The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  The perfume of that time has dissipated over the centuries, but not entirely. At the edge of the Nieuwemarkt, you can still detect a hint of spice in the air in an old house that leans gently toward the Kloveniersburgwal Canal, as if tired out by standing here so long. The sign identifies the building as the Apotheek Jacob Hooy, which claims to be the city’s oldest pharmacy, founded in 1743. The interior sure looks it. Ancient yellowed drawers are inscribed in florid Latin script—Piper nigrum, Piper alum—to indicate their contents of black and white pepper. Chocolate brown barrels line the shelves like the brown cheeses at the Kaaskamer, though these, unlike the spiced cheeses, are just for show. All the same, you know you’re in the twenty-first century quickly enough when you see the display of herbal pastilles on the counter promoting stress reduction.

  Yet despite the shelves of organic bug repellent and world music CDs, the store is still primarily an apothecary, and the pharmacist’s job is still to consult with his customers on just which herbal cocktail will best combat their flatulence or common cold. Ginger and mace are certainly still for sale here, but the attendant tells me that spices are now used mostly in Ayurvedic medicine, not the traditional European medicine that is Jacob Hooy’s stock-in-trade. The Dutch are much more eclectic than Americans in their approach to healing. So-called “natural” remedies exist side by side with more “conventional” allopathic practices, while homeopathy is also commonplace. Ayurvedic medicine, however, is relegated to a fringe of medical connoisseurs. This is somewhat surprising, since a system much like it dominated European medical practice for more than a thousand years. It was in this, the so-called Galenic system, that spices used to hold pride of place. When the pharmacy first opened its doors, the chamomile and mint sold at Jacob Hooy would have been considered good enough for chambermaids and fishwives, but for the more cultured classes, only the likes of expensive nutmeg and cloves would do.

  In 1600, the Galenic system was the conventional medicine of the day and, after more than a millennium of elaboration, consisted of a vast and esoteric body of knowledge. It had all started with the writings of a second-century Greek physician named Galen, who began his career employed in the ER of a gladiator school in Asia Minor and worked his way up to attending to Caesars. By the early Middle Ages, his writings had been preserved mostly in Arabic compilations, which were, in turn, translated into Latin. In the Renaissance, the Galenic school got a new shot in the arm when classics scholars unearthed Galenic writings in the original Greek. Leading the way was the Venetian university town of Padua, with its links to Greece (recall that Greek exiles flooded into Venice after the fall of Constantinople), but other centers of learning, including the University of Leuven, in the southern Netherlands, were part of the trend.

  Ironically, it was university-trained academics, not practicing physicians such as Galen, who now compiled the medical manuals. No wonder that the attraction of the Galenic system, particularly in its later incarnations, was more metaphysical than practical. (This may, in part, explain the appeal of esoteric spices brought from mystical lands.) Because the scheme was not dependent on empirical data that might cloud its clarity, the medical theoreticians could build a model of transparent symmetry and logic.

  The system that underlay Galenic theory could be compared to the workings of a compass, where anything can be mapped according to its four points. North, south, east, and west correspond to four elements (water, fire, air, and earth); which, in turn, match up to four bodily humors (phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile); which are associated with the four seasons; which reflect the four ages of man, the four periods of the day, the four colors, the four flavors, even the four Evangelists…Anyway, you get the idea. By definition, any and all phenomena could be plugged into this paradigm. So, a fish would naturally be cold and wet because of its watery habitat, a spice hot and dry because of its biting flavor and torrid growing conditions. As far as people went, the temperament of any given individual was determined by his or her particular mixture of humors. We occasionally still use these terms when we describe a person as phlegmatic, bilious, or sanguine, though psychiatrists nowadays generally don’t treat depression by prescribing mace to purge their patients of black bile.

