The best bits

Offal, also called variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by culture and region, but includes most internal organs excluding muscle and bone.

The word shares its etymology with several Germanic words: Frisian ôffal, German Abfall (offall in some Western German dialects), afval in Dutch and Afrikaans, avfall in Norwegian and Swedish, and affald in Danish. These Germanic words all mean "garbage", or —literally— "off-fall", referring to that which has fallen off during butchering. However, these words are not often used to refer to food with the exception of Afrikaans in the agglutination afvalvleis (lit. "off-fall-meat") which does indeed mean offal. For instance, the German word for offal is Innereien meaning innards. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word entered Middle English from Middle Dutch in the form afval, derived from af (off) and vallen (fall).

When I was a kid in Serbia, when an animal was slaughtered, there was really no part which was not eaten.

Chicken was slaughtered maybe once every week and the whole animal except for the head and the intestines was eaten including all the internal organs. If the chicken was slaughtered for a feast, then the whole chicken was roasted, but normally it was cut into pieces which were roasted of fried or used in stews. Neck, feet, wings and internal organs were boiled for a stock (soup). Sometimes if you were lucky, you could find a boiled yet unlaid egg in your soup plate. Boiled bones were broken and the bone marrow was sucked out...

Pigs were only slaughtered once a year at the beginning of the winter. Lambs and sheep were only slaughtered for St Georges day. Calves and bulls were only slaughtered for really special occasions and communal feasts. Milk cows were basically never slaughtered unless they got too old.

Anyway if any of these large animals was slaughtered for a feast, then it was cleaned off the innards and roasted on spit whole. Otherwise, large cuts of meet (hams, shoulders, back, neck) were mostly dried and smoked. Smaller fatty cuts were cut into small bits, or minced and stuffed into sausages and salamis which were also dried and smoked. Belly fat in pigs was also dried and smoked and turned into speck and pancheta. This was the meat that was left for the winter. Internal organs, including intestines were the parts of the animal eaten first as they can't keep, and they were eaten fried, grilled or stewed. Heads were boiled and the meat including ears, snout, tong and skin was stripped off the bone. All of these bits were then added back to the water in which the head was boiled, and the whole lot was turned into a jelly using natural gelatin from the scull. The brains were a delicacy and were eaten boiled, fried or roasted. Scrotum and testicles were also eaten grilled or fried. Trotters (feet) were eaten stewed. Fat was also melted and used in cooking as geese. Blood was used for making blood sausages. Bone marrow was also eaten out of the cooked bones.

So basically nothing was wasted. 

When I was a kid, one of my duties during the lamb slaughter was to clean small intestine. You were given a thin stick and intestines in a bucket of water. You had to turn them inside out by using the stick and wash the insides.

The clean intestines were then cooked (grilled, boiled or stewed) and eaten. I remember once my grandmother passed by and said: "Don't wash it too well. Its the stuff that is inside the intestines, that is the best bit. It gives the intestines the good taste..."

I always thought that this was a very strange thing to say indeed. Eating the content of the intestines? Phew. I, like probably most people reading this article, regard the content of the stomach and the small intestine as horrible, dirty, smelly future poo. In doing so we are completely forgetting that the content of the stomach and the small intestine is actually the mix of food that was eaten and the enzymes secreted by the digestive tract and the bacteria living in it. The content of the stomach and the small intestine is the true "elixir of life". And it even has a name: chyme, pronounced "kaɪm". It comes from Greek χυμός pronounced "khymos",  meaning juice.

And it seems that our ancestors didn't let the chyme go to waste either.

Just what Neandertals ate has been more of a puzzle than paleo dieters might have you believe. Isotope analyses of fossilized bones and teeth suggest Neandertals ate very high on the food chain, with high-protein diets akin to those of wolves or hyenas. But wear marks on their teeth suggest the Neandertal diet consisted of more animals in colder high-latitude areas, and more of a mix of plants and animals in warmer areas. Tartar analyses support the idea that Neandertals ate their veggies, and have also suggested the presence of plants considered inedible, or at least unpalatable and non-nutritious. These include some plants like yarrow and chamomile with medicinal value, so one team suggested Neandertals self-medicated.

But now anthropologists Laura Buck and Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum suggest in Quaternary Science Reviews that instead, Neandertals may have picked up some of these plants by eating the stomach (and small intestine) contents of their prey. That would explain the presence of plants with no obvious nutritional value to hominids.

It was not only the Neanderthals that ate chyme. Other (so called Modern) humans ate it too. We know this because the custom of eating chyme was preserved until today in some cultures.

I already said that, judging by my grandmother's comment, it could have been once a custom in the Balkans.

The consumption of stomach contents is ascribed a ritual or spiritual value in several cultures. For the Kuria people from the Kenya - Tanzania border, eating the chyme is eating the life of the animal. It transfers to the taker the vital force of the slaughtered animal

The chyme is eaten because of its medicinal properties. The Damara people from Namibia consume the stomach contents (and dung, which may also preserve plant fragments) of ostrich and kori bustard in the treatment of various ailments, including dehydration, malaria, and burns. These birds are perceived to have medicinal power drawn from their size and eating habits.

