Of course, many crops that had originated or diversified in the Middle East had already come westward with the Phoenicians and Berbers, by serendipity or otherwise. This is also true for many agricultural and industrial technologies later used in Spain. But Abd al-Rahman and his descendants fostered a deliberate process of plant introduction, agronomic evaluation, and propagation of the fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, and aromatic herbs to determine which were best suited to the climatic constraints and opportunities of their adopted home. They encouraged Muslim farmers, bakers, and chefs to participate in the processes of agronomic and culinary evaluations of newly introduced food-crop varieties. More significantly, perhaps, they enlisted Jewish and Christian scholars to join together in documenting the historical origins of horticultural practices and disseminating the results of their shared agricultural, biomedical and culinary experiments. This scholarly collaboration of linguists, historians, and scientists from all three faiths is one of the hallmarks of the cultural intermingling now known as convivencia, or “coexistence.” Although economic and political power was not equally shared during the era of convivencia that began in the eighth century, something fresh did begin to occur both cross-culturally and intellectually.
Within just a few decades of Abd al-Rahman’s arrival in al-Andalus, Jewish and Christian families became Arabized in their use of language, in their behavior, in their land stewardship ethics, and in their cuisine. Both what came out of their mouths and what went in aligned more with the Islamic renaissance than with the lingering cultural doldrums we tend to associate with the Dark Ages in Europe.
Over the next seven centuries of Arab and Berber dominance in al-Andalus, the pluralistic collaborations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews resulted in both the transformation and diversification of the Iberian landscape and a profound influence on Europe as a whole.12 First, they established libraries and universities—for women as well as men—where everything from poultry science to agrarian poetry was taught. Next, they opened the School of Translators and commissioned teams of Latin-, Greek-, Arabic-, and Hebrew-speaking scholars to translate and print ancient agricultural classics from other arid and semiarid lands, in the hope that farmers and orchardists might be guided and inspired by the works.
Suddenly, a multicultural agricultural revolution emerged from the literate members of the farming community—a revolution that was possible because literacy rates in al-Andalus were far higher than those in the rest of Europe at that time. Whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim, these farmer-scholars instantly applied the ideas they found in agrarian classics such as the first century CE De re rustica, which codified the knowledge of farm management among the Phoenician and Roman farmers of Cádiz, and the eighth-century Agricultura nabatea, which rescued even older agricultural practices forged in the Negev.13 Moreover, public discussion of these works initiated new agricultural and culinary innovation, as well as long-term commitment to these arts. The Arabs in particular realized that al-Andalus was better endowed with fresh water and arable land than most of the Middle East and North Africa. If they had arrived in a paradise blessed with ample moisture and fertile soil, they had best make the most of it.
The results of their labors, accumulated over the following decades, noticeably improved the quality, fecundity, and productivity of Andalusian fields, vineyards, and orchards. Notably, Christians as well as Jews and Muslims made significant contributions through these cross-cultural exchanges. Their successes were then compiled and interpreted by a number of farmer-scholars who themselves resided in the Andalusian countryside. Their fresh insights and evaluations of plant introductions culminated in the publication of some of the most important works on dry-land agriculture ever printed. Among the most timeless agricultural classics were Kitāb al-Filāḥa (Libro de agricultura) by Abu Zacaria Iahia, Kitāb Mabāhiy al-Fikhar by Yamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghani y Muhammad, and Obra de agricultura by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera. As my New Mexican mentor, the great Hispanic historian of agricultural diffusion Juan Estevan Arellano, has reminded us, these are the works that old Christians, conversos, crypto-Arabs and crypto-Jews carried with them several centuries later when they escaped Spain to resettle and farm in the New World.14
The works by Abu Zacaria Iahia and Gabriel Alonso de Herrera in particular underscore that the horticultural and culinary arts were not as isolated from each other in al-Andalus as they are in today’s world. Iahia devoted an entire twenty-eight-page chapter to gastronomy in his “agronomy manual,” detailing the best means of drying, curing, preserving, and cooking the various food crops he had personally grown as a farmer.15 Herrera describes the taste and texture of plums introduced from Damascus, the medicinal qualities of a rosemary variety introduced from Jerusalem by a Moorish spice dealer, and the rumors associated with eggplants brought in from Morocco. In his birthplace of Talavera, Herrera dryly notes that, “It is common opinion that eggplants were brought to these parts by the Moors . . . and that they brought them to kill Christians with.”16
Whether Herrera meant that the labor that was required to grow them in Spain was enough to kill a Christian or that the plant was a member of the deadly nightshade clan is unclear. What we do know is that centuries later the Spanish and Italians were at first hesitant to eat another introduced nightshade relative referred to as a pomo d’Moro (fruit of the Moor)—the New World tomato.
