20-1-2005
SPICE - The History of a Temptation
by Jack Turner
Published: 08 - 13 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 1 , Page 35
LEISURE/WEEKEND DESK
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
SPICE
The History of a Temptation
By Jack Turner
352 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
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Ships were launched, expeditions were financed, empires were built, fortunes were made and lives were lost -- not for the sake of power or oil or even Helen of Troy, but for the sake of some condiments. Or so argues Jack Turner in his fascinating new book, ''Spice: The History of a Temptation.'' Columbus, of course, stumbled across the New World while looking for cinnamon, pepper and other spices. And Magellan died in the Philippines for the sake of some cloves (which would eventually finance his expedition's circumnavigation of the globe). The Roman emperor Elagabalus perfumed his swimming pool with spices. The Avignon Pope Urban treated banquet guests to a stupendous 150 pounds' worth of spices. And Dante placed a Sienese gourmet named Niccolò in the eighth circle of Hell for discovering ''the costly use of cloves.'' ''Spice was a catalyst of discovery and, by extension -- that much-abused phrase of the popular historian -- the reshaping of the world,'' Mr. Turner writes. ''The Asian empires of Portugal, England, and the Netherlands might be said with only a little exaggeration to have sprouted from a quest for cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmeg, and mace, and something similar was true of the Americas. It is true that the hunger for spices galvanized an extraordinary, unparalleled outpouring of energies, both at the birth of the modern world and for centuries, even millennia, before.'' |
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In this, his first book, Mr. Turner not only gives the reader a wonderfully vivid history of the quest for spices and the lucrative spice trade, but he also provides some intriguing insights into why spices once exerted such a hold over the human imagination -- and how they catalyzed the Age of Discovery. He shows how the early spice trade forged an enduring, often exploitative relationship between the West and the East, traces the ambivalent attitude of the Church toward spices, and chronicles the gradual de-mythologizing of spices with the advent of the modern era. In doing so, he has succeeded in writing a book that is at once a social and cultural history, a culinary history and a delightful read.
What seems to the modern mind like little more than mundane seasoning -- something to sprinkle on our steaks, deviled eggs or doughnuts -- were once believed to possess mystical, even magical powers. In the days when the average person was ignorant about the origin of pepper and nutmeg and cinnamon (and ignorant, as well, of the hazard-ridden journeys of traders intent on bringing spices back to Europe from the Far East), spices were associated with Paradise, with some mythical, perfumed land. For many denizens of the Middle Ages, spices were something that grew in places where there were dragons and mountains of gold.
In fact, in premodern times, Mr. Turner notes, cloves grew only on five tiny volcanic islands far east of what is today the Indonesian archipelago; nutmeg came from the tiny archipelago of the Bandas or South Moluccas; pepper came mainly from the Malabar region on the southwestern coast of India.
In the days before refrigeration, spices possessed useful preservative qualities. Because they were hard to come by and expensive, they also became symbols of taste and class. They also came to be regarded as possessing a wide array of curative powers. In medieval Europe they were seen as aids in balancing the bodily humors: wealthier households, Mr. Turner reports, even employed ''spicers'' whose job it was to prepare suitable meals based on individual diners' constitutions.
The medical use of spices could be more alarming. In the 13th century, gout ''was commonly treated with the direct application of spices in the hope that the pricking, burning effect of the spices would drive out the disease.'' And in the 11th century, one manuscript suggested that ''dimness of the eyes'' be treated with a poultice made up, among other things, of honey, pepper and wine. Equally painful treatments (like the application of ground pepper to the genitals) were sometimes undergone by believers in the aphrodisiac powers of spices.
The association of spices and sex, of course, runs from the Song of Songs in the Bible through the rather more contemporary Spice Girls. There are the perfumed descriptions of women in literature like Dulcinea in ''Don Quixote'' (who was said to possess an ''aromatic fragrance'') and the enigmatic Queen of Sheba. And throughout the Middle Ages there were warnings about the erotic power of spices, which came to be associated with the lascivious East and the decadence of Rome. As a result, Mr. Turner writes, spices tended to provoke contradictory responses of ''hunger laced with misgivings; of recommendations and recipes hedged about with reservations.''
These days it is hard to understand just why seasonings would elicit such heated emotions, but as Mr. Turner points out near the end of this entertaining book, ''the apex of the spice age was the beginning of the end of their attraction.'' Thanks to the success of the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions and the English and Dutch trading companies that followed, spices became increasingly affordable and familiar. They became commodities, competing with more novel products (like chili, tobacco, coffee and sugar), and they lost their aura of glamour and the exotic.
Spices ''had been dragged into the modern world,'' he writes, ''and with modernity came that deadly quality, attainability.''
Spices had become, merely, condiments.
Spice of life
Pepper, cumin, ginger... Jack Turner's Spice tells how the scents of luxury have
become part of our everyday culinary armoury, says James Buchan
Saturday August 28, 2004
The Guardian
Spice: The History of a Temptation
by Jack Turner
409pp, HarperCollins, £25
In 1444, John Hopton, a small gentleman of Suffolk, sent his steward to Norwich to buy supplies for the winter. The man came back with, among other commodities, a small amount of black pepper. These grains, which had begun life on creepers trailing from the branches of trees on the western ghats of India, ended their journey among English country people who knew nothing of their origin.
