Contents
Title Page
Preface
•
First Taste: St. Albans
PART 1
Venice
PART 2
Lisbon
PART 3
Amsterdam
Epilogue: Baltimore and Calicut
•
List of Illustrations and Maps
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Michael Krondl
Advance Praise for The Taste of Conquest
Copyright
Preface
Writing this book has been a great adventure! I’ve gotten to eat in the homes of Indian pepper growers and Venetian blue bloods. I’ve met Dutch entrepreneurs and Portuguese sailors. I now know the difference between a triangular sail and a square one, and I can explain how ginger is harvested and cleaned because I’ve seen it done. What could be more fun than studying food?
Maybe that’s why the study of the history of eating has been beneath the dignity of serious scholars for so long and why they never bothered to check their facts when they claimed that the medieval gentry ate food drowning in tsunamis of spice. Grudgingly, academia now accepts the study of culinary history into its ranks. But the subject is still new, and enormous work has yet to be done. Nevertheless, data are slowly accumulating that will eventually give us a more complete picture of what people used to eat. And then maybe we’ll really understand why spices, for example, were as much an integral part of the European diet in the Renaissance as they are today in Morocco or India. And then maybe we can truly understand Europeans’ taste for conquest.
I am not a specialist, which, because of the nature of this book, may have been an advantage. It has meant, however, that I have had to substitute breadth for depth. In certain cases, I have had to make deductions where the evidence is just too scanty for solid proof and to depend on the work of others. On the occasions when I have found that research to be self-evidently too shaky to stand, I’ve had to dig under the foundations. Given how often the construction proved faulty, I wonder how many authors I have taken on faith are just plain wrong. Which is not to say that I can blame others for my mistakes. I have surely made plenty of errors on my own. I hope and trust that others will come to correct them.
As with any project of this size, numerous people have given me assistance and offered invaluable suggestions. Many have extended their hospitality on little more than good faith. Others have held me back as I was about to place my foot firmly in my mouth—though probably not often enough.
I’d like to begin by thanking my editors, Susanna Porter and Dana Isaacson, for all their valuable suggestions. In addition, I am indebted to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who originally championed the book at Random House and without whom it might never have taken flight. My agents, Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich, have been fantastic throughout, going way beyond their job description at every stage of the project.
Then there are the dozens of people who helped along the way. In Venice, there is Luca Colferai, who keeps amazing me by his boundless generosity. But he was not alone. I am also grateful to Jurubeba Zancopè, Sergio Fragiacomo, Dr. Marcello Brusegan, and Antonio Barzaghi.
The Portuguese, however, were not to be outdone. I don’t know what I would have done without Mónica Bello, whose journalistic skills and friendship were a godsend. I also want to thank Alexandra Baltazar, Bruno Gonçalves Neves, Hernâni Amaral Xavier, Isabel Cruz Almeida, José Eduardo Mendes Ferrão, José Marques da Cruz, and Rui Lis. Though he is not in Lisbon, my visit to Portugal would have been a pathetic failure without Filipe Castro, the naval archaeologist who opened up his personal Rolodex and thereby many doors in Portugal’s capital.
When it comes to Holland, Peter Rose acted as my academic fairy godmother, fulfilling every obscure inquiry and keeping me on the straight and narrow. In the Netherlands itself, Cees Bakker, Christianne Muusers, and Anneke van Otterloo were all generous with their time and expertise. I greatly appreciate the time Frank Lavooij took out of his busy schedule, to say nothing of our lunch together.
In India, too, people’s generosity was unbounded. In Cochin, C. J. Jose and his staff at the Spices Board were terrifically helpful, as were Heman K. Kuruwa, Jacob Mathew, K. J. Samson, Nimmy and Paul Variamparambil, and Ramkumar Menon. Thomas Thumpassery was especially kind to open up his home to me and show me the ways of the pepper grower. I am also grateful to V. A. Parthasarathy and his eminent staff at the Indian Institute of Spices Research for allowing me a glimpse of their inner sanctum. In Baltimore, James Lynn did me a similar favor at McCormick headquarters.
