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

by Michael Krondl

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  *9 In addition to colombino, there was beledi, or “white” ginger, which could come from Malabar or the interior. Deli and micchino were inferior grades, the former smaller and less white than the other varieties, the latter often tinted red because it had been preserved by adding clay. Ginger preserved in syrup had its customers as well.

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  *10 In later years, the Dutch East India Company would periodically burn its twenty-year-old stock of spices because they were considered unsellable. Does that mean it was sometimes selling fifteen-year-old nutmeg and cloves?

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  *11 When you read on, it turns out that the spices were meant to season six capons, which works out to some thirty pounds of meat! In other words, less than a sixth of an ounce of spice (about 1½ teaspoons) for every pound of capon. Numerous other recipes in the collection have a similar spice-to-meat ratio.

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  *12 Another oft-repeated statistic is that the Duke of Buckingham went through close to half a ton of spice in a single year (1452–53), but when you look at the actual account books, it is more like 400 pounds of spices (pepper and ginger make up more than three-fourth of this) for a household that consumed some 1,500 sheep, 250 cattle, 80 pigs, and easily 5,000 fish during the same year. What’s more, spices were typically sold in “light pounds” of about twelve ounces at the time, so it was likely a scant pound of mostly pepper and ginger feeding between one hundred and two hundred people a day.

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  *13 Before 1400, the data are just too fragmentary to paint a complete picture. Prices of at least some spices do seem to go down as the centuries march on, which would imply an increased supply. So, presumably, spices were more exclusive at the time of the Crusades than two hundred years later. Scattered statistical evidence seems to indicate that this was the case at least in remote England, though trying to project English numbers onto the rest of the continent is iffy at best.

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  *14 Admittedly, this sort of analysis has its limits. While the relationship of the price of pepper to the prices of poultry and eggs was much the same as today, red meat was typically cheaper. Bernardo Morosini could buy about 1½ pounds of beef for an ounce of pepper, while in northern Europe, you could get anywhere between 1 and 5 pounds, depending on the time and place. What’s more, regional specialties were less costly closer to home, too, so that olive oil was affordable in Venice (about ½ liter per ounce of pepper) but relatively expensive in northern Europe, where a liter of oil could be worth between 4 and 12 ounces of the Asian spice!

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  *15 A Flemish reporter describes the arrival of the plague in Genoa: “In January of the year 1348 three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods. When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith.”

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  *16 The reading public was remarkably broad. One survey of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century private libraries in France indicates that the majority were owned by lawyers and churchmen; however, 66 out of 377 book collections belonged to haberdashers, weavers, drapers, tanners, shoemakers, hawkers, locksmiths, coach builders, skinners, dyers, grocers, cheese mongers, and pastry cooks!

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  *17 A half ducat would be on the order of several hundred dollars today.

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  *18 In sixteenth-century Venice, interested visitors could buy an inexpensive pamphlet containing the “tariff of all prostitutes in which one finds the price and the qualities of all courtesans of Venice.” According to two contemporary sources, there were about twelve thousand official prostitutes in the city at the time, or about one in three adult women. The figure is certainly an exaggeration, but it does point to the scale of the sex industry.

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  *19 In the 1620s, Portuguese traders were importing some 140,000 pounds of melegueta, more than any spice other than black pepper and ginger. By the late nineteenth century, some 200,000 pounds were still exported from Ghana alone, though by the First World War, exports from West Africa had virtually ceased. In Ghana and Nigeria, where the spice is still grown, the seeds continue to be used. Not only do they flavor food, but they are also chewed on cold days to warm the body.

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  *20 Moroccans still finish off some main dishes (most famously the pigeon pie called bisteyaa) with a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar. Of course, all medieval European cuisine was heavily indebted to the Arabs, but in the Iberian Peninsula, the influence was much more direct. Portuguese is full of Arabic food words, from beringela for eggplant to açafrão for saffron, laranja for orange, limão for lemon, arroz for rice, amêndoa for almond, espinafre for spinach, and açúcar for sugar. The sugar and rice cultivated in the southern province of Algarve were another Arabic import.

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  *21 João II should not be remembered solely for his efforts to secure the spice route. In 1484, he ordered that measures be taken against the “overturning of chamber pots.” The contents of these were supposed to be disposed of in “reserved places,” such as the beaches. He even ordered the construction of a sewage system the same year Bartolomeu Dias sailed for the Cape of Good Hope, though with little result. A hundred years ago, many of Lisbon’s poorer districts still lacked indoor plumbing, and the cry “Àgua, vai!” still echoed through the alleys.

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  *22Fidalgo derives from filho d’algo—literally, the “son of somebody”—though it later became a generic term for nobility.

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  *23 In a book called The Portuguese Columbus: Secret Agent of King John II, a respected Portuguese academic has made the assertion that Christopher Columbus was in fact Portuguese rather than Italian. However, this is distinctly a minority view.

