Spice: The History of a Temptation
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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 lookalikes, 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.
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 foreign 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.
In the case of the cinnamon Columbus’s capricious labelling would not stick for nearly so long. A witness reported that the twigs did indeed look a little like cinnamon, but tasted more pungent than pepper, and smelled like cloves – or was it ginger? Equally perplexing, and most uncharacteristically for a spice, his sample had gone off during the voyage back – the unhappy consequence, as Columbus explained, of his poor harvesting technique. But in due course time would reveal a simpler solution to the mystery, and one that the sceptics perhaps guessed even then: that his ‘cinnamon’ was in fact nothing any spicier than the bark of an unidentified Caribbean tree. Like the Indies he imagined he had visited, his cinnamon was the fruit of faulty assumptions and an overcharged imagination. For all his pains Columbus had ended up half a planet from the real thing.
In April 1493, his wayward botany amounted to a failure either too bizarre or, for those whose money was at stake, too deflating to contemplate. As every schoolchild knows (or should know), when Columbus bumped into America he was looking not for a new world, but an old one. What exactly he was looking for is clearly delineated in the agreement he concluded before the voyage with the Spanish monarchs, promising the successful discoverer one tenth of all gold, silver, pearls, gems and spices. His posthumous fame notwithstanding, in this respect Columbus was only a qualified success. For in what in due course turned out to be the new world of the Americas, the conquistadors found none of the spices they sought, although in the temples and citadels of the Aztecs and Incas they stumbled across riches that out-glittered even the gilded fantasies they brought with them from Castile. Ever since, it is with the glitter of gold and silver, not the aroma of spices, that the conquistadors have been associated. But when Columbus raised anchor, and when he delivered his report in Barcelona, seated in the place of honour alongside the Catholic monarchs, ennobled and enriched for his pains, the perspective was different. The unimagined and unimaginable consequences of his voyage have clouded later views of causes, privileging half of the equation. Columbus sought not only an El Dorado but also, in some respects more beguiling still, El Picante too.
Why this was so may be answered with varying degrees of complexity. The simplest answer, but also the shallowest, is that spices were immensely valuable, and they were valuable because they were immensely elusive and difficult to obtain. From their harvest in distant tropical lands, spices arrived in the markets of Venice, Bruges and London by an obscure tangle of routes winding halfway across the planet, serviced by distant peoples and places that seemed more myth than reality. That this was so was as much a function of the geography as the geopolitics of the day. Where the spices grew – from the jungles and backwaters of Malabar to the volcanic Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago – Christians feared to tread. Astride the spice routes lay the great belt of Islam, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. As spice was a Christian fixation so it was a Muslim milch cow. At every stage of the long journey from East to West a different middleman ratcheted up the price, with the result that by the time they arrived in Europe the value of the spices was astronomical, inflated in some cases to the order of 1,000 per cent – sometimes more. With cost came an aura of glamour, danger, distance and profit. Seen through European eyes, the horizon clouded by ignorance and vivified by imagination, the far-off places where the spices grew were the lands where money grew on trees.
Yet if the image was beguiling, the obstacles that stood in the way seemed insuperable – prior, that is, to Columbus. His solution was as elegant as it was radical. It was not inevitable, said Columbus, that Eastern goods should arrive from the east; nor that Westerners should pay such a premium, thereby lining the pockets of the infidel. The world being round, was it not simple logic that spices might also come around the other way: round the back of the globe, from the west? (Contrary to one hoary myth, hardly any informed medieval Europeans were flat-earthers. That the earth was spherical had been accepted by all informed opinion since ancient times.) All one had to do to reach the Indies and their riches was head west from Spain: the ancients had said so, but thus far no one had put the idea to the test. With a little endeavour spices would be as common as cabbages and herrings. Columbus, in not so many words, proposed to sail west to the East, to Cathay and the Indies of legend; or, in the words of one of his intellectual mentors, the Florentine humanist Toscanelli, ‘ad loca aromatum’, to the places where the spices are.
