FoodMuseum - Fruits

PRM Inv. nr: 1910.54.1

Apple for New Year’s Day ,

Wales, UK,1910

Christine Elliott - The Immortal Apple

A window seat, pile of books and copious Egremont Russets are my idea of heaven. Little surprise then, that though the Bible describes Eve offering “a fruit” to Adam, it is the eponymous apple which most often features in paintings and on pages depicting the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; notably the serpent’s sensuous eulogy in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’.

Aptly, Pitt Rivers encapsulates the mystique imbued in apples since time immemorial by exhibiting ‘Welsh’ ones in adjacent cases displaying Magic and Trial by Ordeal; and Sympathetic Magic.

The Isle of Avalon - Ynes Afallach in Welsh - also known as ‘the Orchard’, is the mythical resting place of dead kings and heroes. Here, according to Cornish tradition, King Arthur took refuge until the day comes when he will free the Welsh and the Cornish, his compatriots, from the foreign yoke.

In myth the Greek god of intoxication Dionysus (Bacchus his Roman equivalent) created the apple, which he presented to Aphrodite, goddess of love. The apple’s ambiguous symbolism sowed the seeds of destruction by precipitating the Trojan war. Greek goddess Eris called for ‘the judgment of Paris’, on the Trojan prince, throwing down the golden ‘apple of discord’ for the most beautiful, captive Spartan princess Helen.

Alexander the Great, in his search for the ‘water of life’ in India, found some apples which the priests there took to extend their life to four hundred years. He is credited with introducing the apple to Macedonia in the 4th century B.C., sending some back to his teacher Aristotle, who is depicted in medieval text ‘The Book of the Apple’ lecturing about immortality as he is dying, periodically revived and energised by smelling an apple. By the time Pliny wrote Naturalis Historia (77 – 79 A.D.), wealthy Romans had apple varieties a-plenty – from the swollen ‘pulmoneum’ to the shrivelled ‘pannuceum’.

Diminutive crab apples are the ancient ancestor of modern cultivars, their gnarled and thorny branches long associated with witchcraft and folk magic. In Woden’s Anglo-Saxon ‘Nine Herbs Charm’, the wergelu (as the crab apple is thought to have been called) is one of nine plants in a spell to protect against evil and snake’s venom.

From Apple computers’ iconic 1970’s logo grew the myth that its missing ‘bite’ is a tribute to Alan Turing, inventor of the world’s first semi-programmable computer, who committed suicide by eating an arsenic-laced apple. More plausibly, the term 'Macintosh' refers to a particular variety of an apple of which company co-founder and erstwhile frugivore Steve Jobs was fond. For its 1,000th anniversary London’s Borough Market created the ‘real apple store’, featuring one thousand different varieties including the oldest known one, Court Pendu Plat, introduced by the Romans and still flourishing.

The apple has inspired several unrelated but redolent fruits or other plant growths to take its name -custard apple, oak apple and Chinese apple, which is in fact a pomegranate. Sir Isaac Newton’s plummeting muse grew at his mother’s home in Woolsthrope, Lincolnshire. On a visit to this garden during his Cambridge days in the late 1660’s, he observed a green apple fall from a tree and only then began to consider the mechanism that drove what is now termed Gravity. The apple-free theory was published in Newton’s Principia in 1687.

Like Hercules’ successful labour to return stolen golden apples to the Garden of Hesperides, it is the Sisyphean efforts of Brogdale National Fruit Collection that have rescued 2,200 apple varieties, a tart contrast to the paltry selection available from supermarkets.

Thankfully, a cornucopia of metaphor, myth and magic have conspired, like Keats’ ‘moss’d cottage-trees bent with apples’ to prolong the apple in legend and in life.

The two Welsh ‘afals’ in the museum have tripods of three sticks, like stool legs and are studded with – very - dried fruit. These objects are wooden; apple tree wood in all probability and dating from 1910. The originals used to be taken round as Calennig , meaning New Year celebration or gift. (Literally, ‘the first day of the month’, from the Latin ‘kalends’). From door to door, children in Wales would parade their calennings, decorated with cloves, almonds, corn ears, fruit with a candle and holly in the top, singing and in return, receiving small gifts.

