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

by Michael Krondl

  If you stop for a moment to analyze the avalanche of flavors, you realize that the dominant tastes are of sweet and of sour, along with a judicious sprinkle of exotic spice—the same kind of flavor combination (setting aside the chili) you might have found in medieval Venice or sixteenth-century Amsterdam. No wonder that the seventeenth-century Dutch who arrived in Indonesia took to this style of cooking: it had a lot in common with what they ate at home.

  We seem to have come full circle. Today, the spiced cooking of the Renaissance seems no more exotic than the Puri Mas’s rijsttafel. Certainly, the old way of cooking is much more comprehensible than it was even fifty years ago, when French historians rolled their eyes in horror at that earlier era’s “orgy of spice.” Now there is no more mysterious East, Prester John, or miraculous spices as precious as gold. The cuisines of every corner of the earth are as familiar as jet travel—or a visit to a shopping mall food court. Americans import more spices per capita than the medieval ruling class ever did, and many Europeans are not far behind. Flavors that were once exotic imports—the very scents of paradise—are now common, everyday, and ubiquitous. The Dutch are perhaps more responsible for this than anyone. Under their watch, spices became an ordinary—if not quite cheap—commodity, as common as herring or lumber or beer.

  Epilogue

  •

  BALTIMORE AND CALICUT

  THE SPICE CHAMBER

  If there is an heir today to the Estado da Índia and the Dutch East India Company, it would have to be McCormick & Company. So, hoping to catch a glimpse of today’s dominant spice multinational, I called up its headquarters in Baltimore. Easier said than done. When I requested a tour of the plant, the press officer turned me down flat. “We don’t do tours,” she snapped. When I asked for an interview, she grilled me about just what it was I wanted to know and then promised to get back to me. She never did. I felt like a Dutch spy trying to break into the offices of the Portuguese viceroy. What dark secrets could be sequestered in the bowels of the world’s largest spice company?

  But I persisted. Six months and several rounds of bureaucratic gymnastics later, I pulled into the McCormick parking lot. The company headquarters is in a large, fortresslike building isolated in a sylvan corporate park just north of Baltimore. McCormick gave up its previous facilities in the inner city in the early 1980s to move closer to the processing plant and away from the then-derelict waterfront. Luckily, it salvaged some of the old headquarters. Behind the receptionist hangs one of the original Depression-era murals rescued from downtown, depicting East and West Indians gathering black pepper and vanilla—still the company’s top sellers. (McCormick is the world’s largest buyer of vanilla.) Much to my surprise, the receptionist asks for neither fingerprints nor a retina scan before I enter. She is downright friendly as she pages James Lynn, my inside source at the corporation. As Jim shakes my hand and guides me inside, the secrets seem to dissipate, though not the peculiarities—this is Baltimore, after all. McCormick not only transplanted some of the old pictures, it lifted an entire mock Elizabethan hamlet from the old offices and shoehorned it here into the new suburban location. As you step through the generic corporate lobby past the bank of elevators, you are suddenly confronted by a street of timbered cottages and leaded glass windows. (The village had been built to promote tea, which was an important McCormick product in the 1930s.) To your left is “Ye Olde McCormick Tea House,” where visitors used to be offered tea by a wench in period costume at the old harborfront main office. Company guests could also visit the next-door “Tea Museum” to examine tea memorabilia and educate themselves in a six-foot-high book entitled “Ye Story of Tea.” The wench, unfortunately, fell victim to corporate downsizing a long time ago, though Jim does sit me at a rustic oaken table and offer me tea. Jim Lynn works in corporate communications, but on the side, he is an amateur authority on the company’s history.

  Visitors to McCormick headquarters are greeted with a vintage painting of pepper picked and dried much the same as in Roman times.

