by Jack Turner
Inasmuch as I have a thesis, it is that spices played a more important part in people’s lives, and a more conspicuous and varied one, than we might be inclined to assume. As whimsical as the claim may seem, there is a deeper historical point. For in the final analysis the great historical developments associated with supplying Europe with spice sprang from a demand: from the senses, hearts and breasts of mankind; from the shadowy realms of taste and belief. In people’s emotions, feelings, impressions and attitudes towards spices all the great, spice-inspired events and dramas, all the wars, voyages, heroism, savagery and futility had their elusive germination. The very existence of the spice trade, Columbus’s voyages in search of the phantom spices of the Americas, archaeologists’ discovery of four-thousand-year-old cloves in the Syrian desert – these are events that can be endlessly speculated upon by historians and archaeologists, with ever greater elaboration and sophistication. And yet it is easy to overlook the question from which the others derive: why the trade existed in the first place. It all sprang from desire.
Very obviously, a subject as ephemeral as this demands flexibility from reader and writer alike. The story of spice consists of a thousand unruly, aromatic skeins of history, and several years spent trying to untangle them has taught me that they refuse to be neatly woven into the straighter, clearer-cut threads that historians conventionally spin across time and space. In lieu of a narrative, I have tried to isolate such traditions as can be drawn out from the huge rattlebag of facts thrown up by such a diffuse topic, to tease out the more important continuities of spices’ past and follow them down through time. The result bears a resemblance to polyphony, albeit without the satisfying resolution.
The book begins with a brief discussion of what historians have called the Spice Race, the crowded decades at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, when Europe poured quite extraordinary energies into the search for spice. The following chapters consider the chief hallmarks of the appetite that drove that search, under the headings of cuisine, sex, medicine, magic and distaste: palate, body and spirit. An epilogue touches on some of the reasons behind spices’ fall from grace, how it was they ceased to be so esteemed, downgraded to the mildly exotic foodstuffs they are today. These are broad horizons, with scant regard for conventional or chronological arrangement, yet I would argue that the merits of the thematic approach outweigh the drawbacks. Medieval and occasionally even modern authorities constantly looked back centuries or even millennia for precedents and justification of their own use of spice; indeed, one of my concerns is to show the extent to which these traditions have survived since remotest antiquity. This is not to suggest that a set of beliefs pertaining to spice survived intact from beginning to end. But I would argue that the spices have their traditions, reverberating with echoes and recollections; that the apparently straightforward act of eating them has been heavily burdened with historical baggage.
There are other advantages in flitting across time and space. If the narrative wanders from one time and place to another, that is exactly what spices themselves have always done, cropping up in defiance of the received wisdom, in places where, by rights, they should never have been. The drawback, of course, is that any one of these themes could warrant several books of its own, and since day two I have felt overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches. The problem has no easy solution other than a broad brush and a carefree ruthlessness in its use. Where I have resorted to particularly sweeping statements I have tried to flag some of the complexities and nuances of the academic debate, where there is one, in the endnotes.
It might be helpful at the outset to clarify what exactly I mean by ‘spice’. The short list below is far from comprehensive, nor is it intended as a technical guide. There is, in fact, no single, satisfactory definition: ask a chemist, a botanist, a cook and a historian what is a spice and you will get very different responses – for that matter, ask different botanists and you will get different definitions. The history of the word itself, its changes and devaluation, is a theme running through the book.
The OED is, as ever, a good place to start:
One or other of various strongly flavoured or aromatic substances of vegetable origin, obtained from tropical plants, commonly used as condiments or employment for other purposes on account of their fragrance and preservative qualities.
Broadly, a spice is not a herb, understood to mean the aromatic, herbaceous, green parts of plants. Herbs are leafy, whereas spices are obtained from other parts of the plant: bark, root, flower bud, gums and resins, seed, fruit or stigma. Herbs tend to grow in temperate climates; spices in the tropics. Historically, the implication was that a spice was far less readily obtainable than a herb, and far more expensive.
Environment may also account for spices on a more fundamental level. Chemically, the qualities that make a spice a spice are its rare essential oils and oleoresins, highly volatile compounds that impart to the spices their flavour, aroma and preservative properties. Botanists classify these chemicals as secondary compounds, so called because they are secondary to the plant’s metabolism, which is to say that they play no role in photosynthesis or the uptake of nutrients. But secondary does not mean irrelevant. It is generally accepted that their raison d’être is a form of evolutionary response, the plant’s means of countering threats from parasites, bacteria, fungi or pathogens native to the plant’s tropical environment. Briefly, the chemistry of spices – what in the final analysis makes a spice a spice – is, in evolutionary terms, what quills are to the porcupine or the shell to the tortoise. In its natural state cinnamon is an elegant form of armour; the seductive aroma of the nutmeg is, to certain insects, a bundle of toxins. The elemental irony of their history is that the attractiveness of spices is (from the plant’s perspective) a form of Darwinian backfiring. What makes a spice so appealing to humans is, to other members of the animal kingdom, repulsive.*
Historically, of course, neither chemistry nor the curiosities of natural selection could be known, and there were other qualities that marked out a spice. Before the European discovery of the Americas the rare and fine spices were, practically by definition, Asian. There was no shortage of other, home-grown aromatics native to the Mediterranean basin, among them many spices now widely associated with Eastern cuisine, such as coriander, cumin and saffron. (In medieval times England was a major producer of saffron – a reminder that traffic along the spice routes went both ways.) Moreover, many substances formerly counted as spices are today classed otherwise. Early in the fourteenth century the Florentine merchant Francesco Balduccio Pegolotti wrote a business guide in which he listed no fewer than 188 spices, among them almonds, oranges, sugar and camphor. When Lady Capulet calls for spices Juliet’s nurse takes her to mean dates and quinces. Generally, however, the spices were alike in being small, long-lasting, high-value and hard to acquire. Above all, the word conveyed a sense of their uniqueness; there was no substitute. To say a spice was special was tautological; indeed the words have a common root. And as a sense of their exceptionalism was embedded in their name so it was integral to their appeal.