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  *24 It’s tempting to speculate what might have happened if the Portuguese had arrived seventy-five years earlier, when the Ming admiral Cheng Ho was leading Chinese armadas of one hundred to two hundred ships to Southeast Asia and Ceylon, and the Chinese maintained an official network of trade relations from Malindi to Japan. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Beijing not only decided to stop the expeditions in the 1430s but imposed a blanket ban on overseas trade by Chinese nationals. Even the building of new oceangoing ships was forbidden.

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  *25 The Ottoman takeover of Mamluk Egypt in 1516–17 seems to have been aided and abetted by the massive fall in Egyptian revenue derived from taxing the spice trade that occurred when the Portuguese enforced their spice monopoly in the early years of the century.

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  *26 We have the details of a cargo from 1518, which, out of a total of close to 5 million pounds, included some 4.7 million pounds of pepper, 12,000 pounds of cloves, 3,000 pounds of cinnamon, and about 2,000 pounds of mace. The amount of pepper is likely accurate, since its traffic was tightly controlled, though a great deal more of the other spices must have arrived in sailors’ personal chests.

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  *27 Skilled craftsmen would have to work about eight years to earn that kind of money.

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  *28 There were inevitably dissenting opinions on this matter. The Italian merchant Filippo Sassetti, arriving in Cochin on the carreira in the 1580s, wrote home that it was less dangerous to travel from Lisbon to India than from Barcelona to Genoa. No doubt he was thinking of the pirates swarming in the Mediterranean in his day.

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  *29 Linschoten gives the impression that he had done firsthand research in this particular f
ield. But then the Hollander wasn’t alone in noting the Lusitanians’ sexual mores. In 1550, a scandalized Italian Jesuit missionary wrote from India that “the Portuguese have adopted the vices and customs of the land without reserve, including this evil custom of buying droves of slaves, male and female…. There are countless men who buy droves of girls and sleep with all of them, and subsequently sell them. There are innumerable married settlers who have four, eight, or ten female slaves and sleep with all of them, as is common knowledge. This is carried to such excess that there was one man in Malacca who had twenty-four women of various races, all of whom were his slaves, and all of whom he enjoyed. I quote this city because it is a thing that everyone knows. Most men, as soon as they can afford to buy a female slave, almost invariably use her as a girl-friend (amiga), besides many other dishonesties, in my poor understanding.”

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  *30 Manuel I reportedly used to saunter through Lisbon accompanied by a menagerie of several elephants and a rhino. The rhino was later sent as a present to Pope Leo X, though the poor creature was shipwrecked on the way. The Holy Father did eventually get his promised pet, though, by this point, it had been embalmed and stuffed.

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  *31 It’s interesting to contrast this antibusiness sentiment to the attitude of Muslims. Muhammad, who started his life in the camel-driving trade, is quoted as saying, “The merchant enjoys the felicity both of this world and the next,” and, more pointedly, “He who makes money pleases God.” The Christians had to go through all sorts of doctrinal contortions to legitimate moneymaking through trade.

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  *32 One of the dishes that resulted from the persecution of crypto-Jews was called caldo verde com torah, which was the usual Portuguese potato kale soup but with a pork sausage floating in it. You had to eat the sausage, “the Torah,” to prove your Christian credentials. Apparently, one technique devised to fool the prying eyes of neighbors was to eat a sausage made of bread, chicken, duck, and so forth made up to look like regular pork links. A similar sausage is still made with a mixture of bread and meats, but these days, it includes pork.

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  *33 Da Orta managed to avoid the clutches of the Holy Office during his lifetime, but the church’s inquisitors got to him a dozen years after he had died and was buried. He was condemned postmortem for the crime of Judaism, and his bones were exhumed and burned.

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  *34 In fiscal year 2003–4, India alone exported more than five times as much chili as black pepper, some 86,575 metric tons of chili compared to only 16,635 tons of black pepper.

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  *35 In an odd mirror image of Europe, China was also undergoing a consumerist upsurge in the sixteenth century. This was stimulated in part by increased domestic manufacturing but also to some degree by American silver, which was eddying into China as it was into Europe. Here, too, a printing revolution had led to a new popularity for cookbooks, and the same kind of epicurianism you find in Renaissance Italy was in full swing.

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  *36 The sixteenth century saw an enormous migration of Spanish Jews to the eastern Mediterranean, and many of these had been active in the transatlantic trade. What is more, the Turkish name for chili, biber aci, clearly comes from the Caribbean ají.

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  *37 It’s amazing how foods still retain biases based on gender. Not that Portugal is in any way unique in this respect. In places like Texas, hot chilies have a decidedly macho association, too.

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  *38 Once they had lost nearly all their share of the spice trade to the Dutch, the Portuguese tried to cultivate spices in Brazil instead. In 1678, the king instructed his Goan viceroy to send pepper vines, clove trees, and the like to other Portuguese colonies, especially Brazil. At the time, the efforts failed, though the king would be vindicated in the end. Today, Brazil is among the world’s five largest pepper exporters.

