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Reader, what images do the words “tea ceremony” evoke for you? A beautiful young geisha or a white-haired old tea master kneeling on a cushion whisking frothy green tea in a priceless old bowl? Or the Chinese version, seated round a low table watching the careful steeping of fragrant tea leaves in a red clay pot, before sipping the result from minute cups? I was privileged to experience the Chinese version on one occasion myself at a wonderful tea house in Singapore called Tea Chapter, but alas, when I hear the words “tea ceremony”, a very different image tends to come into my mind.

A group of people are sprawled on barrow-boards, in wheelbarrows, or cross-legged on the ground. Oh, the relief of sitting down for fifteen minutes after several hours with a pick and shovel in the blazing sun or the pouring rain! The tea is poured out of a battered tin tea pot into mugs which are sordid in the extreme. Hot water is hard to come by, sometimes even cold water comes in plastic jerry cans, and nobody really has time to spare for thorough washing up. The experienced keep a mug clearly labelled with their name, to avoid cold sores. The tea itself is the colour of dark mahogany and we often add flavour by idly lobbing lumps of mud into each other’s cups.  This is the tea ceremony as performed on almost every British-run archaeological site I ever worked on.

Mind you, it could get even worse. I went on an awful training dig in the Western Isles of Scotland during my second year at university. It took place during the Easter vacation. We spent a fortnight outside on the seashore, digging up an Iron Age wheelhouse in the freezing wind and rain. We had to wear goggles because the wind blew the sand back into the trench as fast as we could dig it out. At morning tea break, a large boiler in a hollow in the sand dunes provided us with tea and coffee. At lunch time it provided us with synthetic soup. At afternoon tea break it provided us with soup-flavoured tea. Of course there was nowhere to wash out the boiler. The tea was warm but I do not recommend it.

On the French-run sites I worked on there was no formal tea-break and no tea. Instead we were urged to take the odd break and help ourselves to iced water and fruit from a cool-box. But when I was working with a French team in the Lebanon, we were taken to visit the museum in Damascus in Syria. After we had been given a guided tour of the museum, we were served glasses of the most wonderful mint tea I have ever tasted. I have been trying without success to recreate the taste for the last fifty years.

I think I’ll go and put the kettle on…..

For many years, I only had a part-time permanent job as a museum curator, and I made up my weekly hours with education work and even re-enacting, at various museums. Food and cooking was a natural extension of my work on medieval and early modern pottery. I had an evening lecture on medieval food and cooking too, which was very popular with local associations, usually to follow their annual general meetings or annual dinners, and Dame Eileen Currant's Tudor Christmas had a regular spot at a local museum. Since the museum which was my home base was at an important Roman site, I ended up doing Roman food demonstrations at open days as well. I gradually accumulated a collection of replica kitchen equipment, and a set of recipes for demonstration purposes. I came to realise that for all of these periods, many of the recipes had a characteristic set of instructions, as to both ingredients and methods, which could be summarised as follows.

In cibum Romanum – to cook Roman food.

Pepper.  Honey.  Fish sauce.  Asafoetida. Herbs. Wine vinegar.

Roman recipes mostly come from the so-called “Cookbook of Apicius”, and many of them are extremely cryptic, often consisting of nothing more than a series of nouns. Project Gutenberg has a translation of Apicius with comments. The line above is a summary of the majority of Roman recipes, in the Apicius style.  To make anything taste Roman, use some or all of these ingredients. They seem to have used them to flavour everything from sliced cucumber to hard-boiled eggs to roast chicken and other birds (including parrot). But you don’t need to try to find sows udders or larks’ brains to go Roman. Most of the time they ate quite ordinary things like chicken or fish or lentils, flavoured as above. Serve them with wholemeal bread, and wine mixed with water.

The herbs could be any of lovage, mint, cumin seed, coriander seed, fresh coriander, oregano, celery seeds, caraway seeds, parsley, savory, thyme, fennel seeds, or ginger. Avoid rue or pennyroyal in case of bad effects.

