Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  The most important role of spices was in a huge variety of piquant sauces, perhaps the single most distinctive feature of medieval European cuisine. In his fifteenth-century Boke of Nurture, John Russell, usher and marshal to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, noted that ‘the function of the sauce is to whet the appetite’ – a more refined purpose, in other words, than a simple exercise in damage limitation. Sauces came in many flavours and colours: blue, white, black, pink, yellow, red and green. They accompanied a huge variety of foodstuffs, both home-grown and exotic, practically anything that moved or swam. Russell mentions spiced sauces for swan, peacock, beef, goose, pheasant, partridge, curlew, thrush, sparrow, woodcock, bustard, heron, lapwing, snipe, beaver, porpoise, seal, conger, pike, mackerel, ling, whiting, herring, perch, roach, cod, whale and minnow, among others.

  Not unlike the major Indian spice mixes still in use today, medieval European sauces tended to be built around a few basic templates that admitted infinite personal variation. Most tended to have one spicy ‘note’ standing out as foremost, with dozens of variations on the theme. Every cook was expected to have the basic repertoire at his disposal to make his employer ‘glad and mery’, as Russell phrased it. Of the various sauces, one of the oldest and most popular was the black pepper sauce, in which the sharpness of the pepper was offset with breadcrumbs and vinegar. There was a hotter variant called the poivre chaut, the hot pepper, and the poivre aigret, the sour pepper, with verjuice and wild apples. Taillevant, cook and equerry to the French kings Phillip VI, Charles V and VI, gives a recipe for a green sauce for fish, comprising ginger, parsley, breadcrumbs and vinegar. Another perennial favourite, often served with roasted poultry, was known as the galantyne, made from breadcrumbs, ginger, galangal, sugar, claret and vinegar. Some took their names from the meat they accompanied, such as the ‘boar’s tail’ mentioned by a fourteenth-century householder of Paris, based on cloves, ginger, verjuice, wine, vinegar and various other spices. One of the most popular sauces across the breadth of medieval Europe was the camelyne, so called for its tawny, camel colour, the key notes of which were cinnamon, vinegar, garlic and ginger, mixed with breadcrumbs and occasionally raisins. (The name was doubly apt, for much of the cinnamon so consumed would have done time on a camel’s back while in transit through Arabia.)

  The usefulness of spices did not end with the main course. It was customary to round off the meal with an after-dinner ‘dainty’ of fruit, nuts and various spiced confections. When dinner is finished the valets of Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century Perceval bring in ‘very costly’ dates, figs and nutmegs. In the early-thirteenth-century romance Cristal et Claire the meal is followed by dates, figs, nutmeg, ‘cloves and pomegranates … and ginger of Alexandria’. When Sir Gawain is entertained at a fabulous castle en route to meet the Green Knight he receives the same after-dinner treats.

  Typically, these after-dinner spices were candied with sugar and fruit, like the Provençal Orengat, fine slices of orange left to soak in sugar syrup for a week or so, before being boiled in water, sweetened with honey and finally cooked with ginger. The convention endured well beyond the medieval period; the candied and jellied fruits served today are its direct descendants. Another survivor is gingerbread, which takes its name from the Middle English ‘gingembras’, originally a composition of ginger and other spices. The modern ‘bread’ bears little resemblance to the original, which was more of a stodgy paste.

  Spices were if anything still more in demand for medieval wine and ale. The custom, like so many others, was shared with the Romans. In one of his sermons St Peter Chrysologos, archbishop of Ravenna (406–450), refers to the custom of smearing leather wine flasks with fragrant spices ‘in order to keep the taste of the wine preserved’. What apparently began as a necessity in due course became an acquired taste. The mid-fourth-century writer Palladius refers with relish to the use of cassia, ginger and pepper in wine, according to a recipe preserved among the Cretans and given them, so tradition had it, by the oracle of Delphi. The Roman statesman and monk Cassiodorus (c.490–c.583) drank his wine mixed with honey and pepper. In Gregory of Tours’ late-sixth-century History of the Franks, one Frankish thug offers another a glass of spiced wine after dinner, shortly before swords are drawn and blood is spilled.