A partial list of others who helped by word or deed would have to include Amanda J. Hirschhorn, Ammini Ramachandran, David Leite, Gopalan Balagopal, Kenneth Albala, and Paul W. Bosland.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and daughter for putting up with my extended absences and weeks of monomania.
First Taste
•
ST. ALBANS
THE SULTAN AND THE ORGY
In my mind, flavor, smell, and memory are intertwined. To really understand a distant time and place, you should be able to sample its antique flavors, sniff the ancient air, and take part in its archaic obsessions. But how can you taste the food of a feudal lord? Where do you meet a medieval ghost?
I came across a likely spot on a cobbled lane in the old English pilgrimage town of St. Albans. The Sultan restaurant is located here in the lee of a great Norman cathedral in a house that seems to stagger more than stand on the little medieval street. I had made my pilgrimage to St. Albans to track down the remains of a famous medieval travel writer—more on him later—but before searching for phantoms, I was in desperate need of lunch. To get to the Sultan’s dining room, you have to climb a set of steep and wobbly stairs to the second story, where the sagging, timbered attic has been fitted with tables, each separated from the next by perilously low rafters. The space cries out for blond, buxom wenches bearing flagons of ale and vast platters overflowing with great haunches of wild beasts showered with cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and cloves. And indeed, the kitchen door exudes sweet and fiery spice. But the waiter is skinny, male, and decidedly not of Norman stock, and if that weren’t enough of a clue, the Indian hip hop on the sound system and Mogul prints on the walls will quickly disabuse you of any illusions of stepping into Merrie Olde England.
The Sultan specializes in Balti cooking, a type of South Asian cuisine that swept Britain by storm some years back. The style originates in Baltistan, a place once identified with Shangri-La but now more likely to make headlines for its sectarian bloodshed. The mountainous territory stands astride a tributary of the Silk Road once used to bring spices from South India to China, Persia, and the Mediterranean. Accordingly, as is only appropriate for such a mythical land, Balti food is profoundly spicy. But is it as spicy as the food of Europe’s Middle Ages, I wonder?
I order gosht chilli masala, a lamb stew pungent with hot Kashmiri pepper. The stainless steel tray of meat looks quite innocent, and the first taste is gentle enough. It begins with sweet notes of coriander, cardamom, and cinnamon. Then the red peppers roar in. Chilies, both fresh and dry, are blended to such incendiary effect that the occasional black peppercorn comes along as a mild respite. I gulp down my wine and pile more stew onto the flatbread.
Take away the chilies (unknown in Europe until Columbus returned from his misdirected search for the pepper isles), and I bet this is food that any self-respecting knight in armor would recognize.
While most historians agree that the Middle Ages loved its food spicy, they differ on just how spicy. The problem is that the recipes of the time are frustratingly imprecise. Typical instructions call for sprinkling with “fine spices,” or as one early Flemish cookbook instructs in a recipe for rabbit sauce, “Take grains of paradise, ginger [and] cinnamon ground together and sugar with saffron mixed…and add thereto a little cumin.” It is assumed the cook already knows what he is doing. Nevertheless, other sources do give more specific quantities and scattered descriptions of feasts where seemingly enormous amounts of spices were supposedly consumed in a single meal. The great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote of what, to his Gallic sensibility, was a “spice orgy.” Some have recoiled in horror at medieval recipes that include handfuls of cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. (Today’s writers warn that an ounce of cloves suffices for the preparation of an efficient anesthetic and that too much nutmeg can be poisonous.) Others just can’t imagine that anyone could eat such highly seasoned cuisine. According to the Italian culinary historian Massimo Montanari, “These levels of consumption are hard to conceive of, and belong instead to the realm of desire and imagination.”
