Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  In the centuries that followed the construction of the spice stores, Rome’s energies waxed and waned, the empire contracted, was overrun by barbarians and finally collapsed. The volume of traffic and consumption that fuelled the trans-oceanic spice trade would not be seen again for over a thousand years. Yet both the taste and the traffic endured. When Rome faltered the Arabs took over, and the Indian Ocean became a Muslim lake, home to the seaborne civilisation that gave rise to the tales of Sinbad and his voyages to the magical realms of spice, giant birds and monsters, genii and gold. Spices were acquiring the romantic, glamorous freight they have carried down to the present day. And although the flow of spices into Europe slowed to a trickle and at times all but disappeared, it was never quite halted. The pepper left behind in Germany by a Roman soldier is the first faint spoor of an ancient tradition, perhaps the oldest continuous link between Asia and Europe and one that has survived, battered but intact, ever since.

  Of Spiced Parrot and Stuffed Dormice

  Long-life spiced honey wine, given to people on a journey: put ground pepper with skimmed honey in a small container for spiced wine, and when it is the time for drinking, mix some of the honey with the wine. It is suggested to add a little wine to the honey mixture, so the honey flows more freely.

  Apicius (first century AD). De Re Coquinaria

  The vast wealth and reach Rome acquired in the first century BC transformed the classical idea of spices, and the uses to which they were put. Though even in Roman times cuisine was only one of the many uses of spice – and not always the most important – one result of the direct trade with India was that costs plummeted, with the result that spices entered the diet more frequently. A revolution in the way spices were used and viewed was underway.

  The first world empire, Rome also boasted the first global cuisine. By the time of Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), Rome’s cosmopolitan tastes had reached such a pitch that he talks of the flavours of Egypt, Crete, Cyrene and India appearing in Roman kitchens. There were dissenters: Plutarch (AD 46–c. 119) writes that even in his day there were some who had not acquired the taste, but they were, apparently, a minority. Pepper in particular was widely used, with contemporary literary sources taking familiarity with the spice for granted. A schoolboy’s textbook featured a talking pig by the name of M. Grunnius (‘Grunter’) Corocotta, who obligingly asks to be well cooked with pepper, nuts and honey. Archaeology reinforces the impression of a widespread taste. Silver pepperpots (piperatoria) dating from the early imperial period onward have been found practically all over the Roman world, at Pompeii, to the south in Corfinium and Murmuro in Sicily, at Nicolaevo in Bulgaria, at Cahors, Arles-Trinquetaille and Saint-Maur-de-Glanfeuil in France.

  Neither the silverware nor its contents were for everyone, as numerous literary references make clear. In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the scabrous tale of the hero Lucius’ transformation and adventures from human to ass and back again, pepper is referred to as a ‘choice delicacy’, fit for a banquet. While still in asinine form, Lucius amazes his owners by eschewing hay and tucking into the sort of food an ass would be least likely to eat, namely meats seasoned with laser (another costly seasoning), fish cooked in some exotic sauce and fattened birds in pepper. The epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis, generally known simply as Martial (c.AD 38–103), writes of pepper in a quintessentially aristocratic pairing of wild boar, generous Falernian – the most prized and expensive vintage of the Romans – and ‘mysterious garum’, a highly esteemed fish sauce. Martial balks at the expense, complaining that his cook has used up a ‘huge mound of pepper’. ‘I have a more modest hunger,’ complains the penniless poet.

  For the more solvent, pepper’s air of exclusivity made the spice an ideal gift. It was customary to distribute pepper at the great midwinter festival of the Saturnalia – a ritual not unlike Christmas gift-giving, whereby favours could be curried, debts acknowledged and generosity displayed.* Martial writes of an influential Sabine lawyer’s largesse: three half-pounds of incense and pepper along with hampers from all over the Mediterranean filled with Libyan figs and Tuscan sausages. One Saturnalia Martial himself received some pepper, although this was a lesser gift than he had hoped for. A stingy patron’s generosity has dried up:

  You used to send me a pound of silver; now it’s down to half a pound, But of pepper. Sextus: my pepper doesn’t cost me quite so much.