  Like Heinz, Kellogg’s, Hershey’s, and so many other grand American brands, McCormick was founded in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Jim describes a tough and feisty Willoughby M. McCormick, who got his start selling flavored syrups out of a basement in Baltimore. He survived the great Baltimore fire, the Great War, the Great Depression—all the while enlarging his portfolio, adding spices, tea, mayonnaise, and even insecticides. And he gave tours of the factory. (Today’s reluctance to host visitors is simply corporate caution, Jim assures me.) When it came to spices, McCormick satisfied its needs by buying on the New York Commodities Exchange, then processing and packaging the imported spices. Up until the Second World War, the spice export business was still mostly in Dutch and English hands.

  Under W. M. McCormick’s successors, the American company went public and gradually assembled an international potpourri of spice companies from Shanghai to San Salvador. Investors can read all about it in the company’s annual report, where they’ll also find out that McCormick’s profits are soaring, mainly because world spice consumption keeps going up and up.

  If McCormick headquarters holds a secret, it is on the fourth floor. This is where the carpeted hallways of the lower floors give way to barren institutional corridors lined with anonymous doors. Jim leads me to one of these doors, slides a key into the lock, and flips the light switch. As the fluorescent lights flicker to life, the little room bursts into a riot of words and colors. Hundreds, thousands of neatly arrayed packages from little one-shot servings of Moroccan chicken seasoning in hot pink tetrahedrons to giant food-service packs of Key West Style Seasonings labeled in tropical turquoise are arranged in row after row after row. A shelf of chili-flavored mayonnaise from the Central American division is squeezed next to a display case for Stange, the Japanese division. (“Taste the magician” is the only part of that package that I can read.) Here, in McCormick’s secret spice chamber, is a snapshot of the world spice market today and where spicing around the globe is going. Today’s company has divisions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Central America, China, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey as well as the United States, and many of those national brands are exported elsewhere. The company that started selling vanilla syrup to Baltimore soda fountains is now the epitome of globalization, sourcing its vanilla in Uganda and Vietnam to flavor chocolate bars in Switzerland and Argentina. But then the spice business has always been a worldwide affair even before the Castilians and the Portuguese set in motion the first great push for a global trade network.

  Yet the way the world eats is changing, and these changes may be even greater than they were after the “Cabralian” exchange that redistributed New World peppers and peanuts along with Old World black pepper and sugarcane across the continents. One of the things made graphically clear in McCormick’s spice chamber is that people don’t cook anymore. They assemble. “Yes, we have all our gourmet jars of spice,” Jim assures me, “but much of what we put our attention to are blends—seasoning blends and grilling sauces—because people can come home and chuhk, chuhk, chuhk [he makes the noise of shaking sauce out of a bottle].” For every package of nutmeg and paprika on the shelf, there are dozens of ready-made mixes of multiple spices: to make teriyaki beef (the United States), chili con carne (the Netherlands), Moroccan tajines (France), or Balti chicken (the United Kingdom). Even in India, where the fashion for spices never faded, women today are as likely to rip open a polyethylene envelope of commercially processed masala as to pull out the mortar and pestle. For good or ill, the decisions about what your food will taste like are made at corporate headquarters.

  And even that is only part of the picture. Jim Lynn explains how McCormick has increasingly moved into the food-service branch of the industry, so that now half its business involves products that never even reach the consumer’s cupboard, or at least not directly. That secret seasoning boasted of by a certain southern chicken chain—�
�They don’t like us to mention the name,” Jim says with a grin—is a McCormick spice mix; that special sauce at the hamburger chain with the arches is concocted in Baltimore. McCormick flavors everything from chips to beer. Processed food is where the future lies. The tastes in that food are often cooked up in McCormick’s “Technical Innovation Center.” Even food processors don’t want to come up with their own seasoning. “A food manufacturer doesn’t want a truckload of ginger; they want a containerload of a ready-made flavoring mixture,” the corporate communicator informs me. Which is why he keeps emphasizing that McCormick now wants to be seen as a “flavor company” rather than a spice company. You can be sure its flavor decisions do no harm to its spice business.