I’d love to invite these academics to the Sultan restaurant. Perhaps then they would understand how perfectly credible is the medieval account that records the use of a seemingly spectacular two pounds of spices at a single bash. The figure comes from a manuscript called the Ménagier de Paris penned by an affluent, bourgeois functionary for his young wife in the late thirteen hundreds and includes all sorts of advice, including just what you needed to buy to throw a party. As an example, the writer describes an all-day wedding feast consisting of dinner and supper for forty and twenty guests, respectively, as well as some half dozen servants. The shopping list does indeed include a pound of ginger and a half pound of cinnamon as well as smaller quantities of long pepper, galingale, mace, cloves, melegueta, and saffron. But it also calls for twenty capons, twenty ducklings, fifty chickens, and fifty rabbits as well as venison, beef, mutton, veal, pork, and goat—more than six hundred pounds of meat in all! What’s extraordinary about this meal is not the quantity of spice—at most, about a half teaspoon of mostly sweet spices for each pound of meat—but the extravagance of the entire event. If this is an orgy of food, the spices would hardly qualify as more than a flirtation.
Still, even that half teaspoon of spice would be unusual in contemporary French or Italian cooking, though it would scarcely merit mentioning at an Indian restaurant. To make the Balti gosht, you use way more seasoning, about a half ounce of spices (or roughly two level tablespoons) for every pound of meat. So it may well be that my medieval knight would have found my gosht hard going even for his developed palate. I can only imagine what the academics would say.
THE NEED FOR SPICE
A great deal of nonsense has been written by highly knowledgeable people about Europeans’ desire for spices. Economic historians of the spice trade who have long mastered the relative value of pepper quintals and ginger kintars (both units of weight) and effortlessly parse the price differential of cloves between Mecca and Malacca will typically begin their weighty tomes by mentioning, almost in passing, the self-evident fact that Europeans needed spices as a preservative or to cover up the taste of rancid food. This is supposed to explain the demand that sent the Europeans off to conquer the world. Of course, the experts then quickly move on to devote the rest of their study to an intricate analysis of the supply side of the equation. But did wealthy Europeans sprinkle their swan and peacock pies with cinnamon and pepper because their meat was rank? The idea is an affront to common sense, to say nothing of the fact that it completely contradicts what’s written in the old cookbooks.
Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration, food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting, and preserving in acid. Think prunes, prosciutto, and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn’t so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici, or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette, even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. The rough-and-ready Franks were largely ignorant of all but pepper. In Renaissance Italy, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron, and cloves adorned not merely the tables of merchants and potentates but also found their way into medical prescriptions and alchemical concoctions. Spices were even used as mouthwash. And then French trendsetters of the waning seventeenth century, after their own six-hundred-year dalliance with the aromas of the Orient, turned away from most spices to invent a cuisine that we might recognize today. So if spices were used for their preservative qualities, why did they stop using them? The French had not discovered some new way of preserving food. There was a shift in taste, certainly, but it was the same kind of change that happened when salsa replaced ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. There were many underlying reasons for it. Technology wasn’t one of them.
Old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren’t used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices toward the end of the cooking process, where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. The Ménagier, for one, instructs his spouse to “put in the spices as late as may be, for the sooner they be put in, the more they lose their savor.” In at least one Italian cookbook that saw many editions after its first printing in 1549, Cristoforo Messisbugo suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage.
Perversely, even though spices weren’t used in this way in Europe, they could have been. Recent research has identified several spices that have powerful antimicrobial properties. Allspice and oregano are particularly effective in combating salmonella, listeria, and their kind. Cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and mustard can also boast some bacteria-slaying prowess. Pepper, however, which made up the overwhelming majority of all European spice imports, is a wimp in this regard. But compared to any of these, salt is still the champion. So the question remains, why would Europeans use more expensive and less effective imports to preserve food when the ingredients at hand worked so much better?
