wood woody sort of elements, but also the tobacco, also the strong kind of animal smell and the sweetness. I don't know, it's hard to imagine. It's funny to talk about with me just having no idea what this smell's like and reading the descriptions and just saying like this doesn't add up, Like my brain isn't making sense of what's being described.
Yeah, yeah, I very nearly. I had this thought last night. I was like, Oh, I should go find one of my perfumes that has some of it in it. We're we're on the internet right now. I can't show you a perfume. Oh no on this video call. So I didn't do that.
Well, that's okay. I almost kind of am cherishing my own ignorance here. Something about it is making the subject all the more mysterious and fun to me. I guess this leads us to the next question, which is, like, what is Ambergresse actually like? How is it actually formed? So I think next we should do like the biological origins of Ambergresse, and then we can talk about ambergrese as food.
Right, once we get good and grossed out, then talk about it exactly, smell strange biological origins. Hmm, let's eat it.
It seemed like the right order to me. So the most detailed scientific study of ambergress and the most detailed history of the formation theories that I could find, was a two thousand and six paper by the British biologist Robert Clark. Clark actually passed away several years back, but he seems to have been the world's foremost scientific authority on ambergrease. It seems this is something that actually not
that many people studied. And Kemp talks about this in his book that he tried to talk to a lot of scientists and marine biologists about ambergrese and a lot of them were just like, yeah, I have no idea,
so yeah. This paper is called the Origins of Ambergrease in the Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals in two thousand and six by Robert Clark, and Clark begins by quoting an ambergrease dealer named Beauville, who explained in the year nineteen fifty four that quote, not many people know what ambergrease is, but those who do know it is not the feces of a whale. And I don't know
what it is, but we know what it's not. And Clark says to the contrary, after decades of study of this mysterious subce, he is prepared to argue that it is indeed the feces of a whale, or, to be a bit more nuanced, a sort of complex quote fecal product of the sperm whale. So, before he explains is the modern theory, Clark does a delightful recounting of the many, many historical hypotheses about what ambergrease is and where it
comes from. Suffice to say, it has long been, in the words of Herman Melville quote, a problem to the learned. He says that in the seventeenth century there was speculation about the origins of ambergreese, and it was like a pretty popular subject. Is so popular, in fact, that in the year sixteen seventy or sixteen sixty seven, sorry, there's an author named Klobius. I think this was Eustace Fetus Clobius,
who recorded eighteen such ideas known at the time. So a lot of people speculating about where it comes from. Here are a few examples. There's an author named Fuskius who claimed that ambergris was a human made fake that was like a composite made out of multiple other components, including a labdanum, which is the resin of a rock rose plant, but also aloe wood and the musk of
a mammal called the civet. I think we were talking about the civet earlier either before we were either off micron, but yeah, the civet is sort of a cat like mammal, a carnivoor.
Yeah, which right? You get musk from? Sure? Or you could. I don't personally.
There was one seventeenth century encyclopedist who claimed that it was simply dried sea foam. Okay, it's hard to see how that happens, but okay. Another said it was dried foam from seals. Seal foam presumably, I guess from their mouths. It doesn't say what seal foam that he's talking about.
There.
Another popular idea was that it was the excrement of a particular species of bird found in the Maldives, locally called the ooh. And I'm gonna try my best of this word the a knackungree pasqui, which lived on a diet of fragrant herbs. So I guess if it eats fragrant herbs and then it poops, and that would explain why the poop is so fragrant. Some wrote that it was a form of lizard musk which was secreted from
the sexual organs and throat glands of crocodiles. Another idea was that it was a honeycomb, as in like from a bee colony which fell into the sea and then was crystallized by exposure to the elements.
Oh, I like that one.
