This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Dining at the (Other) Top of the World: Hunger, Fruitcake, and the Race to Reach the South Pole, first released on February 20, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Dining at the Top of the World: Arctic Adaptation, Abundance, and…Ice Cream, first released on February 6, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Pumpkin Spice Hero: The Thrilling But Tragic True Story of Nutmeg, first released on November 7, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

[LAUGHTER]

JOHN OLIVER: Yes, it’s that special time of year where we voluntarily imbibe pumpkin spice lattes. The coffee that tastes like a candle. But what is strange is that pumpkin spice foods inexplicably seem to grow more omnipresent every year, even though there’s no actual pumpkin in the drinks.

GRABER: Come on John, there doesn’t have to be pumpkin in it, it’s all about the spice part. But John Oliver is right that these days, there’s kind of pumpkin spice everything.

SINGERS: Fa la la la…

VOICEOVER: Your favorite Coffee Mate seasonal flavors are back. So add some delicious Coffee Mate pumpkin spice to your favorite time of the year.

TIKTOK GUY: In the past two hours I had to go to like—four different stores trying to find this. Pumpkin spice Oreos!

TWILLEY: So far so basic, but pumpkin spice doesn’t stop with coffee and cookies.

VOICEOVER: Buff City Soap’s pumpkin spice bar soap smells like a warm slice of grandma’s famous pumpkin bread. Smells so good… you’ll want to eat it.

GRABER: But wait, there’s more, and I have to admit I’m a little bit horrified.

DEEP VOICE: If you like pumpkin spice you’re going to love me.

WOMAN: Who said that?

DEEP VOICE: Over here. It’s me. Bud Light’s new pumpkin spice seltzer. Crack me open. Take a sip. Pumpkin. Spice! Aaah.

TWILLEY: And what does that big refreshing gulp of pumpkin spice Bud Light seltzer wash down?

JIMMY KIMMEL: There’s a new pumpkin spice flavored food item. Pumpkin Spice Spam, that went on sale yesterday. [AUDIENCE GASPS] I know. And already, it’s sold out. In less than seven hours. It completely sold out. And for those who weren’t able to get your hands on any, Hormel is reassuring customers that don’t worry, it’ll be available again when you get to hell. So.

TWILLEY: If only we were making this up.

GRABER: We of course are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber—

TWILLEY: I’m Nicola Twilley. And this episode, you’ll never believe it but we are diving into pumpkin spice. But not the whole thing. The seltzer and the spam—that’s too much.

GRABER: Even the full spice mix is too much. Pumpkin spice usually includes cinnamon, ginger, cloves, allspice, and…nutmeg. And it’s the nutmeg that’s our star this episode.

TWILLEY: Before its supporting role in *the* official spice mix of autumn, nutmeg used to be super rare and hard to get hold of. Because it originally comes from islands that are too small to even show up on any but the most specialized maps.

GRABER: And the story behind how it became popular involves all the classics: bloodshed, war, scurvy, ridiculously wealthy men showing off, a forgotten hero, and even the island of Manhattan.

TWILLEY: Which definitely does show up on most maps! Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

ROCK SINGERS: PUMPKIN! SPICE! PUMPKIN! SPICE!

[BREAK]

GILES MILTON: So nutmeg is a spice that I guess a lot of your listeners will have lurking at the back of their larders in their kitchen. They probably bring it out you know, occasionally if they make a béchamel sauce or, mulled wine at Christmas time.

GRABER: Or of course a pumpkin pie, if you’re in America. Giles Milton is not in America, he’s an author and a historian, and he wrote a book called Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: or, the true and incredible adventures of the spice trader who changed the course of history.

MILTON: Four hundred years ago, back in the early 1600s, this spice was the most coveted thing you could have in your kitchen. It was a really luxury product, and something that most people would never, ever have access to.

TWILLEY: And the reason for that is because the only place nutmeg grew was very, very far away from basically everywhere.

MILTON: It came from a tiny group of islands, lost in the middle of nowhere. In fact, nowhere in England really knew where they were at the beginning of the 1600s. So to go and source this nutmeg, and then bring it home and actually remain alive during the three years it was going to take you to do this, gives you some idea why the spice was so unbelievably expensive.

GRABER: The islands where you had to go to get nutmeg are called the Banda Islands. There are 11 of them total, but only six are inhabited. Officially they’re part of Indonesia but they’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an ocean, basically also directly north of Australia. But also really kind of nowhere.

MILTON: And they’re absolutely miniscule. They’re volcanic, they’re astonishingly beautiful. If you imagine your classic idea of a tropical island, well, you’re getting pretty close to it, except that instead of palm trees and all that sort of stuff, they’re covered in nutmeg trees. All six islands are completely covered in these beautiful trees that are perched on the edge of these volcanoes and cliffs. And, it’s, it’s the most picturesque place on earth.

TWILLEY: The chances are pretty low that most of us will have ever seen a nutmeg tree covered in fresh nutmeg fruit, but fortunately Giles has.

MILTON: The tree itself is a rather beautiful willowy tree with these pale green, very elongated long leaves. It looks very beautiful. And even more beautiful when the fruit comes into ripeness, because the trees almost look like they’ve been sort of decorated for Christmas. You know, they’re hung with baubles, essentially. Which are these, this yellowy green round fruit about the size of an apricot. Which as it ripens, it splits open. And if you glimpse inside, you could see the nutmeg, the nut of the fruit at the center. But that nut is covered in the most beautiful, exquisite kind of red lacy material, which people will know perhaps as mace, which is sold nowadays as a completely separate spice.

TWILLEY: Mace is really pretty rare as a spice these days—honestly for many people, when they hear mace, they think of the thing you spray to fend off an attacker. But that is actually pepper spray, and not related to the nutmeg tree at all. In reality, mace is pretty similar to nutmeg: warm, spicy, delicious, but also a tiny bit more floral and zingy.

MILTON: So mace, is, is covering the nut itself. And the nut is the- was of course, the prize, that’s what everyone’s coming here for.

GRABER: So the nutmeg tree and its fruit and the fruit’s nut are beautiful, exquisite, a major prize, but it turns out that the nutmeg is also an incredibly fussy plant.

MILTON: It requires a very, very particular climate and a very particular soil. A volcanic soil. And so, in the 1600s, nutmeg only grew amazingly on these six islands. That was the entire global supply came from the Banda Islands, this, this beautiful archipelago. So, if you wanted nutmeg, that’s where you had to go.

TWILLEY: And many people did, mostly Chinese and Malay, trading with merchants in India and the Middle East. But Europeans really really wanted nutmeg. Like Giles says, it was *the* most coveted spice.

GRABER: But how did they get hold of that nutmeg, if the islands are incredibly far away and the spice traders who made it there are mostly Chinese and Malay?

MILTON: So the spices would come from the Banda Islands to another port, and then to another port, and then to another port, and then along the great Spice Road.

TWILLEY: There’s some evidence that the Romans got hold of nutmeg via India, but after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it took until the 1100s or so for nutmeg to really start reaching Europe in any quantity again. Thanks to the Venetians.

GRABER: Venice was a port, and because it’s on the eastern side of Italy, Venice was the point of trade for basically the entire Middle East. So these spices would be taken from Banda by local spice traders from the region, the spices then made their way around India. And then they’d often have be taken over land through the Middle East, and then traders would end up in Venice, the gateway to Europe.

MILTON: And every single time the spices changed hands or were, you know, bought up by another merchant, of course the price went up. So by the time the spices reached Venice, having traveled thousands of miles in extremely dangerous conditions, they were very expensive.

TWILLEY: But if you wanted nutmeg, which Europeans did, for centuries you really had no choice. The spice merchants from Eastern Asia kept the exact location of the Banda Islands a complete secret. They even made up stories about vicious monsters that guarded them. Not one single European had ever seen the Banda Islands or even knew where to start looking.

GRABER: That meant that this spice trade unsurprisingly made the Venetians incredibly wealthy.

MILTON: The Venetian merchants made absolute spectacular fortunes out of this trade. You know, if you go to Venice now, you still see the palazzos that were built with this money. That was, that was made from nutmeg—and also, you know, clove, cinnamon, pepper, all these spices.

TWILLEY: Side note, the only place that cloves grew were a couple of other tiny islands—some of the nearest neighbors to Banda in the Indonesian archipelago. And cinnamon grew on the Banda Islands too, as an added bonus. All of these spices were expensive, but nutmeg was one of the priciest.

MILTON: All controlled, by Venice and all, beyond, the reach of anyone except for the extreme, wealthy class in Europe at the time. Notably, you know, the royal courts. And we hear about, nutmeg is spoken about in Chaucer, and it’s spoken about in Shakespeare. But it’s always spoken about as this incredible, you know luxury product, that if you had a bowl of nutmeg on your table, that [LAUGH] that signified that you were seriously wealthy

GRABER: And the richie riches loved showing off that wealth. At the time, in the 1400s and 1500s, when only the wealthy had access to these incredible spices, the royal courts and the aristocracy loved experimenting with lavish, almost ridiculously creative culinary spectacles.

MILTON: So, one of the famous dishes they concoct was the cockatrice, which is where they essentially assemble bits of various animals and they, they’d create mythical beasts, which they then serve up. These extraordinary, rather horrific things they’d serve up on the table. But these would be filled with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves, as a way of really, you know, showing just how wealthy you were.

TWILLEY: But aside from being a status symbol, nutmeg was also really valued for its supposed health benefits.

MILTON: It was believed to be a sort of cure-all for absolutely everything, and notably for the plague. People believed if you took nutmeg, you could stave off the plague, which of course was ravaging Europe at this time. And of course, when you’ve got a luxury product that’s very expensive, you might as well tell everyone it’s an aphrodisiac as well, because that adds to its, you know, adds to its value. So nutmeg was sort of had absolutely—it ticked all the boxes. You know, if you had nutmeg, you were, you were wealthy, you had good food, you staved off the plague and, you know, you were wild in bed.

GRABER: Good times.

TWILLEY: Sign me up!

GRABER: But of course, if nutmeg was so wildly expensive and in demand, and if only one city basically had control over the access, well you can imagine that some other people might want to get in on that trade.

MILTON: The Portuguese and the Spanish, two great seafaring nations, they thought, well. We’re going to try and break this Venetian monopoly. We’ve got good ships. We’ve got good mariners. We know what we’re doing. We’re going to sail to the Banda Islands. We’re going to cut out all the middlemen and we’re going to go and bring this stuff home ourselves.

TWILLEY: The Portuguese set off with a fleet of three ships. And they had, let’s say, coerced some Malay navigators to help them find these mysterious islands. They finally arrived in spring 1512, just as the nutmeg trees were blossoming. They could smell the islands before they could see them—one account describes it as “incomparably delightful.”

GRABER: At first, at least according to the Portuguese, the Bandanese seemed pretty happy to meet up with them. They had been trading their beloved nutmeg for a while already, and the Portuguese were just another group who wanted to buy from them.

TWILLEY: For the Bandanese, nutmeg had long been a material to trade, but the nutmeg fruit was also an everyday delight. Giles says it still is today.

MILTON: They use the spice, but principally they use the fruit for making jams, conserves, things that they could then store all year round. Because you can make a quite delicious, very sweet, jam sort of confection out of the, the, the skin of the fruit.

GRABER: Of course the Portuguese didn’t care about the fruit or its skin, they were interested in the pit at the center. They were excited to finally find it at its source, but they weren’t the only Europeans there for long: the Spanish were hot on their heels. In fact Columbus actually set out on his famous trip trying to get to the Banda Islands.

TWILLEY: But he set out to reach it the opposite way round from the Portuguese—he headed west from Europe instead of east. That’s not because he didn’t have a sense of direction, it’s because the Pope had kindly split the world in two. The east belonged to Portugal, the west belonged to Spain, and the King of Spain suspected the Banda Islands might be on his side of the dividing line.

GRABER: Columbus, as we all know, landed in what’s now the Caribbean, but eventually the Spaniards did figure out the correct route and they made it to the Banda Islands, too. But, they didn’t get too much quality time alone there with the Portuguese—the Dutch and the English were also determined to make it to the Banda Islands, and they were about to set a war in motion that would change the course of history. That story, after the break.

[BREAK]

MILTON: By the late Elizabethan period, this is the golden age of exploration. This is a period where the English are building these revolutionary new ships. They were fast. Well, quite fast. But the Dutch, also great mercantile trading nation. And what both the English and the Dutch do, they do something a little short of spectacular, which is going to change everything. They form these joint stock companies. Now this sounds boring, but it’s not. Because previously, private individuals would have to finance these voyages to the other side of the planet. And they were extremely costly. And if your ship sank, you lost everything. But a joint stock company meant that you get lots and lots of people to invest in your voyage. Which meant that everyone had a small share in it. And it meant that when the ship came back, assuming it did, you shared in the profits. Now this made it a much less risky enterprise, for the merchants who sat in London waiting for their ships to come back. It remained very risky for the sailors on board, but for the people investing in it, it allowed them, really, to send much larger fleets. So instead of one ship going or two ships going, you’d send out six or seven.

GRABER: Which means if you lost a ship due to shipwreck or to piracy, you didn’t lose everything.

TWILLEY: This innovation—this way of de-risking the nutmeg trade a little—the reason it was so important is because the nutmeg trade was almost unbelievably risky.

