Thursday, June 17. 2010
Franklin's
Tin: The Ox Cheek Soup Project
Tin: The Ox Cheek Soup Project
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are travelling on our Into the Northwest Passage Expedition had an
exclusive tour of the museum and of the museum vault, lead by ROM
Anthropologist Ken Lister.
In
the Anthropology collection of the Royal Ontario Museum is a tin of
Ox Cheek Soup dating to the early 1850s that was part of the
provisions for one of the Franklin Search Expeditions. The tin was
manufactured with the same method and materials as the tins carried
in the holds of Franklin's ships. In 1988 Kenneth Lister removed the
soup contents of the tin because the can was failing and the soup was
subsequently frozen for future research. Brandi Lee MacDonald at
McMaster University has analyzed the soup and found the soup to
contain lead at a dangerously high concentration. The tin was also
analyzed and as expected the solder used to
manufacture the tin has a high lead content.
The
soup, however, was in the tin for 136 years and it is not known how
quickly the lead would have leached into the soup. Did it happen
almost immediately or was it a slow process? This is now the
important question and it is being addressed with an 1850 recipe.
Together, Kenneth Lister and Brandi Lee MacDonald cooked up a vat of
ox cheek soup (Figure 3) and canned the soup in mason jars. Placed
within each jar was a length of lead solder and at regular intervals
over six months the jars will be opened and tested for lead
contamination. And now this summer as we walk along the shore of
Beechy Island and pass by the graves of Franklin's men, we may
finally know if in the early months of the expedition preserved food
was
a significant source of lead and perhaps one of the root causes for
the expedition's failure.
Join Ken Lister and the ROM on our 2010
Into the Northwest Passage Expedition. For more information please click here or email Loretta by clicking here.
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