Tiny Bubbles: Where Food Met Science, Medicine, and Religion

Tiny bubbles.  I’m often struck by how often they feature in Western cuisine, how rarely in other major culinary traditions.  Think of mousse and sparkling drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, or whipped cream and meringues, or cake.

Double bubbles: sponge cake and whipped cream

Where are their equivalents in other cuisines? Very few, I think, except in Mesoamerica where the rationale, although related, was somewhat different (see the brief discussion at the end of the paper).

Although the Chinese, for example, separate whites and yolks, they don’t whip the whites but use them to, say, velvet meats and fish. The Islamic world has some lovely cream, but it is generally clotted not whipped.  Everyone has alcohol but champagne and bubbly beer are Western (though now exported everywhere).

Two comments before moving on.  First, and I think it hardly needs saying, this is a comment on the nature of the cuisine, not its quality.  Second, what follows are just ruminations, put down to try to encourage someone to take up this issue in a serious way.

Adding air to food

From about 1650 on, that is, in my scheme of things from the beginning of modern western cuisine on, cooks in northwest Europe and its colonies find all kinds of ways to introduce tiny bubbles into foods. Consider these:

1) using fermentation to make raised bread, lightly bubbly cider, champagne, beer. (In fact, I argue that fermenting briefly replaced cooking as the model for transforming raw materials into something edible.

In actuality, the airiness was more marked during the raising of the bread or the brewing of the beer than in the finished product.  We are now so used to fizzy beer and puffy bread that we forget that these are largely the result of forced carbonation and of bottles, caps, and cans, late inventions all.

Even so, cooks, physicians, and chemists were fascinated by the bubbles that accompanied fermenting, putrefying, and chemical interactions between acids and salts.

2) whisking egg whites or cream with the hand or with twigs to make mousses, syllabubs, meringues, and the like.

3) forcing some air or gas into liquids.  One of the earliest individuals to do this was Stephen Hales, clergyman and Fellow of the Royal Society. Ivan Day, the always informed and delightful food historian, explains how Hales invented an apparatus to force air through milk and water to rid it of bad tastes.

After searching through Hale’s books I noticed that in one work on the distillation of seawater, there was an additional essay at the end entitled An Account of the good Effect of blowing Showers of Air up through MILK, thereby to cure the ill Taste which is occasioned by some Kinds of Food of Cows. (London: 1761).

Dr Hales was very fond of blowing bubbles. The main essay in his book was about blowing air through seawater as it was being distilled to made freshwater for seamen. He also argued that the process of blowing air through milk which had been tainted through cows eating wild garlic or turnips, would get rid of the strong unwanted flavours.

Hales’ apparatus for pumping air into liquids. The bottom was placed in the liquid, then bellows were inserted inserted into the top right hole and pumped to blow the air through.

The apparatus he developed, with air pumped in through the hole at the top, Day establishes, was used at Kensington Palace in the eighteenth century for making the foamy milk and wine desserts known as syllabubs.

Photo. Lonnon Foster on Flickr

Hale was followed by Dr Nooth who a few decades later, following Priestley found a way to push “fixed” air (carbon dioxide) into waters using a fragile glass apparatus.

Chips of marble were placed in the bottom vessel and dilute sulphuric acid was added. Carbon dioxide was given off, rose into the middle vessel and partially dissolved in the water there. A valve arrangement allowed the gas to move upwards but did not allow the water to move downwards. When the water was needed, it was drawn off using the tap in the middle vessel. Science Museum. Science and Society Picture Library

The fizzy drink industry was under way, followed up by Jacob Schweppe and others (see the pretty good vimeo on the history of Schweppes below).

4) [Edit] combining fat, flour and liquid in such a way as to create steam to make light pastries, such as flaky pastry (hojaldre), choux pastry, popovers, Yorkshire pudding, steamed suet puddings, and the like.  There are antecedents for this in the layered pastries of the Ottoman Empire, such as baklava, and in the hojaldre of what I call Catholic cuisine.  But the whole range of techniques is much more fully explored in modern Western cuisine.

5) using chemicals such as ammonium carbonate or bicarbonate of soda, or the commercial product baking powder. Without these, the soft, airy cakes so typical of Western cuisine, would have been impossible.

This 1885 advertisement shows a cat startled by a cake rising dramatically thanks to International Baking Powder. Wikimedia.

Almost all these techniques required considerable labor, new kinds of cooking equipment, new ingredients, or some combination of these.  They did not just happen but were as cutting edge as the spherification and foams of contemporary high chef-ery.

So what created the circumstances for this broad experimentation with airy foods and drinks.

Tiny Bubbles, Chemists, and Technicians

In part, of course, the experimentation with airs is linked to the growth of chemistry in Europe and North America.

What bubbles of air, gas or spirit might be was a question that preoccupied chemists in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.  Air, thought of as one of the four elements since Classical Antiquity, was now being perceived as not one thing but many. And air was linked to other ideas about aethers and pneumas, fluids that were postulated to move the heavens and circulate in the human body, in many schools of thought in Classical Antiquity.  Newton, Descartes and their eighteenth-century successors continued to puzzle over them.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, chemists labored to work out what air was (or airs were).  Stephen Hales, for example, in his Vegetable Staticks (1727), he speculated on air as a nutrient for plants.  (He also invented the pneumatic trough for collecting airs over water, essential to later laboratory work).

