Tyrian Purple

28th February 2021

OPENING MUSIC

LIZ

Hello and welcome to bread and thread a podcast about food and domestic history. I’m liz.

HAZEL

And I'm hazel. We’re two friends who studied archaeology together and love history and making stuff, so what have you been making recently this is the part where we talk about the making things.

LIZ

I don’t know why you clarified that but yes it is.

HAZEL

I don’t know I just thought if someone was listening to us for the first time maybe they would be confused why we started a history podcast by talking about cake.

LIZ

I didn’t make cake, I did make welsh rarebit for the first time in seven years, with some of the homemade beer.

HAZEL

Oh man, oh you’re so cottagecore.

LIZ

I’m going to talk about welsh rarebit in the local larder but this one was very good.

HAZEL

That sounds amazing.

LIZ

If the beer portion is bitter it contrasts really well with the sweet sharpness of cheese and it’s very good.

HAZEL

You sound like you’re having a transcendent experience.

LIZ

I haven’t had it for seven years!

HAZEL

That is fair enough.

LIZ

Food of my fathers!

HAZEL

Dish of my people!

LIZ

Literally, my father’s father. What have you been up to?

HAZEL

I’m just kind of working on different projects really, reading up about dyes and things because I'd quite like to get into doing that. I’ve been processing the sheep’s fleece I have in a giant bag in my room so that’s finally getting done I've been doing a lot of carding and spinning. It’s only been about a year but I'm finally getting to it.

LIZ

You’ve got a lot on.

HAZEL

Yeah there’s a fair amount happening right now. So hopefully I'll have enough for the coat I've been wanting to make. So just continuing with a few long term projects, I haven’t dipped into anything new. I did make chocolate and lime cupcakes and they were delicious.

LIZ

Chocolate and lime is underrated as a combination.

HAZEL

Great flavour combination because I feel lime is a very strong flavour and the chocolate kind of tempers it if that makes any sense.

LIZ

The old fashioned sweet shop near us sells chocolate limes which are kind of like you know like chocolate eclairs with chocolate and toffee outside? It’s like that but instead of toffee it’s a lime boiled sweet.

HAZEL

That sounds like a time.

LIZ

It is very good.

HAZEL

Yeah, lime is tasty. So I did actually want you I wanted to get you to guess my topic for today’s episode, I just thought it would be fun. I’m going to give you some clues this episode is going to be about a colour. Possibly the most expensive colour in history. It is very associated with ancient Greece and Rome, and this colour is directly responsible for the decimation of a particular species of Mediterranean snail.

LIZ

OK I know what it is!

HAZEL

Go on.

LIZ

It’s my favourite colour!

HAZEL

Really?

LIZ

Have you not seen my hair in the past five years?

HAZEL

Oh, yeah! yeah, definitely. Go on, tell the peeps.

LIZ

Is it indigo?

HAZEL

It’s actually not indigo, it’s actually Tyrian purple. Which you probably were thinking of?

LIZ

I knew it was a purple.

HAZEL

I guess you can get similar colours to indigo, but this one-

LIZ

It’s a deep rich purple.

HAZEL

Yeah, there’s a reason why this was so expensive that you could only afford it if you were royalty. And that was because of the way it was made and the materials it comes from and that is was a very particular shade. I think it’s fairly generally known that purple is an imperial colour.

LIZ

Ancient roman sumptuary laws.

HAZEL

Yeah, purple being restricted to imperial use, or to officials being able to have strips of purple on their robes, so I feel like a lot of people would think of ancient Rome and roman emperors when they’re thinking of the colour purple, but actually there’s kind of a reason this purple in particular, Tyrian or imperial purple is the imperial one. I’ve been reading up quite a lot on natural dyes over the past few weeks and turns out there are a few plants you can get purple from you can get it from logwood which is a tree that grows in Asia, you can get it from a few different other plants, but in Europe the trade routes for these kind of dyes hadn’t really been established yet, we didn’t really know about them. Plus the other dyes, so you can use berries like elderberries or blackberries or other kinds of things to get a purple but the thing about Tyrian purple is it’s a lot more colourfast and lightfast it doesn’t fade with age it gets even richer and brighter and that’s why it was so prized it’s a really deep colour really more of a deep magenta colour,

LIZ

Yeah it’s a very red purple.

