HBM154: Ancient Roman Recipes

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Digital render by Jeff Emtman featuring a public domain illustration of the lovage plant by Joseph Miller (via the New York Public Library’s digital collection)

 

Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius. 

Apicius is a bit of a fluke.  It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did.  And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice their gilding skills.  And thus, this fascinating book of recipes (featuring cooking instructions for boiled ostrich soup, complex sauces, and cucumbers stewed with brains) is still feeding people today.

While cuisine today might seem distant from ostrich soup, Grainger thinks that Roman food often gets inaccurately portrayed as overly decadent or overly spiced.  Cooked correctly, the cuisine is quite balanced, she says.  And in her book, Cooking Apicius, she uses her knowledge of ancient Roman life to put the recipes in context for a contemporary kitchen and contemporary cooks. 

 
 

Sally Grainger cooking Chestnut Lenticulam. An ancient Roman recipe from the book Apicius.

 
 

Also, on this episode, Jeff also reads from a 1932 English translation of Apicius by Joseph Dommers Vehling, which is available in the public domain thanks to Project Gutenberg. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

Have you seen the new HBM stickers? They’re beautiful.  Get yours here.  As of publish date: if you buy 4, one of them will be free.  The discount gets applied automatically when you add them to your cart.

 

HBM140: The New Black Wall Street

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A man surveying the damage of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 with a sun rising and pillars of smoke billowing. Original image from the collection of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Digital collage by Jeff Emtman.

 

There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T. Washington called it “Black Wall Street.” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” 

Content Note: Descriptions of racial violence, several mentions of a suicide, language.

In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chapter of the KKK was starting to form. 

In the Spring of 1921, a Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was brought into custody for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Over the coming night and day, a huge mob of white Tulsans burned and looted and murdered in Greenwood and the surrounding areas. Dozens or possibly even hundreds of Black Tulsans died, thousands became homeless. 

But authorities never held anyone responsible. In fact, they detained many Black residents, some for up to a week. And insurance claims made in the aftermath were denied, as the insurance policies did not cover “riots.” 

 
 

In the decades that followed. Records of the event went missing, some fear they were destroyed. The mass graves have yet to be found. And many Black Tulsans believed they could face retribution for speaking out about the event. It wasn’t even taught in school until recently. 

As a result, a lot of Tulsans still don’t know the history of Greenwood. 

Local rapper Steph Simon was one of them. He grew up near Greenwood, and he went to middle school there. But it wasn’t until his 20’s when he stumbled upon a documentary about the massacre on Youtube. From there, he became obsessed with learning more about the true story of Tulsa. And in 2019, he released an album called Born on Black Wall Street where he reintroduces himself as “Diamond Dicky Ro” in homage to the young shoeshiner whom white mobs tried and failed to lynch on that night in 1921. 

In 2011, an Oklahoman journalist named Lee Roy Chapman wrote an article for the publication This Land. Chapman’s story, The Nightmare in Dreamland, was a devastating re-telling of the life’s story of an Oklahoman legend--a “founder” of Tulsa named Tate Brady. Brady was well known as an oil tycoon and hotel owner who ran in the elite circles. However, buried by history was Brady’s legacy of violence and racial animus. He was a defender of the Confederacy, he was credibly accused of tarring and feathering some IWW union members, and for part of his life, he was in the Ku Klux Klan. And on the night of the massacre, Brady was there, acting as a night watchman. He reported seeing several dead black people in the streets in or around Greenwood. 

With these revelations, a movement started to remove the Brady name from Tulsa. That movement succeeded partially, but the Brady name is still a part of the Tulsan landscape. 

When Steph Simon shot the cover image for Born On Black Wall Street, he wanted to incorporate the symbolism of Tate Brady. So he went to Brady’s former mansion—a house modelled visually after the house of Robert E. Lee’s, with murals of the Confederacy painted inside and big stone columns out front. It sits on a hill overlooking historic Greenwood. And he stood on the front steps of the mansion only to see a childhood friend driving by. It was Felix Jones, an ex-NFL running back. The two grew up together. To Simon’s surprise, Jones revealed that he’d just bought the mansion. And he invited Simon inside. 

