ONE
The smell of gruel filled the hut. The coarsely ground emmer simmered gently in a round earthen pot whose pointed bottom was stuck into the glowing embers at the edge of the open fire. The finely cut pieces of pork in it gave it a special aroma, as did the roughly chopped wild garlic and the fresh, soft hazelnuts. The wooden spoons were all ready for everybody to dig in. The next day, there would be simple flat bread instead of gruel, accompanied with boiled lentils and a bit more of the pork. That was a rather special meal, because the grain had to be ground finer, and the women would have to heat the dome-shaped oven in order to make the bread. But it also meant they would be able to dry the crabapples they had gathered while the men slaughtered the pig. This would not only take away the halved apples’ tannic sharpness, but would help them to keep until well into the winter. It took experience and a lot of work to stock the larder well and make it through the long, cold, dark months.
It is certainly tempting to imagine our Neolithic ancestors’s meals in this way, and more than a little vexing that we have no clue about their favoured recipes. Ever so often, while writing this book, I wished I could travel back in time and smell, taste and see for myself. Even if some archaeological miracle suddenly presented us with something like a recipe, our modern ingredients would make it very difficult to get any meaningful results from ‘reconstructing’ it. However, archaeologists have been coming up with increasingly detailed information, and in fact we know rather a lot about the foodstuffs early Germans chose to gather and collect, hunt or raise, and how they slaughtered, harvested, stored and cooked them.
Grain is undoubtedly one of the keys to our civilization. It is extremely difficult to survive on meat alone, especially lean meat, as the body also needs fat and/or carbohydrates. Even if you use all the fat a wild beast’s carcass offers, you wouldn’t put on much yourself. Grains – first gathered from the wild, then encouraged to grow more intensively – offer easily digestible and storeable energy. This budding agriculture seems to have been as flexible as the first nomadic herding, since fields were moved frequently. With time, both tended to become more sedentary, possibly at especially convenient spots. In the Near East agriculture and animal husbandry began as early as 12,000 BC, but these practices took several millennia to reach Central Europe.
Up in the cooler northern regions of Europe, our earliest ancestors only survived the many ice ages because they learnt to control fire. Cooked food, especially meat, proved to be much more easily digestible than raw, and the range of food on offer became much more varied – and tasty. But you had to adapt as best you could to what nature offered in order to live well. Hunting, nomadic herding and animal husbandry on one hand, and gathering, selective cropping and an agriculture that frequently moved fields on the other, presented a wide choice of possibilities. If you wanted to eat well – that is, to survive – you needed to figure out the right mix that suited your location. Around 5,500 BC a more sedentary lifestyle with permanent settlements as well as domesticated plants and animals began to appear in Germany. Experts are divided as to whether these changes indicate the migration and resettlement of peasants or a general adoption of this new way of life. Seeing that the new trend came from the southeast and that in Germany the south and centre took to it much more quickly and widely, one would be tempted to argue for the former. A recent study of ceramic containers from immediately before and after the first evidence of domesticated animals and plants on the Western Baltic has shown that the so-called Neolithic Revolution happened very gradually indeed. In those cooking pots domestic cattle and sheep (or goat, as these are extremely difficult to tell apart) are mixed with red deer and mussels.1 The former tundra and later forest hunters of the north were also skilled fishermen who built elaborate dug-out canoes. Like their contemporaries all around the Baltic, they hunted seals with harpoons and caught fish such as cod, turbot and flatfish with the help of various nets and traps. They might well have found this much easier than working the soil. But even they succumbed to the trend and became more settled as they gradually got used to the new additions to their diet. Eventually all of them could be called ‘proto-farmers’.2
Neolithic spoons.
Crops obviously varied from region to region, but they generally included einkorn and above all emmer, ancient kinds of husked wheat. Both these grains are seeing a revival today within the organic movement. Besides these, barley, millet and spelt were harvested, some as winter, some as summer crops. Rye and oat were still very rare and probably just wild invaders. All these grains were supplemented by peas and in some cases lentils. Linseed was valued for its oil content (and later also for its fibre), as were poppyseeds and other seeds gathered from wild plants. Whereas all other domesticated plants came from the Near East, it is interesting to note that the poppy seems to originate in the western Mediterranean.