What was the Andalusian populace to do with all of these newly accumulated staples and spices, these flavors, fragrances, and textures the likes of which few Europeans had ever experienced prior to the arrival of the Umayyad Arabs on the shores of Iberia? The locals clearly needed guidance on both growing this diversity of foods in Andalusian soils and preparing them for the Andalusian table.
Fortunately, the Umayyad rulers were able to attract to al-Andalus the greatest culinary artist in the world at that time, a man who appears to have been a culturally and racially mixed Arab African, just as Abd al-Rahman and his descendants had been. His nickname was Ziryab—the Blackbird—because of his thick black hair, his olive skin, his sleek profile, his hands fluttering on the strings of the oud, and his melodious voice.
The so-called Islamic agricultural revolution had reached western Europe by 760, but it took Ziryab’s arrival from Persia sixty years later to jump-start the culinary revolution that forever changed European cuisines. Perhaps no single man or woman reshaped the aesthetics of an entire continent as much as Ziryab reshaped Europe’s, not just through the culinary arts but also through gardening, music, fashion, and highminded conversation.17 By all accounts, the multicultural Andalusians not only respected Ziryab for his talents in the garden, kitchen, dining room, and parlor for performing arts but also because he brought Muslims, Jews, and some Christians together through his style and tact. In a time when Muslims, Jews, and Christians in al-Andalus were still struggling to get along and keep conflicts from erupting, Ziryab made many of them forget their differences through the pure excitement he generated among all with whom he came in contact.
Ziryab was born Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Nafi in or near Baghdad within just a few years of the death of Abd al-Rahman I in Córdoba. Even though he was a freed slave of multiethnic descent, he was groomed and trained in singing, stringed instruments, culinary arts, and botany among the Abbasid elite. At a young age, he became so talented at playing the oud that his mentor, Isaac of Mosul, became jealous of his rising popularity and had his name removed from the list of artists to be supported by Abbasid patronage and had him banished from the courts. Ziryab drifted off to the south, only to find Damascus still in disarray, and so he went west, seeking work simply as a musician.
He ended up playing music for a time on the stretch of the Tunisian coast known in medieval times as Ifriqqiya. There, he was invited to join the court musicians of the third Umayyad ruler, al-Hakam I. But by the time he arrived in Andalusia in 822, his sponsor had died. Now desolate and as far from his birthplace as he could imagine going, he grew despondent. Only through the inter
vention of the Jewish musician Abu al-Nasr Mansur did he get an audience with the new emir, Abd al-Rahman II. Fortunately, as soon as he heard Ziryab play the oud and sing, the young emir invited him to stay in his court. But that was not all, for as soon as he saw Ziryab perform, the young emir quickly realized that Ziryab had talents that extended beyond music.