MILTON: Yeah, I mean, I’ve read a lot of the captains’ accounts of these voyages and they are absolutely horrific. Why anyone would ever want to sign up for them, apart from the chance of making a lot of money? Because it was about a three year round voyage, to go to the Banda Islands, the source of nutmeg. But, you’ve got to remember that about one in every three ships sank. So everyone was killed. On the ships that survived the voyage, about two out of every three died on that voyage. So, you know, they died of scurvy. They died of dysentery, the bloody flux, as it was called. They also starved, you know, they ran out of food very early on, it was very difficult to resupply vessels when you’re sailing down the coast of Africa. You know, they ran out of water.

GRABER: So they carried watery beer because alcohol would help kill off any bugs, but even that went off after a while.

MILTON: By the time you’ve been in the tropics for a few weeks or a few months or a few years, this stuff has gone completely rancid. It’s full of flora and fauna. And now men describe how they had to clench their teeth to sieve out all the, all the bits in the beer, before they drank it. And, you know, also they had to contend with, native populations who were not best pleased to see a band of men arriving at their shores intent on, you know, filching as much food as they possibly could. So there were endless battles as well on route. And there were obviously tremendous storms, which they had to navigate through in these, what were essentially very small wooden boats. It was horrific.

TWILLEY: So yeah, even with lots of investors and more ships, the risk of losing everything was very real.

MILTON: Well, the first few missions were really stricken with disaster. Many of the ships sank and very, very little spice made it back. But once the East India Company sort of gets into its stride, and they’re beginning to get quite serious investment. They’re sending out much bigger fleets. The boats are much better constructed. They know how to deal with the tropical seas. They know what you need to do to the underside of your ship when it’s been, you know, in tropical waters for several years.

GRABER: And then when those boats did make it back to England or the Netherlands, the investors got very very wealthy.

MILTON: A sack of nutmeg would cost one English penny out in the, the spiceries of the East Indies. And that would sell for, you know, about 600 pennies when it came back to London. Now, that is a markup, I’ve put this through a number of calculators, it’s a markup of about 54,000 percent. So it kind of explains why people were prepared to risk a three year hideous, you know, grim voyage to the other side of the world.

TWILLEY: Although, to be completely fair, the people making that kind of money were the people who had invested in the voyage, not the people who had actually sailed the ship and who had undergone all the horrors.

MILTON: But of course, individual mariners, they thought, well, you know, we’ve risked our lives to do this. We’re going to try and nick some of this stuff and take it ashore when we get to London and sell it on the black market. And so actually—and here’s an amazing fact, which I found in the East India Company archives—that the mariners were issued with their own dress that they had to wear on these ships, and they were not allowed to have any pockets. So this was to try and deter the individual sailors, the, the rough sea dogs of Jacobean England, from filching some of this nutmeg, stuffing it in their pockets and then selling it, on the black market in London. But we do know that this happened, and continued to happen, because we’ve got an account in Samuel Pepys’ diary of him going down to the docks and buying nutmeg on the black market. So clearly some of these men got away with it.

GRABER: Whether they made money off black market nutmeg or not, these men did get their share of glory.

MILTON: Oh my God. These men were treated as absolute heroes when they got home. But not only were they coming back with spices, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, these things that everyone wanted to get their hands on. They probably had quite a bit of treasure on board because they would have sunk a Spanish ship or two, or captured a Spanish ship or two en route. But best of all, they had fabulous stories to tell. And, you know, they’d go to the local taverns of Jacobean London and they’d be bought endless drinks by people who just simply wanted to hear their stories.

TWILLEY: And then their stories were collected into books that were the bestsellers of their day.

MILTON: Because everyone wanted to hear—these were real sort of boys’ own adventures. And stories of derring-do and, and, you know, hardship and, and violence. People couldn’t get enough of them.

GRABER: But really, the books and the glory were nice, but it was all about the money. This newfound spice trade was bringing back riches to both England and the Netherlands, and it completely transformed northern Europe.

MILTON: I mean, I think the nearest equivalent—I mean, it’s difficult to draw equivalents, but the trade today in cocaine is perhaps the nearest we get to having some idea of the value of this spice, you know, of this trade.

GRABER: So you can start to imagine the scale, it’s kind of like everyone involved was a newly minted drug lord. In the Netherlands, some people became so rich that they could afford to decorate their houses with beautiful imported porcelain and they could commission art from people like Rembrandt. They could invest in putting out books, and so Amsterdam became the center of the publishing world. The money from the spice trade created the Dutch golden age.

TWILLEY: The impact of nutmeg in England was equally transformational. Music, art, architecture, landscaping—all of it flowered. And so did an entirely new social class.

MILTON: It really changed everything. Because, previously the wealthy people in the country would have been the great aristocrats, the nobles who lived on vast estates, who were, you know, awarded their titles and fortunes by Queen Elizabeth the first. And now suddenly, with the rise of the East India Company, everything changes overnight. Because the people investing in these voyages, they tend to be merchants. And you get a rise of a new mercantile class, which simply didn’t exist before. So, the whole structure of society is beginning to change because of this new trading ability. And of course, you know, this will explode over the decades to come, and effectively the East India Company really sets on, sets in motion the entirety of the British Empire. The domination of India, taking over much of the world all comes out of this trade in spices, in nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, pepper. Quite extraordinary.

GRABER: But en route to world domination, the English and the Dutch weren’t so happy to share their nutmeg bounty, just like the Spaniards and Portuguese before them. And the solution wasn’t as simple as a religious daddy figure splitting the world in half and giving each half to one kid, telling them to stay on their side of the room.

TWILLEY: The Dutch thought they they had a legitimate monopoly on nutmeg: they’d reached the islands before the British, they’d crushed the spanish and portuguese by bringing more and better boats, they’d built forts, they’d murdered many Bandanese, and they had persuaded the rest to sign a quote unquote, “Eternal Compact.” So from the Dutch point of view, the English who were trying to trade in nutmeg were taking something that was rightfully theirs.

GRABER: But the Bandanese weren’t necessarily on board with this supposed Dutch monopoly and eternal contract. It’s questionable whether they even knew what they were signing—it was, after all, in Dutch. But also they weren’t so interested in what the Dutch had to trade with them. They were like, all this heavy woolen fabric, why would we even need that? And they weren’t big fans of the Dutch in general.

MILTON: They literally hated the Dutch, who were extraordinarily violent and barbarous. The master of the Dutch East Indies, out in the East Indies was a complete monster who would torture, behead, you know, kill countless numbers of native islanders.

TWILLEY: Meanwhile, the English had built their own fort on the most remote of the Banda islands, an island called Run. It was surrounded by dangerous reefs and it was basically inaccessible for half the year due to monsoon winds, but it was also covered with a dense forest of nutmeg trees.

GRABER: And the Bandese were in support of having the Brits around, because one, they were paying more for the nutmeg, and two, because the Bandanese could use some help against the Dutch.

MILTON: They realized that actually the English might be quite a good thing. You know, they could hold off the Dutch. And so they agree to give the English a monopoly on all the nutmeg that grows on Run Island, provided they keep the Dutch at bay. So provided they defend this island against the hated Dutch.

TWILLEY: The Dutch were obviously extremely annoyed by this, and long story short they ended up massacring what is estimated to have been about 90 percent of the Bandanese. And, they went to war with the British.

GRABER: The two nations were warring over all kinds of trade issues, not just nutmeg, but nutmeg was key. The British wanted to defend their tiny outpost on Run, and of course the Dutch wanted to kick them out so they could have a monopoly. Which brings us to the hero of Giles’ book, a guy named Nathaniel Courthope.

MILTON: So Nathaniel Courthope was a mariner. He signs up for a voyage, which is going to leave in the spring of 1610. And its destination ultimately is the Banda Islands.

TWILLEY: As per usual, it wasn’t a luxury cruise.

MILTON: Now this voyage meets with absolute disaster when it reaches Yemen. They all get captured. They get marched inland to the capital, Sanaa. They’re all imprisoned and 18 months later, they finally get released or they escape, and they set sail across the Indian Ocean.

GRABER: They were stuck in a Yemeni jail for a year and a half! And then they still had to sail all the way to Indonesia! Once they got there, Nathaniel was given command of two ships, and he was told to head out to the isle of Run.

MILTON: And now, herein lies the real problem in our story, or the difficulty that he’s going to face. Because the Dutch are determined to carve out a global monopoly on the nutmeg trade. They want to control the entire thing. And they are coming very, very close to doing it because they’ve already controlled—they control and have subdued five of the six Banda islands. So there’s only one island up for grabs. And this island is the island of Run. Nathaniel Courthope realizes that, if he can retain that island in the possession for England, he’s stopped the Dutch getting their monopoly on nutmeg.

GRABER: For once, the British were welcomed by the natives. Like we said, the Bandanese were suffering hugely at the hands of the Dutch, so they celebrated Nathanial’s arrival with a party. And they gave him a nutmeg tree in soil as a sign of their trust and they pledged that they’d only sell their nutmeg to the British forever more. But they did have some terms and conditions: There was to be no quote, “un-reverent use of women, maintaining of swine in our country, forceable taking away of men’s goods, and misusing of our men.”

TWILLEY: All very reasonable and Nathaniel was on board, but there was a problem. The whole deal was premised on Nathaniel defending Run against the Dutch, but he was a little bit under-resourced.

MILTON: He’s got actually very few men and many of them, soon die. And, he’s got cannons. So he’s got the ship’s cannon. He brings those ashore. He knows he’s going to be attacked by the Dutch, and the Dutch have got a fleet of, you know, a dozen ships or more. Big, powerful vessels. They’ve got more, a garrison of more than a thousand men on the, on the other islands. And they’ve captured a number of English ships and they’re holding English people prisoner, on actually the neighboring island to Run. And they’re being held in the most miserable conditions.

GRABER: But it’s not just that Nathaniel had very few men left, he also didn’t have enough provisions.

MILTON: He’s got very little food, very little water, and there’s no obvious water supply on Run other than rainfall, which is collected by the locals, but there’s not very much of it. So, he’s facing a situation where he’s got very few men, he’s got very little food, almost no water. And he’s got to hold out on this island against an army of Dutchmen, which is absolutely enormous and very powerfully armed.

TWILLEY: Honestly it sounds as though they were doomed. But Nathaniel was determined to hold onto England’s last remaining nutmeg island.

MILTON: And, he writes some of these amazingly colorful letters back to the East India company. Which amazingly, years later, actually arrived back to the company, describing how he will valiantly hold this island. He will not ever give up this island. He’s the—the ultimate sort of patriot. But, you know, he’s facing constant battles against the Dutch. They’re constantly attacking him. The supply ships, English supply ships, try to come to the island, but they’re invariably captured by the Dutch or, or sunk. They meet with various disasters. So by the end, he’s holding out with a band of about 25 men.

GRABER: If you think he was faced with an impossible situation, he did have one tiny advantage in his favor: Run Island has incredibly steep cliffs, so it’s really hard to land a boat.

MILTON: And it also has a little islet at one end of it called Nailaka. And essentially, if the Dutch are going to capture the island, they have to capture this little islet of Nailaka. And he sticks these big ships’ cannons onto this thing. So anytime the Dutch come near, he can fire off his cannon and scare off the Dutch. So he’s in a—although he’s in a very difficult position, he’s also got quite sort of impregnable defenses when he’s on the island.

TWILLEY: After their backup ships were destroyed, the East India Company essentially threw their hands in the air and sent letters back to Nathaniel telling him to give up, he was free to leave the island and come home, thanks for his service but it was a lost cause. But Nathaniel was weirdly determined to hold the fort.

MILTON: He holds out for 1,540 days, you know, this is years he’s holding out on this island. An extraordinary feat with only a few men.

GRABER: He held on for more than four years, but his stand did eventually come to an end.

MILTON: In the end, Nathaniel Courthope is, is really, completely desperate. And he is tricked into believing that the Dutch are going to come to some sort of deal with him. And to be honest, he’s got so little food and supplies left by this point that I think he sees this is possibly his only possibility of surviving. He sails over, to negotiate some sort of deal. And unfortunately, it’s a trick. And we are not entirely sure what happens, but certainly the boat he’s in, the rowing boat, which is going, rowing across to the, the principal Dutch islands, is attacked. And tragically, he’s shot. And the last thing we hear of him is of him being shot and falling, sliding out of the, this little boat into the water. And, and, and almost certainly he drowns.

GRABER: This is obviously a tragic ending for brave Nathaniel. But though his holdout on the island was extraordinarily long, it also sounds kind of pointless. He held out, but then he lost. So why are we still talking about this guy who manned a fort on a tiny island out in the middle of the ocean, more than 400 years later? That story after the break.

[BREAK]

MILTON: So what happened next is quite sort of eye raising really, because what happens is the, the Dutch obviously land their troops on Run Island. They have now got all six islands. They have a global monopoly on nutmeg. This is what they always wanted to achieve and they have achieved it.

TWILLEY: But unsurprisingly the English weren’t super supportive of this fabulous Dutch achievement. So they tried to retake Run, the Dutch fought back, the island swapped hands a few times, and each time the Dutch took over, they burned down and chopped up all the nutmeg trees.

GRABER: This wasn’t the only place the British and the Dutch were warring, they were fighting off the coast of Italy, they were fighting in the North Sea, their boats were basically attacking each other everywhere they could over all sorts of trading issues.