  The methods of preparing spiced wine remained much the same throughout the Middle Ages. The basic technique was to mix and grind a variety of spices, which were added to the wine, red or white, which was then sweetened with sugar or honey and finally filtered through a bag, bladder or cloth. The latter was known as Hippocrates’ sleeve, hence the wine’s name ‘hippocras’. A late-fourteenth-century book of household management gives the following instructions:

  To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger (gingembre de mesche), fine and white, and an ounce of grain [of Paradise], a sixth of nutmegs and galangal together, and grind them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure.

  This basic template admitted almost infinite variation. Hippocras could also be made with cloves and nutmeg; another variant called for mace and cardamom. Clarry was much the same as hippocras, the chief difference (though not necessarily) being the use of honey in place of sugar.

  As with sauces and sweets, then, spices vastly expanded the drinker’s possibilities. But if spices were the means of invention, necessity was the mother. To a far greater extent than with solid foods, their use was dictated by a need to preserve against corruption, or at least cover its taste. It is suggestive that when medieval writers turn to the topic of wine the emphasis tends to be as much on results as on taste. Taken neat, medieval wine could be a harrowing experience, and the problem of foul wine was sufficiently common to inspire all kinds of complaints, as with the man-strangling, ‘hard, green and faithless’ wines of the poet Guiot de Vaucresson. In the poem ‘Dispute Between Wine and Water’, composed sometime in the fourteenth century, the best the anonymous author can say of Gascon wine is that it does better than it tastes, ‘satisfying without doing harm’. Geoffroi de Waterford said of the variety known as vernache that it ‘tickles without hurting’ – faint praise indeed. Several centuries earlier in England, Peter of Blois began a still-flourishing tradition of French complaints about the quality of the wine drunk in England. If Peter is to be believed, the wine consumed at the court of King Henry II tasted like paint-stripper: it was ‘sour or musty; muddy, greasy, rancid, reeking of pitch and quite flat. I have witnessed occasions when such dregs were served to noblemen, they had to sift it through clenched teeth and with their eyes shut, with trembling and grimacing, rather than just drink it.’ But even in France there were similar problems. The Burgundian poet Jean Molinet (1435–1507) borrowed some of the starkest lines from scripture to evoke the full nastiness of those vinegared wines that he could only imagine came from Gomorrah, that left him crying in repentance and calling on God for mercy – ‘Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.’

  While there is a good deal of exaggeration in these descriptions, by the same token they point to an underlying truth. Expectations were low, a problem stemming, ultimately, from the barrels in which wine was shipped and stored. Even if the wine survived shipping and storage in reasonable condition in the barrel – a big ‘if’; barrels were often poorly sealed – the contents began to oxidise as soon as the barrel was tapped, rapidly acquiring a powerfully unpleasant taste, variously described as bitter, musty, smoky, ropey or cloudy. To get the wine at its best the contents of the barrel had to be drunk within a few days – fine for feasts and binges, but less than ideal for all but the largest or most alcoholic of households.

  Failing that, old wine quickly turned so acid as to scour even the hardened medieval palate. Records from England’s royal account books tell of the royal cellarers disposing of t
heir spoiled stocks either by pouring them down the drain or – a gesture of dubious largesse – by giving them away to the poor.* But such drastic measures represented a serious loss of capital. A better alternative was to drink the wine young. Though young wines were considered very much better than old, they were themselves none too gentle on the palate, being naturally harsh and sour. Eustache Deschamps complained that one year’s green vintage was sharper than spears, slashing razors and stabbing needles: ‘I piss a hundred times night and day, yet I’m constipated nearly to death.’ So the trick was in the timing: finding the happy medium between too young and too old, too sour and too musty. In effect, the medieval wine-drinker was caught between two evils, and facing an unenviable trade-off. In his poem ‘Battle of the Wines’, Henri d’Andeli relates the difficulty of finding wines for even the king’s table that are not either ‘too yellow’ or ‘greener than a cow’s horn’; and yet all others are ‘not worth an egg’. (Though even these are preferable to beer, which he leaves to the ignorant Flemings and English.) Compounding the problem was the fact that the stronger and harsher the wine, the longer it was likely to last. Hence one common medieval formula for ‘good drinking now’, which made perfect sense then but sounds self-contradictory today, was ‘strong and harsh and drinking well’. It may have burned on the way down, but it was at least likely to last, and was less caustic than a more ‘mature’ vintage.

