Using a slotted spoon, transfer the chicken pieces to a platter, then ladle the sauce over the chicken. Decorate with the reserved squash seeds and serve.
Bayless, Rick, with Deann Groen Bayless and Jean Marie Brownson. Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant Flavors of a World-Class Cuisine. New York: Scribner, 1996, p. 276 and pp. 316–17.
Kennedy, Diana. The Art of Mexican Cooking. New York: Bantam Books, 1989, pp. 226–27.
———. The Cuisines of Mexico. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 204–6.
Epilogue
Culinary Imperialism and Its Alternatives
At first glance, the political ecology of the spice trade today seems far different from what it was during other eras over the last four millennia. As I write this, the economic downturns in southern Europe and the United States have dovetailed, and China seems to be ascending as a global economic power once again. Nations in North Africa and in parts of the Middle East are struggling to see what “season” may follow the Arab Spring. And although both business acumen and wealth are well represented in the Middle East, neither Israel nor any single Arab country appears to be the galvanizing power in the world of trade, in the same way that communities of Jews and Muslims once were. The richest man in the world today, Carlos Slim Haddad Helú, is of Lebanese descent but was born in Mexico, and is apparently not descended directly from Phoenician or Karimi traders.
Despite the resurgence of piracy on the open sea, most spices move between continents by ship, or across a continent by rail or road. Camels can still be seen browsing along the edges of desert highways from the Gobi to the Sahara but are seldom used for the transport of spices, except between remote gathering grounds and the desert oases where the goods are loaded on trucks. The movements of these cargocarrying vehicles are now tracked by global positioning systems and instantly mapped on computers. Any potential difficulties with meeting the anticipated date of arrival for delivery are quickly communicated by e-mail or text message. If a ship, train, or truck is targeted by a suicide bomber who blows himself or herself up and snuffs out the lives of innocent contemporary spice traders in the blast, people of a half dozen faiths in some sixty to one hundred countries almost instantly hear of the destruction.
But wherever we are on this planet, whether we are devout believers in a specific faith or remain faithless, and whether we are engaged in business or stuck in a homeless shelter, we breathe the vapors of globalization and culinary imperialism nearly every waking moment of our lives. These vapor trails are in the air all around us and began to develop long before the industrial revolution, with the burning of incense in a desert cave some four thousand years ago. And while camel caravans no longer transport cumin and dhows no longer carry cloves, nutmeg, and mace, we are still benefiting from—and beleaguered by—the processes of gastronomic globalization first elaborated by Minaeans, Nabataeans, Arabs, Jews, Phoenicians, Persians, and others from the backs of camels or the decks of dhows.
This book has been a long and winding road that takes us back to the roots of globalization—roots that were put down more than three millennia before the era that fine scholars such as Charles C. Mann and Felipe Fernández-Armesto claim was the onset of the globalized, capitalized world that we know today. But that world clearly did not “begin” around 1492, nor did the processes of ecological imperialism made famous by Alfred Crosby as the Columbian Exchange. If this wayward journey chronicles anything, it is that both the virtuous and scandalous processes that we now refer to as globalization emerged centuries and millennia before the so-called Age of Discovery, whose recorded heroes, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, simply borrowed on the capital assets generated by Sephardic Jews and Arab Muslims over many centuries before these famed navigators went to sea.
Many of the socioeconomic processes and biocultural behaviors that we now associate with globalization were field-tested by desert-dwelling Semitic cultures that pioneered the ancient human pursuit we now call the spice trade. Certainly, other cultures contributed significantly to the globalization process, from Greeks, Romans, Egyptian Berbers, and Han Chinese to Sogdians, Persians, Venetians, Turks, Ethiopians, Armenians, Portuguese, Dutch, and Mayans. But what Mann, Crosby, and Fernández-Armesto view as a new beginning was actually just an extension of gastronomic globalization through spice trade to two additional continents—an effort that utilized the same cultural, economic, and ecological processes that had been employed on other continents in earlier times. Yes, completely new species such as chiles, chocolate, vanilla, and allspice were brought into the warehouses, and entire landscapes were made over as Eurasian and African crops and weeds entered American landscapes. But similar environmental and nutritional impacts had occurred in the past, as traders intentionally and accidentally made their mark on other cultures, cuisines, and biotic communities.