 

 

Together they thought up ideas on how to transform the legacy of the house from something hateful to something loving. So Simon invited about a hundred Black kids to come have a party on the lawn while he filmed the music video for his single “Upside”. 

After that, Simon and Jones started throwing concerts there, drawing huge crowds and starting the slowly re-contextualizing the house into something positive. They renamed the house “Skyline Mansion.”

As this transformation took place, another local DJ and producer, Stevie Johnson woke up in a cold sweat one night. He’d had a dream about rebuilding Black Wall Street, figuratively and literally. He opened his laptop and wrote down his ideas frantically, trying to remember his vision. And soon after, he started to act on it. 

His first step was Fire in Little Africa: a commemorative rap album to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, featuring nearly sixty artists from Oklahoma. And over the course of a weekend in early 2020, rappers and community members and businesses filled Skyline Mansion to record dozens of tracks for the album. 

Fire in Little Africa will be available in February of 2021. Their podcast is out now. They’re also curating spotify playlists of the featured artists, and they’re accepting donations via the Tulsa Community Foundation. 

 
 

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Taylor Hosking visits the former Brady Mansion to talk to the musicians who are looking to build a new Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Taylor also published an article in CityLab called Avenging the Tulsa Race Massacre With Hip Hop.

A lot of people and organizations helped make this episode possible. We’d like to thank Steph Simon, Verse, Stevie Johnson, Keeng Cut, Written Quincy, Bobby Eaton, Felix Jones, Dan Hanh, Mechelle Brown, Chris Davis, Shruti Dhalwala, Brandon Oldham, Ben Lindsey, John DeLore, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Oklahoma Historical Society, and The Woody Guthrie Center. 

Producer: Taylor Hosking (Instagram) (Twitter)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: Steph Simon, Verse, (see embedded YouTube playlist 😀☝) The Black Spot

Also heard on this episode: recordings from Black Lives Matter protests made by Neroli Price of Seattle, Washington; Bryanna Buie of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Bethany Donkin of Oxford, UK. 

More About the Tulsa Race Massacre:

- Official Report from 2001 which describes the events of 1921 in detail and with context. 

- Educational comic about the massacre published by the Atlantic and sponsored by HBO’s Watchmen. 

- Riot and Remembrance By James S. Hirsch

 

HBM138: Did Neanderthals Bury their Dead?

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Foreground: Flowers drawn by 16th century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. Midground: The reconstructed skull of Shanidar 1. Photo by James Gordon. Background: View from mouth of Shanidar Cave, photo by Graeme Barker. Digital composite by Jeff Emtman.

 

There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, the American archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki led a team who excavated a trench in Shanidar Cave, discovering the remains of ten Neanderthals who died about 50,000 years ago. 

Dr. Solecki’s discoveries helped ‘humanize’ Neanderthals, a species of early humans often thought of as the brutish, stupid cousins of our species. In sharp contrast, Solecki believed Neanderthals to be nuanced, technologically adept, interested in art and ritual. Solecki suggested that the bodies at Shanidar Cave were intentionally buried. 

Many of Dr. Solecki’s theories on the complexity of Neanderthal minds seem to be correct. But he also made a famous claim about one of the bodies, named “Shanidar 4.” This individual was found with flower pollen around the body. Solecki suggested this was a ‘flower burial’, an intentional death ritual where flowers were laid on the body, possibly to signify the passing of an important member. This interpretation was not universally accepted, as others pointed out there are several ways for pollen to wind up on a skeleton. 

Half a century later, Dr. Emma Pomeroy from Cambridge University went back to Shanidar Cave with a team of archaeologists. They kept digging, hoping to help contextualize Solecki’s findings. To their surprise, they found more bodies. And their findings seem to support Solecki’s theories. The bodies were likely intentionally buried, and they were discovered in soil that contained mineralized plant remains, meaning that the pollen in Solecki’s findings couldn’t have come from modern contamination. 