I like that too. Unfortunately it's not true. Another idea was that it's just a rock, Like it's just a rock or a type of like clod of earth of a particular sort. And in fact there would be if we could go out and find them, boulders and even entire islands made of this type of rock, where like the ground was ambergris, and these were just like the
chunks that broke off and floated away. The author of a of a ninth century Arabic text mentions that ambergris was a fungus that grew in the dark at the bottom of the ocean and could be ripped up from the bottom by ocean currents and then floated around, and
this idea was held by many subsequent thinkers. The tenth to eleventh century Islamic physician and polymath Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, sort of stuck to the idea that it was fungus, but thought instead that it was like a terrestrial fungus that grew on rocks and then fell into the water from land based rocks and then floated around, rather than originating on the seafloor. Some writers seem to
think it's a type of fruit. The seventeenth century natural philosopher Robert Boyle published a text containing the idea that it was gum exuded from the roots of a seaside tree. And then another idea favored by many later authors was that ambergrease was a form of bitumen exuded from vince on the seafloor. And bitumen is this like dense, thick, black mixture of hydrocarbons that is a natural product of petroleum,
So you can think basically tar. So my idea from like looking at this wide range of options is like it just gives you a sense of how baffling this substance found than the seashorts was. It was a hot commodity, but like its properties are so elusive that it could be anything from bird dung to honeycomb to fungus to a petroleum constituent.
It's got a lot of mystique.
It definitely, like even now it's pretty recent that there's been more information about it, but it was certainly Yeah, just the range of explanations of what it could be, the tails behind it, the range of smells, like this is something that people are like, I don't know, yeah, And I will say that historically, like there were a lot of tall tails told about other precious spices and substances, like because people didn't want you to horn in on
their on their product, right, so you know, like like like like Arab traders would be like, oh, yeah, that comes from a dragon on this one island. Don't go looking for it, man, like dragons, dude, And so some of these stories might have a little bit of that flavor to it as well.
I don't know.
That's a very good point, I mean, and it sort of connects with the idea that even in the even in the modern day, A lot of people who are involved in the ambergris trade like don't want to talk about it, you know, with with outsiders. They're not interested in sharing details of what this stuff is and how
it works. So yeah, you can imagine that similar confusions could have arisen in centuries past for similar reasons that, like, you know, people did not particularly want to share the details of how they made their money in this trade and thus just deliberately confused outsiders with maybe false details or other things.
Yeah, it's also interesting considering the legality too, which well, I know we'll get into later. That's probably not what what's at play here, but I just think that that's a fascinating part of this is sort of like, yeah, find this thing we don't know.
Oh yeah, yeah, you're saying that's another reason, like people are hesitant to talk about it because yeah.
Yeah, like maybe let's just not discuss this, let's just see it as it is.
Doesn't smell let's go.
Yeah, Okay. One last common confusion before we get to the main modern theory is that lots of authors in history thought that ambergris, which we now know is in fact a biological product of the sperm whale. They thought that it was actually the same thing as an in reality, completely different, unrelated biological product of the sperm whale, the waxy substance known as spermaceti, which is found in the whale's head and was the primary product sought by whalers
like the crew of Peaquad. You know, that was the whale oil that whalers were trying to extract, and that tragically led to the you know, the great reduction in the populations of sperm whales around the world. Even in some cases where ambergrease was found inside sperm whales, it was sometimes thought that it was not actually something made by the whale's body, but something that the sperm whale
had come across in the ocean and devoured. So, as I stated earlier, Clark here thinks that the best theory of ambergrease is that it is a sperm whale coprolith aka a mass of feces hardened into a rock like consistency. Clark traces this idea back to an eighteenth century author and named schved Diaver. I don't know if you say those ws like vs. Either schwed Diover or Shiddaver.
Great name either way.
