Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  Inverting the eucharistic imagery of a simple, God-given meal of the bread and blood of Christ, the rites of the gourmand’s dinner were an anti-baptism, a mock martyrdom.

  Like many a scene of clerical debauch, Alain’s sodomitical spice-quaffers are best taken with a pinch of salt; understatement was not a weapon in his or any other medieval polemicist’s armoury. Indeed the very forcefulness of the complaint is arguably more suggestive of high standards than of hypocrisy, of cultural rather than material realities. But what, then, are we to make of that reality? Were Alain and Bernard at least justified in suggesting that this prohibition of spice was largely ignored?

  The answer to this question varies with time and place. Monastic discipline (and wealth) differed from one place to another, and spice consumption with it. Certainly, spices were seldom if ever eaten with such gay abandon as Alain and Bernard were willing to suggest; they were never quite as innocent or acceptable as the critics would have us believe. Even at Cluny their consumption was hedged with conditions. A generation before Bernard’s day, Ulrich of Cluny took evident pride in the fact that his monastery never lacked an ample supply of pepper, ginger, cinnamon ‘and other healthy roots’, which he pointed out were primarily for the infirmary. On food pepper was permitted only once a year, on the last Sunday before Lent, when it could be sprinkled on eggs. A peppered wine was occasionally served after mass. On the rare occasions when spiced dishes were allowed they were on no condition to be cooked by the monks but by the servants, safely sequestered in a separate kitchen. Otherwise this was a regime of vegetables, bread and fish.

  The interpretation and the enforcement of such rules varied with the times. In Bernard’s day, Cluny’s former rigour was relaxed under the abbacy of the worldly nobleman Pons de Melgueil, abbot from 1109 to 1122, although before too long Bernard had what was undoubtedly the supreme satisfaction of seeing even mighty Cluny make an about-face, in large part due to the sheer force of his own example. Two years after Bernard fired off his letter Pons was deposed by the pope. After an unsuccessful attempt to force his way back, he was succeeded as abbot by Peter the Venerable (abbot from 1122 to 1156). The new abbot, whose rule was extremely unpopular at the start, promptly banned the monks from drinking spiced wine altogether, his one concession to luxury the feast of Maundy Thursday, when a little honey could be added to the wine, minus the spices. (It must have been doubly gratifying for Bernard that besides tightening up on Cluny’s diet Peter wasted no time in sending his runaway nephew back to his rightful home. Bernard proved as good as his promise of forgiveness, and Robert ultimately showed himself sufficiently Cistercian – and presumably sufficiently spice-averse – for Bernard in due course to promote him to abbot of a monastery of his own, the house of Maison Dieu in the diocese of Dijon.) Under Peter’s regime ‘royal spices’ were forbidden in terms scarcely less severe than Bernard’s: ‘By what authority is a foreign or oriental spice, sought with such great effort, bought at such great expense, afterwards to be mixed in the wine of poor and abstinent monks?’

  But if there were victories over spices, clerics of Bernard’s ilk were inclined to see them as isolated battles in a larger war. The devil was a tireless worker, and the need for vigilance was constant – even in the shelter of the cloister there were traps and snares, and few places were so fraught with danger as refectory, kitchen and cellar. If the spirit of the rules was clear, all but the hardiest of souls could find qualifications, if not exceptions, in the letter. Even in the sternest order, the consumption of spice was permitted on special occasions. Some monasteries allowed spices in case of medical necessity, the earliest explicit ruling perhaps that of St Ansegisus (c.AD 770–833/4), abbot of Fontanelle. And yet even now there was a risk that in throwing spices out the front door they might creep in at the back. Since a spell in the infirmary meant meat and spice, the sickbed was not necessarily such a bad place to be. Sickness could be feigned, and it seems that it commonly was. The twelfth-century cleric Peter of Blois poured scorn on those hypochondriac monks who, affecting to be ill, and weary of the unrelenting diet of fish and vegetables, took electuaries and refused the sauce unless it was made with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg: ‘Such clerics are disciples more of Epicurus than of Christ.’

