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

by Michael Krondl

  It’s hardly surprising that Europeans would give up medieval cookery just as they were abandoning feudalism, counterpoint, egg tempera, and a Ptolemaic universe. But why was France the hotbed of this innovation? The court of Louis XIV was hardly known for its revolutionary spirit. Renaissance France had no Galileo or Monteverdi, no Spinoza or Rembrandt. But it had La Varenne.

  A glance at François Pierre La Varenne’s seminal 1651 cookbook, Le cuisiner françois, reveals how much things had changed in France.*53 Gone are the generous helpings of sugar and exotic spice of the Italian Renaissance masters, replaced by local herbs and mushrooms. Though this nouvelle cuisine was definitely more delicate (or blander, depending on your point of view), the French chef still includes nutmeg or cloves in plenty of his recipes, though he does so in stingy quantities. A typical recipe will call for “two or three” cloves and a grating of nutmeg. Pepper and ginger are mostly absent, and cinnamon has been quarantined in the dessert chapters.

  There are a number of reasons why the seventeenth-century culinary revolution sprouted in French soil (even while it was pollinated by Europe-wide trends). To a greater degree than elsewhere, the old and once-powerful French aristocracy was increasingly dependent on the whim of the king. As early as 1586, a Spanish commentator (admittedly, not the most impartial source) mentions that in France, the courtiers and grandees are such slaves to royal fashion that they will ape the king even if he has a taste for foods that are “vile and common, which even the poorest wretches would not consent to eat.” (Was he referring to truffles and mushrooms?) To some degree, feasting in the new absolutist monarchies now had a fresh purpose. Whereas, in the olden days, lavish feasts were put on to impress a noble’s underlings, they now headlined an aristocrat’s talents as a sycophant. Ostentation took on a slightly revised form. One thing is sure, though: French aristocrats certainly did not stop using spices because they were now cheap. The fine spices were at least twice as expensive at the end of La Varenne’s seventeenth-century revolution as they had been at its beginning. But it is true that with the establishment of a worldwide colonial system that produced bulk commodities instead of aromatic missives from paradise, spices lost much of their cachet.

  Yet just how quickly the new style penetrated beyond the kitchens of Francophile gourmets is impossible to pin down with any precision. Looking at cookbooks, you would deduce that the upper classes of eighteenth-century England, Italy, and Spain were taking their cues from the French, and probably by the nineteenth century, so were the Portuguese and central Europeans. But when you look at the import numbers, you realize that the decline in spice use must have been very gradual. There was certainly no sudden drop in spice imports in the age of Louis XIV, for even as La Varenne was revising his radical manifesto, other cookbooks of the old-fashioned, well-spiced persuasion kept being published. What did happen, however, was that the astonishing increase in spice use that had taken place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slowed and then halted, even while the population surged. Even today, French butchers still flavor their pâtés with a mixture called quattre épices, which includes pepper, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, and English hams are still studded with cloves. But that is now the exception. Outside of Holland, the spices that used to be stewed with capons and sprinkled on roast sturgeon are now typically used only in sweets. While it is true that the Europe-wide appetite for spices certainly abated after the seventeenth century, that is perhaps the less dramatic transformation. The big change is that Europeans invented sugar-based desserts.

  In the Middle Ages, sugar was simply another spice, used in increasingly greater quantities in meat pies and roasts. There were certainly “sweetmeats,” which we might call dessert, but they were mostly served right along with the meat, fish, and vegetable dishes. There was no distinction to speak of between “savory” and “sweet” courses. An Italian Renaissance pigeon pie might include as much sugar as a typical American apple pie today. As the Portuguese set up their overseas sugar colonies in the fourteen hundreds and the other Europeans jumped aboard a hundred years later, sugar became something everyone could afford. At the same time, a barrier was gradually erected between sweet and salty. As La Varenne’s book so clearly illustrates, cinnamon, so often partnered with sugar in meat-based Renaissance recipes, was now segregated to the sweet side of the wall, penned in with ginger. At least for a while, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper were allowed to roam free among soups and ragouts, though their quantities were severely circumscribed. This exclusionary fashion was uneven across Europe (witness the idiosyncrasies of Dutch cooking, for example) and across the culinary repertoire, but the trend is the same everywhere throughout Christendom. People continued to use the imported aromatics, but since many were now restricted to desserts while others were just plain restricted, there was less and less demand.

