by Jack Turner
Spices figure in practically every one of Constantine’s remedies. For impotence he advises an electuary of ginger, pepper, galangal, cinnamon and various herbs, to be taken sparingly after lunch and dinner. For a morning pep-up he recommends cloves steeped in milk. He has other spiced prescriptions to boost a flagging sex drive, a compound of galangal, cinnamon, cloves, long pepper, arugula and carrot being rated as ‘the best there is’.* He prescribes an electuary for those who suffer from impotence on account of a cold temperament; spices to strengthen the libido and augment semen, both in potency and volume. In light of his calling as a Benedictine monk, perhaps the most startling claim comes attached to a remedy for mild impotence, recommended for those in need of nothing more serious than a boost, consisting of chickpeas, ginger, cinnamon, honey and various herbs. The learned monk writes that he has tried the recipe himself, and it comes ‘highly recommended’. His spices get results: ‘I have put them to the test … they act rapidly, with a gentle action.’
Hence, with a nod and a wink, Chaucer’s condemnation of the ‘cursed monk’. Yet if Constantine’s aphrodisiacal interests may have been a professional liability for a celibate monk, they were evidently not seen as such by the readers of his books, which were regularly published into the sixteenth century. But Chaucer (or January) could equally have picked any number of authors who made similar claims for spices, for this was a belief that long preceded and long outlasted Chaucer’s day. And herein lay not the least of spices’ attractions – or, depending on one’s perspective, a good reason for avoiding them altogether.
Why this was so admits no simple answer. If there is a single, solid conclusion to be drawn from the deeply bizarre study of aphrodisiacs, it is that practically everything remotely edible has at some time or another been credited with sexually-enhancing powers – and many inedible substances besides. Cost, rarity, exoticism, texture, odour, colour, taste or shape – all seem to play a part. At different times strychnine, arsenic, phosphorus and cannabis have all enjoyed a certain vogue, though the latter is now more commonly viewed as an anaphrodisiac, and strychnine and arsenic sound unwise. Moreover, claims of sexual enhancement vary radically with the social setting. Brillat-Savarin prized fish as an aphrodisiac of rare subtlety and potency; yet to the medieval cleric – if not necessarily Constantine – it was the cool and watery safeguard of his celibacy. I have read that a society of disgruntled women of eighteenth-century London once petitioned against the craze for coffee then sweeping the country on the grounds of the allegedly enfeebling effects it had on their husbands; others have made the reverse claim. There have been thousands of vaunted aphrodisiacs. The law of probability suggests that it would be odd if spices did not appear among them from time to time.
And yet even by the standards of this pseudo-science, spices were special. In the ancient and medieval consciousness the ideas of spices and eroticism were inseparable, their purported effects colouring their reception at the table for thousands of years. That spices were sexy was an unchallenged nostrum of the medieval scientist, numbering among its advocates some of the founding fathers of the rationalist tradition in science and medicine, figures such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: a ‘truth’ less cosmic in its implications but perhaps more relevant to people’s day-to-day existence than the no less certain fact that the sun revolved around the earth.
They were, moreover, the pick of the bunch. When Jean Auvray (c.1590–c.1633) wrote a paean to the charms of the humble rustic bowl – ‘for all time a precious relic in the temple of Venus’ – he claimed its libidinous effect outgunned even the other foremost aphrodisiacs of the day, which he listed as egg yolks, pine nuts and Spanish fly, truffles, badger, rooster, hare and beaver testicles, ginger and the other Eastern spices.
While Auvray spoke in jest – mocking, in fact, the nonsense the subject inspired – similarly grand claims concerning spices, and ginger in particular, had long been the medical orthodoxy. To the Franciscan encyclopaedist Bartholomew the Englishman, writing early in the thirteenth century, the erotic effects of spices were part of the cosmic order, inextricably linked to and explicable in terms of the larger schema of medical science and astrology. The spicer was one of several libidinous professions born under the sign of Venus, along with singers, jewellers, music lovers and tailors of women’s clothing. According to a gloss attributed to the Catalan scholar Arnald de Villanova (?–1311), medieval Europe’s appetite for exotic Eastern spices was fuelled by an unholy marriage of lust and gluttony, the ‘corrupter of morals’. The spice trade was driven not so much by the palate as by the gullet and the loins.