Over centuries when few people willingly stirred from their home villages, tropical spices were shipped with great difficulty from one end of the Earth to the other. From the two peppercorns inserted in the nostrils of the mummy of Ramses II in 1224BC to the jar of powdered cinnamon in a modern kitchen cupboard, there lies an almost uninterrupted history of trade between east and west.
Why the luxury spice trade prospered for so long is both hard and easy to understand. Light, portable, hard and long-lasting, such tropical spices as pepper and cloves might have been designed for the centuries when travel was slow and perilous. These spices were traded over immense distances because (like silk, unlike milk) they could be.
Yet what is clear from Jack Turner's learned history is that the spices went on accumulating virtues - in kitchen, bedroom and temple - till they had passed beyond the realm of earthbound commodities into some order of their own. Their fall from grace in modern times has been profound. We have forgotten the metaphysics of the nutmeg.
Spice: The History of a Temptation is a sumptuous edition of a new class of popular monograph - Salt, Cod, Tobacco - that tells the history of the world through the story of a single commodity or class of commodities. Such single-minded focus has the advantage of showing both the big picture and the small: the grinding out of international trade and the fussing of a single household. The risk is of monotony and exaggeration.
The word "spice" derives from the Latin species which in its later history came to means goods or products, often of small volume and high value. Francesco Pegolotti, a servant of the Bardi family of Florence who kept a notebook of his business dealings in the years before the Black Death of the mid-1300s, listed nearly 200 products under "spices". These included not only what we know as culinary spices (cumin, ginger) but 14 types of sugar, medicines such as borax and aloe, frankincense, elephant tusks, gems, copper and tin.
Jack Turner, an Australian scholar who studied at Oxford and lives in New York, has chosen to confine himself to the five super-value tropical aromatics. These are pepper and ginger from the Malabar coast of India, cinnamon from what is now Sri Lanka, and nutmeg (and its associate mace) and cloves from the Moluccas or Spice Islands, south of the Philippines.
The trade in pepper reached a first peak under the Roman empire. In the sole surviving cookery book from Latin antiquity, the De re coquinaria of Apicius, pepper appears in 349 of the 468 recipes, including dormice stuffed with pepper and nuts. The trade survived the collapse of the western Roman empire and, when it was revived, carried associations of ancient luxury and civility. In the Middle Ages, it was almost wholly in the hands of Muslim or Gujarati merchants, with Europeans generally confined to the last leg from Beirut or Alexandria. None the less, even that stage was immensely profitable to the Venetian merchants who controlled it. In the words of the 15th-century Portuguese traveller Tome Pires, "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice."
With the voyages of Vasco da Gama to the Malabar coast, and Magellan to the Moluccas, there began the bloody history of the European monopolies. In the Moluccas, the Portuguese were displaced in 1605 by the Dutch East India Company, which operated a plantation economy as harsh as anything in the sugar islands of the West Indies. The Dutch grip on both the Moluccas and Ceylon was broken by the British at the end of the 18th century. With the cultivation of nutmeg in Grenada and cloves in Zanzibar, the tropical spices lost their rarity just as a Puritan middle class was turning away from aristocratic luxury. Meanwhile the new sciences questioned the medicinal virtues of spices.
In addition to the commercial history, Turner also tells, as it were, the secret history of spice. Because of their fragrance and durability, and their association with embalming and sacrifice, the spices of Turner's story came to have a whiff of the supernatural. They made women desirable and men potent. As embodiments of both sensual luxury and extravagance, the tropical spices always had their critics, from Pliny the Elder to St Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian order. The moralists had as allies the ancient and modern theoreticians of the balance of trade, who saw the commerce in spices draining precious silver out of Europe (and, after the 16th century, the Americas) into the Indies.
In telling this story, Turner is equally at ease in antiquity and the Middle Ages. He quotes well and widely from literature, and has a flair for anecdote. His sole fault is a liking for anachronistic cliché (such as "performance-enhancing drug"), which patronises the past without flattering the present.
"Inasmuch as I have a thesis," Turner writes, "it is that spices played a more important part in people's lives, and a more conspicuous and varied one, than we might be inclined to assume." Yet at times, in a sort of absence of mind, he falls into the trap described by an economic historian he admires, Carlo M Cipolla. In a parody of economic history, published in 1988 and called Pepe, vino (e lana) come elementi determinanti dello sviluppo economico dell'età di mezzo , Cipolla conclusively proved that the Crusades, the Hundred Years war and the Renaissance were all directly caused by the aphrodisiac effects of pepper.
James Buchan's most recent book is Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (John Murray).