Similarly, porcupine stomach is prized for its potency among  Khoisan of Southern Africa because of the animal’s diet of medicinal plants.

Lakota indians ate the guts of the buffalo because the buffalo guts were full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs specifically because of their medicinal value.

Another potentially crucial reason for the consumption of herbivore stomach contents is that it is a rich source of carbohydrates. Reindeer stomach is the best source of carbohydrates (with the exception of berries, which are equally rich in carbohydrates, but more seasonal) in the Greenland Inuit diet.

Greenland Inuit also ate ringed seal pup stomach with its content as a delicasy. They compared this chyme to cream cheese, and today when they want to eat something similar they eat Philadelphia cheese. 

Now don't think that it is only the "primitive" people who had such disgusting food habits. Chyme is the defining ingredient of pajata, a traditional Roman recipe.

Rigatoni con la Pajata (in Italian: Rigatoni con la Pagliata [riɡaˈtoːni kon la paʎˈʎaːta]) is a classic dish of the Roman Cuisine. The dish can be found in some traditional trattorias in Rome. Pajata is the term for the intestines of an "un-weaned" calf, i.e., only fed on its mother's milk. The intestines are cleaned and skinned, but the chyme is left inside. Then the intestine is cut in pieces 20 – 25 cm long, which are bound together with white thread, forming rings. When cooked, the combination of heat and the enzyme rennet in the intestines coagulates the chyme and creates a sort of thick, creamy, cheese-like sauce. These rings can be served simply seasoned and grilled (pajata arrosto) or in the traditional Roman dish in which pajata is stewed in a typical tomato sauce and served with rigatoni.

Now this is very very interesting. Why? Because how people got the idea to make cheese from milk is still a mystery, and maybe the answer to this mystery is chyme.

There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheese-making originated. The earliest secure evidence of cheese making dates back to 5,500 BCE in Kujawy, Poland. Milk extracts have been identified on 34 perforated pottery vessels or "cheese-strainers", which date back 7,500 years that have been excavated in Poland. It is unambiguous evidence for cheese-making in northern Europe during Neolithic times, scientists believe, and the findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature. Dairying seemingly existed around 4,000 BCE in the grasslands of the Sahara.

But how did people discover or invent cheese? If we want to answer that question, we first need to know what cheese is and how it is made from milk.

Cheese is a food derived from milk that is produced by coagulation (curdling) of the milk protein casein. It comprises proteins and fat from milk, usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats, or sheep. During production, the milk is usually acidified, and adding the enzyme rennet causes coagulation. The solids are separated and pressed into final form. Some cheeses have molds on the rind or throughout.

So to get the milk to turn to cheese we need rennet. What is rennet?

Rennet is a complex of enzymes produced in the stomachs of ruminant mammals. Ruminants are mammals that are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion, principally through microbial actions. The process typically requires the fermented plant food (known as cud) to be regurgitated and chewed again. The process of rechewing the cud to further break down plant matter and stimulate digestion is called rumination. The word "ruminant" comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again". There are roughly 150 species of ruminants which include both domestic and wild species. Ruminating mammals include cattle, goats, sheep, giraffes, yaks, deer, antelope, and some macropods.

So ruminant mammals produce rennet in their stomachs. But rennet is not produced by the ruminant mammals throughout their lives. It is only produced by suckling young animals before they start eating grass. Chymosin, the key component of rennet, is a protease enzyme that curdles the casein in milk. In this way it helps the young mammals digest their mothers' milk. 

This is the interesting bit. This means that cheese exists in nature and didn't need to be "invented". Cheese is the chyme found in stomachs and small intestine of the suckling young of the ruminant mammals. Now knowing that our hunter gatherer ancestors ate chyme of killed animals, they must have very quickly realized that chyme from different animals tastes different and some taste way better than others. And being good hunter gatherers who know the habits of their pray, they probably soon realized that the chyme of baby sheep, goats, cows is the milk that they sucked, and which was somehow, magically turned into this tasty goo inside their stomachs and small intestines? All that was left to do then was to try to reproduce what naturally happens in the stomachs of the suckling young ruminant mammals. If this milk chyme was a delicacy, a sought after delicacy, which was only available during the suckling season, then there was a big incentive for people to try to make more of it and at the time when there are no suckling young ruminant mammals that can be killed for their chyme. So why not get the stomach out of a lamb, tie it on one end, pour milk into it, tie it on the other end, leave it and see what happens...and bingo...We have milk chyme or as we like to call it today milk curds. 

The currently accepted theory that tries to explain the invention of cheese is this. Since animal skins and inflated internal organs have provided storage vessels since ancient times for a range of foodstuffs, it is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of a ruminant, resulting in the milk being turned to curd and whey by the rennet remaining in the stomach. 

But maybe these storage vessels made from stomachs of ruminant mammals are the result of the original attempts to make chyme. 

You can make water bottles (aka waterskin) from the stomachs of larger animals. Thoroughly flush the stomach out with water, then tie off the bottom leaving the top open. 