  As Frank Lavooij, the Dutch spice trader, happily informed me, people are eating more spice, and they aren’t even aware of it. There is an apocryphal story about a research project in which dogs are given increasing quantities of chilies in their food. Eventually, they find chili-free food so bland that they refuse to eat it. The dog study apparently never took place, but we are undergoing a similar experiment. More and more of us are eating processed food that is increasingly spicier.

  If the Dutch had figured out how to influence demand as well as control supply, Europeans and their New World colonies might never have given up the spice habit to begin with. But the kind of vertical integration that McCormick has accomplished was inconceivable in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The Heren XVII could only wring their hands as the fashion for the exotic aromatics waned and per capita spice use sagged in the seventeen hundreds. The appetite for pepper, which the VOC had calculated at about seven million pounds in 1688, remained more or less stuck at that figure until the eve of the French Revolution, even as Europe’s population finally surged. Eventually, in the late nineteenth century, the overall demand for spices grew as living standards rose. Just about everyone could now afford to use cloves and cinnamon. But it was a pinch here and a pinch there. Victorians recoiled in horrified fascination at the earlier orgy of spice.

  In the West, this abstemious approach has begun to change only in the last fifty years. Between 1961 and 1994, the volume of spices imported into the United States increased close to 400 percent and doubled again in the next decade. The average contemporary American eats more pepper than any medieval aristocrat, on top of all the other spices once traded on the Rialto and the Nieuwemarkt. But today, Piper nigrum is no longer the king. Dried capsicums have long since overtaken the berries from Malabar as America’s favorite spice.

  The reasons that lie behind the transformation in the American taste for spice are much the same as in the Netherlands—or anywhere in the developed world, for that matter. Immigrants bring the taste for chili and ginger from Latin America and Asia while at the same time overseas travelers (professional chefs among them) return with an appetite for the more complex flavors they’ve tried. However, companies such as McCormick do not merely capitalize on these trends; they shape them and, when it suits their purposes, transform them. Thus, foreign flavors that might be too pungent are mellowed for the domestic market. (You can rest assured that McCormick’s “Balti curry spices” wouldn’t knock anybody’s socks off in Baltistan.) But you can’t really fault Baltimore for that. If the seasonings remained in their original, “authentic” concentration, they would never reach a broad-based audience. Nevertheless, just like the apocryphal dogs, the public is experiencing more and more spicy heat without really noticing it.

  A global company such as McCormick also takes advantage of trends that appear in one market by introducing them in another. When single-use packaging (packets of a few grams of spice in much the same spirit as the little cones of pepper sold in old Amsterdam) became popular in the United Kingdom, similar packages followed in the United States and France.

  Globalization has not only affected how people eat around the world; it has also changed what farmers grow and where they grow it. To some extent, this was true when Malabar pepper was transplanted from India into Indonesia in the early Middle Ages and ginger was brought to the Caribbean by the Portuguese. But now spices come from all sorts of unlikely spots. Guatemala is the world’s largest cardamom exporter, even though the locals barely know what to do with the stuff—virtually all of it is exported to the Middle East. Most of the world’s vanilla—an orchid of Mexican origin—comes from Madagascar and Indonesia, but there are other, relatively new sources. Today, McCormick obtains a lot of its vanilla from Uganda. Because of ever-increasing demand, even the Indian Spices Board is encouraging pepper farmers in Malabar to grow the long, skinny pods. The new kid on the block is Vietnam, which, in ancient times, used to import black pepper from Malabar and is now the world’s premier pepper producer, undercutting everyone else’s prices. (Indonesia and Brazil come next; India is a distant fourth.) These days, Indian farmers worry about cheap pepper exports from Indochina much as American textile workers bemoan imports from South Asia. But even in India, people realize that the spice trade is changing, and perhaps more than elsewhere, they are trying to prepare for a karmic rebirth.

