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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).
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*54 Roughly speaking, pepper imports were a scant 1.2 million kilos in 1500, when Europe held some eighty million people; about 1.5 million in 1600, when the population had risen to one hundred million; and perhaps as much as 7 million in the 1670s, when the population was roughly the same. But this volume of pepper could not be sold, no matter how low the price went. In 1688, the Heren XVII estimated that the European demand was only 3.5 million kilograms. Fifty years later, European imports had dropped to just that number and stayed there until the early nineteenth century. Clove imports peaked in the 1620s at about 350,000 kilos, a number they would not recover until the mid-twentieth century.
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The Taste of Conquest Page 34