Title
Spice: the History of a Temptation
Author
Jack Turner
Publisher
409pp, HarperCollins, £25
ISBN
000257067X
Paradise smelled
of spices
(Filed: 29/08/2004)
Kate Colquhoun reviews Spice: the History of a Temptation by Jack Turner
In Spice: the History of a Temptation, Jack Turner sets out to demonstrate that for our earliest forebears spices were freighted (a word he uses liberally) with alluring associations. In particular, the most valuable, exotic eastern spices - pepper from India, mace, nutmeg and cloves unique to the Indonesian Molucca islands, cinnamon from Sri Lanka and ginger from China - trailed resonances of tropical sensuality, extraordinary wealth and the loftiest social cachet.
Spices were a well-known part of life for the ancients. The Greeks traded in India and the Romans navigated a sea route to its south-west coast for the pepper they prized (which was available to ordinary soldiers on any walled defence). But in the thousand years after the decline of the Roman empire, knowledge of the "spice lands" fell again into myth. Direct European involvement in sophisticated trade dissolved. Meandering overland trading routes, which from time immemorial had snaked precariously westwards to Egypt and the Levant and on to Europe, ensured a continuity of supply, but the cost spiralled. In medieval Europe, spices took their place alongside gold, diamonds and furs as the most prized and exquisite of luxuries.
Turner shows that it was the promise of enormous financial rewards from monopolising trade in exotic spices that provided the impetus for western colonial expansion. These rewards were the driving force behind the great voyages of discovery: da Gama set out to claim the pepper harvests and the ancient spice trade of the Malabar coast for Portugal; Columbus sailed west explicitly in search of eastern spice and instead discovered America, with its seams of gold, tobacco and chillies; Magellan's global circumnavigation was fuelled by a quest for the rarest spice of them all - the tiny clove.
From the Romans to the Normans and the ruling powers of early medieval Europe, spices were part of courtly self-consciousness and played a powerful, symbolic role. The finest of them were reserved for ostentatious display as well as for oiling the cogs of religious diplomacy - and their lack of nutritional value made them doubly impressive. Food was prized for being highly scented and robustly spiced, and cooks - once menial officers of the household - became high-ranking officials (the locus, in Livy's opinion, of Rome's degeneracy and ultimate decline).
Slowing the process of decomposition, spices were as useful in the mortuary as in the kitchen. Roman Emperors were immolated, as was the phoenix, to be reborn from a cinnamon pyre. In later periods, it was believed that paradise smelled of spices and some looked on them as the fruits of lost Eden, but they engendered ambivalence in the Church - while they were used to anoint Christ's crucified body, spices reeked of decadence, carnality and paganism.
Used to balance the "humours", protect against poisoning and bad breath, cure piles, or seduce - mysterious, aphrodisiac and glamorous - spices wafted through the early history of the Western world.
Only at the threshold of the modern era did their potency begin to decline. As the high flavourings of previous generations went out of fashion, simplicity and freshness began to reign over spice, and culinary obsession switched to tea, coffee and chocolate. By then, in spiritual terms, spices had begun to lose their odour of sanctity.
Turner is far better on the grand sweeps of history than on the domestic or intimate, where he is encumbered by the sheer quantity of his source material. His structure is thematic, moving from the spice race (by far the best part of the book, propelled by the vigorous ambitions of his subjects) to an investigation into the culinary, bodily and spiritual uses of exotic spices. This is problematic in that as it ensures frequent repetitions and flummoxing leaps in chronology. His prose veers between gloriously controlled, evocative description and a self-conscious theatricality - an over-spiciness of language - that obscures the line of his tale.
Despite the author's scholarly intensity and narrative talent, Spice would be better at half the length.
Sex and the
cinnamon bun
(Filed: 15/08/2004)
Martin Gayford reviews Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner
According to Livy, the decadence of Rome dated from the era when cooks rose to social prominence. Those who had formerly enjoyed "the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige, and what had once been thought servitude came to be thought of as art". Decline and fall inevitably, if rather slowly, followed. It is a notion that we, in the age of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, might well ponder.
This splendid book is full of such intriguing information. One learns for example, that the first known case of spice exported to the West took the form of two South Indian peppercorns found inserted in the nose of the deceased Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II in 1224 BC. Also, that in an experiment many modern American men were found to be sexually aroused by certain aromas, including lavender, doughnuts and cinnamon buns.
What this book is not, as the author firmly points out, is an account of "how spice changed the world". And it is perfectly true that there are now far too many accounts of how this or that foodstuff, gadget or commodity altered history (though Mark Kurlansky's pioneering volume on cod remains valuable).
As it happens, the search for the sources of spice did affect us all in the most dramatic fashion. Columbus's discovery of the Americas, Vasco da Gama's voyage to India via the Cape of Good Hope, and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe were all essentially quests for these flavoursome and aromatic substances. But Jack Turner has produced something more subtle than merely a description of how that all happened; this is a wide-ranging meditation on just why it was that spices had such enormous appeal.
The first part of the answer - briefly summarised - is that spices were paradigmatic luxuries, because they grew only in certain localised and far-off spots. The clove tree was native only to the five tiny islands of the Moluccas off eastern Indonesia; the world's crop of nutmeg originated in the South Moluccas with a land surface of only 17 kilometres. Peppers grew on a vine from the Malabar Coast of Southern India, the Cinnamon forests flourished in Ceylon. Ginger came from China.