MILTON: And this comes to an end in 1654, when the warring parties, they decide to sit down at the negotiating table. And they decide that all grievances dating back decades are all going to be resolved. And amazingly, as part of this, Run is handed back to the English. So the Dutch have their five islands and they agree to give Run back. But you know, hardly is the ink dried on that treaty, then they sail across and they grab the island of Run again. So they’ve re-established their monopoly on, over the global trade in nutmeg. The English are absolutely furious. They cannot believe that the Dutch have been so treacherous. And they think, okay, we’re going to now hit them hard.

TWILLEY: The English came up with a plan: an eye for an eye, and island for an island.

MILTON: And what they do, they sail across the Atlantic and they seize the Dutch island of New Amsterdam and they rename it New York.

GRABER: Yep, that New York. In case this is new history to you, the island we now call Manhattan was once called New Amsterdam—at least that was the name of the Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan that was the seat of the local larger colony that they called New Netherland. The Dutch had set up trading posts there, they claimed it, they named it, but the British decided they should capture New Amsterdam in this global Dutch-British battle going on at the time.

MILTON: And so there we have, the story of these two islands, which eventually will be resolved in a treaty, the Treaty of Breda, in which the Dutch are allowed to retain the six islands, the Nutmeg Islands or the Banda Islands, and the English are allowed to retain New York. Very few people know this, especially very few people living in New York, know that the early history of their city is wrapped up in the story of nutmeg on the other side of the world.

TWILLEY: And this is why Nathaniel’s lonely, heroic, kind of quixotic defense of this one tiny nutmeg island that no one has heard of called Run—this is why it changed history. Because the English had fought so hard to hold onto Run, it became the leverage they needed to get Manhattan, and Manhattan turned out to be quite the prize.

GRABER: Giles went to New York to see if Nathaniel was somehow commemorated there. He hoped he’d find some sign of Nathaniel and the role he played in New York’s history, maybe a statue on the waterfront somewhere…

MILTON: Absolutely nothing. He’s been completely forgotten from history. No one, in fact, until I wrote the book, I think no one knew much about him at all. But he was a real person. He was a real hero. He wrote vivid letters, which still survive. And, really, it’s a great tragedy that he’s been completely overlooked by history because he really changed the course of world history in what he did on that tiny little island on the other side of the globe.

TWILLEY: At the time of the trade, the Dutch thought it was a good deal—the nutmeg trade and Banda Islands were incredibly important, and Manhattan certainly wasn’t what it is today. For more than a hundred years, that was probably true. But in the early 1800s, the value of the Banda islands tanked.

MILTON: Well, actually, there’s a very interesting story there because everyone was also trying to break the Dutch monopoly. And they realized that although nutmeg was a very, very difficult, plant to grow, it would grow elsewhere. And so they managed, the English managed to acquire some seedlings.

GRABER: The Dutch weren’t paying as much attention to the Brits as they had been in the past, because they’d been invaded by Napoleon at the time. So, you know, they had other things to occupy them. The British took advantage of the moment to try to find a new home for the nutmeg tree.

MILTON: And they didn’t just take the seedlings, they took them in earth. So they already had roots and everything. And they began to plant them in, on the coast of India, where in certain places nutmeg would grow. But most importantly, they took nutmeg to the West Indies. And they planted it in the West Indies. And the West Indies had a very, very similar climate, and soil, it should be said, as in the Banda Islands. The, the nutmeg thrived there. And in fact, I believe that the nutmeg, which I’m told is now used in, is one of the key ingredients in Coca Cola, comes from the nutmeg plantations in the West Indies.

TWILLEY: These days the world’s nutmeg supply comes from all over, lots from the West Indies like Giles says, but also from India and Guatemala as well its original home in Indonesia.

GRABER: But even though there’s a lot more of it around, and a lot more people can have as much nutmeg as they like, nutmeg isn’t nearly as popular and valuable as it once was.

MILTON: I mean, I think it, it remained in fashion throughout 17th century, 18th century, but it was no longer quite such a luxury good. It had lost its cachet, if you like. So it was still used. And certainly in the 18th century in, in England, there was a great love of spices, especially in meat pies, which people love to eat. They were infused with all sorts of spices. So, you know, it, it, it. It was still used, for culinary purposes, but it didn’t have the value, it didn’t have the star quality that it had had in the 1600s.

TWILLEY: For one thing, as time went on, Western ideas about medicine changed, and nutmeg was no longer the cure-all that it had been seen as.

GRABER: And also, once more people had access to it, then making a highly-spiced cockatrice was no longer worth the effort. So the elite in northern Europe decided that spices weren’t hot anymore.

TWILLEY: Instead the new fashionable way to cook was all about letting the individual ingredients shine. No more heavily spiced everything, instead the aristocracy was all into delicate sauces and minimal embellishment.

GRABER: As for the Bandanese themselves, they were under Dutch rule for hundreds more years until they officially became part of an independent Indonesia in 1949. For all those centuries, they were actually a Dutch colony, not just an exploited trading partner. Not that this helped much.

MILTON: They, they suffered tremendously and, and got no sort of gain, economic gain out of this spice that grew there. The Dutch simply took it and, and, and didn’t pay them for it.

TWILLEY: Giles told us that things haven’t changed so much for the better, at least economically, even today.

MILTON: They’re pretty poor. There’s very little local economy. Nutmeg is still bought and sold. But, they, yeah, there’s not a lot of money there.

GRABER: Giles wanted to see it for himself in person. But it’s still really hard to get there.

MILTON: Oh my god, [LAUGHING] it’s a, it’s a nightmare to get there and it’s very—it felt very dangerous at the time. I mean, I flew to Indonesia, to Jakarta, and then I got a second flight to Amboina, and from there, there used to be a little plane that flew to the main Banda Island, but it had crashed the week before I got there. And so that, that wasn’t an option, so I had to take a ship.

TWILLEY: The ship had recently run aground and was half full of water and leaning dangerously to one side. But, it stayed afloat long enough to get Giles to the main Banda island.

MILTON: But, you know, I was desperate to get to Run, that’s where I wanted to get to. And that was a journey in itself, because, as I said, it’s ten miles from the main island to Run. Now, ten miles, okay, you think, well, that’s not very much. I can tell you, when you’re in a tiny little dinghy, fitted with an outboard motor, and, and you’re going through the monsoon seas, it’s absolutely terrifying. It’s the most terrifying voyage I think I’ve ever undertaken.

TWILLEY: Which explains why even today, not many tourists make it to the Banda Islands.

MILTON: They’re difficult to get to, they’re expensive to get to. People who mostly go there, they go nowadays for the diving. Because they’re surrounded by reefs and they have the most spectacular underwater sort of you know, uh fish and goodness knows what. So people love to go for that.

GRABER: Despite everything, Giles says the islands are still worth a visit, if you can get there—largely because of the nutmeg.

MILTON: They’re beautiful. And as I say, they’re still covered in these incredible beautiful um nutmeg trees. Which at the time of the nutmeg harvest, you know, all you can smell, the whole air is filled in this wonderful scent, which is really, you know, I don’t know if you ever grate nutmeg yourself at home—you should never buy ready-grated nutmeg, by the way, always buy it to grate yourself. And you just start grating it and you get this fabulous aroma that sort of fills the kitchen. Well, the entire Banda Islands are like that, they smell like that, it’s wonderful.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: It’s really kind of incredible that this entire, mostly forgotten story of intense violence and suffering with some heroism, glory and riches thrown in—it’s the story that lies behind every single pumpkin spice latte, candle, and even canned meat.

GRABER: We have more stories about that pumpkin spice mix, like where the original blend came from, in our special supporters’ newsletter, gastropod.com/support.

TWILLEY: Enormous thank you this episode to Giles Milton, there’s a new edition of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg coming out next year which is very exciting. And thanks also to our one and only, all star producer, Claudia Geib.

GRABER: We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode, ‘til then!

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode A Tale to Warm the Cockles of Your Heart, first released on April 7, 2020. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

ROBIN LITTLE WING SIGO: I have early memories of salmon bakes and clam bakes. And like, I can remember the smells really well. And I can remember looking through, cause I don’t like little neck clams. I only like cockles. So I would always be the one kind of looking for all those. And my dad would make sure that I would get some.

AZURE BLEU BOURE: They’re really important. They are a food of my youth, my mom’s youth, her grandma’s youth, like—it’s just something that we’ve grown up eating and missing.

SIGO: We would have a lot of clam bakes and there would always be some cockles in there and that those are pretty much gone away. We just don’t see them at all anymore.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Most Americans have never eaten a cockle—in fact most of us wouldn’t know one if it came up and hit us in the face. But we visited the shores of Puget Sound in Washington State where the local Native American tribes care about cockles a lot.

CYNTHIA GRABER: We spent some time with Robin and Azure, they’re members of the Suquamish tribe, as well as the local scientists there to hear about a program to bring cockles back. And we of course are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber.

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley. And although I love shellfish—I love oysters, and I love mussels, and I love love love lobster—I have never had a cockle. So what are they?

GRABER: What’s their relationship to the Suquamish tribe—and actually to tribes all up and down the west coast?

TWILLEY: Plus, why are they on the decline? Where have all the cockles gone?

GRABER: And what will it take to bring them back?

TWILLEY: This episode was made possible thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics.

GRABER: We should also say that we first learned about cockles in Puget Sound by reading a story in an online magazine called Crosscut by Hannah Weinberger, we’ll have a link to her story on our website.

[MUSIC]

VIVIANE BARRY: So we’re in central Puget Sound. In a body of water that we call Port Orchard Passage. This is a very good body of water for shellfish, because there’s a lot of current coming through this little bottleneck area there. It brings a lot of nutrients, food, oxygen.

TWILLEY: Viviane Barry is the shellfish program manager for the Suquamish tribe. And we met her and her colleague Jeff Moore on a tribally owned beach across the sound from Seattle.

GRABER: The area is famous for all sorts of seafood, especially shellfish—oysters, and geoducks, and of course clams.

BARRY: So we have different types of clams here. We have the, the native Littleneck clams. And we have an introduced Manila clam that’s very similar to the Littleneck, but it’s from Asia originally.

TWILLEY: And of course, there’s the star of today’s show, cockles. Which we actually couldn’t see.

BARRY: So they like to live in the lower intertidal zone and then the subtidal. Apparently there are more cockles living under the water than on the beach.

TWILLEY: For those of you who are not up on their whole tidal geography, the intertidal is that part you see at the beach: the wet sand that gets exposed as the tide is going out. The subtidal is under shallow water almost all the time. It’s that sliver of sand that only gets exposed at super low tides, like when there’s a full moon,

GRABER: And so to get to the cockles in that subtidal zone, Viviane and Jeff have to wait until the tide is at its very very lowest point. This time of year, that’s around 3am.

BARRY: We just go at night. We harvest at night. Yeah. [LAUGHS]

TWILLEY: We were out there during the day, but fortunately, there were some cockle shells available on a beach as a visual aid.

BARRY: I see a cockle there. Jeff, could you grab it? Yeah.

JEFF MOORE: Pretty weathered.

BARRY: Yeah, they’re weathered but they’re—you can see, they look like those ripple chips…

MOORE: They’re, they’re ribbed. They have these long ribs that come down longitudinally. This is what you would see when you’re looking in the garden, cockle shells, right, from the nursery rhyme.

GRABER: The shells were kind of round, more like a ball shape. The long ribs Jeff is describing on the shell, it’s those same lines in the cockleshell flowers that give the flowers their name. If you’ve never seen a cockleshell—and frankly, I hadn’t—as Jeff said, you might know them better from nursery rhymes.

TWILLEY: Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row. No one knows exactly what the rhyme means; there’s a theory that Mary is Mary Queen of Scots and the cockle shells are somehow Catholic, but yeah. No one knows.

GRABER: And then there’s another old English rhyme I knew as a kid, it was actually a jump rope song for me, blue bells cockleshells…

CHILDREN SINGING: Bluebells, cockleshells, easy, ivy, over…

TWILLEY: That’s a British rhyme so they would have been talking about a different species of cockle—the common cockle, as its called, which you find in the UK and Ireland and Portugal and all down the Atlantic coast past Morocco.

GRABER: Cockles have long been a popular food in all these countries, just one of the many shellfish people enjoyed. You might have heard the Irish song Molly Malone, where she’s selling cockles in the streets of Dublin…

SINGER: She wheeled her wheelbarrow, through the streets broad and narrow, crying cockles! And mussels! Alive, alive-o.

TWILLEY: In the UK, cockles used to be a pretty common seaside treat, you’d often buy them boiled, served in a paper cone and sprinkled with malt vinegar. They were popular in the East End of London, and especially in Wales. But today, those kind of traditional shellfish, like whelks and winkles and cockles—they’ve become less and less popular.

GRABER: But while cockles are no longer common snacks in seaside towns, they are still actually harvested all along the coast of the UK. They’re shipped overnight to elsewhere in Europe, like France and the Netherlands, where cockles are still popular.

TWILLEY: A lot of places in the UK, that harvesting is still done by hand, using a cockle rake—it can be really dangerous work if you get caught by the tide. But while we were researching this episode, we discovered that, off the coast of Norfolk, they’ve developed an ingenious technique that involves driving boats around in circles. This is from a Channel 4 documentary about cockles.

CAPTAIN: What we do is go round the circle for about 35 to 40 minutes

MAN: Yeah?

CAPTAIN: And as the water drops, the boat’s propellor pushes the sediment away and leaves a ridge of cockles.

MAN: Suffice it to say, you use the boat to wash the sand away.

CAPTAIN: Yeah. Nicely done.