  In terms of the medical theory of the day, these cassocked Epicureans were justified in fretting over the effects of their cold diet, although their worries tended to contravene their ethos of abstinence. To Bernard’s fellow mystic and contemporary Hugh of Saint-Victor, not only spices but even home-grown garlic and cumin were off-limits. He lambasted those pernickety monks who insisted on their dinner being just so, picking out various dishes and seasonings on the grounds of their suitability for their constitutions – not too hot, not too cold; here a little cumin, there a little spiced salt and a little remedial pepper, ‘as fastidious as pregnant women’. To Hugh all such bodily attentiveness was synonymous with the deadly sin of gluttony, which he identified with bakers’ fancy breads, sauces made with the cook’s art, the meat of quadrupeds and birds, sea and river fish, pepper, garlic, cumin and seasonings in general.

  For the hardliners to use spices even in a medical emergency was to be overly attentive to the flesh. The Ancrene Riwle, a thirteenth-century book of advice for an aspiring anchoress, takes the stern line that ‘If a man is ill and he has something to hand which will do him good, he may, of course, make use of it, but to be so solicitous about such things, especially if one is a religious, is not pleasing to God.’ Health of the soul came before health of the body. This grim little injunction was illustrated with the story of three holy men, one of whom

  used to resort to hot spices on account of his cold stomach, and he was more delicate in matters of food and drink than the other two, even though they were all ill. They paid no attention to what they ate or drank, as to whether it was wholesome or unwholesome, but always accepted whatever God provided for them, without examining it. They did not attach great importance to ginger, or zedoary, or gillyflower cloves. One day, when the three of them had fallen asleep and the first of whom I spoke was lying between these two, the Queen of Heaven came to them accompanied by two maidens, one of whom appeared to be carrying an electuary, the other a small spoon of gold. Our Lady took some of the substance from the electuary with the spoon and put it into the mouth of the first, and the maiden went on to the middle one. ‘No,’ said Our Lady, ‘he is his own physician. Pass on to the third.’

  That the monasteries were at the forefront of medical studies is a strangely enduring myth, since they were in fact more inclined to frown on anything that smacked of bodily indulgence: ‘You are a monk, not a physician,’ as St Bernard phrased it. ‘Though a man has severed himself from pleasures, what is the profit if every day he spends his energies and thoughts investigating differences of constitutions, or in devising new ways to cook food?’ It was better to be ill than to eat spices and get better.

  If the excuse of sickness opened a chink in the monks’ defences, whether feigned, feared or real, feast days opened another. Some of the spiciest events in the monastic calendar were funeral banquets, such as those decreed by Burchard the Venerable, Count of Vendôme (958–1007), who had churches built posthumously and masses sung for his soul, followed by banquets of rich and precious spices for the monks charged with the obsequies. When Suger of Saint-Denis lay dying of malaria in 1137 he summoned the monks and decreed two pittances *of spiced wine, plus wheat and wine for the poor. Having summarised the historically Spartan diet of the monks, Udalric of Cluny proceeds to tell of the apocrisarius, the treasure-keeper, charged with supplying the monks ‘if he can lay his hands on the ingredients, with well-peppered fishes, and piment’. Between the austerities of the rules and the periodic indulgence of the feast it is very hard to extract a sense of daily realities, but that some spices were eaten at least occasionally is beyond dispute.

  Elsewhere across the monastic world, the impression is much the same, of a muddy line between theory and practice. Even
as Bernard thundered about decadence and corruption in the kitchen, his contemporary the abbot Rudolph wrote unblushingly and in great detail of the spicy diet of the monks of St Trudo in Brabant. Having commented on the laxity of some monasteries, the lamentable corruption of monastic life, he writes, with no sense of contradiction, of the feast days of saints Remy and Trudo, when the menu was a series of variations on the theme of fish and pepper. For the first course there was a dish of fish marinated with pepper and vinegar, topped with eggs and more pepper. This was followed by poached salmon with pepper, then more salmon, grilled and generously peppered. To finish there were various other fish and peppered caviar.

  But such feasts were special occasions. More startling is the reference in a slightly earlier eleventh-century work by the Blessed William, abbot of the Benedictine foundation of Hirsau in Württemberg, celebrated in his day for the exceptionally strict discipline he imported from Cluny. Although his was a monastery of perpetual silence (an exception was made for confessions), and with particularly harsh punishments for any infractions, the monks were apparently allowed spices when they so desired (although, as at Cluny, they were cooked not by the friars but by their servants, and eaten under supervision in the refectory). The monks used a complex sign language: ‘For the sign of ginger, use the same sign as set out above for herbs, but with your right hand clenched in a fist, raised up high, moving it round in a circle around your jaw; keep moving it around your jaw; then stick out your tongue, and lick your index finger.’