There were winners and losers wherever that trade extended. For many centuries, the winners were the branches of the Semitic language family known to us as Arabs, Jews, Phoenicians, Nabataeans, and Minaeans, for these cultures played disproportionately large roles in managing and controlling trade in aromatics. Of the more than sixtyeight hundred linguistically encoded cultural world views that have emerged on this planet, why have only a handful enabled and driven the trajectory of the worldwide spice trade? Or, why have the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam played such dominant roles in cultural, ecological, and culinary imperialism? I have no answer to these crucial questions and I believe that it will take a long time and many minds to resolve them. But one tenet in which I do believe is that this trio of monotheistic religions and our modern economic structures emerged from the same ideologies, and that even today, they are not that far removed from one another.
Curiously, it was risk-taking desert peoples who first actively played their hands in the global gamble to move aromatics from sparsely populated and vegetated hinterlands into cities of splendor and wealth. They magnified and mythologized the value of lightweight incense, dried herbs, powdered spices, and musk through their fantastic stories, perhaps because they had so few other resources to rely on. In doing so, they became less dependent on place—that is, they no longer relied on the sacredness of particular ancestral landscapes or on the mores of national sovereignty and rooted faith. It is not to say that they were free of nostalgic-filled yearnings to visit Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mecca, or Medina. But their very identity and their sense of the sacredness of place were no longer tethered to living in a specific locale.
Today, climate change is making a larger proportion of humankind into desert peoples, and geopolitical conflicts are making more of us into diaspora peoples. But, as in the past, we tend to ignore the lessons of history by insisting that the future will be a game changer—a new normal where the old rules will no longer apply. Moral threads continue to weave their way back through the centuries of trading spices, however, and the more that we try to pretend that we are freeing ourselves from what has gone before, the more obvious it becomes that we are destined to be stuck dealing with the very same ecological and social consequences that have dominated past human actions.
The ethical debate about the benefits and negative consequences of globalization no doubt began in the first communities that struggled to deal with the onslaught of goods from someplace else and the risks they posed to local economies and ecologies. These imported goods and the Faustian bargains negotiated to obtain them were likely seen as threats to what was intrinsically unique to the cultures and the places.
To paraphrase the late great poet John Hay, the entire sweep of human history can be summarized this way: we are making one place just like every other. The culinary correlate is how the fusion cuisines of wraps replacing tortillas, chapatis, and pitas have tended to make one fast-food meal more or less like every other.
My friend Woody Tasch, founder of the Slow Money movement, reminds us that many thresholds are crossed in the ever more entangled processes of the global
ization of capital, culture, and cuisines, not merely those that occurred during the thirty centuries prior to 1492 that I have traveled in this book:
Every 200 years or so, it seems, we arrive at a threshold moment in the history of capital and culture. In 1600, two men in Amsterdam stood on a bridge over a canal, designing the joint stock company, minimizing risk to capital, and galvanizing the flow of investment in exploration, conquest, and export. . . . In 1800, two men in New Amsterdam stood under a tree on the cow path that would become Wall Street, designing a stock exchange that would create hitherto unknown degrees of financial liquidity and, so, galvanize the flow of capital in support of exploration, extraction, and manufacture. . . . In 2000, we are entering a period of urgent postindustrial, post-Malthusian reassessment and reconnoitering. We find ourselves on a new threshold, signals of systemic unsustainability proliferating alongside those of ever accelerating capital markets and technological innovation. . . . It falls on us to undertake a new project of system design: the creation of new forms of intermediation that catalyze the transition from a commerce of extraction and consumption to a commerce of preservation and restoration.1
What Woody Tasch and many others suggest is that this moment cannot be one in which we fold our hand, throw in our cards, and succumb to the fatalistic notion that globalization is an inexorable process that no single individual or organization can either halt or even redirect. There remain many ways that we can collectively shift globalization’s trajectory in another direction, to not only make it humane but also more responsive to the needs of many cultures. One of those ways is to rethink and redesign the forms of intermediation that spice traders and their kindred spirits have played out in societies for thousands of years. As Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini has said, we must imagine a more virtuous form of globalization in which “there’s a just and true commerce to help small farmers,”2 spice and incense foragers, and fishers and ranchers, instead of the brokers of commerce exacting such high prices from producers. We must pursue it with the discipline, tenacity, and moral courage shown by characters such as Zheng He, Ziryab, Gracia Nasi, and Ibn Battuta. We must track its scent as faithfully and ferociously as a dog with a bone.