Boil a pot of water.  Take the water off the heat and place the stomach in it.  Allow it to sit for 2 hours. 
Empty the water, boil another batch of water, and place the stomach in it again to soak for 2 hours.  Continue this until the water is clear after soaking.
Turn the stomach inside out and scrape away the lining with a dull knife while holding the stomach under warm water.  When the water becomes cloudy, replace it with fresh warm water.  Continue until the inner lining of the stomach is clean.  Be careful to not puncture the stomach.
Boil a pot of water.  Take the water off the heat and place the stomach in it.  Soak for 30 minutes.
Sew one end of the stomach to close it.  Roll the end over the seam and sew it again.

You can see that the above process will remove the stomach lining which contains all the rennet and it would be hard for the container made in such way to turn milk into cheese.  It is of course possible that badly cleaned stomach would have enough rennet left to indeed turn milk into cheese. 

I believe that the bags made from cleaned but not scraped or boiled baby animal stomachs were deliberately used to produce milk chyme, which we today call cheese. Like this dry sheep stomach bag, that is used for cheese fermenting process on a farm in Darguziai village in Lithuania. One stomach bag can be used for cheese production for the whole year.

Now we actually have the proof that this is exactly how the original cheese was made. The proof is the ancient Sardinian cheese called ‘Cazu de Crabittu’  (literally 'rennet of baby goat') . It is produced in Sardinia and dates back probably to Neolithic times. It is made directly in the fourth and final stomach, or abomasum, of a suckling goat, because it contains many enzymes responsible for the digestion – or in this case the coagulation – of milk.

Traditionally, just before killing a goat kid, the shepherd leaves it to suckle its mother milk. He then separates the abomasum from the other parts of the intestines, which are used for other purposes.

The abomasum is emptied, and the milk is filtered with a simple net then returned to the stomach. The stomach is rubbed on the outside with salt and hung to dry (in a cellar, for example) for some months. After the maturation, we slice open the stomach and spread small amounts of the cheese onto ‘pane carasau’, a traditional flat bread which is very thin. In pastoralist circles, the cheese is even referred to as ‘Sardinian viagra’, or ‘faede arrettae’ in Sardo. The taste of the cheese is different every time, because the milk is raw and because the goats live freely eating many wild plant species. The result is a super tasty and strong creamy cheese with different nuances, spicy, sweet, sour, and bitter all combined with a persistent wild animal aroma. When you taste ‘Su Cazu de Crabittu’ you will never forget the taste.

Now making cheese in lamb stomachs is great, but look at the size of it. If you want to make large amounts of cheese you really need to be able to use bigger containers. To do so rennet needed to be obtained from baby animal stomachs. 

Production of natural rennet

Rennet is extracted from the inner mucosa of the fourth stomach chamber (the abomasum) of young, unweaned ruminant mammals. If rennet is extracted from older animals (grass-fed or grain-fed), the rennet contains less or no chymosin, but a high level of pepsin and can only be used for special types of milk and cheeses. As each ruminant produces a special kind of rennet to digest the milk of its own species, milk-specific rennets are available, such as kid goat rennet for goat's milk and lamb rennet for sheep's milk.

Traditional method

Dried and cleaned stomachs of young unweaned ruminant mammals are sliced into small pieces and then put into salt water or whey, together with some vinegar or wine to lower the pH of the solution. After some time (overnight or several days), the solution is filtered. The crude rennet that remains in the filtered solution can then be used to coagulate milk. About 1 g of this solution can normally coagulate 2 to 4 L of milk.

Once you have rennet you can use it to curdle milk in containers which were not made from stomachs, like earthen pots, or wooden barrels or sheep skins. Cheese is still made in sheep skin bags in Montenegro:

So once you had the whole rennet thing figured out, the only other thing really that needed to be invented was how to turn milk chyme, milk curd, into hard cheese which can be preserved, transported and stored. To do that you need to add salt to the curds, press them and dry them. Any idea how this happened?

But the fact that cheese occurs naturally as the chyme from the stomachs and small intestine of the young unweaned ruminant mammals opens another interesting possibility. Our hunter gatherer ancestors could have eaten cheese millenniums before the first of these ruminant mammals were domesticated. Hunters which lived off the large herds of migrating ruminant mammals would have eaten whole animals including stomach content and stomach itself. This means that they would have been ingesting not only milk solids found in stomachs of baby animals, but also stomach cells and bacteria and enzymes and all the other chemicals linked with milk digestion. Is it possible that it is the long term ingestion of this combination of things rather than just milk, that eventually resulted in the change of human stomachs and small intestines and allowed these hunters to eventually start digesting milk itself?  

Anyway I think that this is an interesting story. What do you think?

Acorns in ancient texts

A few months ago I have published several articles about oaks and acorns and their almost symbiotic link with people since Palaeolithic times.

In my first post entitled "Oaks", I tried to answer the question why were oak trees and oak groves considered sacred in the past? I proposed that the reason for this veneration could be the fact that the oaks are one of the most useful trees in the world. At the end of the post I mentioned that the oaks were particularly valued as a source of acorns which were in the past used as human food world wide.

In my second post entitled "Acorns in archaeology" I presented archaeological evidence we have for human consumption of acorns during the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper age, Bronze age and Iron age.

In my third post entitled "How did oaks repopulate Europe" I discussed the possibility that it was people who brought oaks back into Europe after the last ice age. I argued that people venturing up north, brought acorns with them as food and either deliberately or accidentally planted them.