  If a conclusion is to be drawn it is that warnings against spices were reiterated so frequently because they needed to be. Over the longer term, the monastic kitchen shows every sign of having succumbed to one of the constants of culinary history: the effort, on slender resources, to turn a fast into a feast.

  The result, in short, was the return of spices to the monastic menu. Such was cooks’ ingenuity that many dishes of the fast days could scarcely be described as penitential. As mitigation for the hardship of the season, some monasteries used spices particularly in Lent. Even in Bernard’s day, his contemporary Peter Abelard was scandalised by this monkish hypocrisy. In one of his letters to Héloise he noted that spices made the food of Lent better, not worse: ‘What’s the point in abstaining from meat if we then proceed to stuff ourselves with other luxuries? … we buy various fishes at huge expense … we mingle the flavours of pepper and other spices, bloated with wine, we wash it down with chalices of liqueurs and phials of spiced wine – and the excuse for all this is abstinence from mere meat!’

  Others said much the same even of feast days, when, so the critics complained, a brief relaxation of the rules was taken as carte blanche for a binge. When the prior of the Great Church of Canterbury served the visiting Giraldus Cambrensis a banquet on the day of Holy Trinity in 1179, his guest found the meal totally at odds with monastic protestations, the festal circumstances notwithstanding. The table was duly meat-free, but so burdened with dozens of different fish and spiced delicacies in dozens of ‘sumptuous and superfluous dishes’ as to render any abstinence purely nominal: ‘So many types of fish, grilled and roasted, stuffed and fried, so many dishes prepared with eggs and pepper, all the arts of the kitchen, so many flavours and sauces prepared by this art, in order to incite gluttony and whet the appetite.’ All this was washed down with spiced wines. The vegetables, he adds, were hardly touched.

  The lesson to be drawn is one, ironically, close to the hardliner’s heart: that in the battle between spirit and flesh the flesh was never quite defeated. Doubtless many clerics were as good as their word, but in the longer run (and perhaps from the start), the hardliners’ was a losing cause. With time exceptions became the norm. At a monastery at Worcester in 1300, monks were given an allowance of eighteen pence with which to buy themselves spices ‘as they know to be suitable to their own bodily complexions’. (Not only a contravention of dietary rules, this was also an infringement of the prohibition of private property.) And while the accounts of some monasteries record sparse spice expenditure, by the late Middle Ages others rivalled the lusty appetites of the nobility. In 1418 the thirty-five monks of Abingdon abbey spent £53.15s. on spices, a sum equivalent to the annual income of a middling country vicar.

  To an extent, this laxity was symptomatic of a broader relaxation of monastic norms – or, as Luther and company would have had it, of their corruption. With time the intensity of Christian worries over diet faded. A French monk at the abbey of Ligugé argued that rules developed for Eastern ascetics did not apply with the same force to a Frenchman, because, well, the French are different: ‘That a Cyrenean can bear to eat nothing but cooked herbs and barley bread is because nature and necessity have accustomed him to eating nothing.’ What was true of an Eastern eremite did not suit French conditions: ‘We Gauls, we cannot live like angels.’

  The higher up the ladder of ecclesiastical authority one looks, the spicier it gets. Many feasts put on by prelates or monasteries differed little if at all from secular occasions. At the lavish installation feast of John Morton, bishop of Ely, in 1478, guests were treated to elaborate mixtures of meat, eggs, fruit and spices in a sort of aspic jelly. But for the scriptural themes of the elaborate, allusive constructions of sugars and spices to puzzle and delight the guests, this could have been a nobleman’s debauch. But even Morton’s bender was small beer alongside the installation-day feast for Ralf de Born, proclaimed prior of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, in 1309. The six thousand guests ate their way through a hundred hogs, thirty ox carcasses, a thousand geese, five hundred capons and hens, 473 pullets, two hundred piglets, twenty-four swans, six hundred rabbits and 9,600 eggs. Of a total expenditure of £287.8s., over £28 was spent on unnamed spices, plus another £1.14s. on pepper and saffron. Except for the £30 spent on two hundred ‘muttons’, spices constituted the largest single item.

