A Death, and an Exploration of the Four Humours

Onion, a “Hot” Ingredient (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Writers who write well about food and love and belonging pass our way only rarely. And so when one dies, especially if young and promising, the loss is all the more crushing. On the incessant news feeds of Twitter and Facebook that threaten to swallow up what time I have, I read the other day of the death of Marsha Mehran. I’d just put aside a hefty book on medieval medicine, its plump bibliography tiring my eyes, halting my search for material on the impact of humoural theory on cuisine.

The serendipity of this struck me quite hard.

Ms. Mehran, you see, wrote Pomegranate Soup (2006), a novel based in Ireland, the story of three Iranian sisters who – like many immigrants in many lands – started a restaurant featuring the cuisine of their homeland. While the story reminds me (and many others) a lot of Chocolat, Pomegranate Soup transfixed me because on the second page of the Prologue, I read this: “Thomas’s ill nature was the product of an undetermined mixture of sard (cold) and garm (hot), which nothing – not even Marjan’s famously equalizing recipe for tart pomegranate soup – could remedy.” And on the second page of Chapter One, the name “Avicenna” appeared, Avicenna being a reference to the celebrated Arab physician Ibn Sina (973-1037), who wrote the Canon of Medicine and influenced scores of thinkers over the centuries.

Here, albeit in fictional form, I realized, was another example of a question that perplexes culinary historians: What exactly drove the relationship between medicine and cuisine as humans moved through time? Is it that the egg developed before the chicken, or did the chicken emerge from the egg?

Some experts insist that we cannot know the answer to that question, and they’d be right. To a point. But if beliefs about food and health existed in the earliest times, why can’t we think that the food/cooking we see today stemmed from those beliefs? After all, we are experiencing something quite similar today. Beliefs about health are driving cooking, mirrored in the media and the multitude of vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and organic cookbooks.

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If you wish to try a recipe for the soup featured in the title of Ms. Mehran’s book, try this one for Persian Pomegranate Soup with Meatballs, from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

[Note: I will not be posting very regularly over the summer, as I will be researching and writing on my latest project. Please feel free to contact me, however, with comments or whatever. I love to hear from all of you.]