In my fourth post entitled "Eating acorns" I tried to answer the question whether the acorn was the original corn and whether this is why are Thunder deities which are linked with oaks are also linked with agricultural grain cults?

In my fifth post entitled "Christmas trees from garden of Eden" I talked about the origin of Christmas trees (pine and oak). I discussed the possibility that these trees were considered the trees of life because they were the main sources of food during the Mesolithic. I ask whether these two trees are somehow connected to the ancient idea of the garden of Eden, the Golden age "when humans enjoyed the spontaneous bounty of the earth without labour in a state of social egalitarianism"?

Finally in my sixth post entitled "Bulaun stones" I wrote about the possibility that the so called Bulaun stones from Ireland are ancient acorn grinding stones, like the ones we find in North America.

In this post I will list all the references to the human consumption of acorns found in ancient (pre medieval) texts. I will present the list of references to the human consumption of acorns found in medieval and modern historical and ethnographic texts in my next post.

This is a coin minted in Arcadia, Mantineia; c. 420-385 BC.

Nicochares, who lived in the 4th century BC, was an Athenian poet of the Old Comedy. In one of his plays we find this line: “Tomorrow we will boil acorns instead of cabbage To treat our hangover.” I want to thank "SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE" blog for pointing this fragment to me.

Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) in Argonautica, talks about the time when only acorn eating Arcadians lived in Greece. 

“...when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, before the Danai and Deukalion races came into existence, and only the Arcadians lived, of whom it is said that they dwelt on mountains and fed on acorns, before there was a moon.”

Diodorus Siculus (60 - 30 BC), a Greek historian, in his "Library of History"  talks about wild Arcadian acorn eating warriors.

"When the Lacedaemonians were setting out to conquer Arcadia,1 they received the following oracle:

Arcadia dost thou demand of me?
A high demand, nor will I give it thee.
For many warriors, acorn-eaters all,
Dwell in Arcadia, and they will ward
Thee off. Yet for my part I grudge thee not.
Tegea’s land, smitten with tripping feet,
I’ll give to thee, wherein to dance and plot
The fertile plain with measuring-line for tilth."

Pausanias (110 - 180 AD), a Greek Geographer, in his Description of Greece, described the founding of the kingdom of Arcadia by Pelasgus.

"...Pelasgus on becoming king invented huts that humans should not shiver, or be soaked by rain, or oppressed by heat. Moreover; he it was who first thought of coats of sheep-skins, such as poor folk still wear in Euboea and Phocis. He too it was who checked the habit of eating green leaves, grasses, and roots always inedible and sometimes poisonous. But he introduced as food the nuts of trees, not those of all trees but only the acorns of the edible oak. Some people have followed this diet so closely since the time of Pelasgus that even the Pythian priestess, when she forbade the Lacedaemonians to touch the land of the Arcadians, uttered the following verses:

In Arcadia are many men who eat acorns, who will prevent you;

It is said that it was in the reign of Pelasgus that the land was called Pelasgia..."

Though Pausanias was writing about what to him was antiquity, he notes that still in his own time, the Arcadians were fond of acorns.

Claudius Aelianus (175 – 235 AD), often seen as just Aelian, a Roman author and teacher of rhetoric, in his Various History. Book III, also writes that Arcadians ate acorns.

"The Arcadians fed on Acorns, the Argives on Pears, the Athenians on Figs, the Tyrinthians on wild Figs,24 the Indians on Canes, the Carmans on Dates, the Maotians and Sauromatians on Millet, the Persians on Turpentine and Cardamum."

Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus (129 – 216 AD), better known as Galen, a prominent Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher, wrote "acorns afford as good nourishment as many sorts of grain; that in ancient times men lived on acorns alone, and that the Arcadians continued to eat them, long after the rest of Greece had made use of bread corn."

Strabo (63 BC - 24 AD), a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian, in his Geography writes about Lusitanians in Iberia that they ate acorn as staple food for two thirds of the year.

"...that they lead a simple life, are water-drinkers, sleep on the ground, and let their hair stream down in thick masses after the manner of women, though before going into battle they bind their hair about the forehead. They eat goat's-meat mostly, and to Ares they sacrifice a he-goat and also the prisoners and horses; and they also offer hecatombs of each kind, after the Greek fashion — as Pindar himself says, "to sacrifice a hundred of every kind." They also hold contests, for light-armed and heavy-armed soldiers and cavalry, in boxing, in running, in skirmishing, and in fighting by squads. And the mountaineers, for two-thirds of the year, eat acorns, which they have first dried and crushed, and then ground up and made into a bread that may be stored away for a long time..."

Virgil (70 - 19 BC), a Roman poet, in his Georgics claims that acorns were the first human staple food which was later replaced by corn.

"O Liber [Dionysos] and bounteous Ceres [Demeter], if by your grace Earth changed Chaonia’s acorn for the rich corn ear, and blended draughts of Achelous [water] with the newfound grapes."

"Ceres [Demeter] was the first to teach men to turn the earth with iron, when the acorns and the arbutes of the sacred wood began to fail, and Dodona withheld her food [acorns]."