  In the old days, when a physician was called in, his first job was to diagnose his patient’s temperament so he could calibrate the diet. Most experts believed that everyone’s humors were a little out of whack and needed correction, which, in all but the most extreme cases, could be done by fiddling with the nutritional regimen. So someone with a phlegmatic (that is, cold and moist) “distemperature” could be corrected by prescribing a hot and dry diet that might include an abundance of heating nutrients such as cinnamon or mustard. The spices would increase the person’s “choleric” humors, his temperament would return to balance, and all would be well. Incidentally, the concept of “diet” was seen rather broadly. Depending on the authority, it might include not only food and drink but also air quality, exercise, sexual activity, emotional state, and lots of other factors believed to affect nutrition. For example, our phlegmatic patient could also crank up the choleric humors in the body by standing in a hot and dry wind, exercising vigorously, or even getting really angry. The charm of the system was that you could explain anything to anyone. Once all the inputs were considered, a well-read doctor could tell you just what to eat before going for a walk on a rainy spring day, or the dire consequences of indulging in sex too early on a humid summer morning.

  The tricky part of the diagnosis was to first determine a person’s temperament, since everyone was made up of a cocktail of all of the humors, and a clear-cut case of, say, a completely sanguine personality was rare. Sex, age, lifestyle, and climate were all factored into the analysis, as was profession. (Poets and prophets are notoriously melancholy, as we all know.) The physician often resorted to even more nebulous criteria, such as personality, body type, and physiognomy. You could tell a lot from a person’s complexion: sanguine people, having an abundance of blood, were supposed to have ruddy skin, while phlegmatics looked pale and watery.

  This was all very well for the purposes of prescribing diet (in the broadest sense), but to make a diagnosis of an actual illness based on a person’s profession and complexion was harder still. In the absence of blood tests and X-rays, medieval doctors depended to some degree on external indicators such as a high fever or an abnormal pulse as a sign of disease. Urine analysis was also a favorite diagnostic technique. By examining, smelling, and even tasting a patient’s urine, much could apparently be learned and the appropriate measures applied. Bleeding was always a big favorite. (It’s why medieval doctors were often called “leeches.”) This was a quick, efficient way to relieve the many illnesses caused by an excess of blood. As you might imagine, the success rate of this sort of medical practice was rather uneven, and consequently, wiser physicians stuck to Hippocrates’s injunction, “First do no harm,” limiting their advice to diet tips or at least reasonably harmless potions.

  Of course, the Renaissance doctor’s authority, much as it does today, depended on keeping the system as arcane and jargon-filled as possible. For this, physicians required fat Latin volumes filled with humoral system analyses of Talmudic complexity. Publishers were happy to oblige. However, more popular interpretations of Galenic theory were a big hit as well. Platina’s bestselling De honesta voluptate, for example, was intended to be as much a dietary guide as a cookbook and provided all sorts of advice on judicious humor balancing. Even Linschoten’s Itinerario was packed full of advice on the dietary uses of the Eastern commodities. Along with data on the cost of cinnamon and the mating habits of Portuguese fidalgos, Linschoten’s collaborator (a graduate of the prestigious medical school in Padua, no less) adds, “Cinnamon warms, opens, and tones up the intestines.” He writes, “It is good for catarrh, making it move down from the head to the lower parts. It cures dropsy as well as defects and obstructions in the kidneys. Oil of cinnamon strengthens all organs: heart, stomach, liver, etc.” N
utmeg is just as much a wonder drug, according to the good doctor: “[Nutmegs] fortify the brain and sharpen the memory; they warm the stomach and expel winds. They give a clean breath, force the urine, stop diarrhea, and cure upset stomachs.”

  Writings on diet circulated widely in manuscript before printing came around, but those laboriously copied volumes of bound parchment had only been available to a tiny elite. As with Bibles and cookbooks, the revolutionary impact of Gutenberg’s invention brought this highly specialized subject to the attention of a much wider public. Much as it does today, the market for dietary self-help books seemed insatiable. From the 1470s to 1650, a flood of dietary literature rolled off the presses across Europe. As with so many other subjects, Venetian publishers led the way. By the mid-1520s, even editions of Galen in the original Greek were printed by the Aldine Press in Venice. With Venice’s decline, the presses in Amsterdam and other northern cities took up the cause.