But what if the meat were rancid? Would not a shower of pepper and cloves make rotten meat palatable? Well, perhaps to a starved peasant who could leave no scrap unused, but not to society’s elite. If you could afford fancy, exotic seasonings, you could certainly afford fresh meat, and the manuals are replete with instructions on cooking meat soon after the animal is slaughtered. If the meat was hung up to age, it was for no more than a day or two, but even this depended on the season. Bartolomeo Scappi, another popular writer of the Italian Renaissance, notes that in autumn, pheasants can be hung for four days, though in the cold months of winter, as long as eight. (When I was growing up in Prague, my father used to hang game birds just like this on the balcony of our apartment, and I doubt that our house contained any spice other than paprika.) What’s more, medieval regulations specified that cattle had to be slaughtered and sold the same day.
Not that bad meat did not exist. From the specific punishments that were prescribed for unscrupulous traders, it is clear that rotten meat did make it into the kitchens of the rich and famous, but then it also does today. The advice given by cookbook author Bartolomeo Sacchi in 1480 was the same as you would give now: throw it out. The rich could afford to eat fresh meat and spices. The poor could afford neither.
Wine may have been another matter. For while people of even middling means could butcher their chicken an hour or two before dinner, everyone, including the king, was drinking wine that had been stored for many months in barrels of often indifferent quality. Once a barrel was tapped, the wine inside quickly oxidized. Especially in northern Europe, where local wine was thin and acidic while the imported stuff cost an arm and a leg, adding spices, sugar, and honey must have quite efficiently improved (or masked) the off-flavors.
Rather than trying to discover some practical reason that explains the fashion for spices, it’s probably more productive to look at their more ephemeral attributes. One credible rationale for a free hand with cinnamon and cloves is their ver
y expense.
Spices were a luxury even if they were not worth their weight in gold, as you will occasionally read. In Venice, in the early fifteenth century, when pepper hit an all-time high, you could still buy more than three hundred pounds of it for a pound of gold. And while it’s true that a pound of ginger could have bought you a sheep in medieval St. Albans, that may tell you more about the price of sheep than the value of spice. Sheep in those days were small, scrawny, plentiful, and, accordingly, cheap. You will also read that pepper was used to pay soldiers’ wages and even to pay rent. But once again, this requires a little context. Medieval Europe was desperately short of precious metals to use as currency, and if you needed to pay a relatively small amount (soldiers didn’t get paid so well in those days), there often weren’t enough small coins to go around. Thus, pepper might be used in lieu of small change. But sacks of common salt were used even more routinely as a kind of currency in the marketplace.
All this is to say that spices weren’t the truffles or caviar of their time but were more on the order of today’s expensive extra-virgin olive oil. But like the bottle of Tuscan olive oil displayed on the granite counter of today’s trophy kitchens, spices were part and parcel of the lifestyle of the moneyed classes, as much a marker of wealth as the majolica platters that decorated the walls of medieval mansions and the silks, furs, and satins that swaddled affluent abdomens.
In those days, a person of importance could not invite you to a nice, quiet supper of roast chicken and country wine any more than a corporate law firm would invite a prospective client to T.G.I. Friday’s. As the Ménagier’s wedding party makes clear, there was nothing subtle about entertaining medieval-style. Our own society has mostly moved on to other forms of conspicuous consumption—though you can still detect an echo of that earlier era in some high-society weddings that cost several times a plumber’s yearly wage. But much more so than today, the food used to be selected in order to impress your guests. The more of it and the more exotic, the more it said of your place in the pecking order. When Charles the Bold, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, married Margareth of York in 1468, the banquets just kept coming. At one of them, the main table displayed six ships, each with a giant platter of meat emblazoned with the name of one of the duke’s subject territories. Orbiting these were smaller vessels, each of which, in turn, was surrounded by four little boats filled with spices and candied fruit. Spices, of course, literally reeked of the mysterious Orient, and their conspicuous consumption was surely a sign of wealth. When the duke’s great-grandson, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, visited Naples some years later, he was served peacocks and pheasants stuffed with spices. As the birds were carved, the guests were enveloped by the Edenic scent. The idea was nothing new; one of Charles’s predecessors, Emperor Henry VI, in Rome for his coronation in 1191, was paraded down streets that had been fumigated by nutmegs and other aromatics when he arrived.
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice Page 1