  And yet the pepper was no trifle: if the spice was widespread this did not make it commonplace. In a satire addressed to an indolent student, Persius (AD 34–62) writes of pepper belonging in a ‘wealthy larder’, along with hams, gifts from fat Umbrians and tokens of gratitude from clients – in other words, not the sort of thing a poor scholar ought to be feeding himself, such as lentil soup and porridge. Martial implies that what was out of a labourer’s reach fell within the budget of the cook-employing classes:

  So that bland beets, a workman’s lunch, actually taste of something, How often the cook turns to wine and pepper!

  Elsewhere, he advised pepper served with figpecker, a small bird esteemed by the Roman gourmet:

  When by chance a shining, waxy, broad-loined figpecker comes your way,

  If you have any taste, add pepper.

  Martial reserved a special bile for stinginess, a failing for which he lambasts a certain Lupus, whose gift of a ‘farm’ amounted to less than a window-box ‘that an ant could eat in a single day’:

  In which you might find no vegetable

  Other than Cosmus’s leaf and uncooked pepper,

  Where you couldn’t lie a cucumber straight,

  Nor a snake stretch itself out. *

  When in due course Martial finds himself without a patron – unremarkably, perhaps, given his propensity to bite the hands that fed him – he frets whether his latest publication will end up as scrap, used as a ‘cowl’ to wrap fried tuna, incense or pepper, the equivalent of finding one’s book remaindered (the custom survives in the Middle East and the Caucasus, where spices are still sold in cones of newspaper). Robert Herrick (1591–1674) borrowed the notion for a book of his own:

  [T]hy injur’d Leaves serve well,

  To make loose gowns for Mackerel,

  Or see the Grocers in a trice,

  Make hoods of thee to serve out Spice.

  It was also Martial who started a long tradition of figurative use of spice, concerning a dinner guest more light-fingered or ‘peppery handed’ than Autolycus, patron of thieves. The conceit has survived in European languages in one form or another ever since, as in Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s challenge to Viola in Twelfth Night: ‘I warrant there’s vinegar and pepper in’t.’ Or the OED’s complaint of a misused servant: ‘My master pepered my ars with well good speed.’

  As with its figurative uses, so it was at the table, where pepper apparently served much the same role as it does today, as a more or less universal seasoning. Concerning spices’ other culinary applications, reliable information is in short supply. The one significant exception is the cookbook known by the unspectacular title of De Re Coquinaria, or Cookery Book, the sole example of the genre to have survived from antiquity. Both the author and the date of composition are unknown, although traditionally it has been ascribed to a certain Apicius, a legendary gourmand of the first century AD. The version we have has passed through the hands of a compiler who rewrote the book in his late Latin of the fourth or fifth century. Most commentators tentatively date the original to the second century AD.

  On the evidence of Apicius, it would seem that the Romans liked it hot. The De Re Coquinaria is as suffused with spices as, say, a more modern Italian cookbook is with olive oil. Pepper alone appears in 349 of the book’s 468 recipes. Spices are used to enliven vegetables, fish, meats, wine and desserts. The very first recipe is for a ‘spiced wine surprise’, followed by travellers’ honey-spiced wine. There are spiced salts ‘for many purposes’, including one mix for ‘digestion, and to move the bowels’, the latter including white and black pepper, thyme, gi
nger, mint, cumin, celery seed, parsley, oregano, arrugula, saffron, bay leaf and dill. The mix is described as ‘extremely mild, more than you would think’.