From his time working among the rivals of the Banu Umayyah in the Abbasid court of Baghdad, Ziryab had gained an intimate understanding of what fashion and festivity should be in the hub of the Islamic empire. It was to the emir’s political benefit to let Ziryab loose so that he could enhance the cultural sophistication of court life in al-Andalus. On behalf of the displaced Umayyad dynasty stranded on the westernmost edge of the Islamic empire, Abd al-Rahman II brilliantly pursued the agricultural, culinary, and other arts, hoping to attract attention away from the more economically powerful Abbasid elite. This may be why, in 955, within a hundred years after Ziryab’s death, a Catholic sister from the Gandersheim abbey proclaimed that in Córdoba, “the brilliant ornament of the world shown in the West . . . it was wealthy and famous and known for its pleasures and resplendence in all things.”18
In essence, Ziryab had begun to serve as the emir’s minister of culture and soon had his hand in upgrading everything from hygiene and clothing among the local elite to establishing standards for table manners, designing place settings, planning dinner-course sequences, and offering rigorous training for court chefs and musicians.19 His recipes were so beloved that a number of them survive until this day, including ziriabí, a dish of salted and roasted fava beans.20 The Blackbird’s innovations created a buzz and were heartily embraced by Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. Just as the young emir had wished, Andalusia’s sophistication made the rest of Europe seem intellectually stunted and aesthetically deprived.
Lilia Zaouali has deftly summed up Ziryab’s influence in renewing the culinary arts of al-Andalus during his lifetime: “It was a curious route—from Baghdad to Córdoba, via the Mediterranean and North Africa—for ‘Abbasid gastronomic fashion to have taken. It is entirely possible that with his precious lute, Ziryāb brought with him books of recipes and linen pouches filled with [cassia] cinnamon (Cinamomum chinese, known to the Arabs as dārsīni) and other spices. . . . One might well imagine him attempting to re-create the flavors he had tasted at a banquet held by [Abassid ruler] Hārūn al-Rashīd in addition to playing the melodies he had heard there [in Baghdad].”21
By the time Ziryab died in 857, there can be little doubt that the landed gentry of al-Andalus was growing and using a greater variety of aromatic herbs and spices on a daily basis than the rest of Europe combined. Recetarios from the convivencia era suggest that Arabs, Berbers, and Jews were regularly acquiring, sharing, and experimenting with sumac, saffron, cumin, cloves, coriander, garlic, nutmeg, mace, ginger, mint, oregano, rue, laurel, and limes, as well as bitter orange and rose water. What is obvious is how similar this mix of herbs and spices is to what would be found in nearly any kitchen in the Middle East during the same era.
But most remarkable is that many of these herbs and spices were now being grown in western Europe for the first time. It was not that European Christendom had been devoid of farming and cooking traditions or herbal variety until this time, but it can be argued that the fresh influx of ideas and flavors greatly enhanced these Western European traditions. Again, the relative “placelessness” as well as the cosmopolitan nature of Iberian Arabs and Sephardic Jews allowed them to be among the earliest peoples on the planet to shift not just the use of aromatic herbs and spices from one continent to the next but also their cultivation as crops. They refined and intensified the cultural and agro-ecological diffusion processes, which extended from Asia to Africa and then to southwestern Europe, the very same processes later erroneously labeled by historian Alfred Crosby as an altogether new phenomenon, the Columbian Exchange, when it reached the Americas.
Instead, it was simply a form of globalization that had begun in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula as much as thirty-five hundred years earlier. By the tenth century, it had ensured that most saffron was grown in, rather than imported to, al-Andalus, where the spice became a signature ingredient in paella and couscous. To this day, more saffron is grown in Islamic-influenced Spanish landscapes than in any other terrain in Europe.22 It was probably during this same era that Arab or Jewish traders introduced green aniseeds from the Middle East to Córdoba and Granada. Aniseeds quickly germinated on their own in Andalusian soils and soon escaped as weeds into wheat fields and vineyards of the region, where they persist as a naturalized and occasionally harvested invasive today.
Apparently, the concept of terroir—of food grown in a particular place—did not matter as much to the immigrant cultures of the Iberian Peninsula as accumulation of wealth and reliable access to their favorite foods did. Despite lip service about longing for a return to the Holy Lands, most Sephardic Jews and Arabs of al-Andalus were no longer wedded in any way to their ancestral landscape of the Middle East. Due to its excesses, the power base of the Banu Umayyah once again collapsed around 1031 and its members dispersed, although a few Arab Muslims maintained their trading activities in the region.
I walk down the mountain ridge and through an entrance gate high above the ancient city of Córdoba. Madinat al-Zahra, whose walls once held the largest complex of Muslim-designed gardens of any place in Europe, today feels haunted by ghosts from its Islamic past.
