The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  In Asia, it used to be that the promotion of religion was every Lusitanian’s business. Lieutenant Neves describes the early Portuguese mariner as a kind of multipurpose tool that could function as a sailor, soldier, merchant, and Christian enforcer, depending on the time and place. However, even before the years of Spanish rule, the religious campaign was firmly in the hands of a cadre of professionals, the Jesuits, many of whom were not even Portuguese. The Lusitanians once firmly believed that the reason their little country had conquered the waves was that they were doing God’s will. Yet by the middle years of the sixteenth century, the crusading impulse had more or less evaporated in the rank and file who sailed out past the Torre de Belém, now wholly replaced by a quest to line their pockets.

  Echoing the locals’ low expectations, Linschoten mentions that when each viceroy arrives in Goa for his three-year term, he spends the first year redecorating, the second amassing as much treasure as possible, and the third covering his footmarks. Much the same could be said for every other crown official. The Dutchman writes, “There is not one of them, that esteemeth the profit of the commonwealth, or the furtherance of the king’s service, but rather their own.” This had direct consequences on the spice trade across the Estado da Índia. You could make a lot more money buying and selling within Asia than sending pepper and cloves to the king’s agents, who were sending spices back home. Consequently, the trading system settled back to pretty much the same pattern that had existed before da Gama’s arrival. It’s been estimated that in 1515, the Portuguese were shipping some 30 percent of Malabar’s pepper production. At the end of the century, this had shrunk to some 3 or 4 percent. (Admittedly, total production had increased in the meantime.) Once more, Gujarati merchants brought pepper to ports on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. And yet again, Venice became the Mediterranean’s greatest spice emporium. The viceroys and the captains of forts across Asia were happy to cream off what they could from this trade and made sure that little was done to stem the flow that greased their palms. The result of this was that even before the Spanish takeover, and long before the arrival of the swift ships from Amsterdam, the Portuguese had been losing market share in Europe.

  It’s a wonder that the whole Lusitanian empire did not collapse like a half-baked soufflé at the crash of the first Dutch cannon. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Rather than bemoaning the Estado da Índia’s demise, it might be better to marvel at how long this improbable realm actually prospered, especially given the fact that it was based on nothing much more than the profits loaded into the half dozen ships that arrived yearly in the carreira. Amazingly, this rather impromptu empire survived, even if in greatly diminished form, until the twentieth century. Goa finally submitted to Indian troops as late as 1961. In the meantime, Lisbon found other revenue streams to build her palaces and gild her churches. As the Dutch slowly strangled the Portuguese spice route in the East, the monarchs in Lisbon turned west to their long-neglected territories in Brazil for a source of income. Sugar, not pepper, would be the lure of this new El Dorado.*38

  Whatever good and bad can be said of the consequences of da Gama’s and Columbus’s trips across the oceans in search of spices and paradise—and there is no shortage of either—they had the effect of undamming the flow of humanity and commerce across the earth. The silver that was mined in Mexico now influenced currency markets in China. An increase in the demand for pepper in Europe led to changes in production techniques in India. The labor requirements of Portuguese sugar plantations in Brazil had repercussions deep within Africa. People in Lisbon and Madrid made decisions that directly affected the lives of people halfway around the world. The Venetian ambassador to Manuel I had no illusions about the immensity of these transformations: “What is greatest and most memorable of all, you have brought together under your command peoples whom nature divides, and with your commerce you have joined two different worlds.” The wheels of globalization were sent spinning by the wake of the great naus that took leave of the little white tower at Bélem.

  Tell any Lisbon native that you are going to this historic suburb and her mouth will curl into a lip-smacking smile. Naturally, every visitor to Lisbon must make a pilgrimage to Belém’s national shrine. But don’t think for a moment that what she has in mind are the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos and the Torre de Belém. “They are nice, of course,” the Lisboeta sniffs regarding these architectural jewels, “but you really must go for the pastéis de Belém.” The citizens of Lisbon are impassioned about their sweets. A sweet muffinlike bolo is a typical breakfast; lunch might conclude with any one of a dozen variations of pudim (the term flan could hardly begin to describe the myriad variations in color and texture). Other desserts are so peculiarly Portuguese that the English language could not possibly do them justice. I am convinced that the city holds more pastry shops per capita than any other place on earth. A recent search of Lisbon’s Yellow Pages indeed turns up more than eight hundred pastelarias in the capital alone. (A similar search on much larger Paris yields only about 180!) Most Portuguese pastries use plenty of eggs, many are scented with cinnamon, and all of them are very sweet. All this comes together in what is the national dessert, the pastéis de nata, in Belém rechristened the pastéis de Belém. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental, then, that the high temple of this custard tart, the Casa dos Pastéis de Belém, should be located just between the president’s pink-tinted palace and the nation’s pantheon at the Jerónimos, where the country’s greatest kings, heroes, and poets lie interred. On weekend afternoons, the pastry shop’s bar is crowded four deep as visitors and locals alike wait for their turn to nibble the still-warm confection downed with a creamy espresso.