Consequently, for much of the Dark and Middle Ages, the spice trade involved numerous middlemen, so by the time one bought them from the spice merchant in London, Rome or Paris they were extremely expensive - with all the allure and social cachet that costliness implies. Peppercorn rents were - when first applied - heavy burdens for those who had to pay them.
That exclusive status, however, was only part of the explanation for the allure. Spices were also, from a practical point of view, unnecessary (just like art, and so many of the good things of life). They had no apparent nutritional value and were added to food for the worst - or best - of reasons: simply to make it taste nicer.
This naturally excited the hostility of the puritanical in ancient Greece and Rome - it was Livy's point - and afterwards. The dreariness of much English food from the 17th century onwards was connected to Low Church anti-gastronomic prejudice.
Spice had other dubious attractions. It was the basis of most ancient perfume. Roman courtesans and catamites reeked of cinnamon (which may explain the reaction of those modern Americans to spiced buns). The more austere type of medieval acetic therefore concluded that - just as it was Godly to eat meagre and horrible food - it was holy to smell very bad.
But the sweet fragrance of spice put others in mind of immaterial delights. Vast quantities of eastern aromatics were burnt in honour of the ancient gods; and even more were in Christian churches (though, again, the puritanical disapproved).
Spices had one practical use: they slowed the rate at which perishable items went rotten. Therefore they were useful in embalming bodies (which was why Rameses had pepper up his nose) as well as in preserving protein for winter.
More generally, the odour of sanctity was thought to have a spicy character. Saintly bones emitted it. Roman emperors were cremated on vast pyres of luxurious aromatics. Finally, the correct balance of spices was for centuries thought essential to health. Indeed, early medieval doctors had few other remedies to offer.
The mystique of spices declined as the flavourings themselves became more easily obtainable, and tastes changed. But it is clear that when it comes to food we today have a similar tangle of ethical, medical and social imperatives.
It is hard to eat a mouthful without wondering whether it is good for one's health, bad for the environment, or gastronomically fashionable. In a way, nothing much has changed since Livy's time. Jack Turner has written an erudite, urbane and original book - an appetising debut, in short.
Martin Gayford is the editor, with Karen Wright, of 'The Penguin Book of Art Writing'.
HarperCollins, £25/£22 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
24 August 2004
Strange to think that the half-forgotten items at the back of the kitchen cupboard changed the world. The voyages of discovery undertaken by Columbus and Magellan were primarily intended to locate supplies of the stuff we now grind over steaks or grate on rice puds. In 1498, when Vasco de Gama's exploratory flotilla reached the Malabar coast of India, a lowly emissary was dispatched to explain their mission: "We came in search of Christians and spices." The pepper from the Ghat mountains near Malabar is still regarded as the best in the world.
Jack Turner's epic and evocative account explores why spices had such profound significance in the Western world. He sensibly points out that the common explanation for the importance of spices is so much twaddle: "Anyone willing to believe that medieval Europe lived on a diet of spiced and rancid meat has never tried to cover the taste of advanced decomposition with spices." A much more likely explanation is that spices helped to enliven meat preserved by salting, and brought variety to the Lenten fast. Spices also helped make oxidised wine - a constant problem before the development of corks and bottles in the 16th century - reasonably palatable.
Spices made their tortuous way to Western Europe long before the oceanic routes to the East were initiated. Pepper crops up in 394 of Apicius's 468 recipes. It appears in a textbook for Roman schoolboys, where a talking pig called M Grunnius ("Grunter") Corocotta "obligingly asks to be well cooked with pepper, nuts and honey". The appetite for spices outlived the Roman period. When dying in 735, the Venerable Bede distributed his pepper among ecclesiastical colleagues.
Considering the obscure origins of some spices - the clove and nutmeg only grew on tiny volcanic specks in the Moluccas - it is scarcely surprising they were thought to be of divine origin. Their fragrance and preservative powers only added to their mystique. An Egyptian mummy dating from 1224BC was found to have Indian peppercorns stuffed in its nostrils.
Turner notes that the frequent appearance of spices in early-medieval medical texts is "nothing less than astonishing". For the most part, these were of dubious value. When the maritime trade in spices began, they may have been even more deleterious to health. Spice ships enabled the spread of the black rat and its plague-carrying fleas.
Shuffling chronology, Turner explores the role of spice for body and spirit through aphrodisiacs and incense. Some areas of his "long ramble through the past" are more interesting than others, and there are some strange omissions. Why doesn't asafoetida, brought to Europe by Alexander the Great and mentioned in half the recipes of Apicius, get into the book? And where is sumac, utilised as a souring agent before the introduction of lemons? Surely, extravagant saffron deserves more than a handful of fleeting references. But these are quibbles in a book as readable as it is exotic.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Spice
The History of a Temptation
By Jack Turner
KNOPF; 352 PAGES; $26.95
First-time author Jack Turner starts off his academic history of the spice trade with a cutesy premise. The Oxford University Rhodes Scholar reaches back to his grammar school days to retrieve the seed that inspired this deeply astute work. According to Turner's teacher, Columbus stumbled upon the New World in search of spices because "medieval Europeans had been afflicted with truly appalling food, necessitating huge quantities of pepper, ginger, and cinnamon to disguise the tastes of salt and old and rotting meat." The young Turner accepted the explanation, but pursues this line of inquiry in later years: Why spice, really?