Apuleius (124 - 170 AD), a Roman writer, in his The Golden Ass hails Ceres for replacing the barbaric diet of acorns with the civilized diet of grain.

"At one time you [Egyptian Isis] appear in the guise of Ceres [Demeter], bountiful and primeval bearer of crops. In your delight at recovering your daughter [Persephone], you dispensed with the ancient, barbaric diet of acorns and schooled us in civilizes fare; now you dwell in the fields of Eleusis."

Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD), a Roman Poet, in his Amores repeats that acorns were the original human staple food and that Dodona was goddess of old agriculture (oaks and acorns) just like  Ceres was the goddess of new agriculture (corn).

"Here comes the annual festival of Ceres:
my girl lies alone in an empty bed.
Golden Ceres, fine hair wreathed with ears of wheat,
why must your rituals spoil our pleasure?
All peoples, wherever, speak of your bounty, Goddess,
no other begrudges good to humanity less.
Before you, the bearded farmers parched no corn,
the word threshing-floor was unknown on the Earth,
but oak-trees, the first oracles, carried acorns:
these and tender herbs in the grass were our food.
Ceres first taught the seeds to swell in the fields,
and first with sickles cut the ripened sheaves:
first bowed the necks of oxen under the yoke,
and scarred the ancient earth with curved blade."

Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 AD), a Roman writer and naturalist, in his Natural History gives detailed description of various known types of oaks and their acorns and explains which of them can be used as food. One of the oak types he lists is called Æsculus which means edible. He also says:

"It is a well-known fact that acorns at this very day constitute the wealth of many nations, and that, too, even amid these times of peace. Sometimes, also, when there is a scarcity of corn they are dried and ground, the meal being employed for making a kind of bread. Even to this very day, in the provinces of Spain, we find the acorn introduced at table in the second course: it is thought to be sweeter when roasted in the ashes. By the law of the Twelve Tables, there is a provision made that it shall be lawful for a man to gather his acorns when they have fallen upon the land of another.

The varieties of the glandiferous trees are numerous, and they are found to differ in fruit, locality, sex, and taste; the acorn of the beech having one shape, that of the quercus another, and that, again, of the holm-oak another. The various species also, among themselves, offer a considerable number of varieties. In addition to this, some of these trees are of a wild nature, while the fruits of others are of a less acrid flavour, owing to a more careful cultivation. Then, too, there is a difference between the varieties which grow on the mountains and those of the plains; the males differ from the females, and there are considerable modifications in the flavour of their fruit. That of the beech is the sweetest of all; so much so, that, according to Cornelius Alexander, the people of the city of Chios, when besieged, supported themselves wholly on mast. The different varieties cannot possibly be distinguished by their respective names, which vary according to their several localities. The quercus and the robur we see growing everywhere, but not so with the æsculus; while a fourth kind, known as the cerrus, is not so much as known throughout the greater part of Italy. We shall distinguish them, therefore, by their characteristic features, and when circumstances render it necessary, shall give their Greek names as well."

Hesiod (750 - 650 BC), a Greek poet, in his Works and Days, asserted that acorns were staple human food:

"But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to the men of the land, and go not aside from what is just, their city flourishes, and the people prosper in it: Peace, the nurse of children, is abroad in their land, and all-seeing Zeus never decrees cruel war against them. Neither famine nor disaster ever haunt men who do true justice; but light-heartedly they tend the fields which are all their care. The earth bears them victual in plenty, and on the mountains the oak bears acorns upon the top and bees in the midst. Their woolly sheep are laden with fleeces; their women bear children like their parents. They flourish continually with good things, and do not travel on ships, for the grain-giving earth bears them fruit."

Lucretius (99 - 55 BC), a The Roman poet and philosopher,  also tells us that acorn decked oak boughs were carried in procession in the rites of the Eluesian Mysteries, so important was the oak to people's lives. He also says in Of The Nature of Things that 

"during the savage period of mankind soft acorns were man's first and chiefest food".

Oribasius or Oreibasius (320 – 403 AD), a Greek medical writer, also wrote about the the acorns as human food (as quoted by Abu Rihan Burini, the 10th century Iranian scientist).

"Acorn’s nutritional value is superior to that of [other] fruits, and even approximates that of the grains with which bread is made; and in the past, people used to live on balūṭ alone."

4th century BC Greek philosopher Plato in his Republic, says that when Socrates imagines founding a city full of people who live moderately, he creates a menu for this city, and on it are berries, chickpeas, and, finally acorns...

In Assyrian records from the Harran district, from the time of the king Sargon the second (720 - 700 bc), we find inventory of "belut" (white oak) trees. We know from ethnographic records that acorns of these white oaks are used as food.

In Sumerian mythology and literature we find a character called Lugalbanda who features as the hero in two Sumerian stories dated to the Ur III period (21st century BCE), called by scholars Lugalbanda I (or Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave) and Lugalbanda II (or Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird). In the story "Lugalbanda and the Anzud bird" we find the reference to eating acorns.

"...The banks of the mountain rivers, mothers of plenty, are widely separated. With my legs I stepped over them, I drank them like water from a waterskin; and then I snarled like a wolf, I grazed the water-meadows, I pecked at the ground like a wild pigeon, I ate the mountain acorns."