We must wake up and smell the incense—the kind that pervades the air where we live, among those for whom we care.
• • •
• PREHISTORIC MANSAF •
Kid and Lamb Stew with Yogurt, Root Crops, and Herbs
At the end of this book, I thought it appropriate to return to the oldest recorded recipes in the world, written in Akkadian cuneiform script on Mesopotamian clay tablets that are reputedly thirty-seven hundred years old. It reminds us that however far we have “progressed,” there remains a lamb stew found in both Mongolia and northern Mexico. This recipe is adapted from one of these tablets and may be the precursor of the Bedouin stew called mansaf, still popular in Jordanian and Palestinian kitchens. The Arabic term mansaf connotes “an explosion” of flavors. As my friend Cecil Hourani has eloquently stated, “Mansaf is the national dish of Jordan because it represents the culinary fusion of Bedouin and village cooking, which is the defining characteristic of the traditional Jordanian kitchen.”
Archaeologist Jean Bottéro made the initial effort to give these ancient dishes a cultural context within Middle Eastern culinary traditions. More recently, Laura Kelley has done linguistic detective work to identify some of the plant ingredients in them. This particular recipe reveals considerable sophistication in combining meats, vegetables, nuts, fermented dairy products, and spices during the era that Arab traders first came out of the peninsula to Asia Minor. In particular, it uses dehydrated, defatted goat’s milk yogurt, which is fermented in goatskin and then reconstituted with water to make jamīd makhīd, a yogurt sauce. The sauce is seasoned with baharat, a spice mix that combines cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, and saffron with other spices in a manner that varies from household to household. The dish is typically topped with chopped fresh greens. Today, it is served atop flat bread, rice, bulgur, or couscous. Reconstructing this dish in an urban American kitchen may be tough, given that blood from a kid goat and yogurt dehydrated in goatskin are not easy to find. Nevertheless, goats do abound in parts of the country, so sourcing the ingredients could lead to new adventures.
Serve with cold glasses of arak mixed with water and with cold fresh figs. Serves 6–8.
2½ pounds bone-in kid goat, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 pounds bone-in leg of lamb or young ewe, boned, trimmed of excess fat, and cut into 2-inch cubes, with bone reserved
3 quarts plus 1 or 2 cups water
1 cup rendered lamb fat or clarified butter
2 Egyptian walking onions, peeled but left whole
1 head garlic, peeled but left whole
1 cup semolina flour
2 cups dehydrated defatted goat’s milk yogurt, or 3 cups Greek yogurt
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground turmeric or saffron threads, or a mixture
1 teaspoon freshly ground cassia cinnamon
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ cup goat’s blood (or 1 tablespoon cornstarch or 1¾ teaspoons arrowroot mixed with ½ cup cold water to make a slurry)
2 or 3 parsnips, lotus roots, turnips, or red carrots, peeled and sliced Handful of watercress, chopped
Handful of fresh anise or fennel leaves, minced
1 cup pine nuts, toasted
6 pieces flat bread such as pita, marquq, or saj
Put the goat and lamb pieces in a large pot, add the lamb bone, then pour in 3 quarts of the water. Place over high heat and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam that forms on the surface. Add the lamb fat and turn down the heat to low. Place the onions and garlic on a piece of cheesecloth, bring the corners together, and tie securely with kitchen string. Add the onion bundle to the pot along with the semolina flour and stir well to dissolve the flour. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the liquid begins to thicken, about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, if using the dehydrated yogurt, in a saucepan, combine the yogurt with the remaining 2 cups water over low heat and heat, stirring, until loosened and gently combined. Remove from the heat and reserve. If using the Greek yogurt, spoon it into a bowl, add only 1 cup water, and stir until combined.