GRABER: There’s yet another species of cockle that’s widespread in Asia, in Japan these’s a popular cockle sushi that’s available only one month a year. But in a lot of places, cockle eating has really fallen off. The shells are hard to open, and especially these European cockles, there’s only a tiny bit of meat once you do manage to pry them apart.

TWILLEY: But West Coast cockles—like we said, they are a different species and they are most decidedly not dainty little things. They’re actually quite hefty.

BARRY: They probably can get about, a good four inches? Four or five inches. They can get fairly large and heavy.

MOORE: In terms of like, maybe a schoolboy size little apple.

GRABER: So cockles are bigger than clams, but they’re unusual in another way too.

TWILLEY: Most shellfish, like the littleneck clams and the manila clams that covered the beach we were on, they’re pretty stationary.

BARRY: And when they settle from a larva to an adult, they basically dig themselves in and stay in the same place for the rest of their lives.

GRABER: But cockles? They are not quite so sedentary.

BARRY: These cockles have a really heavy and strong foot and, they’re very mobile. So, they can escape their predators by just jumping away from them.

TWILLEY: This jump: it’s not just a little hop. This is a full-on leap!

MOORE: Leap. They, they leap away. So one of the faster sea stars is the Sun Star, Pycnopodia helianthoides.

TWILLEY: These sunflower sea stars are freaky looking. They range in color from bright orange to purple, they get to more than three feet wide and they have up to 24 arms covered in suckers.

GRABER: And they love to use those suckers to pull apart the two halves of a cockle shell, and then they chomp down the flesh.

MOORE: they can sense when the Sea Star’s trying to get a hold of them and they’ll use that foot to just kick away and they can jump.

GRABER: How high? How far?

TWILLEY: A foot? Like what are we talking here?

MOORE: We’re talking mostly sideways and then they kind of kick away and sort of roll along to get away.

BARRY: Yeah, maybe a foot or so at a time, but enough to get away from a sea star.

GRABER: And as long as there have been people living along Puget Sound, they’ve been eating these leaping cockles.

BARRY: Probably over 10,000 years? [LAUGHS] I don’t know. I mean, bivalves have been around for, you know, millions of years in the ocean and the tribes have been around these waters for at least, I think the archeological records say, at least 14,000 years.

TWILLEY: By all accounts, cockles are 100 percent delicious and a favorite food of the first nations people in the area.

BARRY: So they will build a large fire with rocks. So the rocks become very hot. And they will put the shellfish right over the rocks and cover them with seaweed. So they basically steam in their own juices.

MOORE: It’s over open flame and it’s—yeah. It’s the way they’ve been doing it for forever. So it’s—they’ve perfected the art. They’re good. [LAUGHS]

GRABER: What do they taste like?

MOORE: They’re really sweet. [LAUGHS] Really sweet and kind of a rich, kind of seafood taste. Little chewy, a little bit meaty. So.

GRABER: How do they compare to other clams?

MOORE: I would say more—there’s more richness in the flavor.

GRABER: So we went to the experts to hear more — Azure Boure is the traditional food and medicine program coordinator for the Suquamish tribe.

BOURE: Cockles are much more chewy. And you would like you had, you pulled the neck out and use, I scraped the body out and then the neck is just much more chewy and dense than a, than a regular clam.  And just, I don’t know, it’s, it seems sweeter to me. But it’s, it’s a treat and so you just savor it or you dry them and then you nibble, nibble on them.

GRABER: Azure teaches classes about how to prepare and enjoy traditional Suquamish foods and plants. Like how to dry cockles.

BOURE: And so to dry you would just, you would either, like, dehydrate them or bake them in the oven really low and slow or put them in the smokehouse. Smoke house is the best, then you get the smokey flavor.

TWILLEY: Dried cockles apparently also made great teething rings for Suquamish babies.

SIGO: They’d tie a string on them and tie them and tie one to the baby’s toes so that if they were chewing on them and they started to choke, the baby would push their feet out and it would take the cockle out of their mouth so they wouldn’t choke on it.

GRABER: Robin Little Wing Sigo is the treasurer on the Suquamish tribal council, and as you heard at the beginning of the show, she is a huge cockle fan.

TWILLEY: She grew up harvesting them—she’d go out and walk the beach at low tide.

SIGO: My dad would call it the Cockle dance. He’d be like, go out and do the Cockle dance and you just walk around and you could feel them under your feet so you can just grab them

TWILLEY: But Azure told us you can’t really do the cockle dance anymore.

BOURE: I grew up being taught, you know, you could walk along the beach and your bare feet and you could just feel them and I don’t, I just don’t feel that anymore.

GRABER: Robin noticed the cockle decline over the past couple of decades.

SIGO: I feel like by the time I was in high school, we were only getting, you know, four or five cockles in a clambake. And because I only eat the cockles, I would always look for those. But we would always give them to the elders. They got them first. So you’d feed your elders first, and then. You know, some of like, my grandma knew how much I liked them, so she would always save one for me and give one to me. But there just weren’t that many. And then by the time I got back from undergraduate, which was about 1998, there just weren’t any, you just wouldn’t see them at anything. There were you know, still a lot of clams, but there just weren’t cockles. And we started asking questions about it.

GRABER: Robin started to think, something must be going on. So she tried to read up on them and figure out how bad the decline was or why cockles were disappearing.

SIGO: You know, when you look at all the research, there’s not a lot of research about cockles and there’s not a lot of research about what role they play in the environment.

TWILLEY: One of the reasons there wasn’t a lot of research for Robin to read up on is because cockles aren’t a commercially important species of shellfish.

JODIE TOFT: Cockles are a really fly-under-the-radar species.

GRABER: Jodie Toft is the deputy director of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund.

TOFT: There are different—lots of different species of cockles around the world, but the cockle in our neck of the wood: Basket cockle, Heart cockle, Nuttall’s cockle, all sorts of common names. But that cockle really hasn’t been studied that much, although it is a preferred food of not just the Suquamish tribe, but other tribes in and around this region. So not a lot known about the cockles, and breeding of shellfish doesn’t happen that often unless it’s for commercial purposes. And there was really no commercial purpose for, for this species.

TWILLEY: But why not, if they’re so delicious?

TOFT: I think so, I think in some way it’s just because—because the market was kind of blossoming for other species. And so oysters have really held the region tightly for so long. And I think that’s one of the reasons. Oysters, mussels. And then we have a bunch of other clams that aren’t quite in this boom and bust cycle as much as cockles.

GRABER: Jodie told us cockle populations seem to get really big and then fall off, and then grow again naturally, scientists think. And so that means they might not be as reliable to harvest commercially.

TWILLEY: Also, Viviane told us that these West Coast cockles have a really short shelf life, which makes it hard to get them to market. They only last a couple of hours out of water, in the refrigerator, compared to, say, Manila clams, that last a week.

GRABER: And so West Coast cockles had been sort of overlooked. Jodie and her colleagues at the Manchester research station have been working for years on the science of how to make food in the marine ecosystem of Puget Sound more plentiful, how to have really healthy populations. But they hadn’t studied the cockle.

TWILLEY: For a while, Jodie and her colleagues had been working on Olympia oysters, which are a tiny little oyster—the only oyster that’s native to the West Coast. Olympias were practically wiped out, and Jodie’s team have been leading their restoration in Puget Sound.

GRABER: They’re also working on other native shellfish such as abalone. And partnering with the Suquamish tribe and other local tribes has been really important to them for a while, so they reached out to ask what new research would be the most useful.

TOFT: And we said, well, you know, what are your first foods? What’s most important? Cockles, cockles, cockles.

TWILLEY: Basically, if you worked with shellfish in Puget Sound, and you partnered with the Suquamish, that’s what you heard — cockles, cockles, cockles.

SIGO: So Elizabeth Unsell is one of our Marine biologists here, one of our shellfish biologists. And she and I have kids in the same school program. And so I was really excited when she started working here for the tribe. And I said, if you ever want to be a superstar, you just have to figure out how to get cockles back.

GRABER: Elizabeth talked to her fellow biologists including Viviane Barry, and they came up with some ideas about how to get the cockle restoration project started. And they came back to Robin and the rest of the tribe with their plans.

SIGO: And the biologists would come in and they’re like, okay, we have all these plans to do this and this and this, but we are going to need some money. And we’re like, how much money are you going to need? And like thinking it’s going to be like $100,000 or something. And it was like, we’re going to need $10,000. We’re like, Oh my gosh, take 20,000, whatever it takes to do this. Like it’s one of the easy yeses because it’s that important. It’s that important culturally to all of us.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: So the cockle challenge was underway. And for the next chapter in our cockle story, we drove about an hour south, to visit the Manchester Research Station where Jodie Toft and her colleagues are based.

TOFT: For the untrained eye, this is just a random collection of buildings at a federal facility, tucked away in Manchester, Washington, which is a semi-rural area not too far from Seattle. But really, this is the heart of where shellfish research and restoration happens in Puget Sound.

GRABER: We walked into one of the buildings with Jodie and her colleague Stuart to see some cockles.

TOFT: Right now, Stuart is going to open up this kind of funky basket.

STUART RYAN: It’s like a shellfish purse.

GRABER: What’s going on here?

RYAN: So, yeah, these are a handful of cockles that are roughly 1 to 5 millimeters.

GRABER: They look like tiny little pebbles.

TWILLEY: These are baby cockles?

GRABER: They’re sery cute.

RYAN: Yeah.

TWILLEY: So tiny.

GRABER: They are really tiny.

RYAN: These—these were from spawns that happened in early summer, June.

TWILLEY: Baby cockles are adorable, but, it turns out, they’re not that easy to produce. At least in a federal research facility.

GRABER: As Robin had found out when she tried to find examples of research on local cockles, nobody had ever tried to breed them.

TOFT: We have some magicians on staff here who are really good at breeding shellfish. And so we collected some cockles, brought them back here. Nothing happened. There was no magic. There was wonderful people doing great work and just a whole bunch of cockles sitting in buckets of water and they were not making any baby cockles.

GRABER: But even before Jodie and the team tried to get the cockles to spawn, they had to make sure that they had healthy cockles. And Viviane says that wasn’t so easy either. Because some of the cockles had cockle cancer.

BARRY: And they determined that they had a communicable cancer, neoplasia, so they could not be brought into the hatchery right away. So they had to be quarantined for two weeks in a lab about 50 miles away. And kept in a—each individual in a separate bucket while they were tested for neoplasia.

TWILLEY: See, even shellfish have to be quarantined! We really are all in this together.

GRABER: After quarantine, the cockles had to be tested to see if they were sick. Sound familiar?

TWILLEY: Fortunately there were enough tests. But it turns out that when you test a cockle for cancer, sometimes the stress makes them spontaneously release all their spawn in a last ditch attempt to leave a baby cockle behind.

TOFT: And we certainly had concerns that we were going to do a great job screening for neoplasia. And then we will have spawned all of our cockles and then that would be that.

TWILLEY: Because once a cockle spawns, it takes months before it’s ready to make babies again.

GRABER: Luckily the cockles did not shoot their load, and that was in part because the team had another magician on staff with a very gentle touch to get the blood they needed for their cancer tests.

TOFT: She was kind of—kind of got the nickname the, “the cockle vampire” because she was so good at drawing blood.

TWILLEY: After the cockle vampire had done her thing, all but five of the cockles tested clean, which left Jodie and her team with 30 cockles to make babies from. This was their brood stock. And then the fun really began

TOFT: So we tried the first time around. Failed. Tried again. Failed. Maybe we could call it we learned, not failed, but yeah, we failed. They didn’t produce anything. And then the third time around, we brought them in and used a technique that’s pretty common in other kind of production of shellfish, other commercial techniques, and injected them with serotonin, and boom. They, they were off to the races.

GRABER: And this also took a gentle touch because the scientists had to inject each cockle, by hand, in the gonads, with a personal shot of serotonin—the cockle Viagra.

TWILLEY: Just to make things even more interesting, Jodie and the team had to set up a group sex situation, because cockles have a tendency to fertilize themselves.

TOFT: It’s actually called selfing. So, yeah. So, the sel—[LAUGHS] the selfing, which your face is not making it easy for me not to laugh. But you know we’re professionals here.

TWILLEY: We are such professionals that we are going to say it again just for the giggles. When a cockle does the baby making thing by itself, that’s called selfing.

GRABER: Uh-huh. And that’s because cockles are actually hermaphrodites. The same animal can be at different times either male or female. So if a cockle is alone, and it releases eggs, then it can release sperm next and fertilize its own offspring.

TOFT: So the selfing that comes from the hermaphroditic spawning of the cockles—also a great sentence to get to say—is, you know, it can be a challenge for maintaining genetic diversity.

GRABER: If a cockle creates thousands of baby cockles and they’re all exactly the same genetically, that would not be a good thing. As Jodi says, there’d be basically no genetic diversity.

TWILLEY: So with the group sex tank and the cockle Viagra injections, the setting was finally right. And the result was, cockle babies.

TOFT: About a million baby cockles, many of which are out with partners at Suquamish now growing bigger, bigger, bigger.

GRABER: They took all those baby cockles and put them out in the shallow water of the sound in a FLUPSY, which is an acronym for Floating Upweller System.

BARRY: It’s sort of like a nursery for clams that is outside. So there’s water flowing through 24/7. So they have food all the time and oxygen all the time. And that’s where they are right now.

TWILLEY: Once the baby cockles get to about the size of a quarter, they can start living where cockles belong, in the intertidal zone.

