Word of the Week: Ambergris

ambergris

\ˈam-bər-ˌgrē(s)\

It’s been almost a month since the last word (sorry!) and I find myself returning to a throwaway fact I unearthed in the course of writing that post: marmalade used to be made out of quinces flavored with rosewater and musk or ambergris.

That’s pretty intoxicating. Not only is the quince rumored to be both the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden AND the apple of discord that Paris gave to Aphrodite (thus pissing off Hera and Athena and sparking the Trojan War, thanks dude), rosewater is straight out of the Arabian Nights.

All this and ambergris too? The name literally means “grey amber” but the stuff is entirely unrelated to the more familiar yellow amber (ambre-jaune) that comes from fossilized tree sap. Ambergris is marine, much smellier and much more mysterious. 

For a long time, no one quite knew where it came from. The Greeks thought it was a kind of magical guano. The medieval Chinese said it was floating dragon spit. The Arabs said it came from springs deep beneath the shoreline. Dutch sailors claimed it was the sap of a rare coastal tree (and no doubt could arrange to sell you a seedling for a reasonable price). 

John Singer Sargent: Fumée d'ambre gris (1880). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The reality is perhaps equally weird. In the words of the OED, ambergris is:

A wax-like substance of marbled ashy colour, found floating in tropical seas, and as a morbid secretion in the intestines of the sperm-whale. It is odoriferous and used in perfumery; formerly in cookery.

“Morbid secretion” forsooth: we are talking sperm whale shit. In particular, it is the shit of bilious and dyspeptic sperm whales. Sperm whales eat a lot of squid, and it seems that the squid beaks can trigger an inflammatory reaction in the whale’s guts. The result is a thick tarry mass of fatty digestive fluids mixed with squid ink and beaks. The whale shits this out (it is said that the accompanying flatulence can be heard for miles) and it floats around in the ocean for a time, ripening and mellowing, until eventually it washes up somewhere looking (according to Melville):

...like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. (Moby-Dick, ch. 91)

Ambergris is fabulously rare, and fabulously expensive: a 6 pound hunk of the stuff found by an English beachcomber a couple of years ago is said to be worth somewhere between $60,000 and $150,000 dollars.

The thing about ambergris is that it is supposed to smell absolutely divine. A perfumer quoted in a recent news article says “It’s beyond comprehension how beautiful [the smell] is… It’s transformative. There’s a shimmering quality to it. It reflects light with its smell. It’s like an olfactory gemstone.” 

Others, more prosaically, say it smells something like well-rotted manure with top notes of tobacco and decaying seaweed. Most accounts agree that there is a distinct whiff of animal feces or ‘barnyard’ about it. And it has squid beaks in it. 

Not what I would choose to stir into my breakfast confiture, but people are strange. 

Ambergris is traditionally used as a fixative in perfumes to help other more evanescent smells last longer. But as with other conspicuously expensive and smelly things, people also liked to use it in foods and medicines on the rationale that anything that fragrant and that expensive must have magical properties. It was used to treat stomach ailments, paralysis, heart trouble, epilepsy and sore throats. 

It was also (unsurprisingly) prized as an aphrodisiac. Charles II of England, ever the ladies’ man, fortified himself for his escapades with a dish of scrambled eggs with ambergris. Madame du Barry is said to have slathered the stuff all over her body and thrown herself into the path of Louis XV, who obligingly installed her as his chief mistress.  (Did you know the position of chief mistress (maîtresse-en-titre) was an official title in pre-Revolutionary France, and came with considerable power and its own set of apartments? Probably worth a few ounces of ambergris body butter.)

Theodor Giesinger, “Comtesse Du Barry.” Original held and digitised by the British Library. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Grimbert tells me that 18th century doctors made a concoction of chocolate, ambergris, and powdered human skulls, which was prescribed as a cure for hypochondria. I imagine it worked, since a similar mixture (less the powdered skull) was still in use a hundred years later when Brillat-Savarin wrote his Physiologie du Gout: 

Whenever I feel, some day or other, the burden of age, when I think with difficulty, and feel oppressed by some power unknown, I take as much powdered ambergris as will lay on a shilling with a cup of chocolate, sugar it to my taste, and it has always done me a great deal of good.

Interestingly, the modern word “amber” originally referred only to what we now call ambergris––the word comes from the Arabic “anbar,” which means perfume or fragrance. (I do not know if this is the same word as in Iraq’s Anbar province but it is possible.) Eventually though, the word extended to refer also to resinous amber (which confusingly enough is also sweet smelling, also washes up on beaches, and also has stuff embedded in it).  By the 17th century the French started calling the fossilized tree sap “ambre-jaune” (or yellow amber) to distinguish it from the “ambre-gris,” and the term "true amber" (or “ambre proprement dit”) gradually began to refer to the resin rather than the perfume.

(And here’s a neat little aside: resinous amber gives us our modern word for electricity. The Latin word for resinous amber was “electrum,” from the Greek ἤλεκτρον (“elektron”). This in turn is believed to come from an earlier word ἠλέκτωρ (“elektor”), possibly Phoenician, which means “shining sun.” And when scientists in the 16th century picked up a hunk of this shiny sun-like golden stuff and rubbed it, they noticed that other lightweight objects like bits of straw and paper would then stick to it. So they called things with this property “Electrick bodies” since they behaved like “electrum.”)

But back to ambergris!

It has been suggested that 19th century whalers tracked their quarry by following the faint smell of ambergris on the waves. Moby-Dick seems to offer at least potential corroboration––Ishmael suggests that “the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.” 

I find this a rather intoxicating image: the scented lady rustling in her parlor, illuminated (Ishmael would insist) by whale oil lamps or spermaceti candles. Evanescent, though. “Proper amber” will turn soon enough from ambre-gris to ambre-jaune; electric lights will muscle out softer glows; the scent of “olfactory gemstones” replaced by Febreeze and Axe body spray. Our hot chocolate and our marmalade will be clean and modern, free of morbid secretions.

But I’m still keeping my eyes open when I walk on the beach. Who knows, I might happen across some fossilized dragon spit for my hot chocolate. Hold the squid beaks.

"Sperm whale fluke 2". Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

William Quiller Orchardson, "The First Cloud." Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons