The Fruit Explorer Ponders Frankincense and Myrrh, Part 3 of 3

[Continued from Part 2]

The Fruit Explorer Puts Theory into Practice

Not content with merely providing gift ideas to others, I decided to follow my own advice and give out frankincense and myrrh as gifts this year. I bought frankincense and myrrh at Amazon as described above. Below are pictures of my package of frankincense and some tears from this package. On the label of the frankincense you can see the inscription "Does Not Expire," so frankincense joins vanilla extract (22 May 2015) and honey on the list of things that do not go bad. You can also see from the label that this frankincense is from the species Boswellia carteri. Here's the story. Splitters (see e-mail of 24 Jul 2104) have gotten hold of the traditional species B. sacra and split it into two species, B. sacra, which grows in southern Arabia, and B. carteri, which grows in Somalia. In short, my frankincense apparently grew in Somalia, though it was exported from Egypt. (As usual, the splitters have apparently gotten it wrong; this source considers this split to be invalid.)

 

 

Here are pictures of my package of myrrh and some tears from this package. As you see, the myrrh in the bag is rather dusty. To get free shipping, I ordered it along with a five pound container of protein powder, and the myrrh was jostled and crushed somewhat in shipment. The last picture compares my frankincense to my myrrh. (This was a five-star myrrh when I ordered it on 10 Dec 2015, but two negative reviews have since come in; both criticize the package for being less than the advertised pound, but they do not criticize the quality of the myrrh. My shipment of myrrh, including the plastic bag, weighed 15.25 ounces, so it was underweight.)

         

To make these resins gift-worthy, they were gaily wrapped in holiday colors and labeled. See below.

On 21 Dec 2015 I attended the annual Christmas dinner given by Anne and Corey. I gave out gifts of frankincense and myrrh. To my surprise, I was neither lionized nor acknowledged as the life of the party. I guess I should have picked a less jaded group.

The Fruit Explorer Learns How to Burn Incense

If I am going to play Johnny Appleseed and go around giving away frankincense and myrrh, I figured that I needed to know how to burn it. To dispel my ignorance, I went to YouTube and found a video that, starting at 2:56, illustrates the process, which can be summarized as follows.

• Light a piece of charcoal and set it on top of your incense burner.
• After the charcoal turns gray, place a piece of frankincense or myrrh on top of it.

Warning: The burning charcoal and the incense burner are hot. Do not touch them with your fingers. Use tongs to manipulate the charcoal and the incense. The Internet experts are even shriller on this warning than they are on avoiding pomegranate stains (27 May and 17 Nov 2014) and not letting melted caramel touch your skin (19 Dec 2015).

I needed to acquire more equipment before I could burn incense. I purchased an incense burner from Amazon for $6.28. It is rather small; the diameter of the bowl is 2.25 inches.

   

I also purchased a hundred pieces of charcoal from Amazon for $13.70 Here are pictures.

• The unopened box of charcoal.
• The opened box with ten cylinders that each contain ten pieces of charcoal.
• One of the cylinders removed from the box, and one piece of charcoal removed from the cylinder.
• Close-up of a piece of charcoal sitting on a silver dollar.

         

Fully equipped, I will now describe my initial stab on 22 Dec 2015 at trying to burn frankincense. Since this was going to take a while and I needed the kitchen table to eat lunch, I carried out the burning on the card table in the living room. The picture below shows the corner of the living room that served as the setting for this experiment. (The books behind the card table are on Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch history, some of which were used in the e-mails on spices. The fluffy giant reed, Phragmites communis, which stretches diagonally across the picture, is my personal emblem; note how much its flower cluster looks like the flower cluster of sugar (19 Dec 2015), a fellow member of the grass family. The reed is sticking into the trash can next to the recliner, whose back you can partly see in the lower right corner.)

Here is the timeline.

• 11:50: I light the charcoal. (I used a match from a matchbook from Los Olivos, a Mexican restaurant in Scottsdate, AZ,  where Ken Howard and I once ended up while on a business trip.) For about the first minute, the charcoal sparkles as a line of red dances across it much like a wildfire sweeping across a prairie. I am supposed to let the charcoal turn fully gray before attempting to burn any frankincense. You can see the wooden coaster placed under the incense burner to protect the table from the overheated incense burner.

   

• 12:34: The charcoal is fully gray (first picture). I drop a piece of frankincense on it, and smoke immediately starts to rise (second picture). You can see the plume rising from the left edge of the frankincense.

   

• 12:39: There is a surprising amount of smoke (first picture). Several minutes later, the incense is glowing like a coal (second picture).

   

• 12:46: The first piece of frankincense is totally burnt out
• 12:47: I add three little pieces of incense. This is easy since there is still plenty of exposed charcoal. They immediately start smoking.
• 12:52: I add a fifth piece. It starts smoking.
• 1:00: The room is filled with scent. When I stood in the door to the kitchen and looked across the room, It was vaguely smoky, as if there had been a small wildfire in a remote corner of the living room. The smell was not overpowering; it was more of a background smell. It was a sweetish, pleasant smell, nice enough but not something to kill for. Perhaps we need a super-smeller like Mei-Mei to provide a satisfactory evaluation.
• 1:09: The five pieces of frankincense are completely consumed, and no more smoke issues from them. I let the incense burner cool for two hours (probably overly conservative) before I touched it.

It looks to me like this experiment was a success and that I have mastered the science of burning incense. I will now without hesitation dispense advice to those to whom I give frankincense and myrrh.

Rick

References

Food and Agricultural Organization, Flavours and Fragrances of Plant Origin, United Nations, 1995. This document is available at this site. Since it has no page numbers, I have used links to refer to it. Chapter 9 covers frankincense and myrrh.

Herodotus (edited by Robert B. Strassler), The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, Pantheon Books, 2007. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 5 Nov 2015.

Keay, John, The Spice Route: A History, University of California, 2006. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015.