The premise may be coy, but the driving force behind Turner's book, which is to give voice to a history that never received its due, is not. "The astonishing, bewitching richness of [spices'] past has suffered from being too often corralled into economic or culinary divisions," writes Turner, "the essential force of their attraction buried in a materialist morass of economic and political history." Turner dips into spices' history, which he measures from 1720 B.C., the date assigned to cloves unearthed in the Syrian desert and the first proof of trade with the Far East, to the present day, concentrating mostly, though, on ancient Rome and the Middle Ages, spices' golden ages.
He starts by addressing the establishment of spice routes between the West and East during the "Age of Discovery," a dry but necessary geography lesson interspersed with ugly episodes of Europe's impervious greed and imperial sense of entitlement. The author deftly puts the value of spice into material perspective. "Pepper was the cornerstone of Malabar's prosperity," writes Turner. "What the Persian Gulf is today to oil, Malabar was to pepper, with similarly mixed blessings for the region and its residents." He describes the prices in Roman times for various "grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from 35 to 300 denarii the pound, in a pure form a whopping 1,000 to 1,500: six years' wages for a centurion."
Establishing the empirical data allows Turner to move on to the complexities of spices' allure: the value it was assigned spiritually and medically; spice as a status symbol, an aphrodisiac, a culinary additive, an embalming material and an object of ascetic consternation. Turner's study of spice also illuminates modes of social behavior that are as prevalent now as they were centuries ago, reflecting humanity's timeless tendency toward stratification, fantasy and greed. "The culture's objects of desire may have changed," writes Turner, "but not the impulse."
Much of spices' allure was linked to the mystery of its origins. According to Turner, "none could view the system in its entirety. Trade was a piecemeal business, passed on from one middleman to another." Because of this, many theories of where spice came from had more to do with imagined landscapes than actual nature or the geography of trade. St. Jerome (ca. 347 to 419) is credited with one of the more influential descriptions of his day: "the River Ganges ... which flows around the entire land of Evila, and is said to bear many types of spices from the fountain of Paradise. Here are found carbuncles, emeralds, and shining pearls ... and mountains of gold, which it is impossible for men to approach because of gryphons, dragons, and huge- bodied monsters."
"Spice" also serves as a partial history of how the West came to eroticize the East. The West's ignorance of the geography and customs of the East, the source of spices, coupled with Eastern writings prescribing spices for sexual vigor, were two key factors that contributed to a persistent attitude. Turner produces a potent example from a Victorian English translation of "The Perfumed Garden," a 15th century Arab sex manual that left little to the imagination. In a seduction by spiced perfume, the seducer propositions the seduced in a scented room: " 'If you like you may lie on your back, or you can place yourself on all fours, or kneel as in prayer, with your brow touching the ground, and your crupper in the air, forming a tripod.' ... Such images," writes Turner, "were grist for the mill of those who saw in spices one of the hallmarks of the sensual decadence of the East. It was perhaps inevitable that spices came to be considered the aroma of the libidinous Oriental." Underlying this outlook was a morality of consumption that is a leitmotif throughout the text. According to Turner, a doctrine favored by medieval moralists was that "'anything even remotely enjoyable is bad for you." Once asceticism was designated as the path to Christian holiness, spices no longer complied with the medieval lifestyle. "Precisely on account of their proverbial sweetness, their prominence among the luxuries of the medieval nobility, they formed a telling and, or so it was hoped, salutary contrast with a life of Christian austerity. ... For sweetness now surely meant everlasting stench later." Those who wanted sweetness now were the rich, who used spices to mark their social territory. Decadent Romans and medieval nobility showed off their wealth in ways worthy of today's hip-hop elite. Turner writes, "In the medieval as in the modern world, however, the ultimate in ostentation was not to boast, display, or dispense but to discard." Things haven't changed much -- the behavior recalls a recent Vanity Fair article that describes a popular pastime of wealthy vacationers in St. Tropez: to buy bottles of Cristal just to shake up and pour all over each other.
Turner also offers the reader a fascinating window into uniquely medieval quirks, the information ranging from the amusing to the enlightening to the painful. For instance, the medieval explanation of digestion ("The stomach was conceptualized as a form of cauldron heated by the liver, digestion being understood as the final phase of the cooking process."), the use of spices as medication, or the "if it hurts it's good for you" school of thought ("Spices were applied to the parts that apparently needed them least, such as the nose, anus, and genitals"), and the revelation that "contrary to one hoary myth, hardly any well-informed medieval Europeans were flat-earthers. That the earth was spherical had been accepted by all informed opinion since ancient times."
