Punch, the East India trade, Pirates and a dash more Lime Juice

This started as part of the blog on lime juice but is now one of two spin-offs. The lime juice alone was complicated enough without the origins of Punch and Cocktails. Lime juice is still very much a part of this story.

The Origins of Punch 

Scholars have generally believed that the likeliest derivation of the word "punch" as an alcoholic drink is from the Hindi word पंज panch or panj, meaning five. Many of the early descriptions of punch had five ingredients.

Of course the native word for five would have been familiar to the traders and other employees of the British East India Company.

The Punjab region was named for its five rivers, though from Persian rather than Hindi.

The panchamrita is the five-fold divine nectar used as an offering to the gods during Hindu pujas. It often consists of honey, sugarcane juice, cow's milk, yoghurt and ghee. Sometimes it has other ingredients, occasionally more than five.

The famous Indian five-spice powder is called paanch masaala or panch phoran. Not to be confused with the Chinese five-spice powder wŭ xiāng.

Another use of the word panch is in panchadhatu or panchaloha, the alloy of five metals used in India for sacred statues. One version is made with gold, silver, copper, zinc and iron. The five metals represent the five Hindu great elements. The word punch or panch in Anglo-Indian usage denoted a panchayat or local council of five members.

Porcelain Punch Bowl, c. 1770. Worcester Porcelain Factory 

The Cleveland Museum of Art

More after the break.

The Origin of the Cocktail

I started this as part of the blogs about lime-juice and punch but it seemed a little out of place, so I am giving it a page for itself.

Organic Seville or bitter oranges (Citrus aurantium) from Mairena del Alcor, Province of Sevilla. Being sold in Unicorn Grocery on the 8th of March 2019. Probably the last of this season. Earlier consignments were bigger, darker orange and more perfect.

Apart from all the variations of punch, other popular alcoholic concoctions of the 17th century included sangaree (sangría), rosa solis and flip. Along with punch, these were the precursors to the rum toddy, rum shrub (though shrub could be used to make punch), rum sour, brandy fix, gin twist, sling, cobbler, julep, rattle-snake, stone-fence, swizzle and cocktail of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

There are many theories about the origin of the word cocktail for a mixed alcoholic drink. This meaning of the word cocktail was first recorded in 1798. I have my own theory from reading about far too many variations of the descendants of punch.

Limes, Limeys and Insults

A "Lime-juicer". 

The American-built clipper Fatherland, built 1854. Renamed Swiftsure and operated by the British company R & H Green of Blackwall on the London-Melbourne run from 1857 to 1871. 1326 tons. Wrecked at Tripoli in 1888. Hand-coloured lithograph by Thomas Goldsworthy Dutton and William Foster, inward bound off Dover. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Limes, Lime-juicers and Limeys

The origin of the affectionate slang term "limey" for the British is usually told as though it has a long history back to the early 18th century, because limes were used to prevent scurvy in the Navy.

From the 17th century on the British sailors and colonists had been famously associated with limes because of the use of lime juice in the potent alcoholic mixture called punch. Punch appears to have been an invention of the employees of the British East India Company while stationed in India. At the least, it was enthusiastically taken up by them soon after its invention. It was very quickly adopted by sea-farers of all Western European nations. In the East Indies it was made with arrack distilled from palm wine, in the West Indies it was made with rum and in Britain it was made with brandy.

I have separated the section on Punch that I had written here, to keep this as simple as possible. There are many more references to the use of limes in the 17th and early 18th centuries in that piece.

The lime fruit as a deliberate preventative of scurvy only became particularly associated with British sea-faring after 1845 when the British Government started the change from mostly Sicilian lemons to West Indian limes. There had been a crop failure of Sicilian lemons and the Government wanted a secure, British-owned source of citrus fruit. So they encouraged the sowing of lime plantations on Caribbean islands subject to earthquake and hurricanes.

Much more after the break:

Kusagi, the Stinky Tree

Clerodendrum trichotomum
More after the break.

Green Tomatillo

I grew two plants of a green Tomatillo this year. There was no name for the variety on the Suttons website.

More after the break

My Garden

My Mum asked for a few pictures of the garden so I just popped out and took some wide shots. I will add some of the close-ups I have done in the last week. I will add a few more close-ups of plants over the next weeks in separate posts, hopefully.

