First Taste

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ST. ALBANS

THE SULTAN AND THE ORGY

In my mind, flavor, smell, and memory are intertwined. To really understand a distant time and place, you should be able to sample its antique flavors, sniff the ancient air, and take part in its archaic obsessions. But how can you taste the food of a feudal lord? Where do you meet a medieval ghost?

I came across a likely spot on a cobbled lane in the old English pilgrimage town of St. Albans. The Sultan restaurant is located here in the lee of a great Norman cathedral in a house that seems to stagger more than stand on the little medieval street. I had made my pilgrimage to St. Albans to track down the remains of a famous medieval travel writer—more on him later—but before searching for phantoms, I was in desperate need of lunch. To get to the Sultan’s dining room, you have to climb a set of steep and wobbly stairs to the second story, where the sagging, timbered attic has been fitted with tables, each separated from the next by perilously low rafters. The space cries out for blond, buxom wenches bearing flagons of ale and vast platters overflowing with great haunches of wild beasts showered with cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and cloves. And indeed, the kitchen door exudes sweet and fiery spice. But the waiter is skinny, male, and decidedly not of Norman stock, and if that weren’t enough of a clue, the Indian hip hop on the sound system and Mogul prints on the walls will quickly disabuse you of any illusions of stepping into Merrie Olde England.

The Sultan specializes in Balti cooking, a type of South Asian cuisine that swept Britain by storm some years back. The style originates in Baltistan, a place once identified with Shangri-La but now more likely to make headlines for its sectarian bloodshed. The mountainous territory stands astride a tributary of the Silk Road once used to bring spices from South India to China, Persia, and the Mediterranean. Accordingly, as is only appropriate for such a mythical land, Balti food is profoundly spicy. But is it as spicy as the food of Europe’s Middle Ages, I wonder?

I order gosht chilli masala, a lamb stew pungent with hot Kashmiri pepper. The stainless steel tray of meat looks quite innocent, and the first taste is gentle enough. It begins with sweet notes of coriander, cardamom, and cinnamon. Then the red peppers roar in. Chilies, both fresh and dry, are blended to such incendiary effect that the occasional black peppercorn comes along as a mild respite. I gulp down my wine and pile more stew onto the flatbread.

Take away the chilies (unknown in Europe until Columbus returned from his misdirected search for the pepper isles), and I bet this is food that any self-respecting knight in armor would recognize.

While most historians agree that the Middle Ages loved its food spicy, they differ on just how spicy. The problem is that the recipes of the time are frustratingly imprecise. Typical instructions call for sprinkling with “fine spices,” or as one early Flemish cookbook instructs in a recipe for rabbit sauce, “Take grains of paradise, ginger [and] cinnamon ground together and sugar with saffron mixed…and add thereto a little cumin.” It is assumed the cook already knows what he is doing. Nevertheless, other sources do give more specific quantities and scattered descriptions of feasts where seemingly enormous amounts of spices were supposedly consumed in a single meal. The great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote of what, to his Gallic sensibility, was a “spice orgy.” Some have recoiled in horror at medieval recipes that include handfuls of cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. (Today’s writers warn that an ounce of cloves suffices for the preparation of an efficient anesthetic and that too much nutmeg can be poisonous.) Others just can’t imagine that anyone could eat such highly seasoned cuisine. According to the Italian culinary historian Massimo Montanari, “These levels of consumption are hard to conceive of, and belong instead to the realm of desire and imagination.”