HAZEL

You can get some of the other blue toned purples from mixing or overdying but you can’t get this dark red purple colour from anything else, and you can’t get a purple this colour- and light- fast as well.

LIZ

Think of the colour of something super synthetic, grape flavour stuff.

HAZEL

Yeah yeah actually it’s ribena colour. What am I thinking of? Vimto.

LIZ

Yeah I'd say Vimto is more the blue purple end. It’s very hard to think of something natural that that’s purple, and that’s kind of the point.

HAZEL

Yeah. I’d go with ribena.

LIZ

Yeah ribena’s a bit more fake looking.

HAZEL

No shade to ribena I love that stuff.

LIZ

Yeah, and the packaging of something grape flavoured is the colour of Tyrian purple.

HAZEL

As we’re establishing it’s a really hard to pin down colour, which is why this specific shade was really prized, and it’s called Tyrian purple because one of the centres of manufacture was called Tyre. I think it’s pronounced Tyre.

LIZ

Is that T-Y-R?

HAZEL

T-Y-R-E.

LIZ

Oh like a Tyre.

HAZEL

Yeah like Tyre. Which is in modern day Lebanon, which was Phoenicia. Interestingly Phoenicia was the greek name for the Lebanon area. Which could mean land of purple because that’s where the Greeks were getting that dye from.

LIZ

That’s a really pretty name then. Problem is it makes me think of alphabet, but it’s the other way around - the alphabet is named after the concept of phonetics which is Phoenicia which is a different podcast...

HAZEL

We do throw out a lot of different tangents on this podcast.

LIZ

We just like history.

HAZEL

Yeah turns out there’s a lot of it and it all interconnects.

LIZ

Whodathunk?

HAZEL

So Phoenicia was the center of this purple dye industry in the ancient world and they kind of had outposts across north Africa where this was being produced as well. So the purple dye comes from a particular kind of sea snail that lives in the Mediterranean which is called the murex snail and there are at least 3 species of this snail that all produce various different shades from magenta to a dark purple to a red. One of them is Tyrian red, which is also super expensive. So this was highly prized in the ancient world. Charlemagne was buried in a shroud made of Tyrian purple.

LIZ

Of course he was. On brand for Charlie.

HAZEL

So although that was in the 9th century I believe so somewhat after ancient greece and Rome. The manufacture of this dye goes back to probably 1000 bc. What we have found as the evidence o this is a lot of the crushed snail shells on the coastal areas of the Mediterranean. But the earliest evidence of the dye itself was discovered this year. Which is impressive cause

LIZ

Wait when you say this year do you mean...

HAZEL

The article I got this from was published on the 28th of January 2021, and it’s the discovery of researchers in Israel having found some fragments of wool fibers in Israel dating back to about 1000 bc so fragments of wool dyed with Tyrian purple, which is incredible I didn’t expect this much of a recent development in the case of Tyrian purple.

LIZ

Wow!

HAZEL

I know, I know and I believe this is the actual wool they found and it’s still purple, it’s still recognisably purple. It’s incredible. So I mean that’s pretty cool, it’s possible it’s an ancient process and it went on until pretty much the fall of Constantinople. It was popular in ancient greece and Rome and the Byzantine empire preserved the technique of dyeing with the murex snail. But with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 no-one really had the money or could be bothered to continue making Tyrian purple and that is because as well as it being a horrifically expensive dye and as we were saying so expensive you could only afford it if you were insanely wealthy, or imperial, because you’d need so many of these snails to make the dye. The dye comes from within the shellfish, so you have to catch 1000s of these shellfish and have to extract the dye. There are two ways you can do this. The first way which is not the way you can do it in ancient greece and Rome, is a much kinder way. You basically annoy them into giving up the dye.

LIZ

Is it like a squid ink situation?