Initially fields were moved whenever the soil was exhausted, but became more permanent when more manure was available from domestic animals. In these early days of organized agricultural activity, something more akin to horticulture was practised on small plots protected by fences and hedges. Around or near houses, they might have been used for plants considered especially useful and therefore precious, or crops such as peas and lentils which might be threatened by wild animals, or plants that provided a household with everyday supplies. Wooden spades and hoes were used to work the early gardens; as these were extended to become fields, the ard, a simple scratching plough, gradually replaced the hoe. It had the advantage that it could be pulled by draft animals, as evidenced by the earliest example of a yoke dating from around 3,380 BC found close to Lake Constance. Recent archaeological findings in eastern Germany have shown that even before the introduction of metal, these first farmers were accomplished carpenters who excelled in complex timber constructions.3
Except for dogs, all domestic animals were introduced in their tame form and came from the Near East. Sheep (much like today’s moufflon or moorland breeds) were closely followed by goats, pigs and cattle. Any cross-breeding with wild species was actively avoided. As palaeogenetic studies have shown, the native European aurochs was never domesticated, so that all present-day cattle in fact go back to a small herd in the Near East.4 Our early animal keepers clearly preferred smaller, tamer beasts, just as they frequently castrated working animals to make them more manageable. Hunting, practised to varying degrees, made for more culinary variety, and provided useful raw material for clothing, tools and so on, but also sought to protect humans and domestic animals from predators such as bears, wolves and wild cats. Hunters had a wide range of efficient weapons: bows and precisely shaped arrowheads fashioned from flint (which were also used for harpooning fish and wild birds) and the javelin, slingshot and spear. Red deer was the most popular prey, followed by fallow deer, wild boar, aurochs and bison, as well as beaver, badger, fox, otter, lynx and (occasionally) hare. Dogs, though valuable for hunting, might on occasion also be eaten or killed for their fur. Molluscs – both fresh and seawater bivalves and snails – were included in the menu, as were pond turtles in some areas during the summer. As for river fish, pike seems to have been particularly sought after, as well as eel, catfish, tench, trout, perch, carp, sturgeon (on occasion), and various smaller varieties. Fish seems to have been popular: in the south fishing was undertaken in lakes situated at significant distances from the relevant settlements.
Berries, fruit, vegetables and herbs mostly added flavour to the food rather than caloric energy: they provided 2.8 per cent of the total on average. Depending on region and season, women (whom archaeologists assume were responsible for the gathering and collecting as well as the cooking) would know to find strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, elderberries, hawthorn, rosehips, cornelian cherries, wild grapes, sour cherries, pears, sloes, plums and the very popular crabapples. Hazelnuts were equally sought after and frequently grew around settlements. Wild vegetables such as carrots and parsnips were collected, probably others as well, but evidence of these is difficult to trace as these plants did not set seed before they were cropped and therefore have left no traces behind. Herbs such as nipplewort (lapsana, possibly cultivated), wild garlic (Allium ursinum), several kinds of field lettuce and turnips, orach, bistort, sorrel, stinging nettle and various kinds of fat hen (goosefoot) were soon joined by imports from the Mediterranean littoral, most notably parsley, celery, dill and lemon balm. It is very likely that mistletoe, marjoram, verbena, juniper berries, caraway and mugwort were used for culinary as well as medicinal purposes in the form of spicings or herbal infusions.
Fertile loess soils in the regions of the central uplands were generally the preferred locations for settlements, mostly on gentle slopes along rivers and streams. Settlements ranged from isolated farms at considerable distances from each other, and protected by hedges and fences, to structured villages surrounded by fortifications. Large rectangular halftimbered houses (in wet areas on stilts) were constructed using wood, clay and chalk. They were 5–7 m wide and 10–40 m long and included fireplaces. These large-scale constructions are evidence of extensive, far-reaching resources and a high degree of co-operation. Families or clans of up to three generations (approximately seven to 30 people) shared them, occasionally with animals, though these were usually kept all year round on forest pastures or kraal-like enclosures to protect them from predators. The one-house farms were also used for storing crops, above all grain, and other suitable foodstuffs. Pots for storage were strong and egg-shaped, although those used to store liquids were shaped like big bottles. As with similiar containers made from birch bark, these pots often had handles to which string could be attached, so that they could be hung up to protect them from pests. For longer storage periods, earth-pits up to 2 m deep were used. In these the grain would germinate and form a strong, thick, protective layer that kept the content dry and protected it, as in a silo. Grain was also dried and sometimes roasted before being threshed and winnowed. Threshing was done with wooden flails; grinding in hand mills between two stones. Grain varieties with unusually stubborn husks, such as spelt, required arduous pounding in wooden mortars before the kernels could be ground. All these lengthy processes and the tools needed for them were only efficient when carried out in bulk, thus turning grain almost by necessity into a basic food. It has been estimated that a family of seven would have needed to harvest 3,300 kg of grain per year, requiring the cultivation of 1.8 hectares of land.5
As animal husbandry developed, separate stable buildings began to appear, though it was only those animals needed for breeding which were kept in the houses and fed through the winter, often with ashtree foliage. Each settlement supplied itself with its own meat, though with noticeable regional preferences. Pork consumption was high in the southwest while it was of lesser importance in the northeast, where red deer hunting was more intense than in any other region. Slaughtering was more frequent during the autumn months. Archaeologists know that it was done by stunning the animal with a hard blow on the head, then cutting the main artery, but unfortunately we can only guess what happened to the blood. The meat of large animals was generally deboned, whereas smaller ones were prepared on the bone, roasted or boiled. Large bones and skulls were often smashed to allow access to marrow and brains, choice parts because of their high fat content.