 
 

It’s possible that Shanidar Cave may have been a significant spot for Neanderthals. But Dr. Pomeroy believes that further work is still needed. Currently, their excavations and lab work are on hold due to the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Dr. Pomeroy admits to imagining the lives of the Neanderthals she studies. She wonders how they spoke to each other, and what they believed about death and the rituals surrounding it. These things don’t preserve in the fossil record though, so we’re all stuck interpreting from clues, like the source of a bit of pollen or the maker of a tiny piece of string.  These clues have the ability to teach us the “humanity” of some of our closest evolutionary cousins. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna

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HBM129: The Underearthlings

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Map of Bornholm, Denmark with orbs. 3d image by Jeff Emtman with source material from a circa 1900 Bornholm map via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite likes it. However, it also makes him visually match the mythical underground people he spent three years studying on the Danish island of Bornholm. 

Content Note: Language

Bornholm folklore sometimes references “De Underjordiske”, a kind of people that live under the many ancient burial mounds that spot the landscape. Lars sometimes calls the people “subterraneans”, “pixies” or “underearthlings”. They’re known as a militant group, fiercely defending themselves, their homes in the mounds, and the island. But not an unthankful group either, rewarding humans for kindness or bravery.

It’s worth clarifying that Lars is no “troll hunter” (as the press often gleefully mistakes him to be), nor is he in the business of saying whether reclusive, sometimes-red-hatted people are real or legend. He is, however, in the business of collecting those legends and learning what they can teach us about us. And also what the legends can tell us about the archaeological significance of a Batlic Island that’s been conquered so many times that history’s forgotten who actually made those mounds in the first place. 

 
 

Pursuing legends is difficult though, as Lars attests to in this episode of Here Be Monsters. He tells producer Jeff Emtman stories of both the underearthings and the stories of the skepticism he faced when he pointed the anthropological lens on the place where he grew up. He says, “That’s why there was so much talk about this project. Had it been an anthropological study of shamans in Siberia, or something in the Amazon, then there would have been then public expectation that, ‘of course people there have spirits and stuff like that.’...But when it’s about what happens in your own back garden, then I think that’s where it gets more controversial...there’s certainly magic in distance.”

Lars is an anthropologist and the author of Tales in an Underground Landscape, a dissertation he wrote while pursuing a PhD at University of Copenhagen. 

 
 

Many thanks to Rikke Houd, who connected Jeff to Lars and has interviewed him about De Underjordiske for the BBC show Short Cuts. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: Serocell, The Black Spot
Photos: Jeff Emtman

 

HBM117: Grave Oversight

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Fire burning near Abyei town, composited with a shadow of a satellite for HBM by Jeff Emtman. Source image by DigitalGlobe

Fire burning near Abyei town, composited with a shadow of a satellite for HBM by Jeff Emtman. Source image by DigitalGlobe

 

Sudan has been involved in ongoing civil wars since 1983. The wars were about religion, culture and resources. By 2005, approximately two million civilians had died. In 2011, the southern part of the country voted to secede from the north, creating the new country of South Sudan.  But there were still three regions that were claimed by both north and south: Abyei, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan. These regions are rich in oil and have fertile farmlands, so politicians and humanitarians predicted there would be violence following the secession. Civilians in these regions, mostly farmers and shepherds, would be caught in the middle.

Content Note:
Discussion of genocide

Nathaniel Raymond is a human rights investigator. He was looking into an alleged massacre in Afghanistan when he was introduced to the idea of using satellite imagery for humanitarian purposes. At that time, satellite images were sometimes used for documenting force swells and finding the locations of mass graves. But Nathaniel wondered if he could figure out a way to use satellite imagery proactively; what if he could figure out a way to see an attack coming and sound an alarm before anyone got hurt?

