Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  For these, cost alone ensured that spices remained out of reach. This was particularly true of the fine Eastern spices: the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace that are so liberally sprinkled through the cookbooks. Like any other books, cookbooks were for the rich, though occasionally they make a nod to the diet of the masses. The fourteenth-century English Modus cenandi suggests a pepper sauce for wild goose; birds of lesser quality are seasoned with salt alone, and served to diners of lower station. One English culinary manuscript gives details for the preparation of three variants of hippocras, specifying different quantities of spice according to rank and budget: pro rege, pro domino, and, with least spice of all, pro populo. A rare exception to the generally upper-class tenor of medieval cookery books is the mid-fifteenth-century Liber Cure Cocorum, written for those who could only afford to practise economical ‘petecure’, literally ‘small cooking’.* The preface outlines the principles of cooking on a budget: ‘This craft is set forth for poor men, that may not have spicery as they would like.’ The history of cooking is the history of class cooking.

  Though spices became a more familiar presence over time, the essentials of this situation remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages. The data are sporadic but the picture is clear. In England in 1284 a pound of mace cost 4s.7d, a sum that could also buy three sheep – a whopping outlay for even the better-off peasantry. At much the same time a pound of nutmeg would buy half a cow. In London at the start of the third millennium the best places to shop for spice tend to be in the poorer, migrant areas of the city, whereas seven hundred years ago it was the exact reverse, with the business addresses of London’s grocers and spicers concentrated in the (then) well-off areas of the City. Spice could be bought from a number of retailers in the wealthy parishes of St Pancras’, St Benet’s Sherehog, Milk Street and St Mary-le-Bow’s; but no spicer saw fit to set up shop in the poorer area of Farringdon. Spices went where the money was.

  And where the money was not, spices occupied much the same position as they had in the age of Bede: out of reach, but not out of mind. When the poor did eat spices, they did so sparingly, or at someone else’s expense – at public feasts, for example, or, for those attached to a noble household, as leftovers from the high table. For the medieval poor, spices were seen primarily as rent payments and medicines, and as seasonings only rarely, if at all.

  Medieval poverty was seasoned with more run-of-the-mill flavours. For the majority the only seasonings on the menu were garlic, garden herbs and salt, and for some even salt was out of reach. Chaucer describes the situation of a ‘poor widow’ who shared a cottage with her two daughters, Chanticleer the cock and his hens, three pigs, three cows and Malle the sheep. No ‘piquant sauces’ for her, and ‘no dainty morsel ever passed through her throat’. Her calories came from ‘many a slender meal’, based around the staples of milk, brown bread, bacon and occasionally an egg or two. However even Chaucer’s skinny widow was better off than the wretched peasantry described by his contemporary William Langland (c.1330–c. 1400). His Piers Plowman has ‘no penny’ to buy ‘pullets, nor geese nor pigs’; the most he can afford is two green cheeses, curds, cream, an oatcake, two loaves made of beans and bran. And even Piers was one rung up the ladder from the truly destitute who did not have enough to quiet the sobbing of their children ‘in their craving for food’: ‘A farthing’s worth of mussels were a feast for such folk.’ Starvation was a frequent visitor to medieval Europe, as much the result of dreadful communications and transport as poor harvests and pests, and most peasants would have experienced at least one serious famine in their lifetimes. Here and there in the sources there are references to cannibalism and even disinterring of the dead so they might be eaten. One modern scholar has argued that the frenzied millennialism of the sixteenth century can in part be attributed to hallucinations and trepidation arising from a life spent in a cycle of famine and subsistence, constantly overshadowed by a very real risk of starvation.

  It is fair to say that the diet of the majority of the population ranged from meagre to adequate for the entirety of the Middle Ages. The greater part of the peasantry lived at or not far above the level of subsistence, acutely vulnerable to fluctuations in cost and climate, getting by (or not) on a diet built around staples such as cabbage, beans, turnips, onions, ale and above all bread. The latter was commonly black, impure, made from oats or rye; in hard times, it was made from bean flour or even straw. Wine was an occasional luxury. Meat and especially fowl were exorbitantly expensive. The henpecked husband of the anonymous English medieval poem of the same title dares not so much as ask his bossy wife for meat:

  If I ask of our dame flesh,

  She breaks my head with a dish.

  The only alternative supplies were illegally obtained from the king’s forest, poached at the risk of one’s limbs or life.

  In households such as these, on the rare occasions when there was money to spare, it was spent on foods that were more likely to stick to the ribs than spice. That would not change in its essentials until the Middle Ages were a distant memory.

  The exception, at least by the late medieval period, was pepper. Thanks to the success of the Venetians and their competitors in ferrying an ever-increasing volume of the spice from Alexandria and the Levant to Europe, in real terms the cost fell steadily but surely through the Middle Ages. In England in the middle of the twelfth century, the cost of a pound of pepper ranged from 7 to 8d: the equivalent of a week’s wages for a labourer in the king’s vineyards in Herefordshire (and therefore marginally more expensive in real terms than it had been in Roman times). Fifty years later the price was down, at least in real terms, but one pound was still worth around four days’ work. Over the next three centuries the price continued to fall, though not without occasional spikes caused by crises in money supply or in political turmoil along what was an extremely long and sensitive line of supply. The price soared in the middle of the fourteenth century, then steadily fell back again. In England in 1400 one day’s work of a skilled craftsman would buy half a pound of pepper – roughly half the cost of two centuries earlier. The spice was expensive, but well within the means of the better-off peasantry.

