The Cauldron, Part 1

and cauldron bubble. Filliat of a finny snake in the cauldron boil and bake, I of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder's fork and blindworm's sting, lizard's leg and Howlett's wing for a charm of powerful trouble like a hell broth Boil and bubble, double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Welcome to to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. 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 what is that going to lead into? Well, of course we're gonna be talking about cauldrons and and certainly in Western traditions, I feel like one of the first places that one's mind goes is um is to go to act for a scene one of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Uh, this is the scene that we we just read from

round about the cauldron go. Uh. It's uh, and it does bring together a number of the ideas of the cauldron that will be discussed in these episodes. Uh. And of course it's just just a factuless scene in general, with which is doing their their their witchy best to make some sort of horrific potion. Now, obviously you have had cauldron's on the rain. 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 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. Uh. Certainly there's the the Asian tradition, which we'll probably get to first, but then there's this rich Western tradition going back to uh 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 but it is you need to ask ourselves, like, what do we

think of when we think of cauldron? Um. I know I instantly think, of course, of this scene from Macbeth, but I also instantly think back to a trio of early eighties film. As I think of beast Master, I think of Conan the Barbarian, and I also think it was both from nineteen two, but I also think of nineteen Clash of the Titans. All three of these have some sort of a cannibal stew going on some and 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 Green Sisters, who are part of the story of of Perseus and Medusa, and it's hard not to notice the similarities with the three which Sisters in Macbeth. There, Yeah, it's my understanding there is a connection here. These are essentially the ancient predecessors

of Macbeth's which is um. Now, as for the cannibal stoos. Yeah, I think it's a case where I'm just guessing Humber based on the timeline. I think they invoked it and Clashes of the Titans, and then either overtly or not, the makers of Beast Master and Conan and we're like, oh, we need to get in on that. That's that's a great get get 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 it's it's

a 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 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. H he has not seen Well, he's seen Um Clash of the Titans and loves it, but he hasn't seen the other two films. When I asked him, he said, well, I think of soup, and I think of Harry Potter, the Ladder of which of course is also linked to Western

traditions of 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 what you think about this, So I don't know if there's already in a ablished 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 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. Uh. 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. Yea. It is interesting to think about this because with the with the cauldron, you could sort of go cauldron, pot, croc pot, instant pot, and

and the closer you get the instant. Like the the instant pot, it does not have really any nefarious or magical connotations. It's thoroughly modern um, nothing to fear. And I feel like the further back through the terminology you go, yes, the stranger things get um because even pot is more

intimidating than croc pot. 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 gonna end up keeping the third which is bit from the the opening here, but there is a line in that where the um where the wid rhymes children with cauldron children being uh, this old term for like in trails. But I didn't do a deep dive into this terminology, but it's my understanding like that was that was already an archaic term, uh when Shakespeare used it or or you know, or and or a more specified term. But you do what you have to do

when you need a rhyme something with cauldron. Yeah, what else fits in their squadron? Not really? I mean, you can make it work, but why are 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 gotta put some spin on the pronunciation though that's like an eminem style style. Yeah, you gotta be a pro to make that work. So all in all, there is a rich tradition of cauldron's 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 um, I think my family is sick of hearing about it. You've been talking about souper lot. Did you make soup? No, it's too

hot for soup, that's the thing. Oh yeah, I mean we could have made a spato, 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 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. Near as well. But one one question that's interesting to get into is, Okay, well we're talking about cauldron's, were inevitably talked thinking about about soups in many cases, But do you need a pot or you need a metal potter? Do you need a pot at

all in order to make soup. I would have thought so. Uh, 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, um, and this is something that can be made watertight via the use of animal hides, and then one may fill this hole with water and of course food materials. You're 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 to 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 gonna 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 whole nice Okay, the hot stone goes in, then you've got a stew going. Yeah. Now, other perishable above ground bowls and pots apparently We're also used in different cultures with this technique UM, which is generally referred to as

stone boiling UM. And in 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 neander Dolls. And on a quick note about about the Chinese culture, Um, I know when we talk about the cooking with stones and cooking soup with stones, you destually think about the story of stone soup, which I believe in most tellings has no relation to to

to to stone boiling. However, Chinese American author Yan Cheng Compostine acted the classic story but with with the twist uh, first of all Chinese twist, setting it in um in ancient China, but also incorporating a stone boiling motif in this book called the Real Story of Stone Soup. Well, Rob, I know, I know you said everybody knows the story, but maybe some people don't. What's a quick version of

the stone soup? Well, the classic stone soup, say tail is that you know you have some some individual generally there's sort of a you know, a rogueish type character. Uh. There's actually a great adaptation of this with some additional elements in Jim Hinson's The Storyteller series. But here's this, uh, this man and he's he's cooking up some some water and he asked somebody passing by, excuse me, I'm making

