by Jack Turner
By succeeding too well in acquiring the spices, then, the legacy of the discoverers was to rob them of their charm. The old myths and legends died hard, but spices were never the same again. In 1556 Francisco de Tamara claimed that cinnamon and laurels covered the water when the Red Sea rises, but by now this sort of thing was sounding increasingly medieval. The tone of the future was set by Garcia da Orta, who as a subject of Portugal’s Estado da India had ample opportunity to inspect the reality for himself. With cool, Renaissance precision his Colloquies dismande the ancient myths one by one. The most glamorous of the flavours that spices brought to the table, the heady mix of profit, danger, distance and obscurity, was fading fast.
All of which was a far cry from the Middle Ages, when spices arrived in Europe from beyond the known world. Spice was a means of getting rich for anyone willing to take his chances with the perils of the voyage and the deadly monotony of tropical life, with all its loathsome, strange diseases. Spices had been dragged into the modern world, and with modernity came that deadly quality, attainability.
‘The East,’ ejaculated an old Scotsman once – ‘the East is just a smell!’
Dan McKenzie, Aromarics and the Soul. 1923
While spices lost their attractions across the spectrum of their many former uses, from the temple to the bedroom, their most significant fall from grace occurred in the kitchen. As with any discussion of changing tastes, it is extremely hard to pin down a specific reason. Early modern cuisine was no less spicy than its medieval predecessor, but much had changed. Spices had ceased to be the last word in taste, sophistication and health. Even as the East India Company and the VOC brought spices to Europe in ever-increasing volumes there emerged a current of thought that looked on the highly spiced cuisine of the Middle Ages with mingled disgust, condescension and amusement. More was less.
The exact border between medievalism and modernity is a fuzzy one, and this is as true of cuisine as of any other area. Spices still figure prominently in a selection of cookbooks published across western Europe late in the sixteenth century. The English Proper New Booke of Cookery (1576) and Diego Granado’s Libro de Arte de Cocinar (1599) contain dozens of classically medieval spiced sauces and confections – much as is to be expected of an age that expended such prodigious energies on acquiring spices. Meanwhile, in absolute terms, the spice trade more or less doubled in volume through the course of the hundred years after Columbus, peaking around the end of the eighteenth century.
And yet as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, in some circles the heavy use of spices was seen as something of a culinary joke. In 1665 the French satirist Boileau produced a barbed lampoon entitled The Ridiculous Meal, in which the narrator makes fun of the ancienne cuisine. The host of Boileau’s meal is a pretentious boor who likes to pose as a man of taste and refinement when in fact he is nothing of the sort: ‘In the whole world, no poisoner ever knew his trade better.’ Noting that the guest has barely touched the disgusting meal set in front of him, the host enquires if he is unwell, and encourages him to partake: ‘Do you like nutmeg? It has been put in everything.’ The reference may be to a historical figure, the abbot of Broussin, a nutmeg addict who was mocked for putting the spice in all his sauces. Having long since anaesthetised his tastebuds with excessive spice, he was always in need of a stronger flavour that his jaded palate could recognise.
Boileau’s satire is, then, not so much a sign of the widespread use of spices as it is evidence of their fall from grace. The host’s heavy hand with the nutmeg is indicative of his tastelessness. He was a culinary dinosaur, presenting unsophisticated medieval slop as the latest in nouvelle cuisine, comically unaware of his failure to keep up with trends. Tastes had moved on.
It is probably no coincidence that this fall from favour occurred just at the time when spices had to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace. The world was getting smaller, and its bounty was coming to the dinner table. The advent of potatoes, squash, tomatoes and peppers created new possibilities for cooks, at the same time lessening the workload of spices. American chilli was both cheaper and stronger than pepper, and it could be grown practically anywhere. After Columbus first returned with a sample, the plant spread so fast around the world that many Europeans assumed it was of Asian origin. Paprika put down roots from Spain to Hungary. Pepper, for which there had long been no substitute, could now be outgunned.
The chilli was only one of several new stimulants competing for attention. A craving for tobacco swept the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with coffee and tea following not far behind. Although sugar had been known in the Middle Ages (classed, incidentally, as a spice, and used largely for medical purposes), its consumption began to increase dramatically from the sixteenth century on. Late in the century sugar began to be mass-produced in Brazil, and somewhat later in the West Indies, the apparent result of a general sweetening of the Western palate, an upward curve that has continued, much to the cost of our teeth and the profit of our dentists, to this day. The carousing cavaliers of the great Dutch artists endured a dental hell. Sugar had something of the glamour and forbidden attraction formerly reserved to spices, and its air of dangerous newness probably did no harm to its attraction.
Meanwhile the social setting that had so long shaped aristocratic cuisine was gradually but utterly transformed. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented convergence of aristocratic and bourgeois tastes, the effects of which are still very much with us. By the 1700s the distinctions between food for great princes and food for the middling sort look increasingly antiquated; in a word, medieval. The new spirit was captured by the publication in England in 1665 of The Queen’s Closet Opened, offering a glimpse into the food and manners of the monarchy but aimed at a wider audience – a taste of royalty, however vicarious, in the bourgeois home. Across the Channel François Massialot published his Cuisinier royal et bourgeois in 1691 – a title that little over a century earlier would have sounded as offputting to one class as absurd to the other. By the end of the century there were 100,000 copies in print. A little later the pioneering La Cuisinière bourgeoise was a runaway success, running to thirty-two editions between 1746 and 1769.