HAZEL

Basically yeah, so they’re predatory sea snails and among other things this gland where the substance that has the dye in it is used for squirting at things in like predatory behavior so if they get agitated or angry they’ll squirt out the dye. You can go and bother some snails. There is still milking snails in juaca Mexico and there's an amazing Mexican documentary on this on youtube it’s got English subtitles where this one guy explains how they do it. They go onto the rocks and find these snails it’s a different species of snail so it’s not the same one in the Mediterranean but it has the purple dye. They go out onto the rocks and camp out there, because it takes so long. I believe to milk the snails. They get the snail, milk-

LIZ

Unless you’re a professional snail botherer...

HAZEL

They squeeze the snail until it squirts out the dye and they put it straight on the yarn they’re dying and they put it back and find some more snails and apparently it takes 28 days to regain remake the dye refill their glands as it were, and then- they can be harvested again. It’s a method that doesn’t harm the snail and doesn’t deplete the population. But as you can guess you cannot produce a lot of dyed material with this, the guy in this documentary was saying even in its heyday when the population of the snail was really good they might do five or six skeins of yarn in each trip, a week’s camping or something. They’re not really looking to sell, it’s more of a traditional practice and in fact in this documentary there are some amazing shots of back strap weaving with some of this purple yarn. I’ll post a link to that when we put the episode up. That’s the first way. The second way, which was used in the industrial production of this dye. You crushed them, and then leave them to ferment.

LIZ

Less nice.

HAZEL

Yeah. Apparently it smells atrocious.

LIZ

It would!

HAZEL

Like awful. Yeah I feel like people - you’d think people would be used to strong smells back in history but even back then they were like this rank, we don’t want to be around this.

LIZ

I guess they were already making garam, what’s one more barrel of fermenting fish?

HAZEL

Yeah so the way that Pliny the Elder describes it, I said it right, I remembered, the process Pliny the Elder describes is that they so they crush the shells and then they take the vein there’s they find the gland that has the dye, they extract it and they salt it leave it to steep, boil it and then there’s a funnel involved, they have to skim the liquor, takes about ten days, and then you can dye it. That’s the process that he describes.

LIZ

OK...

HAZEL

But archaeological data also indicates that they were left to decompose, ferment. We can’t actually reproduce this method, no-one has managed to be able to do it to this day, we don’t know exactly how they did it.

LIZ

You said it stopped after the fall of Constantinople, was it because it was too depleted by that point, or did the Ottomans look at it and go we’re not gonna do that?

HAZEL

Basically yes on both counts, as you might expect this absolutely decimated the murex population of the Mediterranean, so by this point, even to this day the snail is extremely rare in the Mediterranean, so they kinda ruined it, they used all the snail.

LIZ

I guess the Ottomans could trade with Asia couldn’t they, they had their own sources of purple.

HAZEL

That’s another reason. So it was basically after the fall of Constantinople, the Byzantines were doing this as a tradition going back to Ancient Rome but it was falling out of favour elsewhere cause it was just so expensive just ridiculously expensive. It took about ten thousand of these snails just to make enough dye for trimming your clothing.

LIZ

Presumably getting more and more expensive as time goes on as well.

HAZEL

Running out of snails, yeah, by this point by 1453 it’s getting more and more difficult to even find the snails, no-one’s got the money any more no-one can be bothered, there’s no point. So purple goes out of history at that point, at least in the European middle eastern world, until the importation of purples from Asia which is a couple centuries later.

LIZ

Yeah that’d be more silk road stuff presumably.

HAZEL

Yeah until you get access to logwood which gets you bright colourfast purples, and the medieval western world moves on to again I'm not sure this is pronounced Kermes. Ker-mees?

LIZ

Type it out?

HAZEL

K-E-R-M-E-S.

LIZ

Just Kermes?

HAZEL

Kermes, also known as vermillion or scarlet, that particular scarlet red that was a hallmark of wealth in the medieval world takes over as the fancy colour, which I believe is also why cardinals wear red in the catholic church.

LIZ

Yeah cause catholic priests like their fancy clothes.