  Today’s Portuguese don’t spend much time thinking about their history. In this, they are much like people everywhere. Hernâni Xavier would like to blame the gays and communists who he claims run the Ministry of Education, but even he admits that the sixteenth century is of little concern to his countrymen. Heroism is not in fashion in the European Union, and most of the citizens of what used to be called Christendom would prefer not to be reminded of the jihadist fervor that launched “the age of discovery.” To most of his countrymen, Camões is just the name of a street, a square, an institute. When, in school, they read the great poet’s epic account of their ancestors (“risking all / In frail timbers on treacherous seas, / by routes never charted, and only emboldened by opposing wind; / having explored so much of the earth / from the equator to the midnight sun [they were] drawn / to touch the very portals of the dawn”), it is no more than literature. You can hardly expect the descendants of those Lusitanians to make the connection between Camões’s ancient, stubborn seamen sailing round an unknown world and the cinnamon on their pastéis de Belém, to remember the complaint of another Portuguese poet who lamented, “At the scent of this cinnamon, the kingdom loses its people.”

  And yet, the stories those little custard tarts could tell. You could distill Portugal’s past into a single bite. The delicate flaky pastry that shatters on the tongue is a souvenir of the Moors who brought the technique of making phyllolike pastry to Iberia. The generous sprinkle of cinnamon is like so much aromatic dust, all that’s left of the long-lost Asian empire. Then there’s the sugar brought by the Portuguese to America, a memento of the continent found by accident on the way to the spiceries, a reminder of the sweet cane that sent helpless Africans to suffer and die across the sea and dispatched shiploads of the white crystals to pastry shops from Lisbon to Vienna. All this history bound up with creamy, cinnamon-scented custard.

  SWEETS, SPICES, AND SAINTS

  I spotted the two Zwarte Pieten just in time, as they were getting ready to pack up and lug their sweet-filled sack across the canal. The black-faced figures were the only splash of color in the fading December light, the velvet of their red, yellow, and green tunics glistening from the interminable Amsterdam drizzle. Across the street, I could see little of their dark-painted faces except for the broad carmine grins an
d the flash of fine Dutch teeth as they watched me slip and slide across the slick cobblestones. I looked neither left nor right and made a dash for it—like the fool that I am. A hurtling bicycle almost sent me headfirst into the canal. Luckily, the grandmotherly bicyclist swerved her steed at the last minute, even though I think her expert maneuver was less out of concern for my safety than to keep the tower of pastry-shop cartons from toppling out of her basket.

  It was December 5, the eve of Sinterklaas, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Dutch grandmothers mark the occasion by spoiling their grandchildren with all manners of sweets. Parents hide presents in wooden shoes and broom closets. And numberless blond, blue-eyed Netherlanders paint their faces black and dress up like Renaissance house slaves, as Zwarte Pieten (“Black Petes”)—the name given to Saint Nick’s “African” helpers. They hang out on street corners and in shopping malls, distributing pepernoten to every passerby. The spicy cookies, the campy blackface—they’re as Dutch as windmills and wooden shoes. But they are also somewhat creepy souvenirs of the country’s colonial history, of Amsterdam’s once-great empire of sugar and spice.

  Pepernoten are a kind of small, dark cookie made with brown sugar and a medley of spices that varies depending on the region and the manufacturer. Despite the name, and unlike Venetian pevarini, they are unlikely to contain any pepper to speak of, but no matter what their flavoring—some are now even being dipped in chocolate, to the horror of purists—they are as essential to Saint Nicholas Day as old Saint Nick himself and his swarthy sidekicks.