Oh yeah. There have been some competing modern theories, such as the notion that it is primarily a concretion of bile from the whaless digi estive system, or that it's a secretion of whale like sexual glands, but Clark argues that these don't really fit with the evidence. So here's I'm going to work here from Kemp's synthesis of Clark's favorite copperlith theory. And this does seem to be, from what I can tell, the explanation that is currently the
most widely accepted by cytologists and other relevant experts. So, the average sperm whale eats a lot of squid. You know, sperm whale life is like it's diving down to meet its metabolic needs. It has to eat like a ton of squid every day. Oh yeah, that's a lot. And so it hunts for squid by diving deep into the dark the mesoplagic zone and hunting with the help of echolocation, the acoustic clicks that it can emit with the help of its giant box head. So the whale swim down
and they hunt, and they eat lots of squid. The sperm whale's got four different stomachs, and it digests its prey in different stages. Here you got the soft, liquefied parts of the prey animals that they pass on through the stomachs to the intestine, while the small number of indigestible hard parts and squid. You're primarily talking about beaks there, because squid have you know, their mouth is a beak that is in many ways morphologically similar to a bird beak.
It's like a parrot's beak sort of. But they've also got a hard part that's an internal organ that's a quill like hard part called a pin. These things gather in the sperm whale stomachs and then eventually, when there's too many of them sperm whales like who, and it vomits them up. Yep, Yeah, this is not ambergris. This is just whale vomit. And it's mostly squid beaks. For some reason, sometimes a massive beaks fails to be vomited
up and instead goes in the other direction. And here Kemp quotes from Clark, and this section is very good, so I must quote from Clark as well. So these are Clark's word here. Quote now, once in the Antarctic. In nineteen forty eight, on board a boat called the Southern Harvester, I examined a sperm whale whose cylindrical last stomach was entirely filled with a compacted mass of squid beaks,
squid pins, and nematode worms. The mass was one point two meters in length and zero point four meters in diameter. This last stomach is normally empty except for a few small beaks, pins, and nematode cuticles. We have only to imagine an imperfect valve, a leaky sphincter between this last stomach and the intestine. When all conditions are set for a train of events which should result in ambergrease. And I think the metaphor of a tray in there is
perfect because it's like plowing down the intestinal tract. So here what happens is like this tangled wad of beaks passes into the intestine, which is not evolved to pass solids. It's only for liquid matter is supposed to be going into the sperm whales intestine. The hard beaks irritate the intestinal lining as they pass. Eventually this massive beaks and compacted fecal matter, it becomes stuck and it obstructs the rectum,
and fecal matter builds up behind the mass. And then, to quote from Campire quote, the whales gastro intestinal system responds by increasing water absorption from the lower intestines, and gradually the feces saturating. The compacted mass of squid beaks become like cement, binding the slurry together permanently. It becomes a concretion, a smooth and striated boulder, so it's like forming a cement like solid, hardened rock like mass here and at various points the feces will sort of be
able to pass by. But over time the massive beaks and fecal matter becomes harder and harder and denser and more solid, and new layers are added to it, like the rings of a tree trunk, and eventually, somehow the mass leaves the whale, either because the whale is actually able to pass it, it's unclear how often this happens, if ever, or because the whale dies and its body is subject to scavenging and decomposition, and eventually the chunk of fresh ambergrease is separated from the rest of the
remains floats away through the water, and then it is acted upon and transformed by the elements for who knows how long, maybe decades before it either washes up on a beach and is found or decomposes completely in the ocean.
And the process here is apparently quite rare. Clark estimates that it only happens in roughly one out of every one hundred sperm whales, and of course, sperm whale populations worldwide were greatly reduced by commercial whaling from roughly like eighteen hundred till the nineteen eighties or so, and populations are probably recovering now but still reduced from where they were.
So ambergrease has probably always been a pretty rare nature fact, and it's probably even much rarer now than it was hundreds of years ago.
Wow, that's amazing. And I think there's some speculation that the ambergrease is actually what winds up killing the whale in yeah, a lot of these instances, because it has this intestinal blockage that eventually right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that is speculated to be the case, that it builds up until finally nothing gets around it and the whale dies from it. And that would go again to like the observer and no, this is just a fictional novel, so, and it's from the nineteenth century, so very likely to be wrong. But it kind of fits with like Melville's observation that it was like a sick, emaciated whale in which it was found.
Yeah, I'm really impressed by I feel like that is like score one one out of like thousands for Melville being scientifically correct about anything.
Yeah, a lot of stuff is wrong in Moby Dick, but it's always wrong in an interesting way.