In general, to point out the sexiness of spice was to state the obvious. Berating the corrupt and debauched priesthood of tenth-century Italy, Ratherius of Verona (c.887–974) came close to tautology when he accused them of pampering their bloated bodies, slaking their unholy lust and recharging it with ‘libido-nourishing spices’. There was however nothing inherently Christian about the association; it was merely that Christians viewed the sins of the flesh with a new and baleful intensity. The tradition and the medical reasoning that underpinned it were antique. When Pliny said of Augustus’ daughter Julia that she had made long pepper famous, he left it to his readers to do the rest. No one could fail to connect Julia to the scandal of the age, when the emperor’s daughter had been exiled on account of an overactive sex life: Caesar’s daughter, like his wife, had to be above reproach. It was moot whether she had made the spice famous, or it had been the other way around.
Once the purported aphrodisiac properties of spice are appreciated, much of the taste they aroused, and so too the corresponding distaste, becomes more intelligible. Likewise the context in which they tend to appear. Spiced wines were a common feature of the medieval wedding, and it is a reasonable surmise that there was more to the combination of nuptials, wine and spice than the desire to celebrate in style. Spiced wine or piment was, according to the hymnographer Marbodus of Rennes (1096–1123), the voluptary’s drink of choice. Alongside the cheerful bawdiness of its medieval predecessor the modern Western wedding seems almost studiously prudish, notwithstanding the embarrassing telegrams or recollections of college exploits and indiscretions. There was much unabashed mirth at, and little skirting around, the impending consummation, the success or failure of which was dutifully noted and, if appropriate, toasted. It fell to the cook as well as the priest (and guests) to promote the union of both bodies and souls. A medieval gloss on a collection of Roman recipes mentions that bulbs were recommended for ‘those who seek the mouth of Venus’, and were for this reason served at weddings with pepper and pine nuts – another traditional aphrodisiac. As late as the eighteenth century it was still the custom for English newlyweds to be served a ‘posset’ immediately before retiring to the wedding bed: a mixture of wine, milk, egg yolk, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.*
Admittedly, the force of this sort of symbolism is notoriously elusive. It would be naïve to imagine that each time a medieval spice-eater sat down to a drink of hippocras or a spicy electuary he anticipated, eagerly or otherwise, the effects below the waistline, as though popping Viagra with the ice cream. It would however be no less simplistic to assume that spices could ever be unburdened of their ancient promise of fecundity. The point is made with characteristic bluntness by François Villon, the fast-living lyric genius of fifteenth-century France, whose criminal excess repeatedly landed him in prison – he was jailed for killing a priest – and whose poetic abilities got him out again. His Testament is written as a bequest in which, bidding farewell to Paris, friends and life, Villon leaves his worldly goods to friends and enemies. To the ‘woodworker’, the torturer who once interrogated him in the Châtelet, he leaves some ginger to perk up his love life:
I give the woodworker
One hundred stems, heads and tails
Of Saracen ginger,
Not for coupling his boxes
But getting arses under the sheets,
Stitching sausages
to thighs,
So the milk surges up to the tits
And the blood races down to the balls.
The graphically black humour is typical of Villon: with a little spice even a torturer might lighten up a little.
It was equally self-evident that for those whose erotic problem was not a lack but a surfeit of libido spices should be avoided at all costs. Clerics in particular were well advised to steer clear – a theme we shall return to. In the Registro di cucina of Johannes Bockenhym, cook to the early-fifteenth-century Pope Martin V, there is a recipe for a mild and cooling omelette, recommended specifically for the lustful members of society and as such a conspicuous exception to the otherwise spicy tenor of the work: ‘Take beaten eggs and oranges, mix the juice of the oranges with eggs and sugar. Heat some oil in a pan and fry the egg and orange mix … it will serve for scoundrels, parasites, flatterers and whores.’