  In Amsterdam, Margaretha Cromhout, the wealthy timber merchant’s wife, could now instruct her cook on the fine points of balancing the phlegmatic and the bilious humors much the way diet-obsessed Americans calculate their grams of fat and carbohydrates. Others of a less exalted status followed suit. In Protestant Europe, the reading public was not limited to the wealthiest classes, even though they probably had more time to worry about their diets than seamstresses and shoemakers. One of the unintended but profound aftereffects of the Reformation was an enormous increase in literacy, since everyone was now supposed to read the Scriptures. The middling classes could purchase cheap pamphlets and almanacs much like the flimsy little diet books you find today in supermarkets. The fact that the perennially popular “book of secrets” by the sixteenth-century Dutch surgeon (and cookbook writer) Carolus Battus was expressly intended for the “common folk” underlines just how broad-based the reading public was in the Netherlands.

  As in the case of Platina, the line between cookbooks and health manuals was as blurred as it is today, and the advice seemed similarly confusing and contradictory. Who couldn’t use the advice of experts in negotiating all the complexities of this arcane dietary system? And didn’t everyone need a little fine-tuning of their humoral makeup? Yet how could a layman even begin to gauge the delicate balance among nutriments? Chicken might be too sanguine for spring because of its airy temperament, pepper too fiery for someone with a sanguine makeup, turnips too dry and cold for an old man with a young wife. The diet guides had all the solutions, even if the specifics varied from author to author. They explained in great detail, for example, how you could correct fish’s watery (phlegmatic) nature by roasting it or serving it with an appropriate sauce. The term often used is to temper a dish or a sauce with an appropriate seasoning to make it digestible. (The Portuguese still use the verb temperar for “season.”) For this, spices were seen as particularly effective. The following advice is typical:

  Sauces should be made according to the nature of the season, for in summer sauces are composed of relatively cool ingredients, whereas in cold weather they are made of warm ingredients. Consequently in summer the proper ingredients are verjuice, vinegar, citrus and pomegranate juices, with sugar and rose water…. In cold weather the proper ingredients are mustard, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, sage, mint, parsley, wine, meat broths and vinegar that is so weak it approaches the nature of wine. Between times, when neither too warm or too cold, you make sauces of tempered warmth and cold.

  In light of the need to continually correct a recipe according to all these factors, it’s hardly surprising that medieval and Renaissance cookery guides were so imprecise when it came to quantities. Just how much ginger went into the ubiquitous carmeline sauce often depended on the intended consumer. That is not to say that cooks didn’t also spice food for reasons of taste or that people didn’t eat what they liked in defiance of every dietitian’s advice, just as they do today. Platina, for one, is continually adding comments to Martino’s recipes that make you wonder at first how anyone could eat them. Typical are the notes that follow instructions on how to make torta ex riso, a kind of rice pudding. First, the Vatican scholar recommends the dish for being nourishing. Then, in the same sentence, he adds, “It delays for a long time in the stomach, dulls the eyes, creates stones, and induces blockages.” Perhaps the diners experienced that same guilty titillation we get from forbidden foods like Häagen-Dazs and triple-crème cheeses. How else to explain the medieval popularity of melons despite their being roundly decried by every professional?

  In general, fine-tuning your diet was sufficient to get you on the straight and narrow, but in the case of illness or other physiological dysfunction, the healing professions turned to what might be loosely described as drugs. While common people depended on the kinds of herbs sold today by Jacob Hooy, the wealthy preferred more exotic remedies. Typically, these included all sorts of precious ingredients, spices being only the most digestible. An early Italian nostrum for “soothing the heart” includes gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones, along with cinnamon, cloves, aloeswood, saffron, cubebs, cardamom, amber, coriander, camphor, and musk. The ingredients were to be finely ground, mixed with sugar, and taken in wine.*51 Once again, the demand for these cure-alls escalated after the printing revolution. One of these “books of secrets,” titled the Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontes, was first published in Venice in 1555. Shortly thereafter it appeared in Latin, French, English, Dutch, and German translations. By 1575, fifty editions had been printed, promising to deliver the recipe for a fountain of youth. An English edition opens with a prescription “to conserve a manne’s youthe, and to hold backe old age.” The secret lies in a “miraculous” distilled cocktail of Asian spices, saffron, sugar, citrus, minerals, and alcohol, which was to be stirred into veal, chicken, or pigeon broth or diluted with white wine.