You're making me want to revisit mobi deck for the first time in my entire life.
Oh well, you know, do as you will. But yeah, I agree, there's a lot of interest to be found
in it. And it's not just the chowder. But speaking of chowder, hey, I want y'all to tell me about ambergres as food because one of the most shocking things to me after learning about the substance is not only was it used in these small quantities as like a fixative and perfumes, not only was it used as many natural materials are as a as a medicine of various sorts, or as like a potency enhancer for people, it was also just used as a culinary item.
Yep, yepper's squidbeaks and intestinal leakage. Yeah, that's, as it turns out, has a lot of culinary uses throughout history. So I would like to start by actually quoting from Kemp because he wrote in his book about using ambergris as a seasoning and okay, so he reports it crumbles
like truffle. I fold it carefully into the eggs with a fork, rising and mingling with curls of steam from the eggs, the familiar odor of ambergris begins to fill and clog my throat, a thick and unmistakable smell that I can taste. It inhabits the back of my throat and fills my sinuses. It is aromatic, both woody and floral. The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest floor and of the delicate really undersides of mushrooms that grow in damp and shaded places.
I want to cry, tears streaming down my face with the beauty of eating this whale poop, like I'd like the how, even knowing what, knowing what we know, and knowing that he knows what we know, because he also writes about it in his book of like where this comes from the description of it, like filling his throat like that in the same way that it folds up to clog the intestine rectum of the whale.
It's a very specific kind of poetry. Yeah. Yeah. A writer for Gourmet magazine reported in two thousand and eight that eggs cooked with ambergris are are good. Uh, don't go well with bacon, but we're good with toast.
Yeah, don't go well with bacon.
Yeah, Okay, interesting.
Wonder why, Like, I is it sort of too meaty on its own?
Maybe they were puzzled as well. They were kind of like, yeah, it didn't It didn't go well with the bacon, but the toast was fine. I feel like when.
You eat bacon, though, you're kind of there for the bacon, you know what I mean, Like the bacon is a big part of what why you got whatever you're eating. Yea, So maybe it's just like it was a distraction from the bacon.
I don't know.
Bacon is kind of a perfume of its own, and so maybe bacon, because it has those like smoky complex sweet aromas, doesn't play well with other very strong aromas.
Do you think that in the case yeah, I think so.
Yeah, because, yeah, like the smell of bacon is so distinct. I can see it again, never having smell ambergris, I can imagine that it kind of it messes up with the smell of the ambergris.
It messes up the smell of bacon. So it kind of clashes. You've got too many different kinds of mammal smell coming at you. Yeah yeah.
So so y'all mentioned that one of the things that might be affecting people's willingness to talk about ambergris or ambergris is is the fact of its legality, So, like, what's going on with that, right?
So, Okay, in international law, I think it's technically it's like it's like legal to the point that it's up to individual countries to regulate for or against it, as with any other protected animal product, any product that comes from a protected animal species. Okay. So yes, it is illegal in the United States as a clause in the Marine Mammal Protection Act of nineteen seventy two, but it's
not really prosecuted. Apparently, there have only been like nine reports of people, like like nine reported instances of people collecting ambergers in the US in the past ten years or so, and none of them come to actual prosecution. But yeah, laws vary by country. There have been recent arrests for its possession in India, but that its technical illegality does not prevent it from showing up on American menus, for example, in like posh bars, as an ingredient in
hot chocolate or snazzy cocktails. This one bartender working with it in Chicago back in twenty sixteen told Food fifty two it smells like a tide pool in your grandmother's basement in a good way. Apparently, yeah. There the cocktail they were using it in was like it was like a three rum blend with some pineapple kind of drink and and and apparently yeah, the ambergris added a hint of the ocean.
Okay, tidepool in your grandmother's basement. I can see that how that connects to like the decay or the decomposition molecules we talked about earlier, because it's like one in one sense smells like the ocean. It's kind of briny, but in the other sense of your grandmother's basement. I think one of the compounds was said to smell like mold or like feces, and so maybe the mold is the basement part.