  This would explain, at least in part, why the market for VOC spices stagnated, even as Europe’s population surged. As best we can tell from the numbers, the European demand for pepper had been increasing by modest increments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then, when the price war among the Dutch, English, and Portuguese sent the price tumbling, demand doubled within a few decades. But that was it. Even as Europe’s population surged in the eighteen hundreds, the hunger for pepper crashed into a rock-solid ceiling.*54 Just why that occurred may be connected to the continually declining standard of living that regular folk—the ones who had long consumed most of the pepper—experienced up until the Industrial Revolution. The other spices followed much the same boom-and-bust trajectory, though for a different reason. Here, the Dutch may have strangled their own golden goose. In order to maintain high prices, they controlled just how much cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace made it to their European customers. Their profit margin may have been higher, but the overall amount of fine spices available to Europe’s cooks was artificially restricted. There was actually less spice on the market in 1700 than there had been half a century earlier. When torching spice plantations in Asia didn’t do the trick, the Heren XVII burned their stock in Amsterdam. Close to 2 million pounds of stored (and admittedly stale) nutmeg and mace were burned in the 1730s alone—and this at a time when annual sales were in the 250,000-pound range! Consequently, even those who wanted to cook in the old-fashioned style had no choice but to use less of the Moluccan spices.

  When it came to pepper, the VOC couldn’t control the supply. As a result, in the waning decades of Amsterdam’s golden age, the European market was awash with more Dutch (and English, French, and even Danish) imported pepper than could be sold. All the while, the English East India Company kept right on the VOC’s heels, increasing its pepper cargoes year after year. The VOC’s declining profits, however, could not be blamed just on the pesky English. There is some question whether the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie ever made money, even in the early years when the appetite for spices seemed insatiable. Whatever the fine print of the balance sheet, it seems the Company had a good run for the first ninety years or so of its existence. Perhaps more dividends were paid than might have been justified by the profits, but those payments kept the Amsterdam economy humming, even if the VOC needed to borrow more and more money to keep itself solvent.

  In the early days, the directors had tried to save cash by handing out dividends in the form of actual spices. In 1610, shareholders were left holding a bag of peppercorns and mace instead of hard currency (only about 7.5 percent was paid in cash). Altogether, some 40 percent of the declared value of all VOC dividends in the first fifty years took the form of cloves, mace, and pepper. For some of the larger investors who were in the spice-trading business anyway, this was no hardship, but the cobblers and barkeeps who owned no more than a share or two were about as happy as the stockholders of Heinz would be if they got their dividends in the form of pickles. Those who didn’t want to dump all their investment into the stewpot had to peddle their odiferous dividends at fire-sale prices. Eventually, there was such a backlash from investors that, a
fter 1644, the VOC was stuck with paying in cash. As a consequence, by 1692, the company was four million guilders in debt. The problem was that the cost of maintaining a private empire in order to support the spice monopoly was absorbing all but a tiny fraction of the gross profit.

  Then there was the issue of the workforce. The VOC had always suffered from incompetent and greedy employees, but there were enough trustworthy people at the top to keep the rest at least moderately honest. Now corruption within the company’s ranks increasingly siphoned profits away from Hoogstraat. There had been plenty of fraud in the Estado da Índia, too, but not every employee of the Portuguese crown was in India just for the money. Most were, of course, but a large minority had come for fame or for salvation, too. The Dutch, on the other hand, were there for lucre alone, and, at the low wages paid by the VOC, no one was likely to get rich quick from just his salary. Whatever charges have been leveled at Jan Coen, no one ever accused him of graft. In the next century, though, corruption reached into the highest levels. When Governor-General Van Hoorn resigned from his East India post in 1709, his fortune was estimated at ten million guilders. The kickbacks and profits raked in from the illicit trading of spices became an open secret. In parts of India, the Company’s officials pooled the spoils and redistributed them in proportion to the salary each received, to assure each employee an appropriate share of the embezzled cash. In the early eighteenth century, annual losses mounted from two to four and even six million guilders. Before long, the Company was technically bankrupt.