  Uniquely, pepper had made the transition from luxury to costly necessity. Such was the importance of the spice that in London in 1411 the authorities intervened to keep the price down, Parliament calling on the king to step in and protect the consumer from the perceived rapacity of the London grocers and resident Italian merchants.* Moved by the appeal, the king set a price ceiling of 20d a pound. By the time the Mary Rose sank in 1545 pepper was accessible to a common seaman earning a wage of 7d a week: when their corpses were raised some four hundred years later most were found to have owned a small bag of pepper.

  In the growing availability of the spice to an ever-larger swathe of the population is the first glimpse of a profound shift in perceptions. For, intriguingly, pepper’s accessibility to the common sort seems to have caused a loss of interest on the part of the nobility. Much as vegetables carried the stigma of commonness in the eyes of a meat-eating nobility, so too pepper gradually lost its air of exclusivity. As the spice became progressively more affordable and less exotic, the nobility turned its nose up at pepper and began to hunt around for more exclusive flavours. The trend is clearly reflected in the cookbooks. In the twelfth century pepper had been deemed fit for a king: in the Urbanus or Civilised Man of Daniel of Beccles, a courtier of England’s King Henry II, the spice features in numerous recipes, for poultry, meats, fish, beer and wine; it is in fact the only Eastern spice mentioned by name. Pepper is likewise the sole Eastern spice mentioned in the earliest surviving accounts of an English noble household resident in London and Windsor in the late twelfth century. On trips to the capital they bought pepper, cumin, saffron, sugar, fish, meat, eggs, wine, flour and apples.

  Two centuries later their well-born descendants looked down on pepper as irremediably déclassé. In the Forme of Cury written for King Richard II around 1390, pepper
features in a mere 9 per cent of the recipes. It was much the same on the continent, the spice barely featuring in the early-fourteenth-century Italian Liber de Coquina, another upper-class production. More revealing still is the gradual disappearance of pepper from successive editions of the French cookbook known as the Viandier, published in many editions in the fourteenth century and thereafter, traditionally attributed to Taillevant. Over time the amount of pepper decreases, gradually superseded by other spices that carried a greater social cachet, such as grains of paradise and cardamom.

  What is most striking about pepper’s slow fall from grace is that it runs precisely counter to economic developments. The period when pepper went out of vogue, beginning around the middle of the fourteenth century, was exactly the moment when pepper imports to Europe reached unprecedented levels. From 1394 to 1405 pepper cargoes formed about 75 per cent of all Venetian imports of spices, however, it was not the kings and nobles but the next few rungs down the social ladder that were paying for new palaces along the Grand Canal. The main consumers were the wealthy peasantry and the emergent bourgeoisie. In the mid-fourteenth century Livre des mestiers pepper is the only spice that features in the shopping list of a bourgeois householder in Bruges. The accounts of the Bonis brothers, spicers at Montauban in the same period, tell a similar story of diet mirroring class. Pepper, mustard and garlic are the seasonings sold by the mustard-maker, a poor man’s spicer. Likewise, the lower nobility, merchants and prosperous bourgeois bought pepper, often with smaller purchases of ginger, saffron and cinnamon. Artisans and peasants on the other hand bought pepper, and nothing else.

  An economic change, in not so many words, had social implications: tastes mirrored class. Occasionally pepper’s fall from grace is made explicit. As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century pepper appears in an anonymous poem as an ingredient of a ‘common sauce’ of sage, salt, wine, pepper, garlic and parsley. A little later it is dismissed as a poor man’s spice in the Thesaurus Pauperum or Treasure House of the Poor of Pedro Hispano, later Pope John XXI (c.1215–1277), whose reign was famously and abruptly curtailed by the collapse of a Vatican ceiling. And as the trade grew, so too the stigma. A medical treatise of the Salernitan school dating from the fifteenth century dismissed pepper as the ‘seasoning of rustics’, fit only for the lowly beans and peas of peasants.

  But pepper’s fate was the exception, not the rule. If the other, fine spices did not form part of the peasantry’s diet this did not make them any less attractive. For just as the nobility esteemed spices as a highly visible expression of superior birth and wealth, so too the message of spices as a glittering correlate of the better life lost none of its potency for those on the receiving end. Viewed from the other side, spices were doubly desirable for being the privilege of the ‘great and the good’: which is to say that those barriers themselves contributed in no small part to spices’ allure. Like beggars clustered outside a restaurant window, the medieval poor could only look on and drool as the well-off spiced their meat. What Montaigne (1533–1592) said of sumptuary laws applied equally to the still-more unyielding laws of the market: ‘To declare that only princes may eat turbot and wear velvet and gold braid, forbidding them to the people, what is that but enhancing such things and making everyone want to have them?’