I’d love to invite these academics to the Sultan restaurant. Perhaps then they would understand how perfectly credible is the medieval account that records the use of a seemingly spectacular two pounds of spices at a single bash. The figure comes from a manuscript called the Ménagier de Paris penned by an affluent, bourgeois functionary for his young wife in the late thirteen hundreds and includes all sorts of advice, including just what you needed to buy to throw a party. As an example, the writer describes an all-day wedding feast consisting of dinner and supper for forty and twenty guests, respectively, as well as some half dozen servants. The shopping list does indeed include a pound of ginger and a half pound of cinnamon as well as smaller quantities of long pepper, galingale, mace, cloves, melegueta, and saffron. But it also calls for twenty capons, twenty ducklings, fifty chickens, and fifty rabbits as well as venison, beef, mutton, veal, pork, and goat—more than six hundred pounds of meat in all! What’s extraordinary about this meal is not the quantity of spice—at most, about a half teaspoon of mostly sweet spices for each pound of meat—but the extravagance of the entire event. If this is an orgy of food, the spices would hardly qualify as more than a flirtation.

Still, even that half teaspoon of spice would be unusual in contemporary French or Italian cooking, though it would scarcely merit mentioning at an Indian restaurant. To make the Balti gosht, you use way more seasoning, about a half ounce of spices (or roughly two level tablespoons) for every pound of meat. So it may well be that my medieval knight would have found my gosht hard going even for his developed palate. I can only imagine what the academics would say.

THE NEED FOR SPICE

A great deal of nonsense has been written by highly knowledgeable people about Europeans’ desire for spices. Economic historians of the spice trade who have long mastered the relative value of pepper quintals and ginger kintars (both units of weight) and effortlessly parse the price differential of cloves between Mecca and Malacca will typically begin their weighty tomes by mentioning, almost in passing, the self-evident fact that Europeans needed spices as a preservative or to cover up the taste of rancid food. This is supposed to explain the demand that sent the Europeans off to conquer the world. Of course, the experts then quickly move on to devote the rest of their study to an intricate analysis of the supply side of the equation. But did wealthy Europeans sprinkle their swan and peacock pies with cinnamon and pepper because their meat was rank? The idea is an affront to common sense, to say nothing of the fact that it completely contradicts what’s written in the old cookbooks.

Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration, food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting, and preserving in acid. Think prunes, prosciutto, and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn’t so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici, or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette, even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. The rough-and-ready Franks were largely ignorant of all but pepper. In Renaissance Italy, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron, and cloves adorned not merely the tables of merchants and potentates but also found their way into medical prescriptions and alchemical concoctions. Spices were even used as mouthwash. And then French trendsetters of the waning seventeenth century, after their own six-hundred-year dalliance with the aromas of the Orient, turned away from most spices to invent a cuisine that we might recognize today. So if spices were used for their preservative qualities, why did they stop using them? The French had not discovered some new way of preserving food. There was a shift in taste, certainly, but it was the same kind of change that happened when salsa replaced ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. There were many underlying reasons for it. Technology wasn’t one of them.

Old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren’t used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices toward the end of the cooking process, where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. The Ménagier, for one, instructs his spouse to “put in the spices as late as may be, for the sooner they be put in, the more they lose their savor.” In at least one Italian cookbook that saw many editions after its first printing in 1549, Cristoforo Messisbugo suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage.

Perversely, even though spices weren’t used in this way in Europe, they could have been. Recent research has identified several spices that have powerful antimicrobial properties. Allspice and oregano are particularly effective in combating salmonella, listeria, and their kind. Cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and mustard can also boast some bacteria-slaying prowess. Pepper, however, which made up the overwhelming majority of all European spice imports, is a wimp in this regard. But compared to any of these, salt is still the champion. So the question remains, why would Europeans use more expensive and less effective imports to preserve food when the ingredients at hand worked so much better?

But what if the meat were rancid? Would not a shower of pepper and cloves make rotten meat palatable? Well, perhaps to a starved peasant who could leave no scrap unused, but not to society’s elite. If you could afford fancy, exotic seasonings, you could certainly afford fresh meat, and the manuals are replete with instructions on cooking meat soon after the animal is slaughtered. If the meat was hung up to age, it was for no more than a day or two, but even this depended on the season. Bartolomeo Scappi, another popular writer of the Italian Renaissance, notes that in autumn, pheasants can be hung for four days, though in the cold months of winter, as long as eight. (When I was growing up in Prague, my father used to hang game birds just like this on the balcony of our apartment, and I doubt that our house contained any spice other than paprika.) What’s more, medieval regulations specified that cattle had to be slaughtered and sold the same day.