Thai fish sauce makes a good substitute for the Roman version (“garum”). Hing or asafoetida is the nearest thing to the Roman herb silphium, which was a popular if expensive flavouring. Pine kernels were also used a lot. They were pretty fond of pouring beaten eggs over everything and turning it into a sort of omelette or frittata. Don’t forget that pepper was considered to go well on sweet stuff. Try dates stuffed with pine nuts, fried in honey and sprinkled with freshly-ground black pepper; they are delicious.

Moving on to the medieval period, we come to works such as the Menagier de Paris (The Goodman of Paris), a sort of medieval Mrs Beeton in French dating from the late 14^th century. The author is unknown but it is written as if narrated by an elderly Parisian householder to his inexperienced fifteen year-old wife, and gives instructions on almost everything, from how to roast a swan to how to make ink. The Form of Curye is one of the oldest surviving English cookery books, attributed to Richard II’s head cooks, also 14^th century. So:

For to make your food taste medieval

Smite hym in pieces

Fry hym up in grece

And do thereto good herbyes

Nym wine oder water

And seethe it tyl it be enow

And serve it forthe…

Smite i.e. chop it into pieces. This works for anything, meat or vegetable, but avoid potatoes and tomatoes because they come from South America which hadn’t been discovered yet.

Fry it in whatever you usually fry stuff in, but it should be animal fat (‘grease’)

Add whatever herbs you think will go well with it: thyme, parsley, sage, bay leaves and basil. Do NOT use chilli: again, it hadn’t been discovered yet. “Herbyes” included vegetables so add any that you like. The onion and cabbage families were popular.

Add wine or water

Seethe i.e. boil/simmer it until it is done. Medieval recipes didn’t give cooking times. After all, they didn’t have any clocks. The only clocks were in churches and other important buildings, and they were not very accurate. They didn’t give temperatures either, because they had no way of measuring them. They just had to move the pot closer to or further from the flames. Use your judgement.

Serve it forth, usually in a little wooden bowl with a spoon, accompanied by some “pain de main” (white rolls) or if you are a bit more down-market, some “maslin" i.e. mixed wheat and rye bread. And ale or wine of course. It’s really most authentic if two or three people share the same drinking cup…

If you want to show off, the medieval lord would expect dishes which included rice, almonds, rosewater, sugar, dried and citrus fruits, and a hint of exotic spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. These ingredients were mostly brought back to England from the eastern Mediterranean by the Crusaders. They might be used in something like a rice pudding flavoured with rose petals and a lot of cream, or a chicken dish, where the chicken is boiled, pounded to a paste, and then reheated with wine, ground almonds, dried figs and spices. And if you want to serve a medieval salad, leave out the tomatoes and peppers, go heavy on the spring onions, and use edible flowers and lots of herbs.

Finally we arrive in the 16^th century. For reasons of convenience in transporting the equipment in a small car, and setting it up in a very cramped corner of a small gallery, I usually concentrated on banqueting stuff, which may be summarised quite simply: sugar. They had just got hold of the New World and access to sugar cane in quantity.

A Tudor Banquet

 ‘Suckets’: candied everything – lettuce stalks, cherries, orange peel, rose petals, rosemary flowers, whole spices, etc, simmered in sugar syrup over a chafing dish.

“Manus Christi”: little sweets made of sugar flavoured with rosewater and decorated with gold leaf

‘Marchpane’: marzipan on a pastry base with a layer of icing baked onto it.

Gingerbread: made with breadcrumbs, honey and spices including ginger; it was often coloured red and shaped in small wooden moulds

Sweetened wine

If you were a Tudor with social pretensions, the banquet was a dessert course at the end of a feast. There are many surviving books with recipes for making banqueting stuff; The good huswife's Jewell by Thomas Dalton is as good as any. A banquet involved sweetmeats of all kinds, served on plates moulded from sugar paste, accompanied by sweetened wine drunk from goblets moulded from sugar paste, and enlivened by music, entertainers, and a “subtlety”, a huge sugar sculpture carried in by several servants. This often included a tasteful reference to the importance of the host, such as a coat of arms; or perhaps a reference to the occasion, for example a woman in childbirth if it was a wedding.