  If the VOC had been merely an ordinary joint-stock corporation, it would surely have gone under. But the Dutch East India Company was much more than that: it was effectively a state within a state. And like many governments do today, it was able to continue functioning simply by borrowing more cash. It could get away with it in the eighteenth century because, in spite of its relative decline, Amsterdam was still the prime capital market in the world. Investors from all over Europe kept propping up the Company, and the VOC continued to pay out dividends year after year, even if its imposing shipyards and perfumed warehouses had little more substance than crumbly gingerbread. This might have worked even longer than it did if the Company’s mainstay—the clove and nutmeg monopoly—hadn’t been broken. But finally, around 1750, the French East India Company succeeded in breaking the Dutch lock on fine spices. One of its employees, Pierre Poivre (appropriately, “pepper” in French), stole nutmeg and clove seedlings, which he then successfully propagated on the French Indian Ocean colonies of Mauritius and Réunion. Finally, after years of sagging profits and government bailouts, the VOC was liquidated in 1799, and the Dutch government took over the East Indies. In the Banda Islands, Dutch planters continued to rule over their nutmeg plantations until 1950, when, despite armed Dutch opposition, Indonesia gained its independence. Almost all of the ethnically Dutch population left or was expelled. Batavia became Jakarta once more.

  As it had during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, Holland’s cities had to deal with and assimilate a flood of immigrants and refugees. And that was just the start. Over the last fifty years, the Netherlands has morphed into a multicultural society, with all the variety, tensions, and new flavors that such transformations bring.

  NASI GORENG

  When I asked the president of NedSpice about what Netherlanders eat at home, Frank Lavooij listed the traditional staples: erwtensoep (pea soup), stamppot (sausage and potatoes mashed with kale), and nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice). “My wife is just as comfortable making nasi goreng as pankoeken (Dutch pancakes),” he assured me. Nasi goreng is as much a fixture of the Netherlands as Queen Beatrix.

  The degree to which the Dutch colonial experience has infiltrated everyday food becomes immediately evident if you visit any Amsterdam supermarket. Take the Albert Hein market just off the Dam, for example. The Albert Hein devotes as much space to Indonesian and other Asian products as an American market would to breakfast cereals. Not that most Dutch cooks would ever consider making the Indonesian food so popular now from scratch. No, they go to their local supermarket for the appropriate spice and seasoning mix, adding meat, chicken, or whatever the package instructs. In aisle 1, you have at least seven types of mixes for nasi goreng. Some call for almost no expertise, while others you actually have to cook. Shelf-stable saté stokjes (skewered chicken in peanut sauce) need only have a brief encounter with the microwave, while others require you to buy fresh chicken and chop vegetables before adding the packaged seasoning. To make the meal complete, shelves are crowded with bags of kroepoek, puffy Indonesian cassava and shrimp chips. (These taste—not altogether unpleasantly—of puffed grease with a counterpoint of fish flavor and, occasionally, hot pepper.) All told, these kinds of products number in the hundreds. While some come from niche Asian food specialists, most are manufactured by multinationals such as Heinz, McCormick, and Knorr.

  Even when not cooking specifically Indonesian food, Hollanders turn to ready-made spice mixes. In aisle 2, dozens of these Dutch masalas come ready-mixed. There is vleeskruiden for beef (coriander, black pepper, chili, ginger, marjoram, and thyme) and kipkruiden for chicken (paprika, white and black pepper, nutmeg, coriander, mace, curry powder, cardamom, and oregano) as well as seasoning mixes for oysters, mussels, chili con carne, spaghetti, gyros, and, naturally, nasi goreng. The display holds some twenty-seven spice mixtures in all!

