by Jack Turner
But what is myrrh? What cinnamon?
What aloes, cassia, spices, honey, wine?
O sacred uses! You to think upon
Than these I more incline.
To see, taste, smell, observe is to no end,
If I the use of each don’t apprehend.
Thomas Traherne (1637–1674), ‘The Odour’
In the 1660s the English physician Thomas Sydenham, once hailed as the ‘Shakespeare of medicine’, claimed to have found a wonder drug. His laudanum, he boasted, was an unrivalled ‘cordial’. Made from a pint of sherry or Canary wine, its chief ingredients were saffron, cinnamon and cloves, beefed up with a two-ounce slug of opium. For a long time Sydenham’s laudanum was immensely popular with his fellow physicians. The spiced opiate was regularly prescribed for restless children, nervous orators, light sleepers, pregnant women, a string of prime ministers and their wives, poets and artists. It helped them sleep, brought relief from pain and made them feel terrific.
Like opium, spices had a future after Sydenham’s day, but not for the most part as medicines. Here too spices went into eclipse no less thoroughly than at the table, for similarly diverse reasons. Only very recently, when spices have come to attract increasing scientific attention, has it once more become possible to justify their use in medical terms, although modern discoveries seldom correlate with claims made historically on their behalf. No longer is it credible to claim cinnamon as a panacea.
As with cuisine, decline did not come overnight. In the seventeenth century it still made sense for Milton to write of Ternate and Tidore, ‘whence merchants bring their spicy drugs’. In 1588 Walter Baley wrote a book dedicated purely to the merits of pepper; in 1677 the Scottish savant Matthew Mackaile wrote another on mace. Pierre Pomet, druggist to Louis XIV, said of cinnamon that ‘we have few drugs that we use so much of; he regarded cinnamon oil as ‘the greatest cordial [remedy] we have’. Nutmeg was so widely used ‘it would be needless to say any Thing of it’. Even in the nineteenth century, sweet smells were still used as a defence against disease, although the practice came to be seen as increasingly folksy. Describing the trial of Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens pictures the court ‘all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever [typhus]’. The Galenic theory of olfactory sensation came under attack during the second half of the seventeenth century, but it was only with Pasteur’s discovery of the microbe that the old fallacy of bad air was finally taken out of the equation. With the advance of empirical methods of medicine, subject to verification, humoral theory was dealt a deadly blow. Smells and miasmas, the invisible death-dealing airs that had hung over medical thought since antiquity, were all dismissed as fallacious. As bad air and humoral theory were on the way out, with them went spices.
In the medical schools of Europe and America the study of pharmacy became vastly more empirical, and accordingly far less reliant on traditional herbal remedies. By the start of the eighteenth century the divorce between the physicians and the apothecaries, descendants of the medieval spicers, was already well advanced, with the reputation of the former in the ascendant. In London the ‘Chymists’ and druggists split from the apothecaries; in Paris in 1777 the pharmaciens of Paris split away from the épiciers. With their chemical and synthetic medicines the newer disciplines were seen as more scientific, credible and trustworthy. The apothecary was viewed as an increasingly bogus purveyor of folk remedies. In London the College of Physicians denounced the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper as a ‘physician-astrologer’: a quack.
As spices fell from favour with the living, so it was with the dead. Robert Herrick (1591–1674), we have seen, makes numerous references to spiced embalmings, and a little later Louis Pénicher used spices on the dead dauphin en route to Saint-Denis. It was not until the nineteenth century, with the development of formaldehyde and the improvement of techniques of arterial embalming – first discovered by Dr Frederick Ruysch (1665–1717) – that the practice was finally rendered obsolete.
Spiced aphrodisiacs lived on a while longer. Pécuchet of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet fretted lest spices would ‘set his body on fire’. In at least some parts of the world the faith survived until relatively recently. Writing of early-twentieth-century Morocco, one authority knew of a restorative mix of ginger, cloves, galangal and honey, for which one of his interlocutors made grand claims: ‘My grandfather has never failed to take this remedy, since his youth, and now that he is extremely old and full of years, he remains as solid and as lively as a young man. He keeps himself busy with his business, he travels, he has several wives, and they bear children every year.’ Even in the bedroom, however, spices had to compete in a more crowded field. They regularly crop up in modern books of aphrodisiac cooking, but they have become just one aphrodisiac among many, long since shorn not only of the medical logic but also, and perhaps more importantly, of the costliness and rarity on which faith in aphrodisiacs has always depended.
Something similar occurred with perfumes, although anyone who wears perfumes is likely to have splashed on a little spice, knowingly or otherwise. In the eighteenth century perfumery tended towards fresher, more floral aromas, and with the advent of organic synthesis in the nineteenth century perfumery became vastly more complex, accordingly reducing the perfumer’s reliance on spices. As they became less expensive they lost much of the cachet upon which top perfumes have always depended; today they can be substituted or even recreated by artificial substances, new combinations and, perhaps most important, a barrage of imagery proclaiming this or that scent to be more exclusive, more expensive, more luxurious, worn by celebrities. Cinnamon oil, once the absolute top of the line, is now just one ingredient among thousands.