HAZEL

Indeed! Yeah, so that’s kind of the reason it died out, and as I mentioned the only place they really make this today is in Mexico, and as a very small scale thing. So it’s just absolutely wild, the whole entire concept of this is ridiculous.

LIZ

Yeah...

HAZEL

But then you know it’s just interesting that it really is a completely unreproducible shade, it’s the only way you can get this particular colour, so I guess it makes sense that people would do this but yeah we know they were doing it in these massive quantities cause we found the remains of the industry, the discarded shells which for example, in Sidon, which is another Phoenician city, the quantity of discarded shells produced a mountain 40 metres high.

LIZ

Wow.

HAZEL

This dye was worth more than its weight in gold.

LIZ

That’s a legitimate hill.

HAZEL

Yeah, that’s the scale of this industry, it was big. So even though this was a luxury good and there was very little of it around it required this massive industry to sustain it, so you know, like when you don’t have emperors with massive amounts of personal wealth as well as taxpayers money, no-one can afford this anymore. Yeah, that is the relatively brief but extremely wild history of the colour Tyrian purple.

LIZ

That is indeed extremely wild!

HAZEL

There is a lot more to this than meets the eye. And going a bit more onto I suppose a subject more relevant to us today it’s kind of an example of how I think we going forward need to blend these older ways of making things with the technology we have today, because when you think about the demand we have today for clothing and the amount of people there are, if we were to go back to completely natural dyes that would have a terrible effect on the environment because natural dyes need a lot of quantity of material compared to the thing you’re actually going to dye. Most of them are not as significant as the Tyrian purple, but you still need generally about twice the amount of dye stuff to the material you’re going to dye, so you know in the past this did have an effect on the environment. This snail is almost extinct today because of the demand for this dye, even 2000 years ago so yeah, although the process of natural dyeing itself is much more environmentally friendly compared to creating most synthetic dyes, the actual dye stuff itself that can be difficult to obtain or it could be harmful to the environment if we were to harvest a lot of it.

LIZ

I guess what you really need is an end to fast fashion and developing more environmentally friendly synthetic dyes at the same time and as soon as possible.

HAZEL

Yeah that’s what I'm getting at here I think the way forward is definitely the process of synthetic dyeing needs to become a lot more environmentally friendly and I definitely think that there's a lot of things from natural dyeing we can incorporate into those processes, so I dunno I think going forward the way might be to figure out how we can use waste products as dyes or that kind of thing, so yeah like most things I think it’s a combination of the old stuff and the new stuff.

LIZ

What?!

HAZEL

Surprise! It’s compromise again.

LIZ

So before we go onto local larder, if you want to suggest an episode or just say hi, we do have an email - bread and threadpodcast at gmail dot com.

HAZEL

We also have a twitter at bread and thread, you can keep up with all the exciting things on there and take part in the guess what the episode is game we play every couple weeks.

LIZ

And sub to our patreon at breadandthread if you want monthly recipes and access to a discord server and potentially at the ten dollar tier to make you  custom episode.

Probably bad podcast plug circa 32 minutes.

HAZEL

So tell us about some rarebit.

LIZ

Yes. So the exact origin  is kind of unclear, it’s thought to be a corruption of welsh rabbit, which is first recorded in 1725, but we get rare bit by the 1780s, it’s a writer mostly an antiquarian but one of those people that does a bit of everything called Francis Gross, who refers to it as welsh rarebit and welsh rare bit, two words in that case, it’s generally agreed that rarebit is a corruption of rabbit, which is probably insulting the welsh.

HAZEL

Yeah I was gonna say, sorry, I was gonna say as far as I know there’s no rabbit involved.

LIZ

Oh no it’s a vegetarian dish. The general consensus seems to be welsh people are either poor or stupid so they make cheese on toast and call it rabbit. Because people were really mean to welsh people, especially english people, always being mean to welsh people. so welsh rarebit itself is generally leeks, cheese, beer, mustard, melt it all together and pour it over toast.

HAZEL

And it is delicious.

LIZ

Yeah there’s no way to go wrong with that. Top tip, actually, there’s a welsh cheese called y fenni, which is y space fenni, which has ale and mustard already in it, so if you want to have rarebit really easily, get some of that.

