by Jack Turner
By the end of the tenth century it was by this second, Egyptian route that most of Europe’s spices arrived. The reason was political, in the form of the decline of centralised power in Mesopotamia and the emergence, in Egypt’s Fatimid dynasty (969–1171), of a strong and wealthy commercial rival. Like the Romans, the Fatimids encouraged trade by maintaining naval patrols in the Mediterranean and Red seas. They offered reliable guarantees for the security of merchants, native and foreign alike. Cairo was then embarking on the period of its greatest commercial splendour, drawing commerce, merchants and travellers like filings to a magnet. Alexandria regained the position it had occupied in classical antiquity as Europe’s chief point of access to the exotic goods of the East.
Like the Romans, Alexandria’s Fatimid masters did not have to look hard for buyers. When the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela called at Alexandria in the 1160s he found a Babel of all the major western European nations, with Italians rubbing shoulders with Catalans, Frenchmen, Englishmen and Germans. In an age of religious wars theirs was a somewhat anomalous position, yet they succeeded, not without the occasional setback, in maintaining the commercial relations on which the flow of spice into Europe depended. The Egyptians needed customs duties, and the Europeans were willing to run the risk of the occasional extortionate or even murderous ruler for the sake of the profits at stake, secure in the knowledge that any unexpected price hikes could be passed on to a captive European market.
But if trade could be profitable it could also be perilous, for body and soul alike. Not until the twelfth century did the Church accept trade as a respectable occupation, and even then misgivings endured. No trade provoked more distrust than the long-distance traffic in luxuries, as much on account of the goods themselves as what getting them entailed. Dealing with the infidel only made matters worse. The dexterity of the Venetians in particular scandalised more zealous believers, contributing to their reputation as avaricious merchants but tepid Christians. In 1322 the pope excommunicated many leading citizens of Venice for their dealings with the Muslim powers, and for a time a papal ban succeeded in disrupting trade with Egypt. However, even papal sanctions could not halt so much as redirect the traffic – the Venetians simply went elsewhere. The Armenian port of Lajazzo became a new conduit to the west, and for a time Europeans paid a little more for their spice. Shortly after, the Venetians were back in Egypt as if nothing had changed.
The trade and traders alike had an undeniable glamour. For if the risks were great, the profits were colossal. Success in the spice trade conferred vast fortunes and, particularly in the early and central Middle Ages, the rise to ennoblement. The merchants and financiers who established themselves in the traffic were the Rockefellers of their day. One such was the Venetian Romano Mairano who, emerging from relatively humble beginnings, and having already made and lost one fortune, financed a cargo of lumber to Alexandria in the 1170s with a loan from the doge Sebastiano Ziani. The cargo returned a profit sufficient to repay his creditor (in pepper), leaving enough for Mairano to set up a trading network of his own, stretching from Venice to Alexandria, Syria and Palestine. Such were the risks involved that the valuable cargoes were not entrusted to lumbering, beamy cogs, the workhorse of medieval maritime commerce, but to oared galleys swift enough to outrun any pursuer, leased out by the state to the highest bidder. If the rowers were too slow there were marines to act as the defence of last resort.
With the growth of the traffic there came a slow but decisive shift in the way spices were viewed in Europe. No longer were they reserved for a tiny few. Medieval cooks dreamed up hundreds of different applications, leaving practically no type of food free of spice. There were rich and spicy sauces for meat and fish, based on a practically limitless number of combinations of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, pepper and other spices, ground and mixed in with a host of locally-grown herbs and aromatics. To follow there were desserts such as frumenty, a sweet porridge of wheat boiled in milk and spices, and sugary confections of spices and dried fruits, washed down with spiced wine and ale. Though there were significant variations in cooking from one place to another, and changes over time, with one or another spice falling in and out of fashion, the spicy tenor of medieval cooking remained a constant.