One of Turner's outstanding qualities is that he avoids judgment of the medieval lifestyle, no matter how peculiar it may seem. Likewise, he encourages the 21st century reader to view history with an open mind. After describing, then debunking, the prevalent medieval medical practices, which relied on balancing "the humors" by ingesting foodstuffs that were placed "on the spectra of hot through cold and dry through wet," Turner swiftly counters, "Though who are we to laugh? Modern dietary fads can be just as bizarre -- and we have fewer excuses for our gullibility."
The author's touch is about as light as can be hoped for in a work that surveys nearly 4,000 years of civilization. Turner impressively weaves a tremendous amount of information into a cohesive, pointed narrative. Unavoidable overlap of subject matter can make the book repetitive at times, and an abundance of historical data can become overwhelming, but this is not by any stretch a stuffy academic treatment. Turner comfortably weaves in the present, using colloquialisms and incorporating such subject matter as pop culture (Spice Girls), soft-core porn (the Spice Channel) and Coca-Cola (the secret formula is said to contain nutmeg and cinnamon), all unexpected but welcome citations in a serious scholarly work.
In a predictable turn of human behavior, once spices lost their mystery, people lost interest. According to Turner, this happened at some point between the 12th and 15th centuries. "With the advent of science and reason," writes Turner, "the mystery and mystique of spices' virtues fell out of favor." But Turner expertly demonstrates that the legacy continues, or at the very least, that it existed.
Gabriella Gershenson is a food columnist and critic in New York City.
DENVERPOST.com
Article Published: Sunday, August 08, 2004
Spicy tale of temptation
The mythic properties and age-old appeal of aromatic spices
By Roger K.
Miller
Special to The Denver Post
Spice: The History of a Temptation
By Jack Turner
Knopf, 336 pages, $26.95
In Padua, Italy, in 1214 there was a kind of medieval food fight that neatly illustrates one of the contentions in Jack Turner's "Spice: The History of a Temptation." The noble ladies and gentlemen, crouching behind "battlements" constructed of expensive furs and cloths, pelted one another merrily with likewise expensive nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves and other spices and foodstuffs for little reason other than that they could afford to do so.
Conspicuous consumption was not the only value of spices. Their scent was put to many uses, including magical and religious, to the extent that spice became the odor of sanctity, both before and after death. The second century Christian martyr Polycarp was said to have given off a smell of fragrant spices on his funeral pyre - a "human incense stick," as Turner puts it.
Anecdotes such as those can be found throughout "Spice," and it's a good thing, for they spice up the readability of his work. The author presumably did not set out to rope smoke, but he might just as well have, for he chose a tough topic to get a handle on. The book is not so much a history of the spice trade "as a look at the reasons why it existed."
Turner explores why spices are appealing and how that appeal emerged, evolved and faded. Spices came to the West bearing a cargo of associations, myth and fantasy, and "How spices came to acquire this freight ... is the purpose of this book."
His approach is not narrative, but, as he says, more like polyphony, "albeit without the satisfying resolution." This thematic organization tends to wander, as he admits, the way "spices themselves always have done." His self-deprecation aside, the approach lends itself to an occasional wobbling of focus and contributes to repetition.
Still, basing his writing on research that is wide and deep, Turner succeeds remarkably well at capturing the evanescent attractions of - primarily - pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. He begins with an overview of the trade - the great explorers of the Age of Discovery, such as Columbus and Da Gama, were spice-seekers first, he maintains, and geographic discoverers second - and then moves on to sections dealing with uses of spice in food enhancement, religion and magic, medicine and as aphrodisiacs.
There is some overlap in all of this as he weaves back and forth between the ancient and medieval worlds because, as he writes, food and cooking were considered less an art and more a medical science. Spices and medicines were one and the same; the High Middle Ages were the golden age of the spice trade and spice medicine.
Though spices (from the Spice Islands in what is now Indonesia) had been available in Europe centuries before Columbus, it was widely believed they were grown in a terrestrial paradise. Fantastical accounts of these fantastic "places" were more readily accepted than factual ones, like Marco Polo's, of actual places. Shades of the National Enquirer.
Along the way he spikes a few myths, one being that the reason medieval folk used spices so heavily was to conceal the taste and smell of rancid meat. As Turner explains, if you had enough money to buy costly spices, you could afford to buy at least half-decent meat.
Rather, what spices did, in the form of sauces, was cover the taste of salt, in which meat, when it could not be obtained fresh, was preserved. The "rancid" argument could apply more to wine and ale. In a time when the water generally was unfit for human consumption, they were drinks of choice. But they tended to go bad quickly, and hence were commonly spiced.
The section that may arouse the most interest in the reader is on aphrodisiacs. "That spices were sexy was an unchallenged nostrum of the medieval scientist," Turner writes, in recounting some peculiar, not to say disgusting, things. There are entertaining tales of the clergy (including the mythical Pope Joan) supposedly having their virtue tested, or indeed undone, by indulging in spicy foods.