A wide range of instruments served to produce and prepare food, including shafted hatchets and axes and sickles for cutting grass and harvesting grain. Firestone was knapped into knives and handaxes, and wood, bone, sinews, claws, hides, antlers and vegetable fibres were all used to make other tools and weapons. Earthen containers had been made even before the ‘modern’ influences from the south and again, styles, methods and decor depended on region and personal preferences. Bowls and flat plates were often polished and decorated. Three-legged pots served for cooking, complemented by a wide variety of wooden utensils in the form of spoons, ladles, mortars and baskets. Wicked lamps served as light sources and might have burned tallow or oil produced from linseed.
Coming back to our initial musing about possible recipes and looking at the wide range of possible ingredients and tools, it is important to keep in mind that they were obviously never found together in one single spot. However, a coherent trading network did stretch all over Central Europe from the Paris basin to the Black Sea, as evidenced by the travels of so-called ribbonware, ceramic containers of a very particular pattern and design that appear throughout Central Europe. Carts were used for transport on roads which in some areas were made up with wooden boards, especially in the wetlands of the northwest. Dug-out canoes and boats made from hides carried people and goods on rivers and streams. Traded goods included grinding stones, usually made from quarried volcanic rock. If our gruel dish was salted, the salt would have been another luxury traded over long distances. Salt, a flavour enhancer as well as a preservative, was increasingly distributed throughout Europe, creating wealth and power for the leading elite of entire regions; as an indication of this, place names that include the word sal (Latin) or hals (Greek) survive up to the present, such as Schwäbisch Hall or Salzgitter.
As ore started to be mined and worked into copper, yet another import from the Near East, wood became ever more important. Serial production of tools became technically possible through casting, unlike the earlier stone tools which could only be made one at a time. As various groups moved across Europe from the Iberian peninsula up through Bohemia in search of new sources of ore, the spread of copper technology was a catalyst for a new cultural uniformity, not unlike contemporary globalization. This new mobility can be traced though beakers of various styles – pottery as well as gold – generally associated with drinking rituals. Again, we can only speculate as to what kind of liquids these would have involved – mead from precious honey (bees were encouraged to settle in wickerwork beehives) and perhaps some berries? A kind of ale made from more liquid fermented gruel? A mixture of the two? In any case these beakers, found at funeral sites and in other ritual contexts, certainly served as indicators of social importance and high status. They bear witness to the emergence of an elite class who controlled mining and smelting activities and were buried with a great many precious possessions.
However, copper served prestige and vanity rather than being very practical, since it is much softer than stone. As far as food production and preparation were concerned, the next step, copper alloys such as bronze and pewter, usually with tin added, were much more significant, as they enabled different grades of hardness and elasticity. At this time some people might well have cooked gruel in a metal cauldron and served it with a metal ladle. Although stone tools continued to be used in many areas, early small metal sickles and other utensils were made of metal. As a result of more efficient tools, cultivation became a little easier and less labour intensive, enabling higher crop yields and in turn the division of labour among peasants, miners, bronze-casters (resident or travelling), weavers, dyers, tanners and other specialist craftsmen. This increased productivity even further. The result was a store of readily available carbohydrates that provided security and a surplus that could be traded. This led to rapid population growth. Areas away from rivers and on less fertile soils, where some hunters and gatherers were still living the old way, gradually came under cultivation.
Less productive grains such as einkorn became rarer, while spelt, millet, oats and rye were cultivated more widely. Increased grain production furthered the development of mills. For turning mill stones, harder stone was needed, mostly granite, basalt or porphyr. Again these were traded over long distances. Gruel continued to be the main staple food, and was mostly made from barley and millet. Bread was still rare and was usually made from millet, wheat or a combination of both. Bread was a strong indicator of social differentiation: the milling time for a 250 g loaf of fine flour during this period has been estimated at 2½ to 3 hours, which can be taken as a sign of its rarity. Nevertheless it was technically possible to produce finely ground flour from wheat or barley. It could also be used to prepare small, Spätzle-like pasta, which required a pot for boiling rather than a bread oven (which in some places had developed into a separate building).