Thus if the mental world of medieval Europe was provincial, its palate was globalised. The aroma of spice was all-pervasive. In cookbooks of the day spices feature in over half the recipes, often more than three-quarters. Not until modern times, with the advent of air travel and the bulk refrigerated freighter, an age in which Costa Rican bananas are sold in Moscow and Argentine beef in Bangkok, has there been such a dependency on a food grown on the other side of the earth. Long before there was world cuisine there were spices.
Salt, Maggots and Rot?
These spices played, alas! A great role in the appalling stews in which our forebears took such delight … they understood nothing of the refinements of the culinary art.
A. Franklin, La vie privée d’autrefois, 1889
While for the vast majority of medieval Europeans the dreamworlds of Cockayne and paradise were where the spices stayed, a fortunate few translated their imagined spiciness into reality. Medieval cookbooks and accounts are commonly as suffused with spices as was the fantasy. The early-fourteenth-century kitchen of Jeanne d’Évreux, the widow of King Charles IV of France, boasted a small tonnage of cauldrons great and small, solid iron pots, pans, spits and roasters, offset by an equally heavyweight assembly of spices. Jeanne’s pantry found room for no less than six pounds of pepper, 13½ pounds of cinnamon, five pounds of grains of paradise, 3½ pounds of cloves, 1¼ pounds of saffron, half a pound of long pepper, a small quantity of mace and a colossal 23½ pounds of ginger.
By the standards of the day the widowed queen’s spice stockpile was impressive, but by no means exceptional. In England less than a hundred years later the household of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, ate its way through a similarly imposing mountain of seasonings. In twelve months Humphrey, his family, guests and retainers devoured no less than 316 pounds of pepper, 194 pounds of ginger and various other spices, translating into an average of around two pounds of spices per day. The account books of the medieval nobility tell of a consumption that looks less like a taste than an addiction. Why this gargantuan appetite for spice, and how on earth did they get through it?
Traditionally, historians have resorted to a straightforward explanation: that old and indestructible myth that medieval Europe had a problem with rancid and rotting meat, and that the spices were there to cover other, less appealing tastes. The notion apparently originated with eighteenth-century scholars who looked with horror at the cuisine of their forebears. Like many myths this does contain a kernel of truth. On the one hand, it is true that, in the absence of refrigeration, meat and fish were liable to corruption, and food poisoning was a recognised if poorly understood risk. Standards of hygiene could be lackadaisical, as suggested by an ordinance of England’s Henry VIII forbidding the kitchen scullions ‘to goe naked or in garments of such vilenesse as they now doe’. The cook of the Canterbury Tales has in his shop ‘many a flye loos’; his repeatedly heated and reheated ‘Jack of Dover’ pies sound like a recipe for botulism. His disease-dealing dishes have called down on his head many a poisoned customer’s curse.
The threat was particularly acute with fish, above all in summer. In a famous letter the cleric Peter of Blois (c. 1130–1203) complains that even at the court of England’s King Henry II the fish is often served four days old: ‘Yet all this corruption and stench will not reduce the price [of the fish] one penny; for the servants couldn’t care less whether the guests fall sick and die, so that their lord’s tables are served with a multitude of dishes. We who sit at meat must fill our bellies with carrion, and become graves, so to speak, for various corpses.’
Against such perils spices were, it is true, a remedy. It is also true that at least some Europeans knew that spices could defuse the risks of old foodstuffs and extend their shelf life. In
the medical theory of the day, this preservative effect was explained in terms of the purported physical properties of spices, corruption being understood as an excess of moisture counteracted by the supposedly ‘heating’ and ‘drying’ spices; ‘fiery’ salt was believed to do much the same. The dietetic concerns of the medieval cook are suggested by the ‘Tale of the Four Offices’ by the French poet Eustache Deschamps (c.1346–c.1406), the four offices in question being the kitchen, cellar, bakery and saucery, the latter by this time a standard feature of the larger medieval household. Deschamps’s poem is framed as a mock rhetorical encounter in which each of the offices is endowed with the gift of speech so as to attack the others and proclaim its own superior worth. When it is the saucery’s turn, it claims that not only do spices smell good, they ‘expel the stench and smell of many meats’, preserving and ‘rectifying’ the meat while aiding digestion. The saucery continues:
Your flesh will go off,
When it is not cooked in sauce.