  Immigrants arrive in Holland every day now, bringing seasonings from the four corners of the world. The new mix of race and creed is not always harmonious, and the Dutch, despite their fabled tolerance, have become less welcoming to dark-skinned migrants than they used to be. People’s everyday food choices, however, are being increasingly influenced by the corner stand selling döner kebabs or skewers of satay.

  Just like the Crusaders of yore, the Dutch are coming home after their frequent vacations abroad with a taste for more pungent flavors. “I remember going to Spain for the first time in 1961 and bringing our own food,” Lavooij recounts with an ironic half smile, explaining how the Dutch vacationers worried they might have to eat food cooked with olive oil and garlic. “Now it’s almost the opposite,” he adds. Nowadays Amsterdamers, just like well-off Londoners and Angelinos, take for granted that dinner might be Thai one night and Italian the next. Much as in the United States, these flavors in particular—the vaguely Italian combination of garlic, olive oil, and herbs on the one hand and an Asian sweet and spicy approach on the other—have captured foodies’ imaginations. You’ll find these tastes as ubiquitous among the affluent classes of the developed world as the mixture of cinnamon and sugar once was in the Renaissance.

  The Dutch were introduced to fusion cooking earlier than most when they were forced out of newly independent Indonesia in the 1950s. Not that dishes from the East Indies were entirely a novelty in the mother country. A Dutch manuscript from 1790 includes recipes for achar (a spicy condiment) and other Indonesian dishes. Throughout the colonial period, there was always a trickle of people coming back with tastes acquired in the Spice Islands, but this was nothing compared to the flood of the 1950s. That was when some three hundred thousand refugees arrived in Holland with what little they could carry. Crammed into their luggage, along with all the resentments and nostalgia, they had packed a menu for an elaborate meal they called the rijsttafel.

  The rijsttafel is a peculiar invention of colonial cuisine in which dishes from Bali, Java, Sumatra, and other Indonesian islands are combined into an enormous buffet. The idea is loosely based on the kind of elaborate banquet you might be served at an Indonesian wedding, though in prosperous colonial households, it became a much more everyday affair. The cooks were often ethnic Chinese, which affected not only the flavors but also the ingredients. In particular, they added lots of pork to what was originally a Muslim feast. Meats of all kinds, whether skewered as satay or cooked in a spicy stew like babi ricah, became the focus of the meal.

  There are dozens of places to eat rijsttafel in today’s Amsterdam, from ne
ighborhood take-out joints that give you a choice of some two dozen dishes arrayed in steam tables to white-tablecloth restaurants where the waiters smile and gently guide you through the smorgasbord. I chose, one night, to splurge at a restaurant called Puri Mas. The restaurant is just inside the Singelgracht, the last canal that was incised around the city in the sixteen hundreds, down a honky-tonk street where you have to dodge restaurant hawkers pushing everything from pad Thai to spaghetti Bolognese. It is a couple of bridges away from the Rijksmuseum, so not surprisingly, it is packed with tourists recovering from too much Rembrandt. Yet a kind of genteel atmosphere fills the room, mingling with aromas of fish sauce and spice. You can choose a modest rijsttafel for a succession of thirteen small plates, but better to opt for Rijsttafel Royaal, with a deluge of sixteen dishes. Plate after plate after plate arrives. The table is set with kroepoek, cassava shrimp chips, along with a little bowl of the chili- and ginger-spiced sambal sauce that is as common as mayonnaise in every Amsterdamer’s refrigerator. Egg rolls and batter-fried shrimp come with little turnovers exuding a sweet and savory aroma of coriander, black pepper, cumin, and turmeric. There is an assortment of satays, chicken, pork, and lamb on skewers, hot with chilies, sweet with sugar, and sour with tamarind. Then come little plates of stew: pork scented with chilies and ginger; chicken with chilies and coriander; lamb in a dense masala of cardamom, cumin, turmeric, fennel, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. There are a few vegetables and then the obligatory coda, nasi goreng. This nasi goreng has a few flecks of chicken amid the fried rice with just a suspicion of spice.