Tasty by John McQuaid Page B

prepare a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian ale named Ta Henket, Calagione placed petri dishes laced with sugar at an Egyptian date farm to capture airborne yeasts, mapped their DNA to assure their provenance, and grew strains that were likely descendants of those used by the pharaohs. To make an ancient Peruvian corn ale, he spent four days chewing corn kernels so his spit would break down their starches into sugars.
    For the Jiahu brew, McGovern and Calagione had only a list of likely ingredients from the original chemical analysis, with no quantities or instructions. The Jiahu people had gathered their ingredients from nearby forests and hillsides, as well as their own rice stores. Nine thousand years later, McGovern and Calagione would have to improvise. Chinesegrapes that would have been a good match weren’t readily available in the United States. Nor were the small, tart hawthorn fruits. The pair settled on canned muscat grapes, which are genetically similar to the wild Eurasian grapes the Jiahu artisans used. They were able to import hawthorn berry powder from China in fifty-pound bags.
    The Jiahu people had grown and processed rice. This meant that neither brown rice (unprocessed) nor white rice (processed with modern technology) would do for the re-­created brew. So McGovern and the Dogfish Head team used a kind of precooked rice with some bran and hulls still present. Finally, to set the stage for fermentation, the starches in the rice had to be broken down into sugars that yeasts could metabolize. For that, they turned to a concoction used in Asian cuisine known as koji , rice inoculated with a fungus, Aspergillus oryzae , that did the job. This was also a cheat, as villagers would have used more primitive means—spit, which contains the necessary enzymes. After a three-week brewing process, they had a beverage they called “Chateau Jiahu.” McGovern found it delicious: effervescent, rich, brooding. (He also concluded it was an ideal complement to Chinese food.) I tried it myself. The honey gave it a smoothness, before a bitter aftertaste kicked in. It was not hard to imagine a summer evening, the sun going down, the rice and pigs tended to, a small fire burning, and perhaps the sound of a flute.
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    Throughout history, hungry microbes have fermented not only ripening fruits and honey but many edibles, launching a stream of culinary experiments. One began a few thousand years before Jiahu was founded, about four thousand miles away in a mountain range that spans present-day Turkey andIran, when a scene something like this must have occurred: A herdsman arose from the shadow of a lean-to. The morning light revealed a small herd of goats flecking the hillside below. He walked to a nearby pen made with woven branches for the female aurochs—a now-extinct wild ox—and her calf that he had captured. Aurochs were ornery, but this one was the calmest animal he had ever seen, and so with some effort he had managed to tame and breed her. He tugged on the aurochs’s udder, filling a clay jar with milk. Milk made him sick to his stomach. But when he set it aside for a day or two, the lumpy curds—the simplest form of cheese—made a satisfying meal.
    Aurochs were huge bundles of muscle, an irresistible food source, and herdsmen by this point had long experience handling flocks of goats and sheep. But both of those were docile creatures. Wild goats even sheltered in mountain caves; they were used to being penned. Aurochs were wild, mean, and unpredictable. Capturing and breeding them was nearly impossible.
    Scientists led by Ruth Bollongino of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris analyzed the DNA of modern cows and compared it with ancient DNA from fossils. They concluded that all cattle alive today are descended from about eighty wild animals, and that the original domestication probably happened in a single place in the Eurasian