4th century AD Roman poet Prudentius comments that "acorn bread was imported into Rome from Sardinia when there was a shortage of grain"...

According to the 16th century Desiderius Erasmus’s Adagia, "Satis Quercus", literally "Enough of the Oak", is a Latin proverb alluding to a supposed acorn diet in the days before the use of corn was discovered, before people were civilised...

So these are all the ancient historical record of acorn eating which I managed to find so far.  I would be more than grateful to anyone who can send me any reference that I have missed so that I can update my post. I am particularly interested in ancient North African, Near and Far Eastern records. We know that people in these areas consumed acorns as staple starch food from Mesolithic time to the 20th century and in some areas they still do. So there must be more records of this in ancient texts from those areas.

Anyway stay happy and healthy. And keep smiling. 

Bullaun stones

In my post about eating acorns, I said that people had to invent quite a few things in order to move from eating acorns as occasional snacks to eating acorns as staple starch food. One of these acorn eating inspired inventions was a grinding stone. In archaeology, a grinding slab, or grinding stone is a stone artifact generally used to grind various materials into usable size crumbs, though some grinding slabs were used to shape other ground stone artifacts. Some grinding stones are portable; others are not and, in fact, may be part of a stone outcropping. The grinding slabs or grinding stones work through crushing and scraping actions produced by the motion of the movable part, pestle, over the static part, mortar. Any matter which is softer than the material from which the mortar and pestle are made and which is not viscose, will be crushed or scraped into progressively smaller bits. The longer you apply the grinding motion the finer the bits become. Grinding stones  are made of large-grained materials such as granite, basalt, or similar tool stones.

There are two general types of grinding stones: saddle and cup (conical) grinding stone.

This is an example of a saddle grinding stone from Ojibwe tribe from the Great Lakes area USA:

This is an example of a cup grinding stone from Mariposa county in California USA:

This is an example of a combined saddle and cup grinding stone. The hole in the rock was used like cup grinding stone and the flat surface around it was used like a saddle grinding stone.

On the next picture you can see a large boulder communal grinding stone. These types of grinding stones are also a combination of the saddle and cup grinding stones with multiple conical grinding holes surrounded with flat surfaces used as saddle grinding stones. Here is a great example  of a communal grinding stone from Yosemite national park:

In the book entitled "Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity Their History, Customs and Traditions" you can see the picture of the same grinding stone with pestles still in the holes. These are rude mortars and pestles for grinding acorn meal. The holes have been worn in the granite by constant use.

In this great documentary film called Kumeyaay story "Life Under the Oaks", Kumeyaay people talk about gathering, processing and eating acorn while using one of the boulder communal acorn grinding sites.

For thousands of years Native American women all over America ground acorns, nuts, and later maize (corn) with grinding stones like the ones shown on the above pictures. Here is a picture of  an old Indian woman preparing acorn meal from "The Algonquian Confederacy of the Quinnipiac Tribal Council" website.

On this picture from the Journal of San Diego History you can see that acorns were also ground using saddle grinding stones.

So you can see that Native americans used both cup (conical) and flat saddle grinding stones for grinding acorns. 

As I said in my post about eating acorns I believe that the invention of the grinding stones was a byproduct of the invention of the acorn breaking and leaching process. The people trying to quickly leach acorns for food needed to first shell the acorns. Breaking the acorn shell and separating the acorn from the shell is the most difficult part of acorn food preparation. Acorns have an elastic shell that resists slow sideways pressure. The best way to break the acorns shell is to put the flat end (the side that used to have the cap) on a firm surface and hit the pointy end with a stone. This process of breaking the acorn shells often resulted in broken and crushed acorns. I believe that people leaching acorns would have gathered whole and broken acorns and leached them together. And they would very quickly notice that the crushed pieces leached quicker, and that smaller the bits are the quicker the leaching is. So people would start crushing all the acorns before leaching. While crushing the acorns, people noticed that just whacking the acorns with a stone scattered the bits everywhere. But if they gently broke the shell, took the acorn out, placed it on a flat stone, and then pressed the acorn with another stone and moved the pressing stone in a scraping, grinding motion over the acorn, all the bits would stay on the bottom flat stone. I believe that this is how grinding was invented. 

This is the grinding motion used for grinding on a saddle grinding stone:

People who were crushing and grinding acorns soon noticed that if the mortar stone had a cup like hole, then you could crush the acorns and grind them coarsely quickly without bits flying everywhere. People also realised that if the mortar stone had a cup like hole, they could use rotating grinding motion which is also much more efficient.

This is the grinding motion used for grinding on a cup grinding stone:

As I said in my post about the acorns in archaeology, the earliest grinding stones are all associated with the acorn eating cultures. At the moment the earliest dated grinding stones were found in Upper Paleolithic sites in China (found to have been used for grinding plant food including acorns) and in Mesolithic sites in Morocco and Levant (found to have been used for grinding plant food including acorns). But I firmly believe that even earlier ones will be found. Also the latest paleobotanical data actually confirms that the food traces found on the grinding stones found in a lot of early "agricultural" sites were actually of acorns, which meant that the grinding stones in these societies were primarily used for grinding acorns. 

