Curse and Cure: Lead Tablets Hold the Oldest Recipe

There is a Roman curse tablet sitting in a Dutch museum that has taken archaeologists the better part of two millennia to read. Found in Heerlen — *Coriovallum*, as the Romans called it, a garrison town on the road between Cologne and the coast — the tablet is a thin sheet of lead, folded tight, its letters scratched in the furtive hand of someone who needed the gods to do something ugly on their behalf. The usual business: a name, a grievance, a request for divine violence. The archaeologists who finally deciphered it describe it with the careful neutrality of their profession. What they found was a man calling on deities and demons to harm his enemy.

I find myself more interested in the lead.

Because lead, in the Roman world, was not just the medium of malice. It was the medium of *taste*. The Romans used it everywhere in their cooking — in pots, in pipes, in the reduction vessels where they made *sapa*, the grape syrup that sweetened half their recipes. They called it *plumbum dulce*. Sweet lead. They boiled their wine down in lead vessels because the metal leached something into the liquid that made it taste better, smoother, rounder at the edges. What they were tasting, we now understand, was acetate of lead — lead acetate, which the old chemists once called *sugar of lead* because it genuinely, lethally, tastes sweet. The Romans were poisoning themselves and calling it flavour.

This is where food history gets uncomfortable and brilliant at the same time. Because the question the Heerlen tablet makes me ask is not *who did this man hate* — it is *what was he eating the night he scratched these letters*. What was on the table beside the curse? What did the cook in his household put in the wine to make it taste the way a Roman expected wine to taste? What were the flavours of that world, and how much of the strange particular madness of the late Roman empire — the paranoia, the violence, the elaborate cruelty — was simply lead poisoning expressing itself as politics?

I am not being glib. Some historians have made exactly this argument. Not as excuse, but as explanation. A civilisation that flavoured its food with a neurotoxin and called it sweetness is a civilisation that could not, by definition, think clearly about what it was doing to itself. The curse tablet and the lead pot are the same object. The impulse to harm and the failure to recognise harm — both of them scratched into the same soft metal.

My mother used to say that you could read a culture's history in what it was afraid to throw away. The Romans were afraid to throw away the sweetness that lead gave them, even as it killed them. The Maltese — and here is where my particular inheritance becomes relevant — were afraid to throw away anything at all. Not because of lead, but because of scarcity. An archipelago with thin soil and unreliable rain does not produce a cuisine of abundance. It produces a cuisine of ingenuity. Every part of the animal. Every part of the grain. Every part of the fish that a French chef would have discarded in 1970 and a three-star chef today would put on a tasting menu and charge accordingly.

Jack and Will at Fallow understood this before it became fashionable to understand it. The cod's head. The corn cob. The philosophy that nothing is without value if you look at it correctly — this is not a modern ethical position, it is the oldest position in cooking, and it belongs to every culture that ever had to be careful. Malta had it. Lyon had it, in its own way — the bouchons built on offal and bone marrow and the parts of the pig that the bourgeoisie preferred not to name. My father understood this. He made *tablier de sapeur* — the fried tripe that Lyon's silk weavers ate because they could afford nothing else and discovered, in their necessity, something extraordinary — with the same reverence he brought to *quenelles de brochet*. He never ranked them. He knew that ranking food by its ingredients is the province of people who have never been hungry.

The Romans had everything and still craved sweetness so badly they reached for poison to find it. The lesson I take from the Heerlen tablet is not about curses. It is about the danger of a culture that has lost the thread between what it wants and what it actually needs. That thread — the