  Both physicians and cooks frequently turned to spices to fix humoral imbalances because they were considered a particularly concentrated corrective. Accordingly, a relatively small amount of hot and dry pepper could make dangerously cold and moist fish safe to eat. Given the quantity of fish eaten in pre-Reformation Europe, it is not surprising that a sufficient supply of pepper was needed to maintain public health—at least, by those who could afford it. For more careful adjustments, spices could be combined to reach just the right balance. Thus black pepper, not surprisingly, was considered hotter than cinnamon. By combining the two, a more nuanced effect could be achieved.

  There were, of course, more cheaply available correctives, such as garlic and even salt, but it was generally accepted that people of a “finer” composition needed more refined seasoning. This was explained by the self-evident fact that the humoral makeup of a peasant was necessarily different from that of a merchant or scholar. Numerous writers warned of the pains and illnesses that came about from eating foods inappropriate to a person’s social position. The ruling classes could suffer just as much from eating thick peasant soups as common folk from ingesting more refined foods. Suffice it to say that oat bran never would have made it into upper-class medieval diet books.

  Not that spiced food was deemed appropriate for everyone, even if class and cost were not at issue. Women, for example, were often warned off spices because of their supposedly delicate nature. With obvious disapproval, the sixteenth-century surgeon William Bulleyn describes how some women used pepper to “dry up” their complexion to make it seem more fashionably pale: “Although pepper be good to them that use it well, yet unto artificiall women that have more beastliness then beauty and cannot be content with their natural complexions, but would fayne be fayre: they eate peper, dried corne [grain] and drinke vinegar…to dry up their bloude.” Another seemingly contradictory explanation about why women should avoid hot spices was for just the opposite reason: that they stimulated blood flow that might lead to sexual arousal. If the number of recipes purporting to cure performance problems is any indication, men, on the other hand, seemed to need all the help they could ge
t in this regard. According to contemporary theory, spices, with their concentrated heating ability, were just the potions to get the job done. Cloves “augment miraculously the force of venus,” as one writer puts it. The way the mechanism was supposed to work is that heating foods would agitate and engorge the penis, while an increase in the circulation of blood would aid in the production and eventual delivery of the sperm. Applying the same reasoning, cold foods should have the same effect as a cold shower, so accordingly, bachelors and priests were supposed to eat plenty of lettuce. Even in the Middle Ages, real men did not eat salad. Interestingly, today spices are still widely used in men’s colognes, aftershaves, and so on, whereas the preference for women’s scents tends toward the floral.

  Dry and heating foods were not seen merely as a performance enhancer in the bedroom, they were also supposed to increase mental acuity. It was common knowledge that sanguine and phlegmatic people were slow-witted and forgetful; thus, a dry constitution would seem to guarantee intelligence. Here again, it was upper-class men, who were presumably the only ones making the big decisions and thinking deep thoughts, who were more likely to benefit.

  Does this mean that rich people ate spices only because they thought they were good for them? This theory has been popular of late among food historians as a way of explaining the late medieval penchant for imported spices. And while there is probably something to it, the spice-balancing explanation has probably been overplayed. Certainly, if the reaction of today’s public to nutritional pronouncements is any indication, adherence to humoral principles was at best mixed. What’s more, a plethora of sixteenth-century literary parodies from Shakespeare to Rabelais seems to indicate that physicians, dietitians, and the diets themselves were often a subject of ridicule.