Milk became an additional advantage of animal husbandry as adult humans gradually overcame their inherent lactose intolerance. Early milk drinkers would certainly have known of the benefits of natural curdling as a way of adding a little extra ‘shelf life’ to a perishable source of protein. The latest archaeological findings confirm the existence of this early cheesemaking: the evidence is ceramic vessels riddled with holes, visually reminiscent of cheese strainers and with traces of milk fat still on them.6
Agricultural improvements included the introduction of new oilseed plants such as camelina and hemp, the latter of which was used for fibres as well as oil. In mountainous regions legumes (members of the vetch family) became more important as a food source and possibly also for their usefulness as an indirect source of nitrogen fertilizer. Since legumes were also valued as fodder for domestic animals, the appearance of the fava or broad bean in funerary rituals may well be linked to the gradual domestication of the horse – as indicated by the bean’s secondary name in German as in English, Pferdebohne or horsebean. Horses joined the domestic menagerie from around 2,500 BC, with the addition shortly thereafter of chickens and, somewhat later, geese. Horsemeat seems rarely to have been eaten, but the animals were used for ritual sacrifice, travelling or riding into battle. Hunting for meat ceased to play an important role in the provision of everyday food, and the hunting of larger animals in particular gradually took on a more ritual and/or social meaning.
Much of Central Europe was still covered with dense forest composed of alder, linden, ash, maple, elm and – somewhat later – beech, with pine trees dominating the woodlands towards the east. But the forest was increasingly cleared for fields by felling or the slash-and-burn method, or cut down to provide material for building, work and fuel. Thus in places where farming became the norm the natural landscape was gradually transformed. Different soils formed, from the original post-glacial loess and black chernozem to brown, gradually decalcified cambisols and different grades of loam. The latter accumulated in stretches along rivers through loess originating from high-lying land that had been deforested. You shaped the place where you lived, but the place you lived also strongly shaped the food you could produce and therefore what you ate. It was important to find out more about it if one was not to go hungry. Astronomical data was collected over a very long period of time and used for agricultural planning. A ‘sky disc’ found in Nebra/Saxony from around 2,000 BC represents the sun, moon and stars, including the seven Pleiades, used to determine the dates for sowing and harvest. This knowledge and the diversification of varieties minimized the risk of crop failure, but annual variations in climate persisted and it is highly unlikely that seed stocks of more than a year were available.
With the spread of iron, even more effective tools could be produced. As ard-ploughs were reinforced with iron tips, cultivation became easier and efficiency in food production rose a little further. At the same time a marked cultural division took place between Germanic tribes in the north and the Celts in the south. Celtic settlements in alpine regions were founded on copper mining and were mainly supported by cattle, pigs and grain. The Greek historian Strabo described the diet of the Celts as consisting mainly of milk and several kinds of meat, but above all pork, some fresh and some salted. Trade in rare metals such as pewter increased economic and cultural contacts. Salt mining was now flourishing and Celtic salt pork was even exported in barrels to Rome. The Celts had a knack for shopping and, tired of bartering, introduced coinage, a method of payment they had encountered on their migrations in Asia Minor. Prior to that, objects with systematized weights – gold rings, hatchets, scythes and bracelets – had been used in the exchange of goods. Contact with the Etruscans and Greek colonies in southern Italy resulted in ‘oriental’ cultural influences. Powerful Celtic princes started to import fine drinking and eating vessels, which might well have been filled with imported foods and wines. Evidence for this can be found in a tumulus burial site in Hochdorf/Baden-Württemberg, dated to around 525 BC, where a Celtic prince was buried with a massive cauldron and vessels for drinking and eating. Feasting and fine dining, it can be assumed, were powerful social and political elements then as now.
Once again, we can dream up a menu. The luxurious meal would certainly include lighter sourdough bread and salt pork, perhaps in the form of air-dried sausages or smoked ham. But then? Possibly some form of cheese? Sweet pears, plums or cherries traded from more southern orchards? Walnuts or sweet chestnuts, new and very rare arrivals from the Mediterranean? Some highly luxurious, exotic spices that had travelled from Rome in exchange for salted meat? We don’t know. We do know though that differences in foodways became more marked with the increase in trading activities. Then as now, people tended to move to places where life seemed easier and their plates were fuller. Towards the end of the so-called Iron Age, overpopulation and failed crops made for much upheaval in Central Europe. The Celts were pushed west by expansive, migrating Germanic groups while at the same time the Romans advanced onto the Rhine and Danube.