  WEAPONS AND NUTRACEUTICALS

  The first hint of how seriously spices are taken in India was driven home when I boarded a domestic flight to Calicut. Before I passed through security, the sign warned, “Passengers are requested not to carry pickles, chilly powder, masala powders”—as well as the usual forbidden arsenal of lighters, sharp objects, and nail clippers—in their hand luggage. (“Pickles,” in this case, refers to highly spiced condiments such as mango pickle.) In India, scientists have studied how spices can be used as weapons, food preservatives, colorants, drugs, and nutraceuticals. Naturally, there are also efforts to improve the strains of spices grown for better flavor and hardiness.

  As a result of this ongoing research, the Indian government is especially wary of “biopiracy,” something I learned when I tried to get permission to visit the main research facility in the spice-producing state of Kerala. Luckily, I had been hardened by my McCormick experience. So, a half year’s correspondence later, I arrived at the Calicut airport clutching a handful of letters, duly stamped, dated, numbered, and signed by the undersecretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Agricultural Research and Education. A large white taxi sent by the Indian Institute of Spices Research (IISR) awaited my arrival.

  The institute is located on the outskirts of Calicut, just a little inland from where da Gama’s men first made their landing. To get there, you must brave the usual suicidal Indian car trip—dodging motorcycles, auto rickshaws, oblivious pedestrians, stray dogs, and speeding buses that seem to use the median divider primarily as a centering device. The research campus can be seen from a distance, rising like a castle on a hill. To enter, I have to pass muster with the guard, who seems disoriented to find a foreigner having been granted access to the holy of holies. Then the road winds up the hill, tightly sealed in by a barbed-wire-topped wall. At the highest point, I am deposited before the immaculate buildings surrounded by meticulously manicured grounds. There is no time for greetings or introductions before I am whisked into the sparkling new visitors center, presumably to avoid any temptation to do or see anything not strictly authorized.

  The visitors center is a temple to spice. The local farmers who are allowed access come here to look at photos, receive instructional pamphlets, and get advice. The guardians of the temple, the barefoot scientists, now cluster around me to offer their hands, a cup of chai, a plate of biscuits, and a bowl of cashews. They are perplexed by my presence but also my interest. Just like the guard, they can’t quite understand how I found out the magic word to open the gate to their ivory tower. I am apparently the first non-Indian to have been afforded this honor.

  The assembled cast represents the full range of the institute’s research program. There is the careful biochemist in her emerald sari—still nervous about my presence. The wild-eyed and brilliant botanist stalks the room like a caged panther. I am introduced to the dignified bota
nical economist, the eager field botanist, and the silent young chemist. One by one, they gradually relax as they realize that I have not come to ransack their biological treasure chest. And as they let down their guard, their passions slowly unravel: the biochemist insists on reeling off numbers to explain the advantages of organic agriculture; the brilliant botanist riffs on the overuse of the planet’s resources; the field botanist tries to convince me that our civilization would waste less if only we imitated the swamis who live on water and sunlight alone. Then, green coconuts are served as we cluster around the touch-screen computer module, where a slick interactive promo shows off the institute’s successes.

  The work they do here is the kind done at any agricultural research facility. They study root rot, explore issues of yield, and try to improve the quality of the cultivars. The biochemist launches into a highly technical description of the compounds that give pepper its unique taste. (To a biochemist, the flavors that sparkle on the palate are reduced to fractions and formulas.) An oil called piperine gives pepper its heat, while other trace oils give aroma. Typically, if one is high, the other tends to be a little lower, meaning that the hottest pepper is often not the most flavorful. The IISR maintains a germplasm bank of pepper, turmeric, and cardamom as well as other spices, and field-workers continue to collect wild varieties to add to the collection. The botanist with the guru’s unruly gray hair tells me that they have more than 200 cultivars of pepper here, but then he shakes his quizzical head and offers me a half smile, “But the Brazilians claim to have almost 180.” So much for keeping the secret at home. But then, even the Dutch policy of systematic murder couldn’t maintain Holland’s spice monopoly.