some 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 then like, 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 beginning to get interested. Other passers buyers stop and they're like,

what's he doing? He's cooking stone soup. Uh. They asked him, well, how does it taste when he samples it? And he's like, well, it needs a little salt, So he doesn't have salt, but somebody is is now they're now invested in this process, and so someone brings some salt, but then he chased it again. Knowing these little peppers, So someone brings some

pepper before along. Of course, it needs some celery and needs some potatoes, It needs all these other ingredients, and at the end of the process, uh, 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 sort of an idea about how you can you can like hype bootstrap nothing into something. Yeah, yeah,

it's a it's a it's a wonderful tail um. But but yeah, in this this adaptation, it takes the stone boiling technique and factors it in, which is which I found was pretty clever. Now you might wonder what kind of evidence is there for stone soup um. 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. Uh. 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 earth oven cooking tradition. Oh yeah, okay, so this wouldn't even

necessarily always be something like soup. Like I know that there's some methods for like roasting meat, I think Mesoamerican culinary traditions where you'd like wrap some meat in um 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 if the if the hole in the ground is your level of cooking technology, it doesn't mean you're not coming up with with new and ingenious ways to tinker with that four am at, 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 miserable 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 of of of stone boiling. Now stone boiling, it does eventually lose out to other techniques,

especially container based cooking with pottery, etcetera. 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 and you have to keep adding new hot stones taking out the old stones, Um, 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 or it for a long time and it's not gonna burn or anything because there's enough water content in there that that that's gonna be fine. Yeah.

So one of another source I was looking at, there's a paper titled stone boiling, firecrack Rock and nut Oil published in the Wisconsin Archaeologists in two thousand nine by James Skibow and uh Skibo 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'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 of what you're actually brewing up. Oh yeah, okay, I can see that it was like

sticking to the rocks and stuff. Yeah. Uh. And and then I should also point out though there there is apparently evidence of stone boiling surviving into the advent of pottery, with the stones added to water inside of vessels, um so um. And then I also I believe examples of 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 or modern understanding of 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 wanna 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? Two thousand fifteen, paleo Anthropology Society. I'm and 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, therefore, 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 off thousand years ago than 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 can can 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 charted 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 is fragile and it's perhaps not ideal for people who are

traveling around. Uh So, uh this is this is quite interesting that that Fagan and Stiler bring up here, is that the usefulness of pottery, paired with its fragility, might have been a contributing factor for some group that had pottery to settle down, Like to 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. Uh So, when Fagan and Silo we're writing this is from the seventy grade Inventions of the ancient World, they were pointing to fourteen thousand b c. In Japan as being the the eliest oldest

known pottery discovery. However, after the publication of that book, a two thousand twelve paper um revealed that chin Rin 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.

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 published in Nature by Oliver Craig at All called Earliest

Evidence for the use of Pottery and uh. I also was looking at a write up of this in Science by Sid Perkins called first Evidence of Pottery used for Cooking um 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 You might assume pottery only arises among people who have adopted farming and an agricultural, settled way of life that allows them to have fixed homes, and uh, and you know forges and so forth, that this kind of industry of 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 um late Pleistocene pottery from Japan, a total of a hundred and one charred deposits from thirteen different sites all over the Japanese islands, and these would be pots associated with the Joeman culture that j. O. M. O. N. Craig and co authors here argue that what would have caused people to 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 the 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 or lakes, and so

they were not necessarily by the coast. The author's right. We demonstrate eight that lipids can be recovered reliably from charred surface deposits adhering to pottery dating from about fifteen thousand to eleven thousand, eight hundred calibrated years before present, and that that's again the incipient Joeman period, continuing the oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in most cases these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing freshwater and

marine organisms. So at the time of this paper, it seemed like the some of the earliest pots ever used for cooking, we're being used for cooking seafood. Uh though I guess actually I don't know. Is it still seafood if it's freshwater fish. I'm not sure that's a quandary. As well, More than three quarters of the charred deposits

indicated quote high trophic level aquatic food. 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 have carnivores above them, and then you'd have the top carnivores about 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 uh, these highly nutritious seafoods uh near these inland lakes and rivers, not necessarily by the shore.