Yeah, but then that floral wood note might be the grandma Yeah.
Okay, yeah, yeah, not the grandma's house, right.
Right, yes, definitely, yes, yes, but okay, all right, how did we at here? So older records are scant, But let's start with this Egyptian cookbook from thirteen hundreds that has a whole bunch of different medicinal like perfume, incense kind of recipes that list ambergris, but also does include a recipe for a dried apricot compote made with floral essences pomegranate, juice, and mint, and that you then put
in a vessel quote infused with smoke of ambergris. And because ambergris was often used as an incense, I'm thinking that fumigation might have been a popular way to flavored dishes with the stuff. Yeah, by smoking it kind of like smoking meat in it or something like that.
Yeah, oh okay, that's interesting. So I guess when I imagined it being used in food, I would have primarily thought just like directly adding it to the food. But you're saying, like, like the thing where you'd add the smoke of it in an enclosed container to like sort of I don't know, to perfume the food with the aroma of it, but you're not actually like chewing on pieces of it in this case, in.
That particular well, in that particular case, no, but certainly just chunks of it were being used. Okay. Another cook book right around fifteen hundred from India that had a lot of Persian influence. It was written for the Sultan
who is famous for his eccentric devotion to pleasure. Okay, this cookbook included a recipe for making these skiers of stewed meat that you would then rub down with saffron, white ambergris and rose water, and then cook again with rice, ginger, salt, and onions and serve with a good gravy whatever that means. And that sounds delicious.
Yeah, I want to eat this.
Yeah, very expensive, like saffron was and still is one of the most expensive things on the planet that people insist upon eating, and rose water would have been pricey at the time too, So this is truly a feast of pleasure. And that's just one example. There are dozens of recipes in the books Sweet and Savory Plus for perfumes that include ambergris.
Yes, and there were decadent persons shurbets sarbets once called they once called for ambergris as an ingredient alongside water and lemon And that's been a theme coming up in like ice cream or some kind of similar dessert.
Yeah, ambergris. Yeah. It might have spread to Europe through these kind of Arab Indian cultural exchange roots along the spice routes, and so by the fifteen hundreds, Ish cooks in the Italian courts were flavoring stuff like piscatti and other desserts with it, often paired with musk, like musk and ambergris in these baked goods and other sugary things.
By the sixteen hundreds, France had picked this combination up musk and ambergris, and a famed chef and cookbook author of Francois Pierre de lave Rene had a bunch of recipes calling for ambergris in this book of sweets that he published in Candied Fruits in Marzapan, in creams, in lemonade, and in wine.
Right, and beginning around sixteen sixty, English cooks started publishing recipes utilizing ambergris The English especially enjoyed cooking with it because it was rare and therefore luxurious. This is one of my favorite things, and we do topics like this. There's a part of me that wonders if there's like a willful surely it didn't come from a whales rectum, or.
If it even matters. It's rare.
Therefore we want it in our recipes to show that we can afford it. And a lot of these recipes were for desserts or something otherwise very fancy. Baked puddings made with bread or ground almonds were some of the most popular ways to use ambergris as a food ingredient, mostly sweet in the sweet variety, and ambergris also started showing up in medicinal drinks, alcoholic drinks like posset and punch, candies, and gelatines.
It was often again paired with musk or things like rose or orange flower water and with some warm spices, so especially considering how expensive sugar still was at this time, these were all like really show off kind of kind of recipes. It also showed up in possibly the first English recipe for ice cream, dating from around sixteen sixty five, which listed as suggested flavorings either mace or orange flower water or ambergreen.
Oh yeah, that's something I had seen this association with this early ice cream recipe. I have a question if ambergris if ambergrease works as a as a fixative, Like it's really good at making smells stick to surfaces and linger there, even smells of things that are mixed with it, not necessarily just its own smell. I wonder how that would affect its use in food, Like do you do
you want? I don't know. Is there some sense in which food pleasure could be enhanced by aromas being kind of like sticky year to surfaces even maybe including I don't know, the plate, the utensils, the inside of the mouth and things like that. Or is that an undesirable thing in food? I haven't haven't fully figured that out, but it seems like this fixative quality could affect its appeal as food as well.