BARRY: We thought that they would have been ready by now, but they’re growing very slowly. There’s not that much food in the water right now, although they’re not dying. They’re just kind of waiting, waiting for spring, waiting for the big phytoplankton bloom. And I think they’re really going to start to grow soon

GRABER: Some of the cockles they raised were extra tiny, little stragglers. Those are the ones that Jodie and Stuart had in the building to show us.

TOFT: Okay, well, let’s go look under the microscope.

RYAN: Yeah. [DOOR OPENING]

TWILLEY: We wanted to see them jump! But cockles don’t do anything on demand apparently

GRABER: Okay. Let’s see here. Oh, yeah. Yeah they’re—just—I don’t, they’re not opening. It’s just the shells. The shells are beautiful.

TOFT: And I have a whole bucket of shells that I will show you in a bit, because as exciting as, you know, 5 millimeter baby cockle is, it’s not exactly a meal’s worth.

GRABER: Right. [LAUGH] No we only— looking at it, you can imagine what they’ll look like when they’re big. They’re miniature version.

TWILLEY: I mean, the crazy thing about looking under a microscope is they do look big, so. [LAUGH]

GRABER: I’m like, oh look, dinner! No.

[ALL LAUGH]

GRABER: It was really fun to see miniscule baby cockles under the microscope, but what we really wanted to know was, when will they be ready to eat?

SIGO: So that’s the question we keep asking. Our biologists are constantly hearing from us, so when will they be ready? When will they be ready? Because you know, people talk here about like medicine in terms of food as medicine and, sometimes people say, I need to feed my Indian. And it’s that old school Indian, it’s that ancestor piece inside you that really needs that. These foods, these sovereign foods that we’ve had since time immemorial.

BOURE: The last time I had cockles was about three months ago, but before that it had been about two years. Because I just don’t… want to eat them before we can save them. [LAUGH] But what I had to have some. You’ve got to feed your Indian sometimes. [LAUGH]

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: So right now, everyone’s waiting on these baby cockles out in their FLUPSYs.

GRABER: Robin walked with us down to the beach. We could see the FLUPSY from the shoreline.

SIGO: We’ve been really active in this project, and I feel like part of that is us just going out there to check on them and to love them and to see them grow and witness their story so that we can share that story. Witnessing is a really important part of our culture.

TWILLEY: Robin loves her cockles so much that she told us she regularly walks down to the beach just to visit the cockles and keep them company as they grow.

SIGO: You know, we have a big auntie and uncle type culture here. Like everybody’s your auntie, everybody’s your uncle, cause you’re, you’ve got eyes on everybody and you support everybody. Or you’ll call them out if something’s not going right. And so for me it’s like, the ultimate auntie love that I can give is to go visit these cockles and tell them how much we’ve been waiting for them. And that we hope they do really well, because we know that they understand, too, that process of: they’re growing to feed us. And we know that they, that they want to do that, that they recognize that that’s part of their purpose. And the other part of their purpose is to be part of a healthy ecosystem here in the Salish Sea.

GRABER: And scientists have a lot to learn to understand that part of the cockles’ purpose, being part of a healthy marine ecosystem.

TWILLEY: For starters, no one know exactly how many cockles there should be—and so they can’t know just how bad the drop in cockle numbers really is.

BARRY: It’s hard to say, here, because unfortunately, we don’t really have a good baseline for cockle populations. Anecdotal evidence from elders who have harvested their whole lives, who are in their 70s and 80s, they claim that there has been a decline.

GRABER: Scientists don’t doubt that the native communities have seen a decline—but, in part it’s hard to figure out how serious that decline is, because nobody has data on cockle populations from decades or centuries ago, nobody has those baseline numbers.

TWILLEY: And there’s another wrinkle that makes it tricky to know just how bad things are for the cockles: because it seems as though their population numbers fluctuate quite a bit normally.

TOFT: These are great boom-and-bust species. They recruit in mass to some beaches, some years. And we don’t really know why. Which is kind of how you could end a lot of sentences about marine science: “and we really don’t know why.” And so that’s just opened up a whole ‘nother path of research to try to understand, is it the temperature of the water? Or is it the, you know, the slope of the beach? Is that the substrate? Is it the other animals that are in the area?

TWILLEY: Jodie and Viviane say it’s possible that there are still plenty of cockles but they’ve just moved into cooler, deeper water as the oceans have warmed up with climate change.

BARRY: They may be more sensitive to temperature changes. So, they may be really hot in the summer. Now, they may be moving more toward the subtidal area because of increase of temperatures.

TWILLEY: So now Jodie and Viviane have to figure out how to count cockles underwater, to see if they’re actually there but just hiding out in the subtidal zone.

TOFT: And so Suquamish divers have been out and will go out to survey some of these areas that have been historically important cockle beaches, to try to get that kind of hidden count of what’s there for cockles. Because knowing what you have is pretty important for figuring out how many you need you need to try to put back.

GRABER: These are all big questions. And there’s another question they have to figure out before they even consider using the full-grown lab-bred cockles to try to restock any beaches: how different are the genetics of the cockles from one beach to another?

TWILLEY: If cockles along different parts of the west coast have formed really distinct populations, then it would be a mistake to come in and seed California or Oregon coastlines with Puget Sound cockles—you’d risk wiping out all that important genetic diversity.

TOFT: And so one path that we’re taking is mapping out the genetic diversity of cockles from Alaska down to California. Trying to figure out, are these really similar, or are these really dissimilar? And that helps us inform how we might do restoration.

GRABER: Like, would they need to breed local cockles for each beach restoration, or can they just take the brood stock they’ve been breeding out now and use that tp repeatedly populate beaches up and down the coast?

TWILLEY: Jodie and Viviane have had success restoring Olympia oysters, and some other species of clams. But cockles are a real challenge. Even if they figure out all of these unanswered questions, and get to the point where they can reseed all the beaches, there’s no guarantee the cockles will stay put.

BARRY: The difference with the cockle and the Manila clams is the Manila clams in general will stay in the area where you plant them. But cockles could just move around. If they don’t like it there, they’ll leave. So we’re going to have to try to wrap our minds around how we’re going to monitor the success of these enhancement activities. Because, we don’t know.

GRABER: So it’s hard to tell how big a problem this is, and it’s hard to figure out just how to reseed beaches and then how to figure out if they’re successful.

TWILLEY: But even with all these uncertainties, the one thing the scientists are sure of is that this project is still really important

BARRY: Absolutely. I mean, each species that is native to this ecosystem in this environment, it’s, it’s—they’re all related. They all live in harmony with other species. They provide food for crab. They provide food for birds. And so removing—any time you remove a species, it definitely impacts the environment. We, what you want in, in the environment is as much richness, species richness, as possible.

TWILLEY: And cockles, like all shellfish, are especially valuable because they help clean up some of the pollution that we humans put into the oceans.

GRABER: One way they do this is they take up nitrogen from water—and actually a lot of nitrogen is from farming run off—and they use that nitrogen to build up their bodies. They filter out a lot of things, and that makes the water cleaner.

TWILLEY: As well as excess nitrogen, one of the big problems facing our oceans is acidification from climate change. That happens as the water absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So Jodie’s been testing some of the baby cockles in more acidic conditions.

TOFT: And cockles are actually doing quite well. Which is awesome because ocean acidification is not awesome! And having some species that are designed to be in this area, that have been in this area persisting for a really long time—having them show signs that they might actually be able to deal with those acidic conditions, is a good thing. We will take that. So we’re going to test that out in a much more robust manner in 2020. And TBD. We’ll see what we find.

GRABER: So there’s a lot still to learn. And Robin says deepening our understanding of cockles will deepen our understanding of the waters they live in.

SIGO: Cockles are an important part of tracking how our seas are doing. And our seas aren’t doing well. You know, we see these as indicators of other things going on in the sea and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t step in to do something about it. So cockles, sea cucumbers, the eel grass. You know, I mean, and then to things as big as orcas and seeing what’s happening with them and you know, really… experiencing that hurt. So when we can do small wins like this, it doesn’t feel small. It feels like everything.

TWILLEY: Robin says cockles will likely never be a huge part of her tribe’s diet, let alone others in the region. But they still matter.

SIGO: When you’re eating locally, you are really working to save your environment. You’re really working to build up your local ecosystem and there ends up being a lot of community around that. And community has consistently been a place to build resilience, build resilience as a person, as a community. And also environmentally. Resilience is one of the most important things that we can be working on right now.

GRABER: And even more than resilience, cockles matter because Robin’s people have been eating cockles for thousands of years.

SIGO: So bringing back a traditional food is the piece that reminds us of who we were. And it feels like a voice from your ancestors coming back to feed you, and to tell you that you’re okay, and that they’ve always dreamed this for you. There’s a lot of songs that talk about—traditional songs that talk about standing on the shore and waiting for your people to come home. And that’s what this is. This is part of our people coming home, because we get to feel that. We get to taste that.

TWILLEY: So yeah, Viviane may be worried about how to measure the success of this project in terms of cockle numbers, but Robin knows exactly what success would look like

SIGO: My dream for this project is that we have an abundance of cockles again. So that we can have cockle bakes, so they’re not just clam bakes. We can actually just have cockles there. People know what they are. I want my kids to have a taste and a hunger for them. They don’t have that right now because they haven’t really tasted them very often. And I want that piece in our history that shows the success of us bringing this back, that it was lost and we were able to do this. And I hope that gives inspiration to other indigenous communities on bringing back their traditional food. And I really hope that it’s a reminder to the United States and other governments that what’s good for Indian country is good for the whole country.

GRABER: And other indigenous communities are paying attention. Cockles were incredibly important to tribes up and down the West Coast. Robin met with representatives of other tribes on a trip to DC to testify about the impact of climate change on her community.

SIGO: Oh my gosh. I got asked so many times when I was back in Washington DC, how are the cockles doing? What’s going on with them? And they’re really excited about it. So on days when I do things like this, when I’m talking about cockles, I say I’m cockle dancing. Because that’s what it feels like to me.

TWILLEY: Robin definitely sees the cockle project as an inspiration to invest in other efforts to restore first foods. But really, it’s also just about throwing the world’s most awesome clambake.

BARRY: They say when the tide is out, the table is set. That’s like, a saying you hear at every tribe, and every tribal elder will tell you that. And, just the thought that there is hope to bring back some of these populations on the local beaches. It’s it’s a tremendous joy for everyone.

SIGO: I think we took cockles for granted for so long, and we expected that they would always be there, but that now they aren’t there, we are looking back at, were there any ceremonies around cockles? And if there weren’t or we’ve lost that piece now that reminding ourselves that, that our culture is a living, breathing thing and that something new is going to come from this. So we will definitely have a ceremony welcoming them back and we will be utilizing all of these skills and these resurgence that have happened and that our ancestors will make sure that we know how to honor these cockles in the way that we were meant to. [PAUSE] How cool is that, right?

GRABER: I know, it’s amazing.

SIGO: Oh my gosh.

TWILLEY: I got chills.

GRABER: I know!

[MUSIC]

GRABER: If you’re listening to this show when we first released it, you might notice that we have fewer ads than usual. Of course, that’s because of the global pandemic that’s going on right now, unsurprisingly companies are pulling ad money. We know a lot of you are having a tough time, and we hope you’re all staying safe and healthy. But if you are in a stable financial situation, we wanted to remind you that it is just the two of us working full time on this show, and listener support is critical. If you do happen to have a couple of bucks to spare to support the show, even a dollar an episode is amazing. It makes a huge huge difference. Gastropod.com/support, or find us on Patreon.

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Vivianne Barry and Jeff Moore of the Suquamish Tribe Fisheries, Jodie Toft of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and Robin Sigo and Azure Boure of the Suquamish Tribe.

GRABER: Thanks also to Hannah Weinberger, who wrote a story about the cockle restoration project in the online magazine Crosscut. We have a link to everyone’s work plus lots of lovely photos of cockles on our website, gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: This episode was made possible with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics. And with support from Ashley Belanger, who is our fabulous intern this spring!

GRABER: We will be back in two weeks with an episode that’s orange, blue, and red all over!

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode We’d Like to Teach The World to Slurp: The Weird and Wonderful Story of Ramen’s Rise to Glory, first released on September 26, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

CYNTHIA GRABER: [ATTEMPTED SLURPING] I can’t do it. I can’t slurp. I just made a mess.

NICOLA TWILLEY: [SLURPING] Mmm. Mm! I think my slurp was like C minus, but the flavor is A plus.

TWILLEY: My apologies to those of you who are sensitive to such sounds. I was certainly not brought up to slurp my food.

GRABER: I wasn’t either, but that is apparently the appropriate way to enjoy a steaming hot bowl of ramen.

TWILLEY: Which is exactly what we’re diving into this episode. You’re listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber. And when we’re not attempting to slurp ramen without making a total mess, this episode we’re also trying to figure out a central mystery: how is a meaty broth filled with Chinese style noodles seen as an authentic Japanese dish, I mean aren’t Japanese traditionally a kind of pescatarian and light brothy people?

TWILLEY: Plus yet more mystery: how did this meaty noodle soup become a dried rectangle with a seasoning packet that sustains college students and prisoners alike?

GRABER: What’s so special about ramen? Like why do people these days line up for hours to get a taste of what some hot ramen chef is whipping up?