I have a 5 metre by 5 metre garden. Rather than constantly adding annuals and tender bedding plants I believe in putting plants in the garden that are going to continue and increase for years. Which they have been, so it is now absolutely full.

Pictures after the break.

UPDATED: Manchester Bee swarm

On the 1st of June I was walking along Brantingham Road where it meets Manchester Road in Chorlton, at about 5pm. I saw a young man pointing his phone into a tree. I assumed he was just a fan of elder-flowers until I got nearer. I could then see a few insects orbiting around a clump on a branch of the elder tree. The young man said he had called a bee-herd.

More pictures after the break.

King Caradoc, inspiration for the mythical King Arthur?

There was once a British King who presided over a prosperous time, ruling from the city of Camulodunum. He regularly defeated his neighbours in battle to spread his rule. His father had already been so powerful that he was called King of the Britons. The young king fought against the armies of an invader across most of southern Britain for eight years before being defeated in a final great battle. He left the scene of the last battle alive and was then betrayed by a Queen who was having an affair with her husband's greatest warrior. The king did not die but went into exile in a far-distant and almost mythical land famous for the size and sweetness of its apples.

It was not King Arthur. This king is best known as Caractacus or Caratacus, the version of his name the Romans had used. He was resurrected as a hero of the British Empire in the 19th century because of his bravery in fighting a massive Empire, being British and being a noble, well-spoken loser. Even so, he is nowhere near as famous as King Arthur. The original name is thought to have been something like Caratauc or Caratacos. It is derived from a root meaning "beloved" like the modern Welsh cariad. Old Welsh has Caratauc, which became Caradoc. Modern Welsh has Caradog. Old Breton has Caratoc. The surviving Irish form of the name of Caradoc is Carthach or Carthaigh. The modern surnames Carthy and O'Carthy come from the same name. McCarthy derives from "mac Carthaigh" - son of Caratauc.

Caractacus at the Tribunal of Claudius at Rome
Engraving by Andrew Birrell of a painting by Henry Fuseli, 1792
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

More after the break.

Background

I decided to update the picture in the background to take out the discontinuity between the repeated tiles. So I took a new photo of a pinstripe ginger leaf (Alpinia formosana). I don't seem to have saved the cropped version of the original photo. It would have looked more or less like this:

I then flipped the image horizontally, vertically and both horizontally and vertically. Putting those four images together makes a tile that should tesselate perfectly.

Here is a mosaic approximately the shape of my screen:

King oyster growing kit

I have become tired of the poor quality and intermittent availability of oyster mushrooms in supermarkets in recent years. So I bought a King oyster kit from Suttons Seeds. It arrived less than four weeks ago. It was sitting in the little propagator they provide in a dark but well-ventilated cardboard box for two weeks and near a window since then. Today I had my first harvest. They are simpler to cultivate than the common mushroom. I got 175g of edible mushroom.

More after the break.

Star Carr Duck Pendant

My colourised version of the photo of the original reproduced at
the end of this piece. Colours represent a mallard drake.

A paper was published in the online journal Internet Archaeology* in 2016 detailing a find from the previous year at Star Carr in North Yorkshire. They recovered a remarkable 11,000 year old shale pendant just over 3 centimetres (1¼ inches) wide. Many interpretations of the engraving were offered but most were a bit weird. I think the most obvious is that it is a carving of a duck.

Updated 20/3/2021: I found a larger photo to manipulate, open in a new tab for the full image:

More after the break.

A Swarm of Golden Space Bees can't find Manchester because it is raining.

A Swarm of Golden Space Bees can't find Manchester because it is raining.
or
A terrestrial globe semée of bees volant, all proper.
Totally ©-free. Use as you like. If you care give me credit.

This is my interpretation of the top of the crest of the coat of arms of Manchester Council, made a little more realistic than the usual stylised heraldic cartoons such as that at the bottom of this page. I had a desire to know what it would look like done properly and realised the only way I was going to get to see it was to do it myself.

More after the break.

Marvellous marigolds

Maravilla silvestre (wild marvel, botanically Calendula arvensis) is very common and widespread in Andalusia. This small wild version of the well-known garden Marigold or maravilla (Calendula officinalis) is also used medicinally, for much the same things.