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  *39 The Venetians, who never seemed able to keep their hands off any foreign saint they met, stole the remnants of Saint Nick’s corpse from Turkey in 1100 and deposited them in a church on the Lido. These remains must have been especially miraculous because the same saint was supposedly also stolen from Myra a few decades earlier and set up in Bari. As a consequence, the ancient bishop is the patron saint of thieves. He is also the patron saint of pawnbrokers, presumably for helping out the “financially challenged.”

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  *40 Peter explains that not all speculaas comes filled with marzipan—it can just be a thick ginger cookie—and not all gingerbread is speculaas, which tends to be limited to the holidays. When gingerbread is made into loaves, it is called zoete koek and is eaten year-round.

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  *41 In its most common, and more subtle, rendition, nagelkaas is made with a mixture of cumin and cloves. Even so, you are still likely to get at least one whole clove in every bite.

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  *42 After 1650, the East India Company set the wholesale price of cloves at 3.75 guilders per pound (494 grams, or about 1.1 pounds) and nutmeg at roughly 3 guilders—or about 50 percent higher than they were earlier in the century. Once Ceylon was theirs, they doubled the price of cinnamon to about 3 guilders as well. By comparison, you could buy almost 3 pounds of pepper and about 8 pounds of ginger for a single guilder late in the century—this at a time when modestly skilled craftsmen earned a little more than a guilder a day and a second-rate still-life painting would run to about 20.

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  *43 An Amsterdam ship’s carpenter earning some 30 stuivers (1½guilders) a day might pay some 4½stuivers for a three-pound loaf of bread, 2½stuivers for a pound of Gouda, ½stuiver for a “green” or new herring, and about the same for a half-ounce package of pepper.

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  *44 While this may be true of NedSpice’s imports, Holland as a whole consumes about a third of its spice imports and exports the rest, though any numbers are highly suspect, since they don’t take into account spices present in imported and exported processed food.

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  *45 Financial historians point to the VOC as perhaps the first modern corporation. Needless to say, the resulting innovations in corporate structure are beyond the scope of this work, to say nothing of way beyond my ken.

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  *46 To give just a random sampling of numbers: in the early twelve hundreds, the Genoese sold cloves and nutmeg to their customers for something like four times the price of pepper; in Alexandria in 1347, ten kilos of pepper could be had for 7½ ducats, while cloves were more than 22; and according to Linschoten, even in relatively nearby Malacca, pepper cost about half the price of cloves and a third the price of mace. Here, though, nutmeg was actually cheaper!

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  *47 According to Paul Gahlinger, the author of Illegal Drugs,“Eating twenty grams of ground nutmeg can produce very severe physical and psychological effects varying with the person.” Prolonged nausea is replaced by silly feelings and giggling, and then a feeling of euphoria accompanied by hallucinations. Motor functions may be confused and speech incoherent. He goes on to say, “the after-effects are usually quite unpleasant: aching bones, sore muscles, painful eyes, runny nose, tiredness, depression and headaches.”

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  *48 Admittedly, more than half of the spice consumed was domestically produced aniseed and cumin (the officers’ mess even offered cumin cheese), but the rest—about a pound of pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and mace for each officer for the duration of the trip—were exotic imports.

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  *49 Palmyra palm nectar ferments naturally in the blossoms, yielding a mildly alcoholic beverage called toddy to anyone who makes the effort to tap the flowers. The same sap is also boiled down to make palm jaggery, or sugar.

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  *50 This was roughly equivalent to Coen’s monthly salary at the time.

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  *51 In Portugal, at least, badger powders had their day as a cure for the plague. In a letter written in 1430 to King Duarte, his doctor gave specific instructions on concocting one of these nostrums. First, you had to get a badger drunk on wine filtered through camphor and blended with a compound of gold, seed pearls, and coral. You then decapitated the animal, drained it of its blood, and removed the heart and liver. The blood was mixed with 2 ounces of very fine cinnamon, 1 ounce of geuaana (Guinea/melegueta pepper?), ½ ounce of verbena, ¼ ounce of ginger or saffron, 1/8 ounce of fine clove, 1/32 ounce of myrrh, 1/16 ounce of aloes, and 1/64 ounce of fine “unicorn horn,” and this mixture was dried out under a “slow sun” or in the “heat of a fire.” Into this, you would stir 2 ounces of the poor badger’s pulverized heart, liver, and even teeth. To serve, the mélange was dissolved in wine or in water seasoned with vinegar. Once the remedy was consumed—“the best possible thing against the pestilence”—the patient had to lie down, cover up warmly, and perspire for some six hours, without sleeping, eating, or drinking. He could then drink and eat, but only water and bread soaked in cold water. If the pain of the swellings persisted, it was permissible to bleed him in the aching leg or arm.

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  *52 While it is impossible to quantify the number of cooking and dietary books that were printed between 1550 and 1700, historians have estimated that perhaps four hundred million books were printed overall. Even if we conservatively assume that food books made up a paltry 0.1 percent of the books produced (today, it’s more like 10 percent), we’re still talking four hundred thousand books, and the number was surely higher.

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  *53 The book’s immense influence was seen not only in France, where it went through some thirty editions in seventy-five years, but also in reprints and translations in Holland (1653), England (1653), and even Italy (1690).