 
 

Nathaniel wasn’t the only one who had this idea. Actor George Clooney had also been researching ways to use satellites as “anti-genocide paparazzi” in Sudan through an organization he co-founded called The Enough Project. The Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and others sponsored the project. The Satellite Sentinel Project partnered with the private satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe, who gave the SSP permission to point some of their satellites where they pleased and take pictures. By December 2010, the Satellite Sentinel Project was in full swing, inventing a new methodology for analyzing satellite imagery of active conflict in real time.

The mission of the Satellite Sentinel Project was threefold:

  1. Warn civilians of impending attacks,

  2. document the destruction in order to corroborate witness testimony in later investigations, and

  3. potentially dissuade the governments in both Sudan and South Sudan from returning to war in the first place.

“We wanted to see if being under surveillance would change the calculus… If they knew we were watching, would they not attack?” The Satellite Sentinel Project would release their reports at midnight so that they would be available in time for morning news in East Africa.

Critics of Satellite Sentinel Project say that South Sudan shouldn’t be a playground for experimental humanitarian efforts bankrolled by a foreign movie star. And Nathaniel says the critiques are valid. “It was always a Hail Mary pass. And, we must be clear, it was always an experiment, which in and of itself is problematic. But… what else are we going to do, sit on our hands?”

Satellite Sentinel Project released a total of 28 reports over 18 months. The methodology Nathaniel and his team developed is still being taught at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Today Nathaniel Raymond is a lecturer on Global Affairs at Yale’s Jackson Institute. Special thanks to Ziad al Achkar, one of Nathaniel’s colleagues from Satellite Sentinel Project that helped us with this episode.

Producer: Garrett Tiedemann
Editors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman
Music: Garrett Tiedemann

 
Nathaniel Raymond, former Director of Operations at the Sentinel Satellite Project. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

Nathaniel Raymond, former Director of Operations at the Sentinel Satellite Project. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

Nathaniel Raymond’s 2018 talk on Satellite Sentinel Project at the EyeO Festival 2018.

PBS Newshour Reporting on Satellite Sentinel Project’s documentation of burned villages in South Sudan.

HBM116: Finest and Most Rotten (Going Forward)

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Park Row and William Street, several blocks away from 154 Nassau. Photo taken in August I92I by George Balgue. Via OldNYC

Park Row and William Street, several blocks away from 154 Nassau. Photo taken in August I92I by George Balgue. Via OldNYC

 

Mar 21, 1919 - NEW YORK CITY

An anonymous writer for the New York Tribune stands at 154 Nassau.  The writer asks passers-by a simple question: “Do you think this is a good world?”  It’s just four months after Armistice Day, and on the tail of a flu pandemic that killed 55 million worldwide.  The writer publishes five answers, ranging from “damned rotten” to “the finest”.

Mar 21, 2019 - NEW YORK CITY

Producer Ula Kulpa stands at the same spot and flags down passers-by 100 years later and asks the same question, “Do you think this is a good world?”  Today, life expectancies are up, yet we still fight wars. We are still sometimes cruel to loved ones and strangers. So, with the perspective of an additional century, what do New Yorkers think about the world’s goodness?

Producer: Going Forward (Julia Drachman, Ula Kulpa)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot,  Smiles by Lambert Murphy (1918), You Hear the Lambs a-Cryin' by Fisk University Jubilee Singers (1920)

 
An Armistice Day celebration on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1918. Photo by Paul Thompson via The New York Times

An Armistice Day celebration on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1918. Photo by Paul Thompson via The New York Times

 

Jeff Emtman is visiting Copenhagen to teach a masterclass on sound design and to do a radio cinema event about sound’s haunting nature.  Join him at Radiobiograf, Copenhagen’s Radio Festival.

April 12, 2019: Masterclass: Jeff Emtman on Sound Design

April 14, 2019: Jeff Emtman Presents: The Haunting Magic of Sound