To make the baharat spice mix, combine the cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, and salt and stir well. Set aside.
Remove and discard the lamb bone. Add the blood or the cornstarch slurry, the reconstituted yogurt, the parsnips, and the spice mix to the meat, stir well, and simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the meat is tender and the mixture has thickened, about 1 hour. Retrieve the cheesecloth bundle from the pot and discard.
To serve, transfer the stew to a large, deep platter or a shallow bowl and garnish with the watercress, anise leaves, and pine nuts. Pass the flat bread at the table.
Bottéro, Jean. The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hourani, Cecil. Jordan: The Land and the Table. London: Elliot & Thompson, 2006, p. 77.
Kelley, Laura. “Some Mesopotamian Ingredients Revealed.” Silk Road Gourmet, March 16, 2010. www.silkroadgourmet.com/some-mesopotamian-ingredients-revealed.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I wish to thank my daughter, Laura Rose, and my wife, Laurie Monti, not only for engaging with me in the fieldwork for this book but also for adding their insights and perspectives to the endeavor. Laura Rose accomplished her own fieldwork on Lebanese and Arab influences in the Yucatán Peninsula, guided me around Mérida, and accompanied me to Lebanon and Egypt. Laurie traveled with me to western and coastal China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Lebanon, Oman, Egypt, Italy, and Spain, paying particular attention to aromatics with both medicinal and culinary uses. I admire them for their unflagging curiosity about the world, for their superb language abilities, and for their tenacity when traveling under tough desert conditions. In addition, my greatest
mentor, Agnese Haury of Tucson, Arizona, a Near Eastern studies scholar and human rights activist, provided countless observations, references, leads, and resources that helped push this project toward fruition. I will be forever grateful to these three women, who deserve unparalleled recognition for their contributions.
Near Eastern geographer Michael Bonine, who recently passed away, encouraged and informed me in innumerable ways over the last three decades. I am also indebted to Juan Estevan Arellano, the remarkable historian and farmer of Rio Arriba in New Mexico, for inspiring this journey with his own remarkable scholarship. And thanks to my longtime friend and editor Blake Edgar, who offered encouragement and ideas from the start, but then patiently waited for the strands to be woven together into a cohesive story. No press in the world has done as much to help us understand the history of spices and their cultural contexts as the University of California Press. It is an honor to be part of its community of writers and photographers. Special thanks to extraordinary editors Dore Brown and Sharon Silva for their insights as well.
Some others who journeyed with me not only joined in the fieldwork but also offered travel support. In particular, I wish to thank Diane Christensen and Dr. Ken Wilson of the Christensen Fund of San Francisco, Chris Merrill of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Kareema Daoud Akguc of the United States Embassy cultural programs in the Middle East, and Dr. Emile Frison, director general of Bioversity International in Rome. Many others accompanied me on portions of my journeys through souks and spice-growing areas, including Jesse Watson of the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Sulaiman Al-Khanjari of the University of Nizwa in Oman; Ali Masoud Al-Subhi of Sultan Qaboos University in Oman; David Cavagnaro of the Seed Savers Exchange; Father David Denny of the Desert Foundation; Ogonazar Aknazarov of the Desert Research Institute of Tajikistan; Karim-Aly Kassam of Cornell University; Kraig Kraf, formerly with the University of California at Davis, now with The Nature Conservancy in Nicaragua; chef Kurt Friese of Edible Iowa River Valley; Shibley, Norman, and Douglas Nabhan; and Rafael, Kanin, and Cody Routson. I have been particularly influenced by the works of Mohamud Haji Farah, my colleague at the University of Arizona, as well as by Gene Anderson, Tomás Atencio, Michael Krondl, Stanley Hordes, Clifford Wright, Gernot Katzer, Rick Bayless, Diana Kennedy, Lilia Zaouali, Charles Perry, Paul Buell, Jesus Garcia, Enrique Lamadrid, chef Moshe Basson, Abbie Rosner, chef Ana Sortun, Cecil Hourani, Janet Liebman Jacobs, and my dear friend and traveling companion, the late Jean Andrews.
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