Gifting an apple tree has become an annual tradition at Borough Market; and Slow Food in the UK plants these disingenuous sticks in the market hall, as a sign of growing stronger and deepening our mutual roots of friendship. For symbolic reasons, in 2017, an especially endangered species was selected – the dark and bittersweet Black Dabinett, a cider apple originally grown in Somerset. Like Pitt Rivers’ food tradition, it thrives.

PRM INv. nr 1901.40.79

Dried Sycomore Figs.

Excavations at Abydos, Egypt, 1901. Tomb of Den, 1st dynasty

Susan Weingarten - Figs of de Pharaohs

You will be glad to see that there are some dried sycomore (sic) figs in the museum, less tasty than ordinary figs, by all accounts, but good enough to stave off hunger. The label on them tells us the figs were donated to the museum in 1901 (CE). They come from excavations at Abydos, Egypt, from the Tomb of Pharaoh Den, 1st dynasty. Den began to reign about 2970 BCE, so the figs are nearly 5000 years old.

Sycomore figs, Ficus sycomorus, grow naturally in Africa, mainly in Kenya and Sudan. Unlike ordinary figs, these grow straight out of the trunk of the tree. They live symbiotically with their own specific wasps, Ceratosolen arabicus Mayr , which bore their way into the figs and pollinate them.

Ceratosolen wasps have very complex relationships with other even smaller wasps which also get inside the figs. Rather like de Morgan's fleas:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em

Little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum…

A great film about the sycomore in Africa and its tiny wasps can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM

Thousands of years ago, sycomore fig trees were imported into ancient Egypt and Israel, (as well as Cyprus and Crete), probably by humans, who propagated them through cuttings, or possibly through undigested seeds in the droppings of fruit bats. But in their new homes the trees lost their fertilizing wasps, and had to make do with other wasps, including Sycophaga sycomori and Apocrypta longitarsus , which did not carry pollen, so they could not form seeds. The figs were less juicy too. However, at least 5 millennia ago, humans discovered that simply gashing the figs while they were still on the tree meant that they would turn pink and juicy, and be much tastier. There are painted wall reliefs from the time of the pharaohs which show these gashed figs, and fig-gashing was apparently the occupation of the prophet Amos in the Bible:

14 Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdsman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit.

(Amos.7.14-15, Authorised Version)

Although the Authorised Version translation of the Bible here says that Amos was a 'gatherer' of sycomore fruit, in the Septuagint , the Greek translation of the Bible, the word used is 'gasher.' This practice of gashing sycomore figs is described by the Greek botanical writer Theophrastus in the fourth century BCE, using the same Greek word for 'gash.' People were still gashing sycomore figs in Egypt in the 1960s.

Gashing the figs produces ethylene gas which makes the figs ripen quicker. (Ethylene gas is also used on green bananas so they will turn yellow before they reach your supermarket). These dried sycomore figs in the Pitt Rivers are gashed, and in fact were found threaded on a string.

Pharaoh Den's tomb was excavated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the British archaeologist, Flinders Petrie. In his book about the excavations, The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties, he has drawings of his small finds (plate 32), including a drawing of a single fig (66) with a large hole in it, although his text on page 34 refers in the plural to 'dried sycamore figs strung on a thread.'Petrie donated many of his finds from his Egyptian excavations to the museum in Cairo and other museums all over the world, including these figs here in the Pitt Rivers museum. He also donated some other sycomore figs to the Schweinfurth collection in the Botanical Museum in Berlin. Here they were studied in the 1960s by the world expert on sycomore figs, Professor Jacob Galil from Tel Aviv University, who wrote many papers about the figs and their wasps. (He even had a wasp named after him: Ceratosolen galili. ) Galil found three different sorts of long-dead wasps in the figs from the pharaonic tombs.

We had a look at our figs with a magnifying glass, and didn't find any wasps, but watch out for any we might have missed before you eat them!