TWILLEY: All that and more coming right up in the weird and wonderful story of ramen. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

[BREAK]

BARAK KUSHNER: This is a heavy animal based, I mean, there are plant based now, but fundamentally animal based soup, meaty broth of a type in which these delicious, spongy, you know, kind of al dente noodles swim, that’s slurped up. That really doesn’t reflect any fundamental element of Japanese traditional cuisine. And yet it is indelibly linked with Japanese culture.

GRABER: Barak Kushner is a professor of East Asian history at the University of Cambridge and he’s also the author of a book called Slurp, a social and culinary history of ramen, Japan’s favorite noodle soup.

KUSHNER: And the fascinating thing I think about ramen or why ramen intrigued me as a topic many years ago, when I first went to Japan, is that it kind of completely cuts against the grain of both what you would think of as traditional Japanese foods. but also when you dig into the history, it cuts against the lack of variety and perhaps richness of Japanese traditional dining.

TWILLEY: So wait a minute because this is bananas: Barak is saying that ramen is the example that goes against the fact that Japanese food is traditionally poor and lacking in variety? But really? Are you kidding me? Did you not actually eat anything when you were in Japan?

GRABER: But then we remembered that Barak is a history professor, and he’s talking about the past.

KUSHNER: So Japan historically was very poor. And very geographically isolated. It wasn’t a rich, bountiful agricultural country. It’s very mountainous. Rice or cereals, those sorts of products were very difficult to grow in that climate.

GRABER: So to understand ramen, Barak says we have to understand just how food poor Japan was over the course of most of history. It was hard to grow rice and grains, and on top of that, it was also hard to raise livestock there. And this lack of meat ended up becoming kind of enshrined in religion, too.

KUSHNER: Meat eating is seen as antithetical to Buddhist precepts. You should not kill living things. So Japan doesn’t have the grazing area to raise large animals for meat. And there’s wild boar and there’s stork and there’s heron and those sorts of large animals are eaten, but they’re not necessarily consumed or, raised in the way that they are, let’s say for pigs in China, or let’s say cattle in the West.

TWILLEY: So Japanese cuisine ends up historically not being particularly meat-centric. Really, Barak says, it wasn’t a taste-centric cuisine, either.

KUSHNER: Japan, there’s, there’s no discussion of, kind of, the history of taste. Because there just, there isn’t much. It’s, It’s basic. It’s fishy.

GRABER: Basic and fishy doesn’t sound too appetizing.

TWILLEY: Sorry Japan. Harsh burn.

GRABER: And Barak says this basicness was the opposite of its close neighbor China for most of history. In China, there were lots of different regions with lots of different cuisines. But in general the cuisines were rich and varied and people loved to eat and also talk and write about food. Food mattered in China.

KUSHNER: So the interesting thing first about food between China and Japan is that there is a very different ideology, I would say, in China linked toward the act of eating and food. And food as or dining as a metaphor for politics. Organizing a meal, organizing individuals and eating has certain ritual properties that are identified with how an efficient or moral government should run the country. We don’t see that in Japan. The Japanese don’t talk about food as a metaphor for politics or for ideology as it’s spoken about in, in ancient China.

TWILLEY: The same dynamic plays out in literature—in classic Chinese literature of the 1600s and 1700s, there are lavish descriptions of meals and entire plot lines that revolve around food. And Barak says that is really not the case in Japanese literature and culture from the same time.

GRABER: So Japan was poor and the locals were hungry and they didn’t have great food or great conversations about food, and they looked over at their huge neighbor, which was wealthier and better fed, and they saw that the Chinese seemed to be doing a lot right. Historically, the Japanese really admired China.

KUSHNER: So the historical relationship between Japan and the Chinese continent is virtually one of kind of master and student. It might not be the way everyone perhaps would like to have it phrased, but fundamentally that is what’s going on. China is in a sense the greater civilization that looms west. They sort of disdain the Japanese in ancient times. They don’t really think much of them.

TWILLEY: China’s like oh yeah that tiny island chain over there? Cute but whatever. And then Japan was like the little sister that wants to borrow your makeup and your clothes or in this case your entire culture.

KUSHNER: They’re looking at China as the go-to civilization. So they’re borrowing the written language. They borrow Buddhism, of course, which originally comes from India, but then it’s been sort of Sinofied. They borrow law. And they pretty much wholesale borrow architecture and just in agriculture and food technology and everything else over the centuries.

GRABER: And this is where we get back to at least the beginning of one of the elements of ramen. China was really big on noodles, though they first of course had to invent them. In some parts of the country, the Chinese grew wheat, and wheat noodles seem to have appeared a few thousand years ago.

KUSHNER: It seems in China, perhaps, that noodles don’t start out as noodles. They started as kind of perhaps large pancakes and then those pancakes get unrolled in water.

GRABER: And then over time, the wheat product stretched out and got thinner and longer and became less pancake-like and more noodle-like.

TWILLEY: Noodles were a huge hit in China from the get go because they’re great. And then because the Japanese were just borrowing everything from their cool and more sophisticated neighbor, they borrowed noodles. Although how and when exactly noodles got to Japan is a little bit of a mystery.

KUSHNER: Yeah, so… [LAUGHS] The quick answer is we don’t know. The, the, the more perhaps satisfying answer would be, it seems to come across starting in kind of, you know, seventh, eighth and ninth century.

GRABER: At that time, Japanese Buddhist monks were traveling throughout China to study, well, Buddhism. But also basically everything else, too.

KUSHNER: They’re studying and they’re bringing back various technologies for kind of creating the, the flour from wheat and the elements that, in a sense, then become soy sauce and whatnot. And noodle technology, generally speaking, starts to kind of be linked to the monks going and then coming back. And one of the interesting reasons for that also is temples in Japan, once they’re set up, they have to make money. And so in some parts, they start to be associated with noodle making,

TWILLEY: And over time the Japanese made noodles their own. Some of these temple noodles were wheat noodles, round dense fat noodle called udon, and some were made from buckwheat, which is an entirely different seed that’s ground into a nutty earthy flour, and those are called soba noodles.

KUSHNER: And so udon and soba are essentially eaten in a very thin broth, or a bland soup.

GRABER: Which people really liked, but it is nothing like ramen. But so then, how does something more like ramen, a rich meaty broth filled with a kind of chewier skinnier wheat noodle, how does that get to Japan?

KUSHNER: There are a couple popular myths. One popular myth is that there’s a Chinese Confucian gentleman that comes over in the mid mid to late 1600s. He’s fleeing the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China. He brings the technology with him. He goes to the Mito domain.

TWILLEY: Quick bit of backstory: The Mito domain is a region just north of Tokyo, and it was run by its own lord, called Mito Komon. And Mito Komon brought over this Chinese scholar to help him, to give his region a little Chinese glow up. The story goes that as well as boosting up literature and landscaping and all that kind of stuff, the Chinese guy also brought ramen.

KUSHNER: He teaches the making of ramen, the noodles, the soup, everything to Mito Komon, who interestingly was a character, a historical character, but then also there’s a very popular TV show about him.

[MITO KOMON THEME SONG]

GRABER: This was the longest running tv show in Japanese history, it ran for more than 40 years, and in it, Mito Komon rescues people from crime and injustice. But apparently he also learned how to make ramen from this Chinese guy.

KUSHNER: That becomes kind of the, one of the myths that it’s, it’s Mito Komon being taught by the Chinese Confucian gentlemen. And that’s how ramen gets made, which is of course, preposterous because a Confucian gentleman wouldn’t have cooked, right?

TWILLEY: Cooking was not an activity for gentlemen and scholars, not like landscaping or literature. And anyway, Barak says, even if this one Chinese scholar had taught Mito Komon how to make ramen, the Japanese wouldn’t have liked it.

KUSHNER: In the mid 1600s, the Japanese were not going to eat this wheat-based, al dente noodle soup in a heavy, rich broth. Because their tastes, their, their, you know, uh, national taste palate preference hadn’t changed yet.

TWILLEY: They’re still into their fish, their light broths, their buckwheat, and above all rice. AKA the opposite of meaty wheaty noodle soup.

GRABER: It looks like the real roots of ramen date back to the 1800s. Before then, Japan had been closed off to foreigners, except for the occasional Chinese scholar, as well as a few Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish traders. But in the 1800s, due to a wide variety of historical reasons, Japan started to allow foreigners into just a few port cities.

KUSHNER: And what you realize is the largest number of foreigners in Japan in the mid 1800s, as Japan opens, it’s not Westerners. It’s Chinese.

TWILLEY: There were some Westerners, and they found the Chinese folks in those treaty ports extremely useful.

KUSHNER: And so some of them speak a bit of English, some of the—you know, they’ve been cooks for, um, foreign missions and foreigners and whatnot in China. And it’s the Chinese staff that can interact with the Japanese, that understand what’s going on. And it’s that interaction, really, in those port cities that creates the kind of dynamism for new forms, new cuisines to emerge.

GRABER: The Chinese were translating for the westerners, and they were also cooking, and the food they were preparing was for Europeans and for Americans and for themselves. And of course they were using a lot of flavors and techniques from home.

KUSHNER: And so then you begin to see that interaction, you begin to see restaurants appear and they’re labeled as Western restaurants. But in the Western restaurant, they’re serving dishes, and one of them is called a nanking soba—or nanking as it’s transliterated then is actually nanjing as we know it today.

TWILLEY: Nanjing is one of the four ancient capitals of China. So this is kind of like calling the dish China’s noodles.

KUSHNER: And it’s—we’re not quite sure what it was, but it looks to be some sort of Chinese-y soba dish. These sorts of hybrid dishes using noodles, so soba, perhaps in one case. In Nagasaki almost at the same time, there’s a new dish called champon. And champon is this kind of, again, noodles with perhaps leftover food on it, kind of mixed up in a stew kind of slurry. And that also proves very popular.

GRABER: These weren’t Japanese-style light fishy bland broths, the stews and soups were rich and meaty.

KUSHNER: And these kind of new noodle dishes that are combining Chinese heavier tastes for different palate begin to slowly appeal to both foreigners in these treaty ports, but also Japanese.

TWILLEY: One thing that’s a little confusing is that even though it was called nanking soba or later shina soba, where shina is the archaic Japanese word for China—it seems like most of the time the noodles themselves weren’t actually soba. Soba, remember, is made of buckwheat.

GRABER: But these noodles were mostly made of wheat wheat. And they had something else special about them: they held up really well in hot liquid. They stayed springy and chewy for a while without getting goopy and overcooked.

TWILLEY: The special ingredient that made the noodles so springy and sturdy—it was an alkali salt, specifically potassium or sodium carbonate. The Chinese had started adding this alkali salt to some of their noodles but like everything to do with ramen, no one knows exactly when and where. Legendary food science guru Harold McGee, who’s been on Gastropod a bunch, his theory is that cooks in the south of China where it can be super hot and humid originally added this alkali salt to their noodle dough as a way to prevent it from starting to ferment.

GRABER: It turns out that alkali salt does a lot of other things to noodle dough, too. First of all, it makes the flour kind of yellowish. There are some compounds in flour that are normally colorless, but they turn yellow when the pH goes over 7. It also changes the flavor to taste a little eggier, even though there aren’t any eggs in traditional ramen noodles.

TWILLEY: But the biggest deal is that it seems to strengthen the bond between the gluten molecules in the noodle. That obviously changes the texture and yes, you guessed it, that is what makes ramen springy and sturdy, like we said.

GRABER: So, basically, by the late 1800s, early 1900s, a totally new thing was being created in Japan that was completely different from traditional Japanese food to that point. It had chewier, bouncier noodles that weren’t like udon or soba, and they were swimming in a rich, meaty stew or broth that was nothing like what the Japanese had been eating before.

TWILLEY: But the Japanese started to get into it.

KUSHNER: It’s really just a very basic go to dish for students, for itinerant laborers, for people who are on the street, for late night revelers. Ramen is not something you consume at home. It’s something you consume outside. And so it’s, it really links also with the shift in Japan from agriculture to urbanization. From rural to urbanization.

TWILLEY: By the early 1900s, Japanese people were starting to move to cities en masse, they often worked long hours and didn’t have big kitchens, so they needed cheap fast street food. Ramen fit the bill. It was sold in stalls and restaurants, but also just from carts on the street.

GRABER: And something else was going on at the time, too. There was a big debate about nutrition in Japan. When the country opened up, they realized that almost everyone else was bigger and stronger than they were—Barak told us most Japanese suffered from malnutrition until basically after the second world war. And this made the country’s leaders nervous.

KUSHNER: The Japanese are terrified from the Meiji era on, of being colonized.

TWILLEY: So various military generals and admirals start arguing that the Japanese people need to change their diet. As a matter of national security, they had to start eating lots more wheat and meat.

GRABER: That’s because at this point in history, the Japanese did love noodles, sure, but they were really a rice-based society. Their ideal cuisine revolved mostly around rice and seafood. And the military men thought that had to change.

KUSHNER: We need to change our national diet to be bigger so that we aren’t swallowed, both literally and figuratively, by the West. And—you know, I think that also plays a role, in part, in urging Japanese toward exploring a different national taste palate. Because that conversation is being had.

GRABER: The changes in Japanese society, moving to the city and so on, and also the nutrition debate, that all helped the Japanese get on board with this new delicious meaty wheaty soup. But it was still called shina soba. How did it become ramen?

TWILLEY: This is another thing where there are some popular stories but Barak doesn’t necessarily buy them.