Yeah, I wonder if it would maybe help stick around in a food some of the some of the scents and flavors that would otherwise kind of gas off and get lost to time, Like if you bake it into bread, that fresh bread smell might stick with the bread.
I don't know, seems possible.
Yeah, I feel like that they would be a much like the less the better, and a lot of spices at the time were that way, Like you want that kind of fragrance, but if you use too much then it gets overpowering. So I can see, I can see that ambergris would be valuable in that case of like I want the smell, but it sticks, so it kind.
Of less of whatever you're trying to.
Yeah, show up, which apparently could have led to a death. Oh intrigue, I have to bring the intrigue. Allegedly, King Charles the Second of England died by poisoning via his favorite breakfast, which was eggs and ambergris in sixteen eighty five, and some speculate that the ambergris may have hidden the taste of the poison. So also, a poisoning agent potentially will to kill someone.
Because it like it's so because the aroma is so strong, it would like mask other things.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you're just like soaking up that ambergris smell, You're not thinking about any poisons and then that's the end.
Wait, but his favorite breakfast was eggs and ambergres. So again, I'm wondering, is this just like big just chunks of it cut up in the eggs.
Or it's like it's like a shaving maybe maybe like shaving a little bit of it into the eggs the way that Camp was kind of talking about in the passage. Yeah, I don't know if he was inspired by Charles the Second Urn. Not here we are, okay, all right, moving from intrigue to Milton. We have to talk about paradise regained.
So so this was first published in sixteen seventy one, and in it Milton describes a feast worthy of royalty that the passage begins, a table richly spread in regal mode, with dishes piled and meats of noblest sort and savor, beasts of chase or foul of game, and pastry built or from the spit or boiled gris amber steamed. Ah.
Okay, so grease amber. There would just be another name for amber, grease, a sort of yeah.
Yeah.
People think that he probably just just transposed it because of for the for the meter, but yeah, partially because it is transposed like that. Future annotated editions of the work really like to remark on this. Also because people are just fascinated by ambergris. One note from seventeen fifty three has this really long passage about recent and contemporary
culinary use of ambergris uh the annatyite. The annotators cite it to a curious lady, which I think is rad If if anyone ever forgets my name, feel free to just be like, oh, some curious lady.
Yeah, do you file that under l or c or lady kama a curious.
That's that's that's a style guide question that h. But okay, So this curious lady uh says that it was previously the oh I can't French that the halgu of Queen Elizabeth's court, the how gut the posh, the posh in popular culinary thing that that word yeah, like a main ingredient in every course of a banquet, but especially on all manner of meats, and furthermore used to excess by the notorious Cardinal Wolsey of King Henry the eighths Court.
He was the one who like couldn't get his marriage and old so he was yeah anyway, And this curious lady furthermore reported that she had had it herself as a seasoning on a baked pudding, and of all of what she just said, I believe that part for sure.
That's a baked pudding. Putting in this context, did that mean like a like a dessert just generally some kind of dessert.
Share probably with probably the kind of thing that that Annie was talking about, something with like like eggs and cream and maybe bread or ground almonds as a kind of thickening base, and then and then baked until it's basically like a custard. Yeah. A lot of these, a lot of these recipes from these times, especially when when I got to England, were for like cream based or egg based things.
Can I fill in a piece of context about Paradise regained?
I would love you too, Yes, yeah, okay, So this is.
Of course, you know, sequel to Paradise Loss. So I was wondering in this story, like who's who's gonna eat the grease amber steamed? Like who's this feast?
For?
It is for Jesus, it's Satan. It's in the temptation and the wilderness scene from like the Gospels, So like after Jesus gets baptized, he goes out in the wilderness to fast for I think it's forty days and and Satan comes up to him and tries to tempt him, like, hey, stop fasting, eat this feast I've set out before you, And Jesus says, no, I judge these treats to be tricks.