  The clerical propensity for spice went all the way to the top. A Vatican ceremonial drawn up by Pope Gregory X shortly after 1274 provides for copious wines and spices for the pope and his retinue after the Christmas Eve mass. By the following century, the feast of St Stephen was celebrated with a magnificent meal followed by a collation, or evening assembly, at which pepper was served. Standards may have slipped but spices still retained their capacity to cause offence. The Legend of Celestine and Susanna, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1425, features a pontiff summoned down to the gates of hell where he is accosted by a jubilant personification of Gluttony: ‘I fed you with rich meats and spicery, spiced wines … your soul is mine!’ Duly accused and convicted, the pope is dragged off to join the legions of the damned.

  For at no point was there a downgrading or dismissal of spices’ perils. Spices remained dangerous, laced with contamination, even as their consumption became more common. A reform of Cluny undertaken by Pope Martin V in 1428 reveals just how far dietary standards had evolved – or fallen – in the three centuries since Bernard’s day. Outside the fast periods of Advent and Lent the monks were now allowed spice and meat with few qualms, based upon the historically dubious claim that a ‘heating meal’ of meat, eggs, cheese and spices was ‘approved according to the ancient custom of the Apostolic Seat’. The Cluniacs’ excuse for such luxury was that there was apparently not enough water around to supply all the fish necessary for such a large community (although Cluny had apparently coped in the time of Peter the Venerable). Seasonings and meat would nourish the body and obviate tedium – provided, of course, they were not taken in excess. The feast of Easter Sunday must have been a particularly eye-watering meal, when the monks were allowed bacon, cheese, four fried eggs and half a pound of pepper.

  Even now, however, a sense of the need to regulate spices was retained; the framers of the reform saw fit to stipulate when and how they could be eaten. They were still sufficiently volatile material to warrant inclusion in a papal directive, with a due nod to the laxity of the preceding regime. It was not that spices were suddenly safe; what had changed was the interpretation of the
limits, the sense of what was acceptable. As late as 1690, the Benedictine monk and scholar Edmond Martène had no doubt that the dietary stipulations of the Benedictine Rule amounted to a blanket ban on condiments of any sort.

  Which leaves us, once more, looking over an uneasy divide between theory and practice. But to point out the existence of this divide is not to say that all who flouted or forgot the rules were backsliders or hypocrites. One of the more humane theologians to touch on the question was Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1170–c.1240), author of The Dialogue of Miracles, one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. In his discussion of temptation, Caesarius relates an anecdote by a certain abbot Gisilbert, who permitted his monks the daily consumption of three grains of spice (peppercorns, presumably). Challenged by a fellow religious, Gisilbert explained that improving the flavour of humble fare with a small amount of spices made the monks eat all their vegetables, lentils and peas, thereby avoiding ill health and malnutrition: ‘When a monk avoids his peas or lentils out of melancholy or humours, he commits a greater sin than when he eats too much.’ For if their food was intolerable they would not eat it, and a malnourished monk would weaken and so be unable to fulfil his duties. Moderation in all things was best.

  Prohibition, on the other hand, was not only ineffective but counterproductive. According to Caesarius, temptation ‘arises from the incitements of the flesh and the devil or both, especially after a prohibition’: ‘It is very deplorable that human nature should always strive after that which is forbidden.’ So far as Caesarius was concerned, far from making a dent in spices’ ancient reputation for magical and erotic potency, clerical hostility burnished it. In an age with its own, decidedly mixed, experience of prohibition it would be hard to disagree. This was surely the undertow of the great torrents of condemnation clerics poured out on spices since the time of the Church Fathers. That is not to label as naïve all the banners and damners, St Bernard and company – who after all knew a thing or two about restraint – but rather to point out a paradox, the eternal quandary of the prohibitionist. To forbid something was to inflate its value and vivify its attractions, and in this sense those who would have had spices expunged from the medieval diet could not help but subvert their own intent. And maybe this was the critics’ most lasting legacy: of all the many attractions of spice, real and imagined, perhaps none was so tempting as the allure of forbidden fruit.