The flowers contain lutein, an interesting carotenoid that seems to protect the human body and particularly the eyes. The plant also contains particular saponins that seem to promote the rate of healing of wounds. Other names in Spanish are hierba del podador (herb of the pruner, as pruning tends to end up causing cuts and scrapes) and hierba lavamanos (handwash herb).

They are also very pretty.

I also saw another bright orange-yellow member of the marigold/daisy/sunflower/lettuce/thistle/artichoke/dandelion/tarragon/echinacea/chamomile/ragwort/dahlia/zinnia/chicory/cornflower/feverfew/goldenrod/tansy/coltsfoot/safflower/chrysanthemum family Compositae (also called Asteraceae). It is a very big family. 

The margarita de mar (sea daisy), estrella de mar (sea star) or padrijo (fatherson) is now known botanically as Pallenis maritima. It was previously called Asteriscus maritimus, Buphthalmum maritimum and Odontospermum maritimum. I don't know any uses for this plant apart from as a garden ornamental.

The margarita de mar can spread quite a bit.

Bufalaga marina

Bufalaga marina (Thymelaea hirsuta) is a member of Thymelaeaceae, the same family as the popular fragrant garden shrub Daphne. I didn't notice a smell from the flowers to this example above the Cuevas de Nerja. Like Daphne, it is also toxic, though it was used as a purgative despite this.

Flower of St James

This little buttercup, the flor de san diego (Ranunculus bullatus), seems to be very resistant to being trodden on. It was growing in the middle of a footpath above the Cuevas de Nerja.

Little little dragons and puffins.

Arisarum vulgare is known by many names including dragontea menor, the little dracontium. The dragontea mayor or big dracontium is Dracunculus vulgaris, whose botanical name means common little dragon. So Arisarum is the little little dragon and they are all very small. Other names for Arisarum vulgare are candilicos (candlesticks) and frailecillos (little friars, also used of the seabirds called puffins).

The arisarums of Andalucia include a range of intermediate forms between Arisarum vulgare  and Arisarum simorrhinum (the specific name means snub-nosed). Arisarum comes from the ancient Greek ἀρίσαρον used by Dioscorides, perhaps of this plant.

More pictures after the break.

Sarsaparilla

The Spanish plant Zarzaparrilla (Smilax aspera) is not the Sarsaparilla of commerce, which is Smilax ornata from the Americas. However the root has been used for the same medicinal effects and is famed as an aphrodisiac in Andalusia.

The berries were not ripe in January in Nerja.

The plant can scramble up to 10 metres hanging on with vicious thorns, though here only about 3 metres into great reed (Arundo donax). I would not recommend trying to weed it as the vines spring unpredictably when cut and wrap around digging their huge thorns into any unprotected flesh.

Also along the Rio Chillar I found this little seedling of a variegated form of the zarzaparrilla:

Zarzaparrilla comes from zarza (the bramble or blackberry for its thorns) and parrilla (the grapevine for its long vines growing up supports). A small unhappy zarza or blackberry (Rubus sp.) was also growing in the shade of some great reed.

Olivilla

Olivilla (Cneorum tricoccon), the "little olive" sounds delightful but is unfortunately quite toxic. It has been used medicinally but that probably is not a good idea. It used to be in its own family, Cneoraceae but is now included in the rue/citrus family Rutaceae.

This one was growing by the watchtower called Torre de Maro at the top of the cliff by the sea.

In English the olivilla is called spurge olive, here is an actual spurge, a Euphorbia of some species or other from by the sea east of Nerja.

Viper's Bugloss

The species of Echium found in Britain are called Viper's Bugloss. Those in Spain are called viborera and viperina. In both countries they have a folk reputation for curing snakebite, There are many species in Spain so I didn't try to identify these to species level, so here is some Echium from Malaga wasteland:

From by the Rio Chillar:

Potatoes

This post contains a few of the introduced ornamental members of the Solanaceae found around Nerja and a possible native. The large family Solanaceae contains;
the familiar vegetables aubergine, chili and sweet peppers, physalis, potato and tomato,
the familiar poisons deadly nightshade, henbane, mandrake and tobacco,
the familiar ornamentals petunia, physalis, shoo-fly, solanums and tobacco and many, many more.

All of the plants described after the break are deadly poisonous except for the Lycium, which has edible fruit and other parts used medicinally.