  By taking the sting out of a young, astringent wine, defusing a barrel ‘on the turn’, or else suppressing the full malevolence of a vintage that was destined never to be anything other than horrible, spices made the wine-drinker’s life a little less painful. As far as the medical authorities were concerned, this virtuous trinity of benefits was capped off by a fourth, in the form of potent healing properties. Writing of the popular clove-flavoured wine known as gariofilatum, John of Trevisa summarised the attractions of the spices: ‘The virtue of the spices and herbs changes and amends the wine, imparting thereto a singular virtue, rendering it both healthy and pleasant at the same time … for the virtue of the spices preserves and keeps wines that would otherwise soon go off.’

  With the advent of the technology of the bottle and the cork in the sixteenth century, the need for spices in wine was abruptly less pressing. Techniques of wine-making and the quality of the end result improved. Yet of all of spices’ uses in the medieval world, spiced wines were perhaps the most enduring, long outlasting the Middle Ages. Samuel Pepys enjoyed an occasional glass of hippocras; it even gets a mention in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911). Neither clarry nor hippocras has ever quite disappeared, ultimately evolving into the vermouths, Glogg or mulled wine of today – still one of the best ways of dealing with a red on the turn, short of pouring it down the sink.

  Spiced ale, on the other hand, has gone the way of the crossbow and the codpiece. In the Middle Ages, ale really was good for you – comparatively speaking. It was certainly better than the water, an observation traditionally credited to St Arnulphus, bishop of Soissons and abbot of the Benedictine foundation of Oudenbourg, who died in 1087. Arnulphus is the patron saint of brewers, acknowledgement of his realisation that heavy beer-drinkers were less afflicted by epidemics than the rest of the population. Particularly in Europe’s densely crowded towns, with their poor drainage and rudimentary public hygiene, untreated water was a daily reality and an extremely effective vector of infection. Though the effect of contaminated water was only dimly appreciated, the medical theory of the day added intellectual respectability to the wariness towards water, classing it as wet and cooling, and therefore potentially inimical to the body’s natural balance of moderate warmth and moisture. (It was most likely the probable physical consequences of drinking untreated water that explain the severity of a diet of bread and water, often handed out to errant monks as punishment or adopted willingly as a form of penitence: given the intestinal upsets likely to result this was truly, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, the bread of adversity and the water of affliction.) Given that the beer-drinker was exposed to fewer microbiological nasties Arnulphus’ bias against water made perfect sense.

  The upshot was that ale was consumed in prodigious quantities. In twelve months during 1452 and 1453 the household of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whom we met above galloping through the spices, consumed over 40,000 gallons of ale; a daily average of about one gallon per staff member. A few years earlier the more modestly run household of Dame Alice de Bryene in Suffolk maintained the same girth-stretching rate of consumption. Since its manufacture called for only the most rudimentary technology and ingredients, ale was within the reach of all but the very poor. In England at the start of the fourteenth century it cost approximately one-sixth as much as wine, and was often provided to day labourers as part of their rations. It was moreover a crucial source of carbohydrates. In the middle of the sixteenth century Johann Brettschneider said that ‘Some subsist more on this drink than they do on food.’