  The white-bearded saint dressed in red would be familiar to any American child who has visited a mall in the weeks before Christmas. Our own Santa Claus is largely based on the Dutch original. In the Netherlands, though, he’s supposed to represent a semimythical fourth-century bishop from the balmy city of Myra (in today’s Turkey) rather than a frost-flushed elf from the wintry pole. In the Middle Ages, his claim to fame was as the patron saint of merchants and sailors, so it was only natural that the up-and-coming seaport of Amsterdam would appoint Nicholas as the city’s official saint.*39

  Records as early as 1360 describe a Sinterklaas celebration for children. According to tradition he showed up in medieval Dutch convent schools, where he rewarded deserving pupils with spicy sweets and left behind a birch switch for thrashing ne’er-do-wells. Soon enough, the bushy-bearded visitor became associated with handing out presents, too. In medieval Amsterdam, the city’s central Dam Square was taken over each year by a Sinterklaas market, where the booths overflowed with sweets like cinnamon bark, honey tarts, and pepernoten, all distinctly flavored with the sugar and spices imported from the bishop’s home in the mythical East. All this fun was too much for the Calvinists when they took over during the Reformation, so they tried to ban the rotund saint, indicting him as an idolatrous Papist puppet. “The setting up of booths on St. Nicholas Eve where goods are sold, which St. Nicholas is said to provide, leads the children astray, and such a practice is not only contrary to all good order, but also leads the people away from the true religion and tends toward atheism, superstition and idolatry,” ran the text of one anti-Klaas injunction from 1600. In town after town, measures were taken to ban the baking of spicy Sinterklaas cakes and setting out shoes for presents. But it was to no avail. Old Saint Nick was just too popular.

  Nowadays, Sinterklaas supposedly arrives a few weeks before the December 5 holiday on a steamship from Spain—an event that is widely covered by every TV network. The saint is accompanied by a white horse and one or more Zwarte Pieten. You will hear that Zwarte Piet is supposed to be a Spanish Moor, but that’s a relatively recent idea. In earlier times, the black-faced Pete typically represented the Devil and was often shackled in chains. Today’s Pete, with his frilly outfit and campy wig, looks like he stepped out of a nineteenth-century minstrel show. The look is hardly coincidental. This particular incarnation of Piet was invented at about the same time as those racist cabarets, at just about the time Holland abolished slavery in its colonies in 1863—incidentally, one of the last European states to do so. The Surinamese government had no illusion about what Zwarte Piet represented when it gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and promptly abolished the black-faced figure. In the sugar plantations of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), they had their own opinion of dressing up black men in shackles. All the same, Piet was so popular that he was reinstated in 1992.

  Of course, back in Holland, the Dutch would be no more likely to associate Zwarte Piet with the horrors of the Middle Passage than they would think of the genocide their forefathers perpetrated in the Indonesian nutmeg isles as they nibble their spice-scented pepernoten. In this, they are much like the Portuguese, mostly oblivious to the loss of their sugar colonies in the Americas and their Spice Islands in Indonesia, though, again like da Gama’s heirs, they remain adamant when it comes to their love of sweets. The Dutch sweet tooth has a taste for spicy sweets that is almost medieval when compared to the Portuguese—at least when it comes to the confections traditionally eaten around Sinterklaas and Christmas. If you can believe the statistics, the Netherlands’ fifteen million people consume some sixty-two million pounds of spice cake every year!

  Everyone needs speculaas for the winter holiday. My favorite version of this medieval cake wraps gingerbread spiced by the sweet heat of cinnamon and the gentle glow of ginger and nutmeg around a core of moist, sweet marzipan. But speculaas takes many forms. I was first introduced to this particular Dutch obsession by the food historian Peter Rose.*40 Peter (in Dutch, it is a woman’s name) can list more varieties than a born-again preacher can count up sins. She has documented at least forty-seven different kinds of the gingerbread. She has even shared her recipe for speculaas with Gourmet magazine. That is more than most Dutch manufacturers will do. In Holland, the spices that go into gingerbread are something akin to a state secret. Without a doubt, the Dutch have a thing about speculaas. Typically, though, they buy their gingerbread ready-made. The supersecret speculaas spice mixture, however, can also be purchased, to be added to innumerable other recipes. Any supermarket will sell you a package of this sweet masala, which is likely to include cinnamon, mace, aniseed, cardamom, nutmeg, and cloves, as well as ginger.