By any measure the most exceptional of the spices, and far and away the most historically significant, is pepper. The spice is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a perennial climbing vine native to India’s Malabar Coast. Its tendrils bear clusters of peppercorns on dense, slender spikes, turning a yellowish-red at maturity, like redcurrants. On this one plant grow the three true peppers: black, white and green. Black pepper, the most popular variety, is picked while still unripe, briefly immersed in boiling water, then left to dry in the sun. Within a few days the skin shrivels and blackens, giving the spice its distinctive wrinkly appearance. White pepper is the same fruit left longer on the vine. After harvest the outer husk is softened by soaking, left to dry and rubbed off in water or by mechanical action. Green or pickled peppercorns are picked while still unripe, like black pepper, then immediately soaked in brine.
Pepper has several lookalike
s, the cause of much confusion, which all belong to different species. Melegueta pepper was widely used in medieval times, but is now confined to speciality shops, a fate shared by long pepper. (The latter is doubly confusing for sharing an Indian origin with black pepper, whereas Melegueta pepper is native to Africa.) The attractive pink peppercorns commonly sold in combination with the other peppers are entirely unrelated – the plant, native to South America, is in fact mildly toxic, recommended more by its appearance than its taste.
The clove, on the other hand, is unmistakable. The spice is the dried, unripe flower bud of Syzygium aromaticum,* an evergreen tree reaching a height of twenty-five to forty feet (eight to twelve metres), thickly clothed with glossy, powerfully aromatic leaves. A walk through the perfumed groves of Zanzibar or the Indonesian islands is an unforgettable experience; in the age of sail mariners claimed they could smell the islands while still far out to sea. The clove itself grows in clusters coloured green through yellow, pink and finally a deep, russet red. Timing, as with pepper, is everything, since the buds must be harvested before they overripen. For a few busy days of harvest the more nimble members of the community head to the treetops, beating the cloves from the branches with sticks. As the cloves shower down they are gathered in nets and spread out to dry, hardening and blackening in the tropical sun and taking on the characteristic nail-like appearance that gives the spice its name, from the Latin clavus, nail. The association is common to all major languages. The oldest certain reference to the clove dates from the Chinese Han period (206 BC to AD 220), when the ‘ting-hiang’ or ‘nail spice’ was used to freshen courtiers’ breath in meetings with the emperor.
For reasons of both history and geography, the clove is often paired with nutmeg and mace. The latter two are produced by one and the same tree, Myristica fragrans. The tree yields a crop of bulbous, yellowy-orange fruit like an apricot, harvested with the aid of long poles, with which the fruit is dislodged and caught in a basket. As the fruit dries it splits open, revealing a small, spicy nugget within: a glossy brown nutmeg clasped in a vermilion web of mace. Dried in the sun, the mace peels away from the nutmeg, fading from scarlet to a ruddy brown. Meanwhile the aromatic inner nutmeg hardens and fades from glossy chocolate into ashen brown, like a hard, wooden marble. Legend has it that unscrupulous spice traders of Connecticut conned unwitting customers by whittling counterfeit ‘nutmegs’ from worthless pieces of wood, whence the nickname the ‘Nutmeg State’. A ‘wooden nutmeg’ was a metaphor for the fraudulent or ersatz. Schele de Vere’s nineteenth-century Americanisms cites the ‘wooden nutmegs’ of the Press and Congress who ‘have to answer for forged telegrams, political tricks, and falsified election returns’.
Adulteration, conned customers and mistaken identities are recurrent themes in the history of spice, bedevilling the historian’s sources just as they did, historically, the consumers. The problems were particularly acute with cinnamon – a fact, we shall see, with some considerable ramifications, and over which scholars continue to wage arcane debates to this day. The tree that bears the spice, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, is a small, unassuming evergreen, resembling a bay or laurel, native to the wet zone of Sri Lanka, in the island’s west and south-west. The spice is formed from the inner bark, which is stripped from the tree with knives, cut into segments and left in the sun to dry, curling into delicate, papery quills. Cinnamon’s best-known relative is cassia, the bark of Cinnamomum cassia, originally a native of China but in historical times widespread throughout South-East Asia. This and several other members of the family were long considered the poor relations – cassia has a coarser, ruddy bark, with a more pungent aroma. (It is also easier and cheaper to produce: much of the ‘cinnamon’ sold in the modern West is in fact cassia.) It is disconcerting, though hardly surprising, to find the medieval consumer more attuned to the difference.