If you felt that providing your guests with sugar plates was a bit over-the-top, you might have a set of little circular wooden trenchers decorated in bright colours with gold leaf. Many of these little plates had a poem on the back. If you were going to eat a wet sucket dripping with syrup (my favourite is candied lettuce stalks), you might even use a fork. Fingers were still used for the rest of the feast.

If you were wealthy enough, you might have a separate banqueting house, where you went to enjoy your dessert after the rest of the feast was over. Some people built them on the roof of their mansion, others out in the garden, where they might be a permanent structure, or something made for the occasion out of green branches decked with flowers. My favourite was one built up a tree.

All this sugar was very bad for Tudor teeth, as Queen Elizabeth I is said to have found out the hard way!

Some of these dishes are really yummy. So if you get tired of making your food taste Chinese or Italian or Indian or Mexican, try a Roman, Medieval or Tudor dish instead.

The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II

Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!

 “…the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” 

Thus spoke the 18^th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who made a tour of the Western isles of Scotland in 1773. Although extremely rude about much of the food he was offered on the journey, he was whole-heartedly in favour of Scottish breakfasts. So I am currently living in the right country, and I strongly agree with the marmalade bit.

When I was working on a dig in France, we lived in tents in the field next to a small country restaurant. We had our breakfasts (jam not marmalade but it was good and the coffee was marvellous) on the terrace of the restaurant in the early morning sunshine, surrounded by tubs of petunias and geraniums. The owner of the establishment had an ancient father who used to come and sit on a corner of the terrace while we were eating. His breakfast consisted of a piece of salami and a large glass of cognac.  To each his own…

I saw an interesting breakfast in a Singapore café. A little old Chinese lady came and sat at my table, bringing with her a very large bowl of curried noodle soup. She was a tiny, skinny little thing, and I watched with interest as she steadily spooned and chop-sticked the enormous bowlful into her diminutive person. She looked very perky so it was obviously doing her good. Maybe I should try it. Probably this form of breakfast was the inspiration for my son’s current favourite, which is to take a pot of instant curried noodles, break two eggs into it, and pour boiling water over the lot. When the noodles have had their due time, the eggs could by a stretch be said to be poached.

I myself was eating the signature breakfast of the city, or at least part of it. This is coffee and kaya toast, eaten with two boiled eggs. I skipped the eggs as I am not fond of soft eggs in any form, and the eggs that go with this breakfast are so soft boiled that you are expected to break them into a bowl, stir them up with soya sauce and drink them. ‘Kaya toast’ is white toast made into a sandwich with kaya jam. Kaya jam is a combination of coconut milk, egg and sugar flavoured with pandan leaf, and is very nice. My first attempt at this breakfast was a bit oversweet, as I did not understand how to specify that I wanted my coffee without sugar.  I watched the man preparing it  put a tablespoon of sugar into the (glass) mug, then about an inch of condensed milk, and then fill it up with coffee. But once I had got the coffee sorted out it was a fine tropical start to the day’s sightseeing, especially when I started adding miniature, perfectly fresh bananas bought from a nearby supermarket. Oh joy!

The Full British Breakfast, in its English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish variants, is part of the pleasure of staying in B&Bs all over the British Isles. Sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, baked beans, fried mushroom and fried tomato: a decadent combination of saturated fats to begin a day walking up mountainsides or along the seashore in the freezing rain and/or howling gale. I like the Scottish version (Lorne sausage and haggis) even better than the traditional English one. The Irish version (black and white pudding, soda bread and potato cake) is not to be sneezed at either. I haven’t yet tried a Full Welsh, which allegedly includes seaweed and cockles made into a patty with oatmeal, but it sounds promising.

But I think my favourite breakfast is the bacon butties you get on the local ferries to the Outer Isles of Orkney. Coffee and really good bacon butties munched as you sail across a brilliantly blue sea past small green islands on your way to visit a chambered tomb is the absolute best. Oh, how I’ve missed them during Lockdown!