Lastly, and perhaps most significant, spices lost their mystical, quasi-magical quality. Already by the late medieval period the religious applications of spice were a faint though vaguely troubling memory for only a handful of learned theologians. With the Reformation, even incense was banished from some (but not all) churches, as Protestant polemicists revived old worries about aroma in worship:
As if the pomp of rituals, and the savour
Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please.
The true, reformed religion stripped the altars, scrubbed and whitewashed the churches, and threw out the censer. Even the purely figurative force of spices went into abeyance. The modern saint, unlike his medieval predecessor, is generally odourless.
With irrelevance came innocence. The sense of spices’ latent temptations, long framed in the medieval moral matrix of gluttony, lust, avarice and worldliness, was downgraded to strictly individual issues of personal consumption. Falling costs and widespread availability would combine to strip spices of the potency of their symbolism, to the point that the idea of their incompatibility with Christian doctrine or for that matter a life of poverty now seems faintly absurd. In the modern world it tends to be the poor, not the rich, who eat spices.
In short, spices lost their air of dangerous attraction. And yet, as I have tried to point out through the course of this long ramble through their past, spices undeniably do still have a certain something. Faint reminders and echoes are still with us. Most are, admittedly, more literary than literal, the faint cultural echoes that still reverberate around this charged word. The allure of the exotic remains as alive as when Keats wrote in 1819 of
lucent syrups, tina with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
The nouveau gourmet who savours the cross-cultural mix-and-match of fusion cuisine is not so far removed from the self-consciously exoticising aesthetic of the medieval nobleman; indeed, some of the more post-modernist combinations of the trendier restaurants of London and New York recall the culinary chiaroscuro of medieval food more directly.
Spices may even lie at the heart of modern capitalism’s
most closely guarded secret. Mark Pendergrast concludes his history of Coca-Cola with a leaked copy of the formula of the world’s most popular and symbolic soft drink, which is, it would seem, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. Earlier leaks of the formula, while differing among themselves, suggest the same. If Pendergrast’s source can be trusted, then it would seem that spices remain as much the flavour of the age as they have ever been, albeit in disguise, hidden away in the basement of Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. Is Pendergrast right? It would, one feels, be wholly appropriate.
* With some rare exceptions: on the slopes of Ternate’s Gamalama volcano there is a clove tree over four hundred years old
* As of course it still is – the rate at which ‘rustic Tuscan’ cookbooks are published shows no signs of faltering.
* A spiced pudding, forebear of the modern Christmas pudding.
* The name derives from Portuguese wine (vinbo) and garlic (d’albo): wine and garlic sauce. The dish is effectively Portuguese India on a plate, the pork and vinegar of Europe married to the ginger and cardamom of India.
SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
The sources on spices are as diverse and as far-flung as the spices themselves, ranging from the scholarly to the culinary, the literary to the sexual, from the bookishly pious to the way-out bizarre; for which reasons a bibliography such as this is necessarily highly selective. Among the best general treatments are J.W. Purseglove et al., Spices (London: Longman, 1981); Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, The Encyclopedia of Herbs, Spices, and Flavourings (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1992); Terre, planète des épices (catalogue of the exhibition at the Palais de la Bourse, Marseilles: Jardins botaniques de la Ville de Marseilles, 1990); J.O. Swahn, The Lore of Spices (London: Senate, 1991); and Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (London: British Museum, 2002).
My two indispensable sources of primary material were J.P. Migne’s colossal Patrologia latina, and the even fatter Acta sanctorum of the Bollandists. I made liberal use of Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae latinatis, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of Middle English and the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.
Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.
Introduction: The Idea of Spice
The account of Terqa and its enigmatic cloves may be found in Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly Buccellati, ‘Terqa: The First Eight Seasons’, Les Annales Archéologiques Arabes Syriennes, 33, no. 2 (1983): 47–67. Although a vast amount has been written on the subject of spices there is as yet no comprehensive, single-volume history of the spice trade; nor, given the sprawl of the subject, is there likely ever to be one. A useful bibliography can be found in Jeanie M. Welch, The Spice Trade: A Bibliographic Guide to Sources of Historical and Economic Information (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994). Some classic essays are collected in Spices in the Indian Ocean World, edited by M.N. Pearson (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). R.H. Crofton, A Pageant of the Spice Islands (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielson Ltd, 1936) and Sonia E. Howe, In Quest of Spices (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1946) are two entertaining introductions. The enduring myth of American spices is mentioned in A. Nevins and H. Steele Commager, America, the Story of a Free People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 27. On the pitfalls of ‘mono-causal’ history, see Carlo Cipolla, Le poivre, moteur de l’histoire (Paris: L’esprit frappeur, 1997). On some of the linguistic and cultural fallout of the spice trade, see Anne E. Perkins, ‘Vanishing Expressions of the Maine Coast’, American Speech, 3, no. 2 (Dec. 1927), 136; and, in passing, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 4; Schele de Vere, Americanisms: The English of the New World (New York: Scribner and Co., 1872). On the chemical properties of spices: G.S. Fraenkel, ‘The Raison d’être of Secondary Plant Substances’, Science, 129 (1959), 1466–70; Natural Antimicrobial Systems and Food Preservation, edited by V.M. Dillon and R.G. Board (Wallingford, Conn.: CAB International, 1994). On the pleasures and perils of nutmeg abuse, see Andrew T. Weil, ‘Nutmeg as a Narcotic’, Economic Botany, 19 (1965), 194–217.