  Those who could not afford spices, on the other hand, were inclined to view the issue less analytically. For those outside the charmed circle the line between admiration and resentment was a fine one. During Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt of 1381, the rebel priest John Ball, self-styled ‘Bishop of the People’, harangued the crowd of rebels in Canterbury before marching on London. In Froissart’s (c.1333–1405) version of events, Ball asks of his feudal overlords:

  Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show or what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs ornamented in ermine and other furs while we are forced to wear poor clothing. They have wines and spices and fine bread while we have only rye and refuse of the straw and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome manors … while we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field …

  Burning the Savoy and sending their overlords scurrying for safety would not change the situation one iota. Someone more resigned to the situation than Ball, but like him one of the many who found himself on the wrong side of those insuperable barriers, was the Kentish hero of the medieval English poem ‘London Lickpenny’. Visiting London from the country, he was overwhelmed by the street scene that greeted him in the capital:

  Into London I set off;

  Of all the land it bears the prize.

  ‘Hot peascods!’ someone cried – ‘Cherries on the branch!’

  One called me over to buy some spice: pepper and saffron they offered me, cloves, grains of Paradise … but for the lack of the money I could not avail me.

  The culture’s objects of desire may have changed, but not the impulse. The unattainable luxury goods in the windows of Bond Street or Madison Avenue continue to inspire much the same sentiment in the cash-strapped visitor – or, for that matter, the impoverished writer.

  * Cubeb or ‘tailed’ pepper, Piper cubeba, is a pepper-lookalike native to the Indonesian archipelago, popular in medieval times as a seasoning, medicine and aphrodisiac.

  * The incident brings Shakespeare’s fretful Antonio to mind: the ‘dangerous rocks/Which touching but my gentle vessel’s side/Would scatter all her spices on the stream,/Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks’: Merchant of Venice 1.1.33.

  * The insistence of modern doctors on the healthfulness of a diet rich in fruit and vegetables would have startled an ancient or medieval physician. Throughout the medieval period pears, apples, peaches and other moist fruits were viewed with suspicion as ‘meates that breed ill bloud’, in the words of one sixteenth-century authority. For the same reason, long after its introduction from the Americas the juicy tomato was viewed as dangerous, ripe with the seeds of madness. In Italian the aubergine retains an echo of an erstwhile unhealthy reputation in its name melanzana, ‘unwholesome apple’.

  * In England this generally meant Ireland or some other neighbour. In 1374, despite a general shortage of wine and a ban on its export from England, the king made an exception for a certain Thomas White of Great Yarmouth, a wine merchant who found himself in possession of twenty casks of spoiled Gascon wine. The wine was so noxious that not even the London poor would buy it, so he was granted the right to send it to the less discriminating drinkers of Scotland and Norway instead.

  * Eating barnacle goose, believed by some to be neither fish nor fowl, was another way around the rules.

  * A ‘knight’ whose deeds of valour were all performed indoors, in a carpeted room; or, quite possibly, on the carpet.

  * The pun relies on the Latin homonym for ‘law’ and ‘sauce’ (ius).

  † Consumption of wildfowl was another badge of noble status.

  * A similar custom was observed in the East as well: emissaries from the Great Khan to Pope Benedict XII left Beijing in the middle of the fourteenth century bearing gifts of silk, precious stones, camphor, musk and spices.

  * As spices and meat were noble foodstuffs, so black bread was regarded as a correlate of peasantry. The hierarchies of bread existed even within a single loaf. The English expression ‘upper crust’ dates from medieval times, when the quality of bread served in the hall varied according to rank. On account of medieval baking techniques, the best bread came from the top of the loaf, and so was served to the ‘best’ people.

  * From the Old French petite queuerie.

  * It would seem unjustly so: disruptions further down the spice routes were more to blame, for the Venetians had themselves paid a high price at Alexandria.

  III

  Body

  4

  The Spice of Life

  They pulled out his bowels, and they stretched forth his feet, They embalmed his body with sp
ices so sweet.

  Anonymous, ‘The Duke of Grafton’, c.1694

  Sleep in thy peace, while we with spice perfume thee,

  And Cedar wash thee, that no times consume thee.

  Robert Herrrick (1591–1674),

  ‘Dirge upon the Death of

  the Right Valiant Lord, Bernard Stuart’

  The Pharaoh’s Nose

  The first known consumer of pepper on whom we can hang a name did not use his spice to season his dinner, for he was long past any pleasures of the flesh. He was, in fact, a corpse: the royal skin and bones of Ramses the Second, arguably the greatest of Egypt’s pharaohs, up whose large, bent nose a couple of peppercorns were inserted not long after his death on 12 July 1224 BC.

  The upper reaches of the pharaoh’s nose mark the beginning, for the time being, of one of the most important chapters in the history of spice. Long after Ramses’ day many other illustrious corpses went to a spicy grave. In 565 the Byzantine poet Corippus recorded the embalming of the emperor Justinian with balsam, myrrh and honey, whereupon ‘a hundred other spices and wondrous unguents were borne in, preserving the holy body for all eternity’. In Pericles, a play based on a novel of late antiquity, Shakespeare described the burial of Thaisa,