But once the grinding stone was invented as a tool for grinding acorns, people quickly realised that it can be used for grinding other things. Ethnographic evidence and ancient historical texts show that a wide range of foodstuffs and inorganic materials were processed using grinding stones (or as they are also known as, querns or mortars), including nuts, seeds, fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, meat, bark, pigments, temper and clay. Grinding stones were also widely used in grinding metal ores after mining extraction. The aim was to liberate fine ore particles which could then be separated by washing for example, prior to smelting. Also, finely ground ore requires smaller fire to be heated and melted which makes it easier and faster to transform it into molten metal in primitive smelting pits. The earliest example of use of mortars in metallurgy can be found in Vinča culture where grinding stones were used for grinding cinnabar ore. One of the earliest uses for grinding stones was probably for the manufacturing of ochre and other pigments. You can read how this was done in this great article entitled "How to paint a mammoth".

In my post about the acorns in archaeology, I said that I could not find any mention of acorns in archaeological material from Ireland and Britain. This makes these two places the only two places in Europe where acorns were not found in archaeological sites. Does this mean that people in Ireland and Britain did not eat acorns when everyone else in the northern hemisphere did? I don't think so. We know from ethnographic and historical records that people in both countries ate acorns during hard times even in relatively recent times. This means that there is no chance that acorns were not consumed by people in Ireland and Britain during Mesolithic and Neolithic time.

As I said in my post about how oaks repopulated Europe, oaks reached Eastern Britain by 7500 BC. Oaks reached Ireland very soon afterwards. I believe that oaks were brough into both Britain and Ireland by hunter gatherer groups exploring the western coast of Europe in dugout canoes and I gave detailed explanation why I believe that to be the case in my post "how did oaks repopulated Europe".

We know from the archaeological records that the first humans arrived around 9,000 years ago (7,000 BC). This dating is based on the material recovered from the Mount Sandel Mesolithic site which is the earliest Mesolithic settlement found in Ireland. Storage pits found at the site are of the same basketed dug in storage pits type found in other acorn eating cultures in Evroasia at that time and later. So there is a strong possibility that the Mount Sandel people also ate acorns. At the time when Mount Sandel people lived in Ireland, the island was predominantly covered in a blanket of woodland. Oak and Elm were well established, with Scots Pine growing on the lower slopes of some uplands. There were two major woodland types namely, mature deciduous Oak Woods in the lowlands and valleys with an abundance of ferns, mosses and liverworts, and the Pine Forests on poorer soils with ling heather, grasses and bracken occurring in the ground layer. Some birch woodlands would have also existed on poorer soils. Other species such as Rowan would have flourished in natural openings in the forest canopy, along with whitebeam, holly, ivy and honeysuckle. These forests were home to animals, some of which are extinct in Ireland today, such as brown bear, wolf and boar, while others, such as fox, pine marten and stoat, still occur. The forests covered most of Ireland apart from exposed coastal areas, lake edges and the more exposed mountain tops. Alder and ash were still uncommon in Ireland 8,500 years ago but they expanded to become common around 500 years and 2,000 years later respectively. 

These early inhabitants were Mesolithic hunters, fishers and gatherers. And as we see in all the other major Mesolithic cultures, settled hunter gatherers living in well established mixed oak forests all ate acorns and other nuts as their staple starch food. Why would the Irish Mesolithic hunter gatherers be an exception? Why would they ignore the most abundant and the easiest to get food source which was everywhere around them? Well I don't think they did. And here is why:

Have a look at these three pictures:

No these are not acorn grinding stones from Native American acorn eating cultures archaeological sites. These are bullaun stones found in Ireland. This is what official archaeology has to say about bullaun stones:

A bullaun stone (Irish: bullán) is the term used for the depression in a stone which is often water filled. Natural rounded boulders or pebbles may sit in the bullaun. The size of the bullaun is highly variable and these hemispherical cups hollowed out of a rock may come as singles or multiples with the same rock.
Local folklore often attaches religious or magical significance to bullaun stones, such as the belief that the rainwater collecting in a stone's hollow has healing properties. 

Ritual use of some bullaun stones continued well into the Christian period and many are found in association with early churches, such as the 'Deer' Stone at Glendalough, County Wicklow. The example at St Brigit's Stone County Cavan still has its 'cure' or 'curse' stones. These would be used by turning them whilst praying for or cursing somebody. In May 2012 the first cursing stone to be found in Scotland was discovered on Canna. It has been dated to circa 800. The stones were latterly known as 'Butterlumps'.

St. Aid or Áed mac Bricc was Bishop of Killare in 6th-century. At Saint Aid's birth his head had hit a stone, leaving a hole in which collected rainwater that cured all ailments, thus identifying it with the Irish tradition of Bullaun stones.

Possibly enlarged from already-existing solution-pits caused by rain, bullauns are, of course, reminiscent of the cup-marked stones which occur all over Atlantic Europe, and their significance (if not their precise use) must date from Neolithic times.