Not that bad meat did not exist. From the specific punishments that were prescribed for unscrupulous traders, it is clear that rotten meat did make it into the kitchens of the rich and famous, but then it also does today. The advice given by cookbook author Bartolomeo Sacchi in 1480 was the same as you would give now: throw it out. The rich could afford to eat fresh meat and spices. The poor could afford neither.

Wine may have been another matter. For while people of even middling means could butcher their chicken an hour or two before dinner, everyone, including the king, was drinking wine that had been stored for many months in barrels of often indifferent quality. Once a barrel was tapped, the wine inside quickly oxidized. Especially in northern Europe, where local wine was thin and acidic while the imported stuff cost an arm and a leg, adding spices, sugar, and honey must have quite efficiently improved (or masked) the off-flavors.

Rather than trying to discover some practical reason that explains the fashion for spices, it’s probably more productive to look at their more ephemeral attributes. One credible rationale for a free hand with cinnamon and cloves is their very expense.

Spices were a luxury even if they were not worth their weight in gold, as you will occasionally read. In Venice, in the early fifteenth century, when pepper hit an all-time high, you could still buy more than three hundred pounds of it for a pound of gold. And while it’s true that a pound of ginger could have bought you a sheep in medieval St. Albans, that may tell you more about the price of sheep than the value of spice. Sheep in those days were small, scrawny, plentiful, and, accordingly, cheap. You will also read that pepper was used to pay soldiers’ wages and even to pay rent. But once again, this requires a little context. Medieval Europe was desperately short of precious metals to use as currency, and if you needed to pay a relatively small amount (soldiers didn’t get paid so well in those days), there often weren’t enough small coins to go around. Thus, pepper might be used in lieu of small change. But sacks of common salt were used even more routinely as a kind of currency in the marketplace.

All this is to say that spices weren’t the truffles or caviar of their time but were more on the order of today’s expensive extra-virgin olive oil. But like the bottle of Tuscan olive oil displayed on the granite counter of today’s trophy kitchens, spices were part and parcel of the lifestyle of the moneyed classes, as much a marker of wealth as the majolica platters that decorated the walls of medieval mansions and the silks, furs, and satins that swaddled affluent abdomens.

In those days, a person of importance could not invite you to a nice, quiet supper of roast chicken and country wine any more than a corporate law firm would invite a prospective client to T.G.I. Friday’s. As the Ménagier’s wedding party makes clear, there was nothing subtle about entertaining medieval-style. Our own society has mostly moved on to other forms of conspicuous consumption—though you can still detect an echo of that earlier era in some high-society weddings that cost several times a plumber’s yearly wage. But much more so than today, the food used to be selected in order to impress your guests. The more of it and the more exotic, the more it said of your place in the pecking order. When Charles the Bold, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, married Margareth of York in 1468, the banquets just kept coming. At one of them, the main table displayed six ships, each with a giant platter of meat emblazoned with the name of one of the duke’s subject territories. Orbiting these were smaller vessels, each of which, in turn, was surrounded by four little boats filled with spices and candied fruit. Spices, of course, literally reeked of the mysterious Orient, and their conspicuous consumption was surely a sign of wealth. When the duke’s great-grandson, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, visited Naples some years later, he was served peacocks and pheasants stuffed with spices. As the birds were carved, the guests were enveloped by the Edenic scent. The idea was nothing new; one of Charles’s predecessors, Emperor Henry VI, in Rome for his coronation in 1191, was paraded down streets that had been fumigated by nutmegs and other aromatics when he arrived.