Spicy concoctions were whipped up especially for weddings, which were, if anything, bawdier than today's. It is a wonder that people stayed credulous for so long, since the nostrums not only often involved discomfort and unpleasantness but did not work.
Or do they? Turner tells of a modern experiment in which mice that were practically stuffed with cinnamon developed larger genitals and higher sperm count. Beware of the crowds around the spice shelves at your local supermarket.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer for several publications.
Books
from
the August 03, 2004 edition
SPICE:
THE HISTORY OF A TEMPTATION
By Jack Turner
Alfred A. Knopf
352 pp., $26.95
A spicy history of humanity
The quest for spices drove exploration around the world
On a shelf in one of my kitchen cabinets, I have a small jar of much-traveled cloves that have crossed the Atlantic twice in the international moves I have made over the past decade. As their numbers have dwindled over the years since I bought them, back in the last century, they have been transferred from their original pasteboard box to the rather spiffier glass jar. At the rate they are disappearing, they may well last another couple of decades. They are not, in short, a big deal in my household.
But I have new respect for those cloves since reading Jack Turner's "Spice: The History of a Temptation." For he demonstrates that it was cloves - 60,060 pounds of them, to be precise - that funded no less historic a human enterprise than Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.
Recent years have seen the flourishing of a new genre of history: the book focusing on some object of material culture considered a window on the larger pageant of human history. Thus we read about "salt" or "cod" as having "changed the world," or about the ordinary lead pencil, or the manufacture of chemical pigments, or even the color mauve. "Spice" continues that tradition.
Turner locates spices at the confluence of some major currents of the human experience: life and death; God and religion; sex, love, and food. It was the desire for spices as much as the desire for gold and silver, he argues, that motivated the great voyages of discovery of half a millennium ago. "The Asian empires of Portugal, England, and the Netherlands might be said with only a little exaggeration to have sprouted from a quest for cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmeg, and mace, and something similar was true of the Americas.... For the sake of spices, fortunes were made and lost, empires built and destroyed, and even a new world discovered. For thousands of years, this was an appetite that spanned the planet and, in doing so, transformed it."
Magellan, Columbus, and Vasco da Gama are the heroes of the adventure story of the spice trade. But the history of spice has other sides as well. Those who risked their lives in the spice trade were motivated by what Turner calls "the idea of spice," an idea derived from a reading of Christian theology that saw spices as literally the fruit of an earthly paradise. It was an idea reinforced by the fact that so many spices came to medieval Europe via the markets of the Bible lands of the Middle East.
Spice has another, much worldlier, set of associations, too. Someone at an airport newsstand looking for a spicy novel to read on the plane is not thinking of cinnamon and nutmeg.
Indeed, one of the threads of "Spice" is the long-running tension in Christian Europe between spice as the fragrance of the saints and spice as a (real or imagined) aphrodisiac. Of many anecdotes along this line in the book, the one that can be cited in a family newspaper is the story of the (apocryphal) Pope Joan of the 9th century, who was so aroused by the luxurious spices in her cuisine that she swooned over one of her courtiers, with obstetrical consequences nine months later.
This book is organized thematically rather than chronologically, "flitting across time and space," as the author admits. But he adds that "if the narrative wanders from one time and place to another, this is exactly what spices themselves have always done, cropping up in defiance of the received wisdom, in places where, by rights, they should never have been."
Turner, an Australian classicist now in New York by way of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, combines erudition with a breezy style. His research is contemporary enough to draw on the Internet and cable television. But it also extends back as far as an archive of ancient clay tablets caught in a house fire in Syria around 1721. The blaze baked them as if in a kiln, and thereby preserved them for the erudition of generations of delighted archaeologists.
There is definitely a gross-out factor in some of the anecdotes (spices were the key to early embalming practices). But Turner has a knack for talking about previous centuries in a way that resonates with our own times. And there are some wonderful touches of humor here, as well. Describing an ancient Roman chef's effort to present a cooked hare with wings to suggest Pegasus, the flying horse, he notes the effect was "not unlike a broiler hen trussed up as Superman."
And having grown up in a household where even freshly ground pepper represented a venture into the terra incognita of the gastronomic map, I was interested to read Turner's confirmation of my hunch about the link between religion and culinary practice: The Puritans were not big on spice.
In this telling, the spice trade itself is implicitly a sort of proto-Internet over which the traffic was not in bytes but in grains, and it went forth much more slowly. "Spice" is history that hits home.
Ruth Walker is the Monitor's chief copy editor.
Sunday, August 22, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
Book Review
"Spice" is
tasty but jumbled stew of a story
By Adam Woog
Special to The Seattle Times
As a schoolboy in Australia, Jack Turner was fascinated by the Age of Discovery, when the European frenzy for spices helped fuel an astonishing period of exploration (not to mention conquest and exploitation). Turner, who now lives in America, has turned this boyhood interest into prose. The resulting book, "Spice: The History of a Temptation," is maddeningly disorganized but intriguingly varied and rarely dull. (Kind of like my spice cabinet, come to think of it.)