Whoever keeps meat two days,
Will find it has a big smell,
Followed by flies and vermin.
Without the ‘all-surpassing spices’, the act of eating would be a perilous business. ‘Many would be in grave peril, and at risk of death.’
Similar claims can be found with less hyperbole elsewhere. The Trésor de Evonime of 1555 contains a recipe for an essence made of ground nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and ginger, used for keeping ‘any meat, fish and all food … from all corruption with their [the spices’] good aroma and taste’. This was not always done with the consumers’ knowledge. John Garland, an English scholar resident at the University of Paris in the early thirteenth century, writes of the cooks who pass off meats ‘unwholesomely seasoned with sauces and garlic’ to ‘simple servants of scholars’ – a scam still flourishing in some of the less salubrious curry houses of the world.
These sources suggest that the traditional view of spices as instruments of concealment has at least some merit. And while medieval rhetoric is seldom without exaggeration, it lost all its force if its claims were simply invented. It is telling that when the kitchen of Deschamps’s poem responds it chooses not to dispute the substance of the saucery’s claims, but rather their seriousness.
What the kitchen does point out is that the saucery, like many a food historian since, greatly overstates the threat of decomposition. Though the problem of old meat and fish was real, it was the exception, not the rule: not all the meat and fish consumed in the Middle Ages was rotten. Indeed since most products were locally grown, it is likely that much medieval food was in fact fresher than food today. (In this connection it is worth recalling that spices went out of vogue long before refrigeration was invented.) Moreover the argument is at odds with the economic reality. The issue of decomposing ingredients was of least concern to those in a position to afford spices, particularly noble or royal households. Spices were expensive, and those with the money would generally have been able to acquire at least half-decent meat at a fraction of the cost of spices: why waste good, expensive spices on poor, cheap meat? Rotting ingredients were a more serious concern for the poor, and the poor lacked the money to buy spices in the first place.
Medieval Europeans were no more hardened to the taste of putrid meat and fish than we are. The risk from unsafe ingredients was not taken lightly, so much so that by the later Middle Ages municipal authorities across Europe were taking steps to crack down on sellers of bad meat and fish with harsh penalties; in comparison, the modern health inspector is a toothless creature. The pillory was primarily a punishment for crimes committed in the marketplace. In Oxford in 1356 the chancellor of the university was granted jurisdiction over the market, with authority to remove ‘all flesh and fish that shall be found to be putrid, unclean, vicious or otherwise unfit’. In 1366 one John Russell of Billingsgate was prosecuted for selling thirty-seven pigeons deemed ‘putrid, rotten, stinking and abominable’, for which offence he was sentenced to a spell in the pillory while the offending pigeons were burned beneath him. Offended customers, and interested passers-by, had the opportunity to rearrange his guilty features with any filth or stones at hand – hardly the sort of response one would expect from a culture that was indifferent to the wholesomeness of its dinner. Anyone willing to believe that medieval Europe lived on a diet of spiced and rancid meat has never tried to cover the taste of advanced decomposition with spices.
There were, however, other flavours that spices helped surmount. The offending taste was not of putrefaction, but of salt, as mentioned earlier. In the winter months fresh meat was at a premium for the simple reason that there was nothing to feed the animals. Medieval Europe lacked most of the high-yielding grass and root-crops that are today used to feed the herds through the winter and enable a year-round supply of fresh meat – the turnip, for instance, was still considered a garden vegetable. (The beauty of the pig, so to speak, and the main reason behind its importance to the medieval diet, was that unlike sheep or cows it could be left to fend for itself, foraging on chestnuts and waste, whether in town or country; but even for pigs there was not enough food to go around in the lean months.) Only the largest and wealthiest households had either the pasture to keep the herd alive or the storage space to put aside sufficient hay to see them through the winter.