KUSHNER: One is that lamen. So it’s the, because you have pulled noodles in China, in Lanzhou. And it’s la mien in Chinese, which it means literally pulled noodle. Which is very similar to ramen in Japan, which—pulled noodle. That there’s a story that they come directly from Lanzhou through China to Japan. And that’s how you get ramen.

GRABER: But Barak doesn’t think it’s a straightforward process of noodles from Lanzhou and the name crossing over to Japanese. He says the alkaline noodles and the soup were popping up in different places in Japan from different cooks who were from a variety of regions in China.

KUSHNER: There’s some stories up from Hokkaido that it was called yumen, um, or that it was, it was called damen, uh, either after the way in which one of the Chinese cooks pronounced it in the back room or that it was put on the menu that way. But those, it’s tough to know.

TWILLEY: Honestly, one of these stories could be true. We just don’t know.

KUSHNER: But what we do know is basically then by the start of kind of the post war, and some slight protestation from the Chinese nationalist government as well, that shina was derogatory and Japan shouldn’t use that term anymore, it becomes ramen. And so you don’t, after really kind of 1946, you don’t really see shina soba.

GRABER: Basically, we don’t know how the dish was renamed, but we do know that after world war II, ramen became ramen. But actually at that point, there wasn’t much of it around.

TWILLEY: In 1945, when they surrendered, Japan was starving. The official ration from the Japanese government was just 775 calories per person, per day.

KUSHNER: And within the American occupation, there is initially no plan to assist Japan with its food programs. And there was no program to let Japan rebuild economically. They’ll just let Japan go its own way. By the time you get kind of, the fear of the rise of communism in East Asia, the Americans take what’s called the reverse policy, the reverse approach, and they want to bolster Japan because they don’t want it to fall communist.

GRABER: America had had some great wheat harvests and they had more wheat than they needed. So they decided to dump it in Japan as aid to help the country get back on its feet and stop it turning Communist. We talked about this approach in our episode on food aid.

KUSHNER: And they begin to import it into Japan and try to get the Japanese to use it, strangely to make bread. Which was a singular failure, because the Japanese don’t cook bread at home.

TWILLEY: In fact they mostly don’t have ovens at home. But although the bread and cake program didn’t pan out, some of the wheat made it onto the black market, in the form of ramen noodles, and people loved those—here was this warm, nourishing, and by then quite familiar soup that was comforting and reviving and delicious.

GRABER: And cheap. But not as cheap as instant ramen. The story of the invention of the noodles that took over the world, coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

KUSHNER: Ando Momofuku, he is the original father of instant ramen. So we do have one person for instant ramen story.

TWILLEY: Finally, an origin story for something to do with ramen that is actually true! But now we’re talking about instant ramen, which is a very different beast. Depending on where you’re from, you might know it as Cup O’ Noodles, Top Ramen, Maruchan—in England we call it Pot Noodle.

GRABER: Basically it’s a block of fried ramen noodles that rehydrate in boiling water, and you add some flavor powder to it—choose the flavor you want—and hey presto, instant meal. In the year 2000, the Japanese people chose Instant Ramen as the greatest invention of the entire 20th century.

TWILLEY: So who *is* this Ando Momofuku guy who invented the century’s greatest invention?

KUSHNER: So Ando Momofuku is a, is kind of an entrepreneur businessman, failed several times. He’s Japanese, but he had grown up in Taiwan. So in a sense, he’s kind of part of the imperial periphery. And then he comes back after the war and he’s penniless. He’s actually, I believe at that point arrested for tax evasion. But he is an inventor and he… wants to create a caloric food stuff for post war Japan that can be easily consumed, really just by adding hot water. He has some contacts with the Bureau of Nutrition people and they’re kind of floundering around for what to do with this wheat with the Americans. And so he begins to fiddle around with instant ramen.

TWILLEY: Momofuku’s inspiration came from the long lines he’d seen for black market ramen in the ruins of his home town of Osaka, in 1945. Obviously ramen was popular and nourishing, but he didn’t think it was perfect. He wanted to improve it by making it non perishable and ready in fewer than three minutes. That was the goal.

KUSHNER: He couldn’t get it right. He kept adding the water and then the noodles will just melt. And so he finally hits upon the idea after years of experimentation, that if you fry the noodles, then they will reconstitute in the hot water. And then he kind of makes the flavor packs, um, as well. And it is just miraculous.

GRABER: To be fair, even this origin story doesn’t tell the whole truth, because while Momofuku did invent and popularize instant ramen, he wasn’t the first person to invent it. It had also been invented a few years earlier by another guy, but that guy didn’t patent it, and he didn’t have all the same government contacts that Momofuku had. Momofuku was just in the right place at the right time and he was a better businessman.

TWILLEY: Momofuku marketed the living crap out of his instant noodles. He got government permission to label instant ramen as a special health food, thanks to the B vitamins he added to the noodle dough. He advertised it on all the brand new TV and radio sets in Japan, complete with a special song, “The Chikin Rāmen Song.”

[CHIKIN RAMEN SONG]

TWILLEY: It was seen as the perfect fast healthy cheap food for men and women working all hours in the new Japan.

KUSHNER: But it’s that kind of push with instant ramen that then becomes an emblem of a reasserting Japa, Japanese working hard late at night, cheap food once again.

TWILLEY: Instant ramen was the fuel to help rebuild Japan.

GRABER: Instant ramen hit the US market in the 70s, here some versions were sold in a styrofoam cup and called cup o noodles, which is how I became acquainted with it in suburban Maryland.

MAN: Mmm, that looks good, Cory. How many noodles do you think are in that bowl of Top Ramen Noodle Soup?

LITTLE KID: I want to tell you something. You count the noodles, okay? And I’ll eat.

GRABER: We have that story and groovy photos from the 70s for our supporters in our special supporters newsletter—if you’d like to be on that list, go to gastropod.com/support.

TWILLEY: And when we say instant ramen hit the US market, we mean exploded! Instant ramen was huge, here, there, and basically everywhere. These days there are billions of packages sold a year, some estimates are that there’s enough instant ramen sold every year for every single human being to eat fourteen bowls of it.

GRABER: One of the things that surprised me is that one of the places in America where instant ramen is the most popular—maybe other than a college campus – is in prison.

GOOSE ALVAREZ: It became the go-to whenever you were incarcerated, you know, because it would blow up in your stomach, keep you full, because it was hard sometimes you didn’t eat very well in there.

TWILLEY: This is Gustavo Alvarez, he goes by his nickname, Goose. And Goose has done some time, eaten some ramen, and published a book about it called Prison Ramen.

ALVAREZ: Frankly, I never tasted it on the streets. I never even heard of it. I’m going to be honest with you. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m Mexican descent, so it’s tortillas and beans, you know, growing up. And I did not come across it ‘til, I guess you could say I started going to juvenile hall, which was in my teens 14, 15, and I would see it at the commissary. And I’m like, what’s that? They go, oh, that’s noodles.

GRABER: At first, Goose wasn’t such a fan.

ALVAREZ: But as you did years or or whatever months in prison, you started to notice how they would cook with it. And you started thinking, man, that smells pretty good. Let me taste it. And then once you try it, you’re like, wow, you know, now you start craving it. Now you start making your own recipes.

TWILLEY: This may be too obvious to even say, but the food in prison is terrible. Goose says that it used to be better, but they cut all the funding.

ALVAREZ: They started giving you what’s called packaged foods, spaceman food. They just open it up, pour water in it, chili beans. Open it up, pour water in it, pasta.

TWILLEY: Which is not super tasty. And also, Goose says, there’s never enough.

ALVAREZ: And most of the guys, they just can’t survive. So they start drawing, they start doing penmanship. They’ll wash your clothes. Whatever it is to make an, an extra can of chili beans, a pack of ramen noodles or some tuna. To keep them going. You know, you have to have a hustle.

GRABER: Ramen was just one of the things you can buy at the commissary with the money from your side hustle. But ramen had a special place among all these ingredients. In prison, ramen became a kind of blank canvas to paint any kind of culinary dreams onto.

ALVAREZ: This is, this is more than just a piece of bread, for some people. This is a noodle that the basic hot water can transform it to something edible. But, it depends on the ingredients you put into it that make it what it is, a dish. You can eat it raw with seasoning on top. You can add your cultural ingredients to it and make it a dish from your—you know, ’cause I’ve I’ve seen dishes from as far as Mexico to Vietnam, to Philippines, to Africa. You can do so much with it that it’s just—everybody in prison and, and even if they don’t eat it, they have it. It’s in their locker. They need to have it. You know, it’s used to barter. You could trade. I mean, it’s a necessity in prison. If they were to take Maru Chan or Cup o Noodles out of the system in prison, I think there’d be mayhem.

TWILLEY: Goose says that ramen was sold for 50 cents a packet at the commissary, although ramen hustlers would buy in bulk and resell it for more in times of shortages or lockdowns.

GRABER: Ramen was a necessity. You had to have it. And then for any other ingredients they might want to add, they might find those at the commissary, or maybe they’d just kind of pocket some extra from the dining hall.

TWILLEY: And then you’ve got to cook it. Goose told us about a frankly lethal sounding hot plate setup you can build with a razor blade and a power outlet to cook your ramen, definitely do not ever try this at home. And of course there are no pots and pans in prison. But NBD, there’s a workaround for that too.

ALVAREZ: Every facility, every dorm, every barrack has what they call a porter, a person that cleans. So he has access to gloves, he has access to plastic bags. So he becomes somebody you barter with. Hey man, here’s a case of soups. I’m going to need these bags, I’m going to need a bucket, a clean bucket. So usually you’ll get the bucket and the bag will be put inside the bucket, right? And you would fill that up with the ramen and the hot water, and then you just tie the bag. And just let it cook.

GRABER: And there’s a lot of cooking going on. Goose’s book is filled with ramen recipes, some of them he made up, some of them he heard about from the guys he was serving time with.

ALVAREZ: You know, because they’re kind of passed down, you know. And they’re going to continue being passed down for a long time. There’s this one recipe I have where you cut the brick in half without separating it, and you spread peanut butter and jelly. A couple raisins, maybe some trail mix on top. There you go. That’s a healthy snack. We used to eat it right before our workout. And, and another is making a sandwich out of it. Leave it just the way it is in the packet. Warm it up. A minute. So it’s still kind of crunchy. And you put bologna, a chees. You have a, we call a ramen witch. Not a man witch, but a ramen witch. Popcorn. Crush it in the bag, put the seasoning in there, watch a movie eating ramen as, as a popcorn. These, these guys from Vietnam showed me how to make teriyaki. Yeah, get, get some strawberry jam and soy sauce. Mix it together with a little bit of garlic powder. Oh, teriyaki. And then there’s this other one that we did with… olives. We were able to get a jar of olives, and there was this mixture, this Persian guy taught me, where you crush all the ramens and you get the, the green olives. And you some of the olive juice, which is kind of weird. But he mixed it all together and made like a paste. I, at first I go, this is the grossest thing ever. But when I ate it, I’m like, Hey man, this is pretty good.

TWILLEY: Listening to Goose describe the wonders that can be created with instant ramen, it almost sounds appetizing. But taste is only part of the point of ramen in prison. It’s about more than that.

GRABER: Which Goose discovered one day when he got a warning from a friend to get back to his cell, and fast.

ALVAREZ: And he’s like, look man, go back to your cell block and about five o’clock-ish everybody’s going to go off with the blacks. They’re going to fight against the blacks. So by the time I got to my cell block, I noticed everybody grouping, all the blacks on one side, all the Hispanics on the other, and the whites were already in their corner, ready to escape. The cops, before it escalated, literally opened up their windows and ran out. And left us in the cell blocks.

TWILLEY: So this is not good. Goose is a smart guy, he hears fights starting to break out and he knows it’s not going to be pretty. So he tried to get out too. But he didn’t want to leave his photos of his kids on the wall to get trashed.

ALVAREZ: So as I was ripping the pages, I was getting mad. I go, I’m not going to take 80 pictures down in time. So I said, I’m not leaving my kids.

GRABER: At this point, it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to get out of there, and a bunch of other Latino guys said they’d stick around with him. And then the gang outside started hammering at their door. And it opened up just a little bit, just enough to start letting people through.

ALVAREZ: In that instant, in that moment, an older black gang member who we never talked to. He was always grumpy. We never said nothing to him, but we left him alone. He left us alone. He stood up, walked directly to the hundred inmates and said, Hey, you guys are not coming in here.

TWILLEY: And this older guy just starts talking, just holding the other guys off, for nearly an hour.

ALVAREZ: I am watching him calm the storm and he calmed them so much to the point where they, they just stopped. He walks back to his locker, grabs a snicker bar, some chips, and gives it to one guy out of a hundred, says to share the food. And so something, bing, clicked in me. I told the guys, go in all these lockers and get all the food, get all the soups, get all the ramen. They’re like, why? I go, man, just do it. I had a little influence there, so they obeyed me and they went and got all the ramens. And we got buckets and just filled them up. And started making what we called a spread. A potluck. Of noodles and sausage and tuna and mixed with ramen and hot water.

TWILLEY: And Goose and his guys made this huge spread. To share with these other guys who just a few minutes earlier were planning to kill them. They all sat down, they ate, they talked.

ALVAREZ: And so I started conversating with my enemy and I made amends, so to speak. It’s a simple noodle. It was the equalizer to… two hardcore enemies, you know. And it’s been a blessing since.