Now am i the only one who sees similarity between the acorn grinding stones from North America and bullaun stones? There are thousands of bullaun stones scattered throughout Ireland. If any of them was found in North America, they would have been immediately classified as acorn grinding stones. How is it possible that "we still don't the precise original use of these stones"? As I said already Ireland was once covered with mighty oak forests and people who lived in these oak forests must have eaten acorns like all the other oak forest dwellers did. And if we find the same type of hollowed stones in Ireland that we find in North America, and if in North America these stones were used for grinding acorns, then these Irish stones must have been used for the same purpose. 

I believe that bullaun stones were not classified as acorn grinding stones primarily because until very recently we did not realise how ubiquitous consumption of acorns was in the northern hemisphere. Maybe its time to re-evaluate the bullaun stones and reclassify them as acorn grinding stones. I also believe that the earliest examples of bullaun stones probably date to Mesolithic and Neolithic time and that they predate the arrival of agriculture to Ireland..

As you could see from the pictures of grinding stones from North America, people used both cup, conical and saddle grinding stones originally for grinding acorns and then later for grinding grains. Apart from bullaun (conical) grinding stones, in Ireland we also find saddle grinding stones. 

This is a saddle grinding stone from the bronze age ~1500-500BC from Ovidstown, County Kildare.

This is a saddle grinding stone from the bronze age from Grange county Meath.

Saddle querns were used into the 20th century in Ireland, as you can see on this picture kept in the Ulster Folk and Transport museum. Compare this picture with the picture of the old Native American woman grinding acorns using saddle grinding stone. I love this woman's face. She looks more Native American than the actual Native American woman on the above picture.

This is a list of all the Irish bullaun stones as recorded in the National monument service database. As you can see they are found all over Ireland in huge numbers.

Ireland is not the only place in Europe where we find bullaun stones. As far as I know they are also found in Cornwall, France, on the Swedish island of Gotland, Lithuania, Germany, Belorussia...I was recently made aware of the existence of many bullaun type grinding slabs in the Levant of which the earliest were dated to 11,000 BC. I am preparing an article about these grinding stones and will publish it as soon as it's finished. 

These are grinding stones found in so called "court houses" in Cornwall.

These are grinding stones from Cornwall dated to late Neolithic early Bronze Age.

This is one of many old hollowed stones from the Baltic. They are called bowl stones and are, like in Ireland and in Slavic countries, regarded as sacred. The place where the stone is located is used as a place of worship. The diameter of this stone is about 60 cm and a depth - about 15 cm. In the past people considered the accumulated water as sacred and thought that it had healing properties. In the past the stone used to be called the stone of god.

You can see many more of these stones if you run this search. Here are some of them. This one is called "Lielais Daviņu Akmens" which means great stone of giving, offering, great altar. It seems that the stone was linked to harvest rituals.

This stone stands on a hill, where an old oak forest grew until the seventeenth century. The hill was a site of a pagan temple. 

For information about these stones in English look at the pages 27 - 33 of the book "Studies into the Balts’ Sacred Places".

I was just made aware of an article about an interesting half-made bowl-stone from Baltic region. On its top part there's a circular groove of a similar size as the usual bowls on other stones, as if someone had intended to gouge out a bowl there too but stopped half way through the process of gouging the hole. 

We can deduce though that this is how these bowl stones were actually made from their name in Lithuanian. Lithuanian word for bowl is dubuo, dubeni akameni...These words come from Slavic root dub meaning wood but also to gouge. This second meaning comes from the time when utensils were made by gouging bowl like holes in pieces of wood and later stone. In Southern Slavic languages Dubiti means to gouge and Dubeni, Dubeno means gouged, with a gouged hole, bowl in it...Dubeni kameni in South Slavic languages means gouged stones, bowl stones...

This is an example of the "pierres à cupules" or cupped stone from france. This is a communal boulder grinding stone.

This is a bullaun stone from Leistruper forest Westphalia Germany (taken by Oliver Reichelt).

These are just two of many bullaun stones from Belorussia. In Belorussia these stones are also regarded as sacred and the water accumulated in them is considered to have healing properties. In Belorussian these hollowed stones are called "valun" which in Slavic languages means both a boulder and a grinding stone. I believe that this name holds the key for understanding the original purpose of these stones and proves how ancient they truly are. But I will talk about this in one of my next posts....

Bullaun stone , situated on the location of a destroyed ancient chapel.
Izhorian Plateau, St. Petersburg region, NW Russia.

This is duben kamen, well, called zdenac from Dinara mountain region in Croatia:

This is a picture of the central hole with the reflection of the mountain top:

Bullaun stones Serbia. Unfortunately I don't know exact location...I also have information about similar stones in Makedonia.

If anyone has any examples of similar stones from Europe please let me know and send me a link to the pictures so that I can update the post to keep it relevant. 

In the end there is something I would like to draw your attention to. 

This is a prehistoric bullaun stone mortar and pestle:

And here is how it must have been used to grind Acorns:

And here is a bullaun stone mortar and pestle I have in my kitchen:

I use it to grind plant food, in the same way our Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic and Neolithic ancestors did. People are extremely conservative when it comes to tools and will use something that works until they find something that does it better. As it seems, when it comes to grinding plant food, mortars and pestles are still the best tool for the job all these thousands of years later.

I hope you had fun reading this post. If you did, please plus it. It would mean a lot to me. Thank you and stay happy.