"Spice" moves rapidly across a vast (and mostly Eurocentric) canvas. There are, for instance, discussions of the use of spices as anti-plague nostrums, in burial practices, as aphrodisiacs or as coverups for body odors — and, of course, of their great costliness. (Only one ship returned from Magellan's famous round-the-world voyage, but its single load of cloves was so valuable that the entire expedition saw a profit.)
Turner's book is stuffed with interesting and provocative bits. For example, he argues persuasively against the common belief that in olden days spices were treasured because they hid the taste of rotting meat. Not likely, Turner says, considering spices were far more expensive than a hunk of meat. Anyone who could afford spices could afford good meat, so it was always easier and cheaper to buy high-quality meat than to buy spices for disguise.
Sometimes the volume of the interesting bits in "Spice" is overwhelming. Turner is obviously a demon researcher, and his grasp of sources — especially ancient and medieval European ones — seems firm. But this can be too much of a good thing; the nonstop parade of spice facts sometimes lacks a clear narrative, and time and locale can jump back and forth like crazy. More stringent editing could have done wonders.
Also disappointing is the lack of insight about the modern-day spice trade, or of what it's like to travel in the lands where cloves or pepper grow. The emphasis remains firmly on library research.
Nonetheless, for what it does deliver, "Spice" is more than sufficiently seasoned.
Adam Woog's Scene of the Crime column appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Seattle Times.
Chicago Sun-Times
August 8, 2004
BY ROGER K. MILLER
In Padua, Italy, in 1214, there was a kind of medieval food fight that neatly illustrates one of the contentions in Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation. The noble ladies and gentlemen, crouching behind "battlements" constructed of expensive furs and cloths, pelted one another merrily with likewise expensive nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves and other spices and foodstuffs for little reason other than that they could afford to do so.
Conspicuous consumption was not the only value of spices. Their scent was put to many uses, including magical and religious, to the extent that spice became the odor of sanctity, both before and after death. The second century Christian martyr Polycarp was said to have given off a smell of fragrant spices on his funeral pyre -- a "human incense stick," as Turner puts it.
Anecdotes such as those can be found throughout Spice, and it's a good thing, for they spice up the readability of his work. The author presumably did not set out to rope smoke, but he might just as well have, for he chose a tough topic to get a handle on. It is not so much a history of the spice trade "as a look at the reasons why it existed."
Turner explores why spices are appealing and how that appeal emerged, evolved and faded. Spices came to the West bearing a cargo of associations, myth and fantasy, and "how spices came to acquire this freight ... is the purpose of this book."
His approach is not narrative, but, as he says, more like polyphony, "albeit without the satisfying resolution." This thematic organization tends to wander, as he admits, the way "spices themselves always have done." His self-deprecation aside, the approach lends itself to an occasional wobbling of focus and contributes to repetition.
Still, basing his writing on research that is wide and deep, Turner succeeds remarkably well at capturing the evanescent attractions of -- primarily -- pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. He begins with an overview of the trade -- the great explorers of the Age of Discovery such as Columbus and Da Gama were spice-seekers first, he maintains, and geographic discoverers second -- then moves on to sections dealing with uses of spice in food enhancement, religion and magic, medicine, and as aphrodisiacs.
There is some overlap in all of this as he weaves back and forth between the ancient and medieval worlds because, as he writes, food and cooking were considered less an art and more a medical science. Spices and medicines were one and the same; the High Middle Ages were the golden age of the spice trade and spice medicine.
Though spices (from the Spice Islands in what is now Indonesia) had been available in Europe centuries before Columbus, it was widely believed they were grown in a terrestrial paradise. Fantastic accounts of these fantastic "places" were more readily accepted than factual ones, like Marco Polo's, of actual places. Shades of the National Enquirer.
Along the way Turner spikes a few myths, one being that the reason medieval folk used spices so heavily was to conceal the taste and smell of rancid meat. As Turner explains, if you had enough money to buy costly spices, you could afford to buy at least half decent meat.
Rather, what spices did, in the form of sauces, was cover the taste of salt, in which meat, when it could not be obtained fresh, was preserved. The "rancid" argument could apply more to wine and ale. In a time when the water generally was unfit for human consumption, they were drinks of choice. But they tended to go bad quickly, and hence were commonly spiced.
The section that may arouse the most interest in the reader is on aphrodisiacs. "That spices were sexy was an unchallenged nostrum of the medieval scientist," Turner writes, in recounting some peculiar, not to say disgusting, things. There are entertaining tales of the clergy (including the mythical Pope Joan) supposedly having their virtue tested, or indeed undone, by indulging in spicy foods.
Spicy concoctions were whipped up especially for weddings, which were if anything bawdier than today's. It is a wonder that people stayed credulous for so long, since the nostrums not only often involved discomfort and unpleasantness, but did not work.
Or do they? Turner tells of a modern experiment in which mice that were practically stuffed with cinnamon developed larger genitals and higher sperm count. Beware of the crowds around the spice shelves at your local supermarket.
Roger K. Miller, a journalist for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer.