  This Dutch fondness for spice cakes—or peperkoek, as these sweets are generically known (whether they contain pepper or not)—is well documented as far back as the Middle Ages. You can look it up in a 1417 council decree from the eastern Dutch city of Deventer that prescribes just what could go into their compact honey and spice loaf. Anyone who made a Deventer koek that didn’t conform was faced with an astronomical fine of 666 guilders. It turns out the fine burghers of Deventer knew they had a good thing going, for by the end of the sixteen hundreds, the city was exporting 715,000 cakes a year (and this from a city of a mere seven thousand souls!). More recently, gingerbread has been used as a morale booster for the troops: Dutch soldiers have been issued spice cake rations in much the same way as American GIs receive Hershey’s bars.

  In Amsterdam, the city’s heritage of spice isn’t just evident in December’s speculaas and pepernoten. You can also see it on grand buildings by the old waterfront emblazoned with the logo of the Dutch East India Company. You can smell it in the old warehouses. Construction workers sometimes report the sweet smell of nutmeg and cloves seeping out from the beams when they tear apart former spice depots to renovate them into trendy lofts. Of course, spice scents Dutch kitchens, too, often in ways that would make other Europeans cringe. But that’s because, in other places, tastes have changed. The penchant for spice cakes used to be shared well beyond Holland’s borders; those Deventer cakes were intended as much for export as for the local sweet tooth. As the last of the great spice-trading nations in Europe, Netherlanders never gave up their love of spices in the way most other Europeans did with the waning of renaissance fashions. This is most obvious in the traditional sweets that accompany holidays, in treats like Amsterdamse korstjes, spice crusts from Amsterdam; in Oudewijven, a tangy
, light-colored loaf flavored with aniseed; in the now rare Kruukplaetje, old-fashioned spiced griddle biscuits made in South Holland. But spices, especially the sweet spices so favored by sixteenth-century Italian cooks like Scappi and Messisbugo, show up not only in cakes but even in sausages and stews. Per capita spice consumption here is comparable to Morocco and easily double the American average. The Dutch, of course, who don’t think much of, or about, their own food, are blissfully unaware of any of this as they shop at their local Albert Hein supermarket to buy a custom spice mixture for their evening chicken. In Holland, you find nutmeg sprinkled on asparagus, red cabbage scented with cloves, sausage rolls flavored with mace, and even eel topped with cinnamon. A visit to a butcher shop in a suburban shopping complex can unearth a treasure trove of Dutch culinary peculiarity. Hidden away among the preprepared schnitzel, Italian salami, and gloppy mayonnaise-dressed salads are blood sausages scented with pepper and mace, and a scrapplelike balkenbrij containing so much cloves it burns the tongue.

  Even the cheese for which Holland is justly famous can be flavored with astonishing quantities of spice. If you need proof, walk west a few hundred yards from Dam Square to the westelijke grachtengordel (western canal belt), a district built to accommodate the mansions of spice and timber merchants in Amsterdam’s golden age. Here, on a little strip of quaint shops, hidden behind one of the plain shop façades, is one of Amsterdam’s cathedrals of cheese. Not that the Kaaskamer looks much like a high temple even when you’ve opened the front door. The modest space is more like a giant closet (kaas kamer means “cheese chamber”). Still, for Dutch cheese lovers, it is a place of devotion. Everywhere you look, the walls are lined with numberless wheels of cheese separated by plain pine planks. On the bottom layer are fat, yellow rounds of four-year-old boerenkaas (farm cheese), brittle and caramel-sweet with age. On the shelves near the ceiling are tubby, little red balls of creamy young Gouda. And in the middle are cheeses crammed with spice. Pepper, mild paprika, and hot chili season some of the boerenkaas. Cumin gives an almost Moroccan tang to cheeses both young and old. And perhaps most unexpected is the nagelkaas, packed with whole cloves, perhaps three or four in every bite. Oddly, the assertive presence of the cloves is tamed by the buttery cheese and the generally sweet undertone so characteristic of most Dutch cheeses. Admittedly, anyone who didn’t grow up with wooden footwear would most likely think it weird, but I rather like it. What’s more, a hunk of nagelkaas puts neatly to rest any skepticism historians of food might have about the amount of spice that Europeans could ingest, now or four hundred years ago.*41