  Mixtures such as these were evidently added after cooking, and many recipes end with the directive to ‘sprinkle on pepper and serve’ – no great change there. To modern eyes the most striking use of spices is in a huge variety of sauces, both hot and cold, either cooked as an integral part of the dish or added afterwards. There was a sharp sauce to cut the fat, made of cumin, ginger, rue, cooking soda, dates, pepper, honey, vinegar and liquamen, a fermented fish sauce much loved by the Romans. A digestive sauce helped the meat go down with the sharp-sweet combination of pepper, cardamom, cumin, dried mint, honey, liquamen, vinegar and various other aromatics. There was a green sauce of pepper, cumin, caraway, spikenard,* ‘all types of mixed green herbs’, dates, honey, vinegar, wine, garum and oil. Another was served cold with poultry, consisting of pepper, lovage, celery seeds, mint, myrtleberries or raisins, honey, wine, vinegar, oil and garum. Some sauces were more complicated, using spices with all manner of trussed and embellished meats: kid, lamb, suckling pig, venison, boar, beef, duck, goose and chicken. There were even dormice stuffed with pepper and nuts – presumably a fiddly operation. There was a peppery sauce for ‘high’ birds (literally ‘goatish’), by which the author meant not putrid but gamey. To subvert lettuce’s flatulent properties Apicius suggests a pepper sauce of vinegar, fish sauce, cumin, ginger, rue, dates, pepper and honey.

  While most of Apicius’ seasonings grew within the empire, the Eastern spices occupied a prominent place in his spice rack: most conspicuously, ginger, cardamom and of course pepper. There is a learned debate on the possibility of others; some have speculated whether clove and nutmeg lie hidden under unfamiliar names. One notable absentee is cinnamon. Apart from a solitary reference in Pliny’s Natural History to a recipe for cinnamon-spiced wine, in Roman times the spice appears to have been reserved for more elevated purposes – a subject we shall return to.*

  The Roman table, then, was apparently not so bizarre as some have been willing to believe. The De Re Coquinaria offers the same discordant mix of the strange and the familiar as one finds with so many other aspects of Roman civilisation. Minus exotica such as parrot, flamingo and dormouse, there is much here that would not be out of place on the average twenty-first-century table – in recent years there have appeared several editions of the work adapted to the modern kitchen. Many of Apicius’ seasonings can still be found in any well-stocked spice cupboard, and even the fermented fish sauces that revolted some early commentators were probably not so far removed from Vietnamese or Thai fish sauces, or for that matter the pungent anchovy relish much loved by English gents in the age of Queen Victoria. His spiced wines are not at all dissimilar to the mulled wines and vermouths still around today, and some of the spiced sauces are startlingly reminiscent of the pungent and sharp sauces enjoyed by the European nobility in medieval times and beyond. It would seem that the art of the sauce has been a perennial feature of elite cuisine, from Apicius’ day down to our own.

  Even the notion of sweet-spiced desserts is not as odd as it might at first sight appear. To round off a meal Apicius suggests a variety of spiced desserts such as a peppered wheat-flour fritter with honey, or a confection of dates, nuts and pine nuts baked with honey and a little pepper. The spice is still used to add tang to sweet confections such as pan forte, now a speciality of Siena, but once widespread through medieval Europe. Were it possible to trace the ancestry of this Italian dessert the path would lead, I suspect, back to ancient Rome.

  Palate

  Spice for Trimalchio

  If Atticus feasts in style, be is considered very grand.

  Juvenal, Satires (AD 100–127)

  One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavour.

  M.F.K Fisher, Serve it Forth, 1937

  Familiar is not, however, how most modern readers have seen Apicius. In the last few centuries his book has provoked more bafflement than admiration, particularly in the matter of spice. ‘Perhaps the craving for excessive flavouring is an olfactory delirium, a pathological case, as yet unfathomed like the excessive craving for liquor, and, being a problem for the medical fraternity, it is only of secondary importance to gastronomy’ – such was the verdict of one of his nineteenth-century editors. And this opinion is fairly representative of the received wisdom on Roman food. Until very recently, the ancient Roman meal was generally considered on a par with other notoriously lurid displays served up for public consumption, along the lines of gladiatorial bloodbaths and public crucifixions: harsh and brutal, more a subject for revulsion than emulation or serious study. Apicius’ cookbook in particular is regularly cited as proof of rampant excess in the kitchen, nowhere more than in the taste for overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings.