For even the most indifferent there can be no mistaking the last major spice, ginger. Zingiber officinale has been cultivated for so long that it is no longer found in a wild state. Of all the spices it is by far the least fussy, and far the easiest to transplant. The plant will no longer go to seed of its own accord but must be propagated manually, with root-stalk cuttings. (During long oceanic voyages Chinese navigators grew the spice in boxes to ward off scurvy.) Provided the ambient soil and air are sufficiently hot and wet, the slender, reedy stems soon sprout, flowering in dense spikes coloured pale green, before maturing through purple and yellow. The spice is the root, or tuberous rhizome. But, amenable as it is to transplantation, before the technology of refrigeration, air travel and greenhouse, no European had eaten fresh ginger, at least not in Europe. The spice arrived after a long journey by ship and caravan, occasionally candied in syrup but more commonly and conveniently in dried form, either powdered or whole, in the distinctive, gnarly lumps still occasionally to be seen in a Chinese grocery.
These, the archetypal, tropical Asian spices, are the main subjects of this book – the dramatis personae. Occasionally the narrative strays beyond them, for as we have seen, ‘spice’ was never a clear-cut category. There were others that rose into and fell from favour, however these were foremost, whether on grounds of cost, origin, reputation or the sheer longevity and intensity of demand. They were in a class of their own. But while spices are the immediate subject, in a broader sense the book is necessarily about Europe and Asia, the appetites that attracted and the links that bound. For the most part, however, the scene and action of the following chapters are written from a European perspective, partly on account of my own linguistic limitations, but also in deference to what might be termed the law of increasing exoticism. A fur coat is standard in Moscow, a luxury in Miami. When the world was an immeasurably larger place so it was with spices, and particularly these spices. The further they travelled from their origins the more interesting they became, the greater the passions they aroused, the higher their value, the more outlandish the properties credited to them. What was special in Asia was astonishing in Europe. In the European imagination there never was, and perhaps never will be again, anything quite like them.
* Nard is an aromatic plant of the Himalayas used in ancient perfumes and unguents. Calamus is an aromatic, semi-aquatic perennial herb, widely distributed from the Black Sea to Japan, put to similar purposes. Frankincense and myrrh are powerfully aromatic gum resins native to southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Frankincense was primarily used in ancient incense. Myrrh was put to purposes as diverse as incense, seasoning and embalming.
* Spices can be toxic to humans too if taken in sufficient quantities. Protracted overdoses of nutmeg can cause cancer of the liver.
* Sometimes also called Eugenia caryopbyllata.
I
The Spice Race
1
The Spice-Seekers
When I discovered the Indies, I said that they were the richest dominion that there is in the world. I was speaking of the gold, pearls, precious stones, and spices, with the trade and markets in them, and because everything did not appear immediately, I was held up to abuse.
Christopher Columbus, letter from the third voyage, written from Jamaica, 7 July 1503
The Taste that Launched a Thousand Ships
According to an old Catalan tradition, the news of the New World was formally announced in the Saló del Tinell, the cavernous, barrel-vaulted banqueting hall in Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic, the city’s medieval quarter. And it is largely on tradition we must rely, for aside from a few sparse details the witnesses to the scene had frustratingly little to say, leaving the field free for painters, poets and Hollywood producers to evoke the moment that marks the watershed, symbolically at least, between medievalism and modernity. They have tended to imagine a setting of suitable grandeur, with king and queen presiding over an assembly of everyone who was anyone in the kingdom: counts and dukes weighed down by jewels, ermines and velvets; mitred bishops; courtiers stiff in their robes of state; serried ranks of pages sweating in livery. Ambassadors and dignitaries from fo
reign powers look on in astonishment and mixed emotions – awe, confusion and envy. Before them stands Christopher Columbus in triumph, vindicated at last, courier of the ecosystem’s single biggest piece of news since the ending of the Ice Age. The universe has just been reconfigured.
Or so we now know. But the details are largely the work of historical imagination, the perspective one of the advantages of having half a millennium to digest the news. The view from 1493 was less panoramic; indeed, altogether more foggy. It is late April, the exact day unknown. Columbus is indeed back from America, but he is oblivious to the fact. His version of events is that he has just been to the Indies, and though the tale he has to tell might have been lifted straight from a medieval romance, he has the proof to silence any who would doubt him: gold, green and yellow parrots, Indians and cinnamon.
At least that is what Columbus believed. His gold was indeed gold, if in no great quantity, and his parrots were indeed parrots, albeit not of any Asian variety. Likewise his Indians – the six bewildered individuals who shuffled forward to be inspected by the assembled company were not Indians but Caribs, a race soon to be exterminated by the Spanish colonisers and, deadlier still, by the germs they carried. The misnomer Columbus conferred has long outlived the misconception.