For purely professional reasons it seems doubtful whether his intended audience would be so inclined. So tempting were spices that not all those who should have known better were able to resist, and clerics in particular spun off many a cautionary tale of those whose chastity was undermined by a spicy diet: the worldly abbot diverted from his dedications by his rich diet, his meditations ‘more of sauces than of Solomon’; or the monk who, succumbing to his appetite, was undone by the flames of impure lust. One such in its later permutations is the legend of Pope Joan, reputed to have occupied the fisherman’s throne at some stage in the late ninth century. The earliest references to Joan by Marianus Scotus (c.1028–1086) and Sigebert of Gembloux (?–1112) are sparse, and almost certainly fantastical. Nevertheless in the late Middle Ages the legend proved hugely popular, and despite papal denunciations was embroidered by dozens of authors. Recently there has been revival of interest among the credulous, some of whom are willing to see Joan as a real person (though all years of the ninth century are in fact accounted for by male popes), and even reincarnated as a proto-feminist.
Joan almost certainly did not exist, however, the real interest of the tale is the telling. And in this respect Joan can claim to be a proto-feminist martyr, albeit a fictional one. For in the poetic versions of her life which crop up from the twelfth to the fifteenth century she is generally cast as impressively learned but ultimately, like all women, weak, lustful and prone to overindulgence. The later writers concur that these feminine traits, and in particular her weakness for spicy foods, proved her undoing. Her tables were always laden with richly spiced dishes and flavours of the sensual Orient, and one spiced meal too many and this weak female, overcome with desire, fell into the arms of her (presumably startled) attendant. After nine months – in which time her increasingly ample girth went unnoticed among the well-fed cardinals – out popped a bouncing baby boy in the middle of a papal procession, whereupon the enraged populace turned on the impostor and stoned her to death. To this day papal processions avoid the alleyway in which this unsavoury incident is said to have occurred, between San Vicente and the Colosseum, still lugubriously signposted as Vicolo della Papessa.
The Spice of Love
Hot Stuff
To make a Tarte that is a courage* to a man or woman: Take two Quinces and two or three Burre rootes, and a potaton, and pare your Potaton and scrape your rootes and put them in a quart of wine, and let them boyle till they be tender, and put in an ounce of Dates, and when they be boyled tender, draw them through a strainer, Wine and all, and then putte in the yolkes of eight Egges, and the brains of three or four Cock Sparrowes and strain them into the other and a little Rose water and mix them all with Suger, Cynamon and Ginger, and Cloves and Mace, and put in a little Swete butter …
Thomas Dawson, The good huswifes iewell, 1610
Essentially, spices’ erogenous reputation rested on the medical precepts just described. The tenets of humoral theory applied to the sexual as to any other branch of medicine. Like any other ailment, erotic dysfunction was seen as symptomatic of an imbalance: one or more of the humours was out of kilter. Broadly, a loss of erotic interest or capacity was the result of excessive coldness. And as impotence was frigid, so lust was hot – a thousand pop songs are the heirs to an ancient tradition. Spices, as we have seen, were powerfully heating medicines – and, ergo, aphrodisiacs.
Sex drive, however, was only part of the equation. Fertility on the other hand was generally regarded as a function of both heat and moisture. It followed that a hot substance increased libido, while perhaps reducing fertility. Since fecund sperm and womb alike were classed as hot and wet, it was simple logic that the best aphrodisiacs were both warm and moist. Hot and dry translated into potent but possibly infertile. A diagram scribbled by a thirteenth-century copyist in Hereford framed the issue in stark terms: the sanguine members of the monastery (hot and wet) were the most fertile and potent, whereas the choleric (hot and dry) had a still higher level of desire, but less capability. His fellow melancholics might as well abandon any thoughts of love. Given that they were monks, this was probably just as well.