The aesthetic of this distinctively middle-class cuisine was radically unlike its precedents, marked above all by a shift away from the colour, cost and elaboration that were the hallmarks of medieval and Roman cuisine. It would be misleading however to suggest that food became classless and therefore spiceless; it was rather that spices were no longer as appealing, medically, socially, even spiritually. With the Renaissance there was a reordering of the cosmos along less theological, less allegorical lines, with the result that spices lost their symbolism, their ancient significance of health and holiness. (Gold, also common in aristocratic medieval cooking, went the same way, for much the same reasons.) Meanwhile the conspicuous outlets for consumption were increasingly channelled away from the table, to jewellery, music, dress, houses, art and carriages. The modern dinner was a more private affair than its medieval predecessor. The coded messages of land and money remained the same, but refinement and affluence were expressed by different means.
Although some of the hallmarks of aristocratic cuisine lingered on – game, in particular – even aristocrats turned to simpler and fresher flavours. Across all orders of society (except the poor, who never had much choice) there was a shift to simpler and more local flavours. In place of the transmutation sought after by the medieval cook the new ideal was that food should taste of itself. The new cookery stressed natural, inherent flavours, the ingredients cooked in such as way as to enhance their particular character. In the cookbooks of the later seventeenth century food begins to appear recognisably modern. Often the new taste took the form of an appetite for supposedly rustic food: the idea of the ‘rustic’ table, however contrived, became a good thing.* An upper-class fascination with a supposedly Arcadian peasant life brought country cuisine to the upper-class table – the same
instinct that saw Marie Antoinette build faux cottages and cowsheds in the gardens of Versailles. The medieval or Roman delight in witty or exotic subtleties, fish trussed as flesh, came to seem artificial and overwrought.
In this respect changes at the table reflected trends in the wider world. The age of the emergent nation-state was also the age of national cuisines, none of which had much room for spice. Nowhere was the new trend more fully or more successfully expressed than in Italy, both regionally and nationally, where the delight in fewer, simpler and fresher tastes remains the quintessence and local genius of Italian cooking. Anglo-Saxon cuisine went down a different and bleaker route, but one that led equally far away from spices. In the cookbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elaboration and costliness make way for economy and practicality. In Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery of 1747, for nearly a hundred years the most popular cookbook in the Anglophone world, the use of spices is strictly limited. Pepper survives in much the same role as it has today, no longer the central element, as in medieval black pepper sauces. Across the Atlantic, the trend was much the same. There were relics: galentyne survived, now transformed from the original spicy sauce into a jelly. The general trend was to relegate spices to desserts such as mince pies and puddings. Which is where, until very recently, they remained.
It was an outcome that would have gratified a St Bernard or a Peter Damian, and indeed some of their more puritanical successors may have played a part in marginalising spices in the modern Western kitchen. For as social and economic change pointed in the direction of bland food, so too did religion. Insofar as diet was concerned, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation succeeded in popularising what had hitherto been strictly monkish debates on diet; and unlike the Jeremiahs of the previous chapter, they seem to have had a good deal more success in taking that message beyond the cloister. The Puritans felt the ancient Christian wariness of cooking on a visceral level, a fact that goes a long way to accounting for Protestant cuisine’s well-deserved reputation for blandness. There was no small irony in the fact that the Protestant powers were also the leaders in the spice trade. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, even as the VOC brought back cargoes of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, Calvinist preachers railed against the corrupting influence of Eastern spices and their redolence of pagan sensualism. In Cromwell’s England, propagandists took aim at seasonings along with the bear-baiting and theatres. Dull food was on the way to becoming both a religious and a patriotic duty, as one poet lamented:
All plums the prophet’s sons deny,
And spice-broths are too hot,
Treason’s in a December pie,*
And death within the pot.
The Commonwealth soon faltered, but its legacy in the kitchen endured long afterward. After the Restoration the scent of treason still lingered over the spices, and in due course what apparently began with mercantilist economics and religious belief acquired the force of habit. In the cuisine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bland was beautiful. This is the age when the English travelogue acquires the figure of the Englishman abroad, complaining about the unpalatable spiciness of foreign food. In 1679 John Evelyn thought the food served at the Portuguese embassy ‘not at all fit for an English stomac which is for solid meat’. More bluntly, his contemporary Lord Rochester expressed his preference for ‘Our own plain fare … Hard as the arse of Mosely’ (Mother Mosely was a famous London brothelkeeper, evidently a hard bargainer).