And the use of tiny bubbles owes much to glass blowers who made this apparatus, to those who invented glass bottles capable of standing up to pressure, caps and corks to seal them, and a steady stream of small improvements in the ways of handling bubbles.

Tiny Bubbles and Physicians

From Antiquity, physicians discussed airs. Air obviously had to do with life itself.  Perhaps it was not the spark of life in the way that oils were, but no air, no life. Bad airs, bad health.  Airs were in an important sense nutrients.  In particular, they were nutrients that fed the brain or spirit.  All kinds of wrinkles on these basic insights were debated.

By the eighteenth century, doctors, often with chemical training, commonly saw airs as medicines. They were thought to be good for problems of the nervous system such as sluggishness and lack of attention.  Patients hurried off to spas that spouted sparkling mineral water to improve their physical and mental health.

Tiny Bubbles and the Intellectual and Spiritual Life

Airs had to do with spiritual health too, not something easily separated from physical and mental health in traditional medical schemes.  Many Protestant physicians and chemists followed Paracelsian tradition in seeing ferment, with its tiny bubbles, as turning lifeless matter into vibrant bodies. The supreme example was Christ, fermentum, the food of the soul.

In Paradise Lost Book V, 300-500 (First edition 1667, second 1674), John Milton, writing at a time when the Classical humoral system (or more broadly what I call the theory of the culinary cosmos) gives way to this new theory of a fermentation cosmos, gives a nice summing up of the earlier view.

He describes how cooking (coction), assimilation, and digestion turn coarser matter into finer, through the four elements, earth to water to air to fire.  And holds out the hope that one day body may turn into spirit.

Therefore what he gives

(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in part

Spiritual, may of purest spirits be found

No ingrateful food: and food alike those pure

Intelligential substances require

As doth your Rational; and both contain

within them every lower facultie

Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste

Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate

And corporeal to incorporeal turn.

For know, whatever was created, needs

To be sustained and fed; of Elements

The grosser feeds the purer, Earth the Sea

Earth and the Sea feed the Air, the Air those Fires

Ethereal, and as lowest first the moon. . .

Time may come when men

With angels may participate, and find

No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:

And from these corporal nutriments perhaps

Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit.

My Suggestion About the Genesis of Western Airy Foods

To sum up, my suggestion is that a confluence of medical and religious theorizing, with roots going back to Antiquity but taking on new forms in the seventeenth century, created an atmosphere of opinion in which airy foods were seen as healthful, moral, and at the forefront of gastronomy.  Not everyone who ate them subscribed to or understood all the details of one of the many versions of this line of theorizing, any more than in the past generation diners have subscribed to or understood the ongoing debates about fats, sugar, and gastronomy.  But kitchen practice and dining habits were affected.

Afterword One: Tiny Bubbles and Contemporary Foams

Bubbles in champagne. Quinn Dombrowski. Creative Commons.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few decades, if you have an interest in food you will know that chefs have been playing around with the present-day descendent of Nooth’s apparatus to make all kinds of flavored foams.

This is has nothing to do with nutrition. It has nothing to do with medicine.  And it has nothing to do with spirit, soul, and religion.  It is sheer secular delight in the technique and the taste. The earlier metaphysical, religious, and nutritional bases are long gone.

Afterword Two. Tiny Bubbles in Mesoamerica

Such an obsession with airs and foams is rare in food history.  I don’t seem much sign of it in Asian or Middle Eastern cuisines.  It was common in Mesoamerica and I had a very interesting discussion about this a couple of years ago with my then Austin, Texas colleague, Brian Stross of the University of Texas Anthropology Department, who sadly died earlier this year.

Stross published a  very interesting paper on “Food, Foam and Fermentation in Mesoamerica: Bubbles and the Sacred State of Inebriation,” in  Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of MultidisciplinaryResearch, Volume 14, Number 4, December 2011 , pp. 477-501(25) in which he argued

Edible foam is held in particularly high esteem in Mesoamerica, and in certain instances, even considered sacred. Based on “observational” rather than “cultural” logic, this paper suggests reasons for this high regard. It proposes that the relationship between bubbles and the sacred state of inebriation is a key factor contributing to the status of edible foam in Mesoamerica.

A Maya vase showing a noble and a vase of what is thought to be foamy chocolate

Of course, there’s no causal link between Mesoamerican foams and airy foods in eighteenth century Europe. Nor were bubbles and inebriation hallowed as inducing a sense of ecstasy and closeness to the spirits (well, except perhaps among certain artists).

And So, Help Needed with Tiny Bubbles

You’d think, given all these intriguing interconnections between gastronomy, medicine, religion, chemistry, and technology that there would be several people out there working this up. Apart from Linda Civitello working on chemical leaveners, I don’t know of any.  Is this just my ignorance?

And what about other ways of getting airs into foods and drinks?

And am I right about other culinary traditions?

And any more details on air and spirit in Protestantism? and the culinary consequences?

The floor is open.

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