Wow, just tricks.
After all, it seems funny that Satan would be like, what would Jesus really like? And He's like, yeah, Ambergrease, I've got it.
But right, but again Milton is talking about like like specifically Satan was steaming these meats with the ambergreas. Mmm.
Oh oh okay, I see your Yeah, I read that wrong. Yeah, so it's it's like perfuming the meats.
Yeah.
But also there could have been a layer of temptation here because another fun sound effect we have on our show. It comes up every time a food is an aphrodisiac, and this one was, at least according to Italian author, amongst a lot of other stuff Casanova, who allegedly added it to chocolate moose to use it as an afrodisiac in the seventeen hundred, So you know, could have been something else going on as well.
Have y'all noticed on Savor, like, is there a pattern to the types of food ingredients that are believed to be to have afrodiziak qualities. Is it kind of random or is it more like delicacies and luxury items or strange foods that are considered strange in a certain time and place, Like, what is there a pattern at all?
No, it's all foods. It's all foods ever have been by someone at some point considered an afrodisiac.
Yeah, we only have we found one instance where something was considered not so far, we still have a lot of topics to come.
Yeah, and it let us right, and it was let us but lettuce Hold your laughter, Joe, because lettuce also has been cited as an aphrodisiac. So, okay, I don't know what we're to take from this. I think it might have been a joke.
I think it was kind of satire, those like fourteen hundred jokes I can't really pick up on.
So he could have just been choking. Okay, Oh yeah, Yeah. I believe that there's been some sign topic inquiry into this in modern times concerning not lettuce, but uh but ambergris Uh. I feel like I kept reading, I didn't look into it, so I didn't like find the scientific paper, but I saw in a lot of places people refer to some study that had been done in rats where it made them randy. Yeah, so I don't.
Know, Okay, Yeah, I feel like a lot of the big ones we talk about are usually meat somehow like animal related.
But it is everything, Lauren is correct.
It is like pretty much every episode like oh yeah, at some point.
Someone thought this was an aftertas gag. Okay, going back to our amber grease is food timeline, okay. So so some of these recipes even eventually made it to America.
Amelia Simmons, who we talk about a lot on Savre, included in her seventeen ninety six book American Cookery, which was the first American cookbook actually published in America, a recipe for a kind of like whipped cream and egg white foam dessert sweetened with sugar and flavored with wine, lemon, peel, and musk or ambergris termed their amber gum, which stemmed from earlier English recipes for similar dishes.
In eighteen twenty six, influential and instrumental French chef billiat Severan recommended people mix about a shillings worth of ambergris in a mixture of sugar and chocolate for a tonic that was in the vein of coffee but wouldn't leave you over caffeinated.
Yeah. He described this hot chocolate as the chocolate of the afflicted. He recommended this mixture to quote any man who is drunk too deeply of the cup of pleasure, who finds his wit temporarily losing its edge, or who is tortured by a fixed idea. Oh wow, that's very Richard, by a fixed idea. Wow. Oh, I like that. We're bringing back the laxative concept. Together. It all goes around.
Oh boy, get that idea out.
Yeah. In the aforementioned Moby Dick, published in eighteen fifty one, Melville does talk about culinary uses of ambergris or ishmael I should say really in like sugar medicine drops in Turkish cooking, and as a flavoring in claret wine specifically so Yeah. As with many other flavorings, it mostly fell out of fashion when tropical spices and seasonings like cinnamon
and vanilla became more available and less expensive. By the time chemists synthesized one of those scent compounds in the mid nineteen hundreds, Amberger was pretty much relegated to perfume.
Yes, but as Lauren said, there are people doing stuff with it still, like in cocktails. I especially saw lot of like beverage applications, so it is still around, but yeah, not very common.
I would say, are the two of you interested in
trying ambergree flavored foods or if you have? If you have, I don't know, I don't know what the like the ethical issues with ambergris are that would make it, like why it is subject to you know, being a controlled animal product in some ways, I would assume that has something to do with like trying to discourage poaching or or harming of sperm whales, even though it does seem to be from what I can tell, generally collected not by killing the whale in a modern sense, but just
like found on a beach. But but yeah, so like if you put those concerns aside, whatever ethical concerns you have, like, would you be interested in trying it in food?