Spices hung on in isolated pockets, but they were not what they had once been. Today the astute culinary archaeologist can still find such relics as spiced bread in Devon, and further north there is a plethora of richly spiced puddings – Scodand’s national dish, the spicy haggis, is essentially a medieval pudding. Scandinavia and the Baltic have preserved several remnants of medieval cooking, largely in biscuits, breads, cakes and liqueurs. One of the most interesting and unexpected survivals lives on in Mexico’s molé poblano, a fusion of American ingredients with the flavours of medieval Spain: turkey, chocolate, vanilla and chillis married with almonds, cloves and cinnamon. If tradition is to be believed, the combination was dreamt up by a nun of Santa Rosa convent in Puebla, asked to prepare a meal for a visiting viceroy. It is as though the tastes of Montezuma and the Catholic kings meet on the plate.
Yet such survivals represent the exception, and they tend to be confined to peripheral areas. Perhaps more to the point, there was an acute consciousness of this fact. Western European visitors to more spicy climes did not hesitate to regard spices’ longevity as a symptom of provincialism, or backwardness. When the Abbé Mably visited Krakow in the late eighteenth century he snootily dismissed the locals’ best effort, ‘a very plentiful meal which might have been very good if the Russians and the Confederates had destroyed all those aromatic herbs [sic] used in such quantities here, like the cinnamon and nutmeg that poison travellers in Germany’. His scorn was more than an isolated instance of the still-flourishing French tradition of lofty contempt for cooking à l’étrangère, but rather marks a more general shift. The perception had taken hold that spices were all power and no subtlety, best left to the coarse palates of the easterners.
And the further east one got, the hotter and coarser it got. In an age of intensifying nationalism, food came to be seen as a projection of national virtues or, looking elsewhere, vices. What you ate was a proclamation of national authenticity or, alternatively, decadence. Dryden, we have seen, translated the satires of Juvenal and Persius, in which the importation of Eastern or fancy foods was repeatedly scorned as degrading and debilitating. Spices were increasingly associated with Oriental habits; they were exotic and mysterious, effeminising and voluptuous. An early example was the ‘cruell Sarazin’ of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a character who prefigures the opium-smoking Chinaman or hashish-addled Turk of the nineteenth century, in this case deviously enhancing his manliness with illicit stimulants, ‘dainty spices fetched from furthest India, secretly to kindle their machismo’ – not playing it straight like his gentle Christian knight.
Spices became a mark of the exotic and a decadent, incompatible Other. The sensuous Easterner was pictured sauntering through bazaars of spice or reclining on his velvet couch, feasting on aromatic banquets as the houris danced around him. In ‘Hermione’ Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined an Arab ‘Drugged with spice from climates warm’; Swinburne’s Laus Veneris oozes
Strange spice and flavour, strange savour of the crushed fruit
And perfume the swart kings tread underfoot,
For pleasure when their minds wax amorous,
Chaired frankincense and grated sandal-root.
Intriguingly, this sense of the foreignness of spices was most acute in the nineteenth century, precisely when exposure to ‘swart kings’ and their perfumes was greater than ever before. In the early days Europe’s pioneers in the East had little choice but to assimilate, Portuguese, Dutch and English alike eating Indian food and developing their own fusion cuisine, of which the vindaloo is perhaps the classic example.* Whereas in the days of the Raj there evolved a parallel white man’s cuisine, the dreadful white and brown sauces that still linger on in some of India’s wealthy households and boarding schools. Meanwhile in Europe, Antonin Carême (1783–1833), the founder of the French style of grande cuisine and arbiter of nineteenth-century taste, regarded the abuse of spices as the antithesis of good cooking. The sense of spices’ inherent Eastern dangers was summarised by the dour Scots writer Dan McKenzie, who was repelled by the ‘strange vices’ of those ‘outlandish Eastern aromata, redolent rather of vice and its excitements than of virtue, and its placidity’. Fortunately his native land had undergone a thoroughly Presbyterian fumigation: ‘I may, therefore, with justice, raise a song of praise to our fathers who have had our country thus swept and garnished, swept of noxious vapours and emanations and garnished with the perfume of pure and fresh air, to the delight and invigoration of our souls.’ Even as Western penetration of the East reached new levels, East and
West went separate ways at the table. In this sense, Kipling got it right.
But historically, of course, Kipling was wrong, for nowhere is the history of East and West more incestuous than at the table. For the sake of spices East and West had an ancient relationship. In light of the appearance of spices in the most remote periods, it is a reasonable possibility that it was because of spices that they first met. Yet so thoroughly implanted is the sense of the otherness of spices that native Mediterranean aromatics such as cumin, coriander, saffron and fennel have come to be more associated with the cuisine of the countries that adopted them than with the lands of their origin – a reminder that the cultural traffic that travelled along the spice routes went both ways. Beyond the Essex town of Saffron Walden, few would guess that in medieval times England was long Europe’s greatest producer of saffron. Today, when spices are making a comeback, with an upsurge of interest on both sides of the Adantic, it is often claimed that spices were introduced to Europe with the great wave of migration from the former colonies. It is a claim that would have startled the first Europeans who went to Asia, particularly since it was spice that lured many of them there. The Englishmen and Portuguese who ate at the courts of India’s Moghuls and the rajas in the sixteenth century found there a cuisine which, in spite of several unfamiliar ingredients, they immediately recognised as showing all the hallmarks of refinement and taste, in its qualities of spiciness and elaboration not at all dissimilar to the cuisine their kings and nobles ate back home.