For all those who lacked these luxuries, as soon as the frosts moved in and the pasture died off a good proportion of the herd had to be slaughtered. Traditionally, the seasonal killing was set for Martinmas, or 11 November – for which reason the Anglo-Saxon name for November was ‘Blood Month’. What could not be eaten within a few days had to be salted down, with the result that most if not all of the meat eaten from November until spring was dry, chewy and salty, requiring soaking and prolonged cooking to amelioriate the taste. As winter dragged on the tedium became, by all accounts, unbearable. In Rabelais’ second book, Pantagruel and his companions are utterly fed up with the salty repetitiveness of the winter diet, one of their number, Caralim, professing himself quite ‘knocked out of shape’ by the experience. The one good word Rabelais can find for salted meat is that it worked up a fearsome thirst, the better to throw down the wine.
At least in theory, there were ways around this problem, but in practice the food for one third of the year suffered from an unrelenting lack of variety. Most of the herbs and vegetables available in summer had yet to germinate, and many of the staples of the modem diet – tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, maize – were still undiscovered across the Atlantic. Several long-lived staples were available – onions, beans, garlic, leeks and turnips – but an already limited selection was further narrowed by cultural and class bias. Fruits were seen as ‘moist’ and ‘cool’, for which reason the sources advise they should never be eaten raw. With extremely rare exceptions carrots, kale, lettuce and cabbage are entirely absent from the surviving cookbooks, the apparent reasons being misguided medical belief and snobbery.* This is not to say that vegetables were never eaten – they were – but it is true that they were looked down on as food for the poor and animals, unfit for a nobleman. To eat meat was an expression of superior class, whereas to eat vegetables was to join the ranks of the gruel-munching churls (or monks). With nobility came land, and with land came meat, whether it was salted or fresh.
To the constraints of climate and class, religion added another. The dietary restrictions of fast days and Lent further narrowed an already limited selection. Even salted meat was off limits for the forty days of Lent, Fridays and the other fast days on the religious calendar – in all, nearly half the days of the year. At the start of the thirteenth century, the twelfth ecumenical council decreed no fewer than two hundred fast days in total, which put fish on the menu (and gave a huge boost to the fishing industry), but provided little respite from the salt. Particularly for those living inland, all the fish that could not be supplied by local rivers, lakes and ponds came heavily salted: herrings pickled in brine; codfish flattened, salted and dried hard like strips of yellowy le
ather. Lent was a far more severe form of abstinence than it is today, which helps account for the glee expressed when it ended, most famously in the gluttonous riot depicted by Brueghel in his famous Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559). Such was the monotony of the season that Eustache Deschamps could flirt with sacrilege, writing of the ‘stinking herrings, rotten sea-fish … A curse on Lent, and blessings on Carnival!’ One poor fifteenth-century scholar complained, ‘You will not believe how weary I am of fish, and how much I wish that flesh were come in again, for I have eaten nothing but salted fish this Lent.’
In the modern West, secularisation, greenhouses and cold storage have brought variety to the tedium of the Lenten fast. In the Middle Ages, for those with the means, one escape was spice. If salt and a deadening lack of variety were the constraints facing the medieval cook, spices were the great opportunity, a means of enlivening a drab and numbingly repetitive diet. What the sixteenth-century Portuguese botanist Garcia d’Orta said of ginger applied to all the major Eastern spices: ‘On our days of fish it gives us flavour.’ This the medieval cook did with a dazzling inventiveness. Far from being an age of culinary primitivism, such was the cooks’ ingenuity that the ‘lean’ dishes of Lent could be scarcely less appetising or diverse than meat dishes. Spices helped make a feast of the fast.
They were used with practically every type of meat, fish or vegetable, from the start to the end of the meal. Over and above material necessity, the delight in spices for their own sake – often-times with unsalted meat – is unmistakable. Their role was to offset and enhance contrasting flavours, making each taste better: like an espresso before bitter chocolate. The effect was perhaps not wholly dissimilar to the mingling of sweet and sour, pungent and fresh such as can still be found in dishes of Persian and Moroccan cuisine – many of which are, in fact, medieval survivors. The twelfth-century encyclopaedist Honorius of Autun claimed that people ate spices such as pepper to prepare the palate so the wine would taste sweeter afterwards.