Absolutely? I will, I will say I do have.
I'd like I'm ready to try anything, but I am sensitive to really bad smells. Like one of the only times I've almost vomited in high school during our anatomy class was the smell of the al pellet. I didn't care about anything else. It sounds like ambergreen will be fine, but that's my only concern. I want to try it. I don't know how the smell go. I'm also the same with Darian, which we have long been waiting to try the smell. I don't know, but I want to try it.
How about you?
Oh yeah, I'm super intrigued. I mean, I think I would want to figure out first, like what is the deal with like why is it illegal and discouraged and all that is? Like, you know, if you were to actually buy some of it, is there a chance this is being like actually, like is a sperm whale being killed in order to retrieve this or something?
I think it really is what you were saying earlier. Where does people? Where does illegal people? Just or the government entity wants to discourage people from killing whims, which is cool, which is great. I'm super into that. But that's why an or national law. It's basically like, yeah, it's up to you.
Isn't it Also like not in a lot of places it's not. There aren't laws about it as a food because they don't necessarily consider it as a food. I think there's a lot of places where they don't even they haven't even thought.
Of that part. The FDA has generally recognized it. It's safe though, So yes.
Well in that case, yeah, I mean this, this poop is mighty, mighty interesting to me, and I would I would taste of the copper lith absolutely. Now I wonder when you get it. From what I understand, I think more often it would be sold maybe this is more in the in the sense of a perfumery, but more often it would be sold like as a tincture or
something like that. I don't know how easy it is to just like get a hunk of it too, as as you were talking about in Kemp's story, like shave off pieces like it's like it's a truffle that might be harder to get. I'm not quite sure.
But I'm not sure either. I didn't really look into it. I read some stories where people were talking about receiving it as a tincture and some stories where people had like a rock of it, And so I'm not without without doing more research, I can't. I can't tell you.
Well, Lauren, Annie, I have so greatly enjoyed you joining me on the show today, and I'm really really grateful that you took time out of your busy schedules to join us here today. I know, I know, we're all very busy around here, so it really means a lot. I greatly appreciate it. And hey, where where can people find your work to hear more of what you do?
Oh, you can find us on the Savor Podcast, where we do cover a bunch of things that I think are just in line with stuff to blow your mind, including fictional foods. Any kind of marine biology is always interesting when we talk about like scallops, what's going on there?
Lobsters low so, what is going on there?
What's going on exactly?
They're so cool?
Oh yeah, yes, yes, we have a lot of topics that I think have great crossovers. So you can find us there, and we are on all the social media's related.
Yeah, yeah, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at saver pod. As we say at the end of every episode, which is why that was so sang song you and I just said it. But yeah yeah, also right, yeah, Annie's on a show on a show called a Stuff Mom never told you. That's a podcast about like intersectional feminism. And I've got a short form show called brain Stuff with general science and history that Joe used to write for the YouTube version of back in the days when we did that.
That was some time ago. That was an that was an Ambergris seasoning lifetime ago. Absolutely well, once again, I really appreciate you joining me today and it has been such pleasure talking to you as always, you know.
This was thank you any any any time we can talk about squid beaks and whale poop.
Yep, we're there, all right, let's see to wrap things up here. Hey, if you're new to the show, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, kind of science and culture intersecting topics, where core episodes publish every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday of each week we read back listener mail and I'll give you the email address if you want to get in touch in just a moment. On Wednesdays, we run a short scripted episode called The Artifact or the Monster Fact or
even new forms of short scripted episodes are emerging. On Fridays, we do a show called Weird House Cinema where my co host Robert Lamb and I just watch weird movies and talk about them, well known or obscure, good or bad, all types of movies, as long as there's something strange about them, Let's see huge. Thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer JJ Posway. 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. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Plant is with Rat Rat Rat Rat