  Ale’s shortcoming, like wine, was a very short shelf-life. Its optimum age was around five days, after which it rapidly deteriorated, turning ‘ropey’ or ‘smoky’, whereafter it became undrinkable, and occasionally even injurious. (Beer on the other hand is made with hops, which contain a natural preservative. Hopped beer is mentioned in a document from the abbey of Saint-Denis dated to 768, although its consumption did not take off in continental Europe until roughly the thirteenth century; its acceptance in Britain dates from the fifteenth century.) Old ale could be truly foul: St Louis found the drink so noisome he took it during Lent as a form of penance. Peter of Blois called it a ‘scurvy drink, sulphurous liquor’ – had not Christ elected to turn water into wine, not beer? The sixteenth-century medical writer Andrew Borde was merely stating the obvious when he insisted that ale should be drunk ‘fresshe and cleare … Sowre ale, and dead ale, and ale the whiche doth stande a tylte, is good for no man.’

  This was where spices came, yet again, to the rescue. The medieval popularity of the nutmeg owed much to ale’s perishability: as the clove and cinnamon were to wine, so the nutmeg was to ale – the context of Chaucer’s reference to ‘notemuge to putte in ale’. Here too, the medieval palate seems to have developed a virtue out of necessity, acquiring a taste for spiced ale to the point that the addition of spice became expected, even preferred – it was used ‘Wheither it [the ale] be moyste [i.e. fresh] or stale,’ as Chaucer puts it. Further down the social scale, ale laced with spice could even be regarded as a poor man’s delicacy. When Chaucer’s ‘joly lovere’ Absalom pays court to the miller’s wife, he sends her spiced wine, mead and ale – little good though it did him. Some of these spiced ales survived until relatively recently, such as ‘Stingo’, a variety of pepper-flavoured beer popular in London in the eighteenth century. Russian writers of the nineteenth century mention sbiten, a spiced mead flavoured with cardamom and nutmeg.

  Much as occurred in the wine trade, advances in hygiene and technology eventually rendered spices redundant, as better preservation and sterilisation took the harmful bacteria, and so the spice, out of ale-drinking. The invisible and unavoidable action of bacteria was not, however, the only threat to ale that spices had to counter. Other problems were man-made, the culprits being the taverns and alewives who produced perhaps the bulk of the ale consumed outside the great households. The alewife’s profession was not, to put it mildly, renowned for its integrity. (Along with prostitution this was, incidentally, one of the very few economic opportunities open to women in the Middle Ages.) The thirteenth-century German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach included the tale of the honest alewife among his collection of miracles. So outstandingly repugnant were some of the alewives’ home brews that they inspired a whole sub-genre of poetry, the ‘good gossips’ tradition. Nor was the law any gentler with the unscrupulous alewife than was the monk or satirist. Towns of any size appointed officials responsible for performing spot checks on ale and enforcing harsh penalties on offenders. In London in 1364 one Alice Causton was obliged
to ‘play Bo Peep through a pillory’ for tampering with her ale; others did worse (and received worse) for selling bad ale – befouling the national drink, after all, was not to be taken lightly. Even the Church had something to say on the issue. In Ludlow church in Shropshire parishioners were either warned or gratified by a carving of an alewife in Hell, condemned to eternal torment among claw-footed devils.

  But while such laws and warnings may have sent the occasional shiver down an unscrupulous alewife’s spine, their sheer proliferation suggests that laws on ale quality were regularly flouted. In this world if not in the next spices were a more dependable ally for the ale-drinker than were the authorities, the pillory or even, it would seem, the threat of perdition. Just how desperately they were needed can be gauged from John Skelton’s ‘Elynour Rummynge’, a poem composed early in the sixteenth century and perhaps based on a real alewife of the same name, recorded to have lived at Leatherhead in 1525. Skelton’s heroine had come up with an ingenious way of accelerating the production of her homebrew, by letting her chickens run in the ‘mashfat’, the vat where the malt and the water were mixed. Worse, they roosted

  Straight over the ale-joust,

  And dung, when it comes,

  Drops right in the ale …

  There were worse tastes for spices to counter than salt and sourness.

  The Regicidal Lamprey and the Deadly Beaver

  The first thing is to know and recognise the complexion and nature of all things that are suitable to eat, and of him who eats them.