To summarise the tenets of sexual medicine as they applied at the more lustful end of the spectrum: a warm and wet temperament meant lots of sperm and a healthy level of desire; warm and dry translated into less but more ‘fiery’ sperm, and more lascivious still.
Such, at least, were the outlines. Among the foremost heating drugs, spices were an obvious choice for the first part of the equation.* They were near or at the head of a very short shortlist of erotic medicines, since substances believed to impart such potent bodily heat were strictly limited in number. From ancient Greece to early-modern Europe, the same foods were cited time after time, the ideal hot-wet combination for both potency and fertility being particularly rare. To Constantine the African, the top hot-and-wet sperm and libido-boosters were pepper, pine nuts, egg yolks, warm meats, brain and arugula.† Chickpea was another perennial favourite. Centuries after Constantine the French writers Nicolas Venette (1633–1698) and Paul Lacroix (1806–1884) were advising much the same formulae. Lacroix advised a nightcap of ginger, pepper, rocket, Spanish fly, sugar and skinks as a remedy for impotence.
Because of ginger’s rare hot-wet classification, it was the most sought after of all the spices. There may be some substance to this reputation, for it is indeed true that ginger boosts circulation, and in this sense the spice may in a minor way stimulate erectile tissue. In her History of Food (1992) Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat cites the grisly case of Portuguese slavers in West Africa who fed ginger to the ‘studs’ on their slave farms so as to increase their productivity. The same author suggests that it is perhaps on account of ginger’s reputed aphrodisiac properties that the spice appears in the Islamic vision of paradise. According to Surah 76 of the Koran, beautiful houris serve the virtuous martyrs ‘cups brimming with ginger-flavoured wine from the fount of Selsabil’.
Whereas ginger was regarded as a hot and wet all-rounder, boosting both sperm and desire, the other spices were generally classed as drier, and accordingly more libidinous but less productive of sperm. One popular choice was the clove, situated midway along the spectrum of dryness, and generally classified as less fiercely heating than pepper or cinnamon, for which reason it was commonly recommended to ‘favour the seed’*of male and female alike. A Middle English guide to women’s health suggests three ounces of powdered cloves with four egg yolks will make a woman conceive ‘if God wills’, whether it is eaten or applied to the stomach. Pepper on the other hand was regarded as extremely hot and dry and therefore powerfully productive of erotic performance, but liable to ‘dry up’ the sperm. The seventeenth-century Nicolas Vennette summarised its effect: ‘Pepper, by dissipating the superfluous humours … warms and dries the genital parts, which are naturally cold and humid, and thus procuring a uniform temperament it augments their power, which is in turn the cause of a more advantageous coction.’
While the variations on these themes were limited only by the imagination, perhaps the best sense of their force is in the prolific warnings agains
t overdoing it. The medical writers seldom fail to warn darkly of the effects of too much sex and spice. Too many spices could induce drying out, derangement and even death. Something along these lines occurs in the twelfth-century romance Cligès, by Chrétien de Troyes. After the heroine is forced into a marriage against her will, her nurse Thessala prepares a spiced potion that so overheats her unwanted husband’s libido and addles his brain that he suffers from erotic delusions. On his wedding night he is convinced he has consummated his marriage, when in fact he has done nothing of the sort: ‘He is satisfied by a vain semblance, embracing, kissing and fondling nothing at all … All his pains are of no avail … he thinks that the fortress is won.’ Her virtue unsullied, the heroine is free to indulge in her hopeless love.
For a young or healthy man or woman, then, spices were so potent as to pose a health risk. For this reason Hildegard of Bingen said of ginger that it was harmful if eaten by a man in good health and weight – an individual in whom, in other words, the humours were in balance, ‘because it makes him ignorant, stupid, tepid and lascivious’. One version of the Salernitan Guide to Health claims that unless the desire for lust-enhancing spices is held in check by the healthy precepts of the doctors, the human inclination to lechery and luxury will lead to permanent ill health as our systems overheat and slowly desiccate themselves to death.*