It is painful for me to tour this historic monument, promoted by a government that has hardly ever tolerated the people who conceived, designed, and built it. But that is a common feeling among many scholars and tourists wishing to see the vestiges of Moorish al-Andalus that are scattered around the Spanish region of Andalusia. Here the past is glorified even while being presented as antiseptically as possible: no contemporary Islamic presence, and few if any living remnants of the cultivated plants and domestic livestock that they raised. What commands my attention is the sterility of the walls, terraces, and tunnels. Descending from the highest terraces, where fortified buildings dominate the scene, I can make out the ancient gardens and fountains that Abd al-Rahman III took forty years to design, construct, cultivate, and populate. The gardens were elegantly framed by the stone silhouettes of ornate miradores, the portals that opened up one panorama after another in stair-step-like succession. But what is revealed by the reconstructed miradores of today is not what Abd al-Rahman III’s guests would have seen. Gone are the pomegranates, figs, and quinces, the grapes and dates characteristic of the cultural landscapes of Moorish Spain. Instead, ornamentals—myrtle and jasmine, flowering shrubs, fan palms, and citrus—stand in their place.
The apricot and rose varieties that medieval residents here knew as damascos have been replaced by nonfragrant, inedible horticultural varieties whose only asset is indestructible perennial foliage. Although the third terrace once held field crops of herbs and spices and vegetables of every shape and color, it is now predominantly hardscape, for historic preservationists seem to love barren stone more than they love living plants. Even though the pamphlets, folios, and guidebooks claim that Spanish archaeologists will use the dead seeds and pits they have found in tunnels and storage caverns to design an intentionally renovated cultural landscape on the terraces, no such thing can yet be seen, sniffed, tasted, or touched. They may be awaiting resurrection, as if suddenly, someday soon, a rapture will come and all of the ghosts will reroot themselves in this dry but fragrant earth.
Disappointed, I descend to the heart of modern Córdoba some twenty miles below, hoping to find a few spice markets that feature Berber- and Arab-style spice mixtures. After a few hours of searching for an open-air market, I finally find Mercado Ciudad Jardín, where Manuel Ruiz tends the spice shop known as Casa Manola. But it appears that the complexity of Moorish spice mixtures has dwindled down to just a few composites of four to six herbs per bag. These herbs are premixed, then vacuum sealed and labeled in bulk quantities.
&nb
sp; Manuel Ruiz shakes his head when I ask if any local food artisan still custom mixes freshly dried herbs and seeds for sale in the city. “No, not here, not now” he replies, “but they still may mix especias morunas in the Alpurrajas region high in the mountains east of Granada.” I glance at all his other shrink-wrapped bags of single spices and think of the ghosts also trapped inside those packages. I envision their aromas escaping into the night air at the midnight hour, playfully, fragrantly mingling with one another until the shopkeepers return in the morning.
• • •
• POMEGRANATE •
Although you might not consider the succulent pulp and seeds of a fruit to be a spice, the seeds and syrup of the pomegranate (Punica granatum) can be used as a garnish, in a salad dressing, as a flavoring for sauces, and as a nutraceutical, much like many spices and herbs. Technically speaking, the pomegranate fruit is a leathery-skinned berry, and each of the many seeds in that berry is surrounded by a juicy, gelatinous aril. Some heirloom pomegranate varieties yield fruits that are exceedingly sweet and pleasant tasting; others run to sour, bitter, astringent, or tartly acidic but are widely used nonetheless. The juice is rich in oesterone, an antioxidant that is a potential anti-cancer agent.
The wild ancestors of domesticated pomegranates are likely of Central Asian origin, though some fruit historians pinpoint Persia as the place of first domestication, and others suggest a broad arc between the Caucasus and the Himalayas. Another Punica species now cultivated as an ornamental is native to the island of Socotra, which lies about 150 miles off of the Yemeni coast, but it did not directly contribute its genes to pomegranate domestication. Incidentally, the term Punica alludes to the pomegranate’s association with the Phoenicians and Punic traders, who moved the fruits around the eastern Mediterranean.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 22