HAZEL

Oh I had some on my birthday, it’s amazing, would recommend, go get yourself some it’s delicious.

LIZ

Yeah, the dish itself probably developed from a much earlier thing, we don’t know how early but probably medieval cause cwse pobi, which is welsh for baked cheese. You put the cheese by the fire, the top of it melts and you scoop that off and put it on bread you’ve also toasted over the fire with a toasting fork.

HAZEL

Oh wow it’s extreme cheese toast.

LIZ

It’s almost like a welsh fondue.

HAZEL

Oh man! That’s amazing!

LIZ

Which is, it’s interesting cause you need quite a hard cheese for that and a lot of welsh cheeses are soft. But there’s some tudor accounts of a hard ewe’s milk cheese being used, which I can imagine it being particularly good actually because ewe’s milk cheese tends to be quite nutty, not that I eat an inordinate amount of cheese or anything.

HAZEL

I like the idea that people all throughout history are like yep, toasted cheese good.

LIZ

There is something in the stereotype I mentioned of wales being poor especially at that point, because england likes to just go into wales and attack people and take all the good stuff, so a lot of welsh people were very poor, especially you know, peasants, who are poor everywhere. So something like that would be, especially if you can mix some seasonings in there with the rarebit, would be a really nice comforting dish after a hard day. You’re out, you’re working in you know, on the hills with your sheep or whatever, and then you go back into your little house, you get some hot cheese and some hot bread, and you put them together and you just sit there and you eat it and everything’s ok for a little bit.

HAZEL

Aah, hot melty cheese, yup, yup.

LIZ

Yeah, so there’s references from the late 18th century of it being, becoming a tavern meal, a thing you would just wander into a pub and order.

HAZEL

It sounds like good pub food, it’s fairly simple to make, and it goes good with beer.

LIZ

I mean like I said if you make it right it’s got beer in it. Interestingly it gets referred to at various points and in various places as english irish or scotch rarebit as well as welsh, but referring to it as welsh seems to come first. There is also a variation called buck rarebit or golden buck, which is when it’s served with an egg, which just sounds like a really good breakfast. Yeah apparently you can get in some places especially places in the US with a large welsh background so places like Appalachia and parts of Pennsylvania that have a lot of welsh ancestry you can get rarebit sauce or rabbit sauce on a hamburger in some places.

HAZEL

Oh wow. Wow that is a whole new dimension. I feel that would be quite good.

LIZ

Yeah, cause the problem with queso the american cheese sauce I think is that it’s very, it doesn’t have a lot of depth of flavour to it, you know the sort of bright yellow tex-mex cheese sauce?

HAZEL

I think I know what you mean I don’t think I've ever had it, but I watch movies.

LIZ

I think having it with rarebit would be really good, and I'm going to have to try it at some point. So yeah, that is there’s not a lot of welsh rarebit that’s all the information I could find about it, apart fro that it is mentioned in a tudor era jokebook so it’s one of those sort of I've forgotten the name, it’s a shaggy dog story, god getting sick of so many welsh people in heaven, cause god’s mean I guess, and tells st peter to do something about it, and st peter goes outside the gates of heaven and says cwse pobi which is much to say as roasted cheese, and the welsh people run out because they want rarebit and st peter locks them out of heaven. So there’s that...

HAZEL

OK! Well, I think I'd pick rarebit over heaven to be honest. It’s basically the same thing, right?

LIZ

Yeah, that’s... it really is though. That is pretty much all the information I could find on welsh rarebit.

HAZEL

That is fantastic, I love the rarebit burger idea.

LIZ

Yeah thank you for listening, and we’ll be back next time. I think we’ll do sumptuary laws next cause I brought them up and people probably don’t know what that is.

HAZEL

That’s a great idea, I feel like it will, we’ll have a good segue for once.

LIZ

Yeah, the segue will be listen to the last one and then this one. So yeah we’ll be back in a couple weeks and i’ll tell you all about sumptuary laws. Goodbye!

Ending music.