1: The Spice-Seekers
THE TASTE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS
The sole eye-witness account of Columbus’s reception in Barcelona is given by the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia General, edited by Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1959); see also Le Scoperte di Cristoforo Colombo nei testi di Fernández de Oviedo, edited by Francesco Giunta (Rome: Instituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990), 96. For an accessible narrative of where exactly Columbus went and what he found, see Samuel E. Morrison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942).
Until relatively recently, the economic considerations behind Columbus’s voyage were remarkably neglected in favour of more personal or ‘romantic’ themes. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in an extremely cogent and refreshingly sober account, Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), has put the financial motivation into proper perspective. The pre-voyage agreement specifying precisely what Columbus hoped to find can be found in Morrison, 105–6. On the influence of Toscanelli and his hypothesis of a western route to the spices of the East, see Leonardo Rombai, ‘Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli e la Cosmographia nel xv secolo’, in Miscellanea storica della Valdelsa, 98, no.3 (1992), 173–88; Henry Vignaud, The Columbian Tradition on the Discovery of America and of the Part Played Therein by the Astronomer Toscanelli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920). The best way to fathom Columbus’s optimistic misreading of the evidence is to read his own letters. They are collected in Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, edited by Cecil Jane (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930); Cecil Jane, The Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971); Clement S. Markham, The Journal of the First Voyage of Christopher Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893); and Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, edited by Samuel E. Morrison (New York: Printed for the Members of the Limited Editions Club, 1963). Other misplaced enthusiasm over American spices may be found in Bartolomé de las Casas: Obras Completas, vol. 13, Cartas y Memoriales, edited by Pantino Castañeda et al. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995); Cartas de relación: Letters from Mexico, edited by Anthony Pagden (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2001). On early disillusionment with America’s botany see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Knopf, 1990), 143. Citations from Peter Martyr’s descriptions of Columbus’s samples are from De Orbe Novo de Pierre Martyr Anghiera, edited by Paul Gaffarel (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1907), and De orbe novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, edited by Francis MacNutt (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1912).
The best account of da Gama’s voyage available in English is by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The only surviving narration of the expedition by one of the participants is the anonymous account known as the Roteiro, available in English translation as A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499, edited by E.G. Ravenstein (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898). For an overview of the Indian Ocean at the time of the Portuguese arrival see Geneviève Bouchon, ‘Un microcosme: Calicut au 16e siècle’, in Marchands et hommes d’affaires dans l’Ocean indien et la Mer de Chine, edited by Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1988), 49–57; India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, edited by Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987). Cabral’s voyage is narrated in The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India, from Contemporary Documents and Narratives, edited and translated by W. Brooks Greenlee (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938).
For an overview of Portugal’s rise and demise in Malabar, see C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969); M.N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Anthony R. Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Un
iversity Press, 1978). There is a lucid discussion of the empire’s ideological underpinnings and its peculiar blend of spiced messianism in Luís Felipe F.R. Thomaz, ‘Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion in the East, 1500–1521’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 28, no. 1 (1991), 97–109; the same author’s ‘L’idée imperiale manuelino’, in La découverte, le Portugal et l’Europe, edited by Jean Aubin (Paris: Centre culturel portugais, 1990), 35–103, is a handy overview.
The Estado’s economic frailties are discussed by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993). Debate over the economic impact of the Portuguese démarche in the East, and its effect on Venice in particular, is surprisingly ample and, occasionally, arcane in the extreme. Some of the more readable discussions are Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, book 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965); Frederic C. Lane, ‘Venetian Shipping During the Commercial Revolution’, American Historical Review, 38 (1933), 219–33; Romano, A. Tenenti, U. Tucci, ‘Venise et la Route du cap: 1491–1517’, in Mediterraneo e Oceano Indiano. Atti del VI colloquio internazionale di storia marittima (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1970), 109–40; V. Magalhães Godinho, L’Economie de l’empire portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: SEVPEN, 1969); Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East Indian Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974); C.H.H. Wake, ‘The Changing Pattern of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400–1700’, The Journal of European Economic History, 8 (1979), 361–404; ‘The Volume of European Spice Imports at the Beginning and End of the Fifteenth Century’, The Journal of European Economic History, 15, no. 3 (1986), 621–35. For contemporary assessments of Portuguese prospects, Fernão de Queyroz, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, translated by S.G. Perera, SJ. (Colombo: A.C. Richards, 1930); Hakluyt Society, A Selection of Curious, Rare, and Early Voyages (London: R.H. Evens, 1812).