  Well, maybe. But it is a confident judge who reaches a verdict on the cuisine of an entire civilisation on the basis of one cookbook, and in fact there are good reasons for reading Apicius with due caution. The physiology of the human palate has not evolved appreciably in the last two millennia, and it is no more likely that the Romans regularly seared their mouths with spices than we do. Nowhere does Apicius give quantities for his recipes: all we know is that the end result was spicy, but we don’t know how spicy. Doubtless if a recipe for an Indian curry were transcribed in the same manner it would provoke similar confusion among those for whom Indian food is as alien as Roman food is to us.

  In any case it is more than a little naïve to read the text simply as a practical cookbook, since its nominal author was himself a figure of some notoriety. According to a version of events circulating in the first century AD, Apicius supposedly ate his way through a vast fortune before finding himself down to his last ten million sesterces: still a healthy bank balance, but not enough for this gourmand, who took poison rather than live on a limited budget. To the satirist Juvenal (c.AD 55–c. 127) his name was mud. Christians were still more prejudiced: to the Church father Tertullian (c.AD 155–C.220) Apicius’ greed was legendary, contributing an adjective of his own for his trademark seasonings; to Sidonius (c.430–c.490), ‘Apician’ was another word for ‘glutton’. The notoriously debauched and luxurious Emperor Elagabalus (ruled AD 218–222) is recorded as having had a high regard for his works, a detail the author of the Augustan History slipped in as mutually revealing, and damning. There was in short nothing neutral about Apicius; his name carried none of the comforting, homely associations of an Elizabeth David or a Delia Smith. In any case, the contents of the cookbook that bears his name were of practical interest only to a relatively narrow segment of Roman society. Most of the population of the empire lived at or not far above the level of subsistence, and on the grounds of cost alone Apicius’ more celebrated recipes—boiled, spiced flamingo, for instance – were out of their reach.

  Which was, in all likelihood, precisely the point. For like the flamingo, spices were an expensive taste. Only pepper was reasonably available to a sizeable part of the population, and even pepper, as we have seen, carried an air of exclusivity. In his Natural History Pliny gives a list of spice prices that were probably fixed by the state. Black pepper was the cheapest at four denarii the pound, white pepper nearly double that at seven. A pound of ginger cost six denarii, the same quantity of cassia anything from five to fifty. By far the most expensive were various grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from thirty-five to three hundred denarii the pound, in its pure form a whopping 1,000 to 1,500. At this time a citizen soldier earned a wage of 225 denarii per annum, and a little later a free day-labourer could earn about two denarii per diem. In the days of the early empire a pound of black pepper, the cheapest and most available spice, would buy forty pounds of wheat, representing in the order of a few days’ wages for a member of the ‘working class’. A pound of the finest cinnamon oil would cost a centurion up to six years’ work.
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  They at least would not have been pouring on the spice with a heavy hand. And even for those with the money, there is plenty of evidence that Romans knew when their food was over-spiced. The irony of the now traditional images of Roman food as an exercise in baroque excess is that they were in large part the product not of Rome’s enthusiasm for bingeing but its reticence, the credit for which is due to Christian polemicists, who were virtually obliged to portray Rome as a vast, gluttonous sink – culinary history, like any other form of history, is written by the winners. But in fact a great deal of Roman writing on food is couched in the sort of language we might associate more with Zen minimalism than with a Lucullan banquet. In his eleventh Satire Juvenal lays out the criteria of the morally blameless meal: modest, rustic and home-grown, it will not break the bank. The service is simple and unaffected, without any indecent floorshows. A bracing reading of epic poetry is entertainment enough. One of the letters of Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus, who repeatedly scorned invitations to simple meals of lettuce, snails and wheatcakes chez Pliny for the flashy delights of oysters, sows’ innards, sea-urchins and Spanish dancing girls (can we blame him?). In Pliny’s opinion the ideal meal should be ‘as elegant as it is frugal’.