GRABER: For Goose, the blessing of ramen continued when he got out of prison and was able to write about the role it played for him and the guys he knew. You can find those stories and recipes in Goose’s book, Prison Ramen. But instant ramen is like a completely different food compared to the ramen that’s trendy today: hand-made noodles, broth that takes like 30 ingredients and three days to prepare—and, after instant ramen, this artisanal slow-food ramen was the next ramen phenomenon that took over the world. That story, after the break.

[BREAK]

MARK HOSHI: The restaurant that I particularly worked at was a number one ranked ramen shop in all of Japan for seven straight years. So it wasn’t just a normal ramen shop that you could find on the corner of Tokyo or Osaka or anywhere else. It was pretty much always packed. There was a two hour wait.

TWILLEY: This is Mark Hoshi, he’s a food consultant behind the website Ramen Culture and he’s Japanese-American. He was born in Tokyo but he grew up in LA. And a little more than a decade ago, he went back to Japan. He fell in love with ramen, quit his job, and apprenticed himself to noodle soup.

GRABER: At the time, ramen chefs were serious celebrities in Japan. They were rock stars. They were gods. People would travel for hours, even fly from far away, just to get a taste of what they were making.

HOSHI: At the time when I was working, basically people queue up at 6:00 AM. Some people will queue up at like 5:00 AM depending on where they’re coming from. People travel from all over Japan, from all, from all over the world as well.

TWILLEY: Last time we met the non-instant kind of ramen, it was black market soup for the working people in postwar Japan. So how exactly did it become the darling of the global gourmet scene?

GRABER: After the 50s, ramen came out from the black market shadows. And even though instant ramen had become popular for a quick meal at home or at work, ramen shops stayed popular in Japan over the decades. It was hot and inexpensive and comforting. There was even a super popular movie in the 80s called Tampopo that’s also referred to as a ramen western.

TWILLEY: In the 70s and 80s, all that ramen-fueled hard work paid off. Japan was not only rebuilt, it was rich. And like most countries, as people got richer, they ate more meat. These types of meaty rich flavors weren’t so unusual in Japanese cuisine anymore by the 80s.

GRABER: But back then, Barak says ramen still wasn’t artisanal food, it was fast food.

KUSHNER: It’s still kind of a second class citizen in some ways, perhaps until the failure of the bubble, in the 1990s.

GRABER: Before the 1990s, Japan and a lot of the world was kind of riding high. The 1980s were full of excess and easy money and business men and the occasional woman on brick-sized cell phones making boatloads of cash. But then that bubble burst.

KUSHNER: And all of these people who didn’t suddenly have work. And some food historians have said, you know, this is where we get this massive proliferation of ramen. It’s really in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When out of work, entrepreneurs, business people, et cetera, need to find someplace small they can set up and make a business, because the economy is floundering once again.

TWILLEY: So lots of these out of work guys started ramen shops all over the country. And they started making this popular casual fast-food a little more slowly, or at least with a little more craft.

GRABER: Different regions had different crops and flavors that were already more common in those regions, and so ramen itself differed from region to region in Japan. And these new small ramen shops usually specialized in one particular style of ramen. And they became tourist attractions.

KUSHNER: So as the Shinkansen, the bullet train in Japan expands, it’s possible to travel more easily around Japan and national campaigns of tourism begin. And one of the ways to get people in from the big urban areas out to your hinterland area in Japan is to sell a popular food item.

TWILLEY: And all of this combined made artisanal ramen and the chefs making these distinctive regional styles—it made them really cool. In Japan, in the 1990s and early 2000s, ramen was a thing.

GRABER: And then, unsurprisingly, ramen, just like instant ramen before it, it started to catch on overseas. This trend really picked up over the past decade.

TWILLEY: Part of this is because for a while everything Japanese was super cool. Japanese denim, Japanese manga, Japanese reality TV, and of course Japanese food.

GRABER: Plus Mark says there was a ready audience just waiting for a grown-up version of one of their favorite childhood foods.

HOSHI: Just like we grew up in McDonald’s, but we wanted more. We have Shake Shack, we have gourmet burgers. So I think us, that generation growing up with Cup of Noodles, helped increase the popularity of craft ramen these days.

TWILLEY: In the late 90s early 2000s, for most people in America, ramen meant instant noodles. Most Americans had no idea there was a better, richer, freshly prepared version of this noodle soup.

GRABER: The beginning of the change is usually credited to David Chang, you might have heard of him, he went to Japan to teach English in the 90s. Like Mark, he fell in love with ramen, and he came back and opened a really popular, really famous restaurant in New York City in 2004 called…Momofuku. And he served fantastic ramen.

TWILLEY: Over the past couple decades, this is a story that has repeated itself over and over. Americans go to Japan, they fall in love with ramen, they come back, they open a restaurant. And then Japanese chefs saw that there was a market here, so they opened restaurants. And today, every major US city worth its salt has at least one craft ramen shop, somewhere that is taking ramen seriously.

GRABER: Seriously, but not always as seriously as Mark would like.

HOSHI: A lot of it is still pre-made. Pre-made soup, pre-made sauce, and it’s very rare for me to see something that’s still made from scratch. So if a, for example, if you see a ramen shop that boasts that they make their own house-made noodles, they are going to be unique.

TWILLEY: Alright, let’s see some noodles!

RAYNEIL DE GUZMAN: Yeah, let’s do it, guys.

GRABER: So of course, we had to go to one of those places that makes everything from scratch. Rayniel De Guzman is one of the owners of The Ramen Shop in Oakland, California, and we watched him dip small metal mesh colanders into boiling water, each one had a single serving of freshly made ramen noodles, and then every so often he lifted the cylinder out of the water and snapped the basket up and down.

[SNAPPING, SHAKING, TAPPING]

DE GUZMAN: This, because it’s so important that the noodles kind of not stick, and that they stay kind of… boiling, and so that they cook as evenly as possible.

TWILLEY: The Ramen Shop in Oakland has been around since 2013, which was in the early days of when ramen was really starting to get super super trendy in the US. It was founded by three friends who met when they were working at Chez Panisse, which is Alice Waters’ restaurant in Berkeley where everything is local and sustainable and delicious.

GRABER: But for Sam White, he’s one of the other owners, he had the David Chang experience, because “craft” was not his first experience of ramen.

SAM WHITE: Yeah, I mean, for me, Cup O’ Noodles. Definitely that was one of the staples growing up and I totally loved it, and then didn’t really think much about it beyond that. And I then got invited to go to Japan, ended up having kind of a revelatory moment at a ramen shop. Where I’m just tasting something that I just never really tasted before. And realizing that it was just missing from my whole diet.

TWILLEY: Sam started talking to his kitchen friends Rayniel and also Jerry, he goes by JJ, and it turned out they too had had similar ramen revelations. And so the three of them tried finding ramen to eat locally in the Bay Area, but there just wasn’t a lot around, and especially nowhere doing the kind of artisanal, sustainable, locavore type cooking that they loved.

GRABER: They were interested in opening their own ramen shop, but they had a learning curve. JJ went to Japan and followed around a ramen chef, Rayniel taught Sam the trick of making alkaline ramen noodles. They messed around with recipes, figured out what was missing, tweaked and tweaked and tweaked.

WHITE: You know, before it felt like it was impossible to make a bowl of ramen. There’s some magical… science happening that you just don’t know about and, you know, we’ll never know. But then suddenly it felt like, oh, we, we can make it. And then we made a couple bowls. We did a, we did a pop up at a friend’s house and they kind of went, oh, you know, I would buy this if this, if this was available.

TWILLEY: So then Sam and Rayniel and JJ opened a restaurant. And it did really well.

WHITE: For the first—for the first couple of years it was a four hour wait. So it, it was, yeah, it was, it was crazy. It was crazy for a while, and we, we didn’t really know how to keep up with demand. And we were running out of noodles every night, because we were making everything fresh.

GRABER: They’re since expanded the restaurant, and the lines aren’t quite as long anymore. But they’re still serving up tons of amazing ramen every day.

TWILLEY: It’s some of the best ramen you’ll ever eat, in my humble opinion. So we went there to get familiar with what goes into a bowl of noodle soup, to turn something that is basically noodles and broth into the kind of thing that people will queue for for hours.

GRABER: Of course at its core, there’s still noodles and broth, with some variations on the theme. The team at The Ramen Shop spends a lot of time on all of their different broths and they make their noodles by hand. But Sam and Rayniel told us that even the broth has two components. There’s the basic broth broth, and then there’s a more concentrated flavor element that you add at the end of heating the broth up so the aromatic compounds don’t boil off.

TWILLEY: This concentrate is called tare. And it’s basically a flavor bomb, kind of like adding a bath bomb to your bathtub. At The Ramen Shop, they have a few different varieties of tare, and we tried one. It was made with three different soy sauces, some dried shiitake mushrooms, and a few different types of dried fish.

GRABER: Okay. I imagine it’s going to be a little intense. Ooh.

TWILLEY: Yowza. It’s kind of like… incredibly delicious though. Like, I, like… I like super delicious, intense, like Marmite

GRABER: The soy and the kind of the, like the sea undertones, the fish. It’s salty. It’s totally delicious.

TWILLEY: In more viscous form I would put it on toast. It’s incredible.

GRABER: Sam and Rayniel mixed the tare into the broth and they prepared our bowls—they brought us three different kinds of ramen. One was a spicy miso ramen that also had pork in the base, and came with a cured egg and some beautiful vegetables. Another was a special ramen they don’t always have, it was a rich beef broth with slices of brisket and of course vegetables and an egg, and then a vegetarian meyer lemon shoyu ramen with mushrooms and eggplant and confit tomato. We were basically in heaven.

GRABER: Oh my god.

TWILLEY: Mmm. wild. It’s even better than I remember it.

GRABER: Wow, that’s good. I’m going to taste the beef broth.

TWILLEY: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

GRABER: It’s really rich without being, like, super oily.

TWILLEY: [GIGGLING] It’s incredibly delicious. That’s incredibly delicious.

GRABER: I’m not sure I have a favorite here.

TWILLEY: They’re so good. Wow. You guys.

WHITE: I’m not hearing a lot of slurping.

[LAUGHTER]

TWILLEY: We tried.

GRABER: And failed.

TWILLEY: But we really did try, because there are good, scientific reasons to slurp your ramen.

WHITE: [SLURP SOUND] So you’re sucking in air as you’re taking in the, the noodles and you know, in theory, that’s kind of cooling it down, allowing you to eat it a little bit faster. But if you go to a ramen place in Japan, that’s—that’s what everybody’s doing. That’s kind of an understood part of the process.

GRABER: In another scientific theory, all that air also helps you aerate the aromatics in what you’re eating, so you get more of the flavor notes. That’s why wine people often suck in air through their teeth as they’re tasting. I can’t say I do that with wine, and I wasn’t so great at attempting it with ramen.

TWILLEY: Sam tried to coach us. Everyone gathered round, and offered advice to help us nail the slurp, even Sue Chin Chin, who is the pickle and fermentation queen of The Ramen Shop.

SUE CHIN CHIN: Okay. This is a slurp. [RAPID SLURPING]

GRABER: Okay, so, that was perfect. I think it means I need to do fewer noodles.

TWILLEY: We need to be lower to the bowl.

GRABER: Yes.

TWILLEY: That’s where I’m going wrong here.

GRABER: I’m going wrong with not living in Oakland and eating this every day.

[ATTEMPTED SLURPING]

GRABER: No. No. I haven’t perfected this yet.

[ATTEMPTING SLURPING]

[BOTH LAUGH]

GRABER: I may not have been an expert slurper, though I could not stop eating any of the three bowls. But luckily Sam told me not to worry. There’s no one right way to eat ramen.

WHITE: It’s just kind of your own individual style. I’m definitely an egg last person for whatever reason. But I do, I like to do the noodles first and then focus on the broth. Maybe a little broth as I go. And I definitely know plenty of people who will do the broth and then the noodles last, which is kind of a… that seems like an odd approach to me. But I, you know, again, no judgment. You, you live your own ramen life.

TWILLEY: People can get quite serious about ramen but the thing to know is that actually not only can you eat it however you like, it can kind of be whatever you like. There are ramen rules but there are really no ramen rules!

WHITE: Ramen is a new thing on the time scale of food and Japan and our kind of cultural history. So, Oftentimes Americans have this idea of like, oh, you know, what, what is traditional ramen? And there’s not really traditional ramen. And if you look at the leading kind of ramen people in Japan, they’re doing all sorts of crazy things. And putting Parmesan, and all these things that don’t really make you think of ramen, on their ramens. Because it’s meant to be a little bit playful.

TWILLEY: I mean, what’s not to love? No wonder ramen has caught on all round the world. As a trend, it’s still growing, with new shops and new styles, though Barak says it’s maybe peaked in Japan.

GRABER: But while there may be ramen highs and ramen lows, we may someday get to a time when ramen shops don’t have lines around the corner, it’s never going to totally go out of style. It’s fun to eat, and it’s delicious.

KUSHNER: When it’s hot and you slurp it, it’s addicting. I’ve only met one person in my life who dislikes ramen. And. You know, I have my reservations about that individual.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: Thanks this episode to Barak Kushner, Goose Alvarez, and Mark Hoshi, we have links to their books and sites on our website, gastropod.com. And thanks so much to everyone at The Ramen Shop for hosting us, it was amazing.

TWILLEY: Thanks also to our fabulous producer Claudia Geib. And we’ll be back in just a week with dessert. Time to make the donuts!

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