It was an idea of hallucinatory promise – not for the prospect of discovery for discovery’s sake, nor even because the idea was particularly original, but because of the fiscal rewards. In the event of success Columbus’s scheme would deliver his Spanish patrons a limitless source of wealth. For the small outlay required to fit out the expedition – a sum roughly equivalent to the annual income of a middling Castilian nobleman – Columbus proposed to drag the Indies out of the realms of fable and into the mainstream of Spanish trade and conquest. Though the story of his voyage has been endlessly mythologised, buried under a mountain of romantic speculation and scholarly scrutiny, in effect his success depended on convincing a coalition of investors and then the crown that his relatively inexpensive plan merited the gamble. There were experts who disagreed, but in fifteenth-century Spain no more than in a modern democracy did expert opinion or the weight of evidence always carry the day. With a powerful syndicate and capital on his side, those who labelled Columbus crack-brained no longer mattered. His voyage was possible because he got the backing and the cash, and he got the cash because of the promise of more – vastly more – to come back in return. Today he would be labelled a venture capitalist of a particularly bold and inventive hue.
Hence, very briefly summarised, the scene in the Saló. And if the returning discoverer’s choice of exhibits made a good deal more sense then than now, so too, in his defence, did his mistakes. Very few Europeans had been to the real Indies, and fewer still had looked on the spice plants in their natural state. Reports of spices and Indies alike arrived rarely, often heavily fictionalised, a situation that left the fertile medieval imagination free to run riot, and few had imaginations more fertile than did Columbus. A month after first sighting land he had seen enough for his own satisfaction, writing in his log that ‘without doubt there is in these lands a very great quantity of gold … and also there are stones, and there are precious pearls and infinite spicery’ – none of which he had thus far laid eyes on. Two days later, as his small flotilla picked its way through the coves and reefs of the Caribbean, he discerned hidden treasures beyond the palms and sandy beaches, convinced that: ‘These islands are those innumerable ones that in the maps of the world are put at the eastern end. And he [Columbus] said that he believed that there were great riches and precious stones and spices in them …’ The evidence was lacking but his mind was made up. He had set out to find spices, and find spices he would. Desire was father to discovery.
And yet for all Columbus’s confidence there was, undeniably, something odd about his ‘spices’ – not least the fact that they did not taste, smell or look like spices such as he and his patrons knew from their daily table. But Columbus would not be disillusioned. Indeed on the subject of spice the logs and letters of his voyages read like a study in Quixotic delusion. His imagination was more than equal to the challenge of an intruding reality, far outstripping the evidence. Within a week of his arrival in the Caribbean he had the excuse to dispel any doubts: a European, unfamiliar with the plants in their natural habitat, he was bound to make the odd mistake: ‘But I do not recognise them and this causes me much sorrow.’ It was an escape clause that would stay obstinately open for the rest of his life.
So Columbus kept looking, and he kept finding. He was far from alone in his wishful thinking. His men claimed to have found aloes and rhubarb – the latter at the time imported from China and the Himalayas – although, having forgotten their shovel, they were unable to produce a sample. Rumours flitted among the excited explorers; sightings abounded. Someone found some mastic trees.* The boatswain of the Niña came forward for the promised reward, notwithstanding the fact that he had unfortunately dropped the sample (a genuine mistake or a cynical manipulation of his commander’s optimism?). Search teams were dispatched, returning with yet more samples and the caveat, by now customary, that spices must be harvested in the appropriate season. Everywhere they were bedevilled – and shielded – by their innocence. On 6 December 1492, lying off Cuba, Columbus wrote of the island’s beautiful harbours and groves, ‘all laden with fruit which the Admiral [Columbus] believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognise them …’
What Columbus could see for certain, on the other hand, was the potential of great things to come. If the first samples of ‘Indian’ spices left much to be desired, his evidence and testimony were at least enough to convince the crown that he was onto something.* Preparations for a second and much larger expedition were immediately put in place, a fleet of at least seventeen ships and several hundred men sailing from Cádiz on 25 September 1493, carrying with them the same freight of unfounded optimism. In the Caribbean forests Diego Alvarez Chanca, the expedition’s physician, found evidence of fabulous wealth tantalisingly out of reach: ‘There are trees which, I think, bear nutmegs, but they were so far without fruit, and I say that I think this because the taste and the smell of the bark is like nutmegs. I saw a root of ginger which an Indian carried hanging around his neck. There are also aloes, although not of the kind which has hitherto been seen in our parts, but there is no doubt that they are of the species of aloes which doctors use.’ As he shared his commander’s illusions, so Chanca also shared his excuses: ‘There is also found a kind of cinnamon; it is true that it is not so fine as that which is known at home. We do not know whether by chance this is due to lack of knowledge of the time to gather it when it should be gathered, or whether by chance the land does not produce better.’