That's fascinating because you have the first place my mind went was, okay, perhaps boiling some sort of crustaceans and so forth, because sometimes that's that's the best way to to get at these organisms and turn them into something you can you can you can eat. Uh. But but salmon. Now 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 uh glut of Santa at

your disposal. What are you gonna 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 wanted to discuss a few notes on what this type of pottery was. So again, this would have been the incipient Joeman culture uh Joe Mont. The Joeman people actually get their archaeological reference name from the 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 the ropes. So if you look up joem On 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 these early pots. First of all, they tend to be very small, and second they have round bottoms. Robb I attached a picture of one of these round bottom pots for you to look at, and uh, 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 gotta be like it needs to be flat so it can

sit on a table around the floor. Right, Yeah, these are not flat. You could not sit these on a table. They would roll over, can't stand up by itself on the flat surface. That's kind of odd and it makes you think about We'll wait a minute, then, how were they using these pots later? Joeman pottery shows increases in size, so bigger pots and tend to innovate a flat bottom. So it seems like the later pots would have been able to stand on the table or on the ground.

These earlier pots no, 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 the 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 um. I wonder if the small size of the bowls has to do with the fact that 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, and eventually moving onto 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 pot's 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 and 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's a reason anybody is 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 you know, people built things that didn't survive as much, like a holder of some kind. Yeah, or or also it could have to do I'm guessing here, what with making it more durable impacable for people on

the move. You know, thinking roughly about against like if you're going to if you're going to, uh, you know, create the walls of a castle to withstand battering rams and so forth. You don't want you don't you don't want a sharp right angle. You want to have a smooth, rounded corner. Uh. So, So I don't know, I don't know if that has anything to do with the design

of these pots. Were not. Oh yeah, the bottom does kind of look like an egg eggs or eggs are good DESI line, right, yeah, yeah, thank 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 this 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 roasted over the an open flame. What kind of advantage does cooking it in a pot with water bring? Well? One one important factor that has brought up in the literature is that boiling allows for faster and more thorough cooking of ingredients. Uh. And it also creates a tasty broth. Uh. Later on, this is also going to be important with 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 new trition 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 their 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. This reminds me of We did an episode of the show where we talked about what gravy. Gravy, Yeah, like gravy is essentially the legacy of of meat drippings

and so forth, the precious drippings. Oh yeah, we were I don't remember the name of the people, but they were. They were a group that lived in the region that is today Finland, and these people had some religious traditions of 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 event an episode on Ketchup where you're also dealing with kind of a dripping based condiment, that is that

isn't used as a way to transform other dishes. I believe also with with boiling your 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, like to a to a person with sensitive taste, but it's harder to like burn foods if you're boiling them in water. They will just

continue to leach. I mean, the the like 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. Now, there were there were certainly you do 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. Uh, 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 BC, copper smelting by six, bronze by the third and brass by the final centuries b C. Wrought iron by the third millennium BC, cast iron in the ninth century BC. He treated steel in crucible steel during the first millennium BC. I gotta say

that's a great luxury of the modern era. I appreciate being able to cook in 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 on the cauldron as it bubbles, And so I did want to mention briefly that I came across the paper about early evidence for the use of spices in cooking, 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 saul at All published in Plus one in August, and this study actually did analysis of what are called phytoliths that literally means plant rocks or plant stones, which are these tiny, uh, mineral structures that you can find inside plants, which are made out generally out of silica that is like taken up from the soils and 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 finaliths 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 thousand, seven hundred and fifty before present. Now, these clay cooking pots were found at uh the Neolithic sites in I believe modern day Denmark in Germany. And so they analyze the finaliths 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 alliaria petio latta, they write, quote as this seed has a strong flavor, little nutritional value, and the finalists are found in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues. These findings are the first direct evidence for the spice of food in European prehistoric cuisine. Wow, that's 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, uh probably from before the age of agriculture, or if they are practicing agriculture. It's early sort of proto agriculture. So you have either hunter gatherers or early farmers already putting putting spices into their food because they just gotta 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 is worth knowing about, 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. Um it.

This reminds me too of how in Chinese traditions, it's often described that like the the earliest tea traditions were not the we're not were not necessarily the consumption of tea as a drink the way we think of it now, but more as a soup, um as this thing that is prepared thusly. Uh 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 transformation. It can take um, you know, that which is inedible and make it edible. It can take uh, 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, uh that involve the supernatural in the divine. Oh. Yeah, so we're coming back with cauldron's right. Yeah, So we're gonna be back uh in the next episode talking about

cauldron traditions, particularly in Chinese mythology, Chinese traditions. Uh, there's a lot of wonderful stuff in there that gets gets very divine but also highly infernal love and 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. UM. I know that some of you out there have have written in about various sort of older ancient practices that have been you know, either revitalized or just you know, just explored as a as an as an exercise. So I would be very interested if anyone out there has done any any stone boiling and if you have any any tidbits you'd like to share about that experience, because I find the whole process fascinating, so right in with

any of that. Uh. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the core episodes published two days and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. On Monday's we usually do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we usually do an artifact or monster fact episode, which 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's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows. B Non nonn