In the late Middle Ages, when the increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie began to be able to afford a little ostentatious display of their own, the feasts of the aristocrats had to become even more fabulous, the spicing more refined, the dishes more exquisite and artfully designed. And just to make sure the entire populace would know how fantastic was the prince’s inner realm, the entire dinner might be put on display for the hoi polloi. “Before being served, [the dishes] were paraded with great ceremony around the piazza of the castle…to show them to the people that they might admire such magnificence,” recounts Cherubino Ghirardacci, who witnessed a wedding party hosted by the ruler of Bologna in 1487. Our reporter does not mention the smell, but surely the abundance of expensive meat with a last-minute sprinkling of spice gave forth an aroma that broadcast the ruler’s power even more effectively than the grand dishes glimpsed from across the road.

It was a medieval commonplace that people of different status and position not only deserved but required different foods. A peasant might fall gravely ill from eating white bread and spiced wine rather than the appropriate gruel and ale. A monk would certainly suffer painful indigestion from eating peppered venison, a food more properly reserved for knights. These rules were accepted as being part of divine providence. Inasmuch as there was a natural order among the beasts, each of which was assigned its appropriate food by the Creator, so each human being was assigned his position in the divine plan. Something of the kind still exists today in food attitudes among observant Hindus, with each particular caste having its own rules regarding what may or may not pass their lips. For an upper-caste Brahmin to eat food that is forbidden or inappropriately prepared is to disrupt the order of the universe. A similar connection existed between food and religion in Christendom before Martin Luther upset the cart. When Saint Benedict set up his monastic communities in the early sixth century, he specified just what his monks could eat and when. (It wasn’t much and it wasn’t too often.) Every Catholic had to conform to the religious calendar, but within that generalized scheme, each social stratum had different rules. The Italian preacher Savonarola, best known for castigating Renaissance Florentines for their ungodly ways, also had opinions on the appropriate dining habits of various castes. “Hare is not a meat for Lords,” he writes. “Fava beans are a food for peasants.” Beef was apparently okay for artisans with robust stomachs but could be consumed by lords and ladies only if corrected with appropriate condiments.

The Italian word for apothecaries was speziali ( from spezie, “spices”), for the obvious reason that they were the ones selling spices.

Spices were supposed to be especially effective when it came to “correcting” the nutritional defects of other foods. In much the way we analyze food according to three categories (protein, fat, and carbohydrate), medieval nutritionists divided up foods according to the four humors (phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile). The diet manuals of the time were as obsessed with breaking down foods into their constituent parts as the most avid follower of the South Beach Diet. However, since the nutrients in food were seldom in balance, the cook was expected to fine-tune every dish. It was a job for an alchemist as much as a chef. Outside of the kitchen, physicians also made use of the humoral system by recommending specific foods for particular personalities and maladies, and since spices were deemed especially concentrated compounds for adjusting humoral imbalance, they were prescribed for everything from plague to impotence.

That spices were integral to an opulent lifestyle, even a “necessity” required by one group to set itself apart from another, is incontrovertible. That they were widely used as nutraceuticals is also broadly documented. All the same, if health concerns were the main determinant of what the moneyed classes eat, customers for foie gras and forty-five-dollar-a-pound chocolates would be in short supply.

In many ways, the medieval and Renaissance elite’s desire for spicy food may not be so different from today’s popularity of Thai food in America and Balti food in Britain: it was exotic, it was hip, but people also assuredly liked the taste. That spices were pricey and had almost magical curative powers only added to their allure.

SIR JOHN AND THE SEARCH FOR PARADISE

Hard facts and solid reality go only so far in explaining any cultural phenomenon, and this was certainly the case for medieval Christendom. I figured if the academics didn’t have the answers, maybe a ghost could give me some clues. This is why I found myself in St. Albans. The phantom in question was Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century knight supposedly buried in the city’s great cathedral. Sir John was the acclaimed author of the most