I’m standing in my kitchen, holding a teaspoon filled with freshly-grated ambergris, wondering if I really want to go through with this. It’s mid-autumn in Michigan. Rain is falling from a low dark sky. I’ve got a bone-deep seasonal dispiritment. But I’m hoping that maybe I’ve found the cure.
What is ambergris? It’s a preternaturally-hardened type of sperm whale dung. In other words, it’s shit.
At some point in the unknowable past, a sickly, skinny-flanked sperm whale either died with this ambergris trapped in the loops of its hind-gut like a stubborn boulder, or jettisoned it into the ocean and survived. Afterward, the ambergris spent months—perhaps even slow, forgotten years—lost at sea, slowly transforming as it went.
By the time it washes ashore on a remote shoreline, the ambergris—which is (or was, depending on who you believe) used as a fixative in high-end fragrances—is worth almost as much as gold.
And I, in my darkened, entropic lair in Michigan, am about to eat it. I will eat the aged, incredibly valuable whale shit. Actually, I’m going to drink it.
At one time—centuries before antibiotics were discovered and the FDA existed—ambergris was prescribed for almost every ailment.
From Hortus Americanus by Henry Barham, written in 1794: “People that are acquainted and know the use of this sovereign remedy, take it in all weaknesses, and in great evacuations by vomiting and stools, and in all other too-liberal discharges of nature and strength; in dispiritments; in fevers, in the hip, or any melancholy or dejectedness, they happily take ambergris, and that not in a very small quantity.”
It was also used, Barham wrote, to treat headaches; to refresh the memory; for fevers; for spasms; in the treatment of bruises both inward and outward; and to address barrenness in women. It was used as a tonic and a corrective for failing libidos.
I stare at the ambergris in my spoon. It looks like a little heap of grey sand. Could it really have such miracle healing properties?
Ambergris defies description, mostly because of its uniquely strange odor, which is difficult to characterize. It smells of stables, and old wood and tobacco, and animals, and ozone, and wild open spaces, and violets, and the thick, wet smell of overturned soil.
And, of course, to some degree, it smells of shit.
Around the time Barham was writing Hortus Americanus, the average American druggist was selling all sorts of oddities masquerading as medicines. On his shelves, alongside ambergris from sperm whales, were bottles of mercury, frequently used to treat constipation, and vials of mummy powder, made from ground-up Egyptian mummies.
As medieval as it sounds, this was progress.
In 1719, when the English apothecary John Quincy first published The Complete English Dispensary, some of the remedies called for much darker ingredients. There is a lotion that requires a “Human Skull, kill’d by violent Death.” Readers of Robert James’ encyclopedic Pharmacopoeia Universalis (1747) were instructed to rub their pestilential carbuncles with a dead toad that was dried in air and moistened with vinegar.
These were strange times indeed: the precise moment in history before knowledge and empiricism intervened. Mummies, newly discovered in Egypt, were ground into powder and used as a tonic. People wore foul-smelling resins, and attached leeches to their bodies. And ambergris—mysterious fragrant product of the ocean—was pounded, powdered, made into tinctures, grated, sugared, and eaten.
Before I ingest ambergris, I contacted a few food scientists, just to make sure I wasn’t, you know…. poisoning myself.
“It’s a bad idea based on goofy history,” says Professor David Mills, a food scientist at the University of California, Davis. “While understanding the past is worthy, don’t necessarily assume there was wisdom or insight there, nor that it applies in today’s world.”
In general, Dr. Mills is not a fan of feces. “I never recommend folks eat poop,” he says. “Simple as that. Poop that has been floating around in our oceans of today, which are significantly more contaminated than in the 1700s, is of more concern.”
Others echoed Mills. “I want to caution you,” says Bruce German, professor of food science and director of the UC, Davis Foods for Health Institute. “Do not eat it before it is analyzed for various pathogens and toxins. You could do yourself and potentially other people you interact with conspicuous and potentially permanent damage.”
You’d think I was planning to eat mummy powder.
At some point, I had stumbled upon a recipe for strong hot cocoa with ambergris, from the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who died in 1826.
“Whenever I feel, some day or other, the burden of age,” Brillat-Savarin wrote in A Handbook of Gastronomy, “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.”
That sounds exactly like what I need, to chase away the autumn blues. But who to believe? Who should I be taking medical advice from? A long-dead French guy who had a soft white cheese named after him? Or two food scientists alive in the age of penicillin?
Goofy history wins in the end.
A kettle begins to boil. I have rubbed a white, aged lump of New Zealand ambergris about the size of my thumb—a piece worth about $100, or more—across the surface of a cheese grater until I have a spoonful of it. It smells like an old cigar and horse manure. I pour it into an empty mug, add sugar, cocoa, and hot milk. And I drink it.
I stand in the strange fumes of it, sipping and waiting for my mood to change.
Nothing.
The hot chocolate leaves a greasy film on my mouth. My stomach rumbles a little. I think for a while about toxins and contaminated oceans. I wait for my dejectedness to dissipate. Nothing happens. I wonder about the cleanliness of the oceans in the 1700s. And I wait. But it never comes.
Whatever it is, it never comes.
The next morning, the greasy coating is still on my teeth, and my dispiritment is still there too. The rain falls. The wet leaves clog the gutters outside.
I get on eBay and begin to shop for a human skull, kill’d by violent death.
Christopher Kemp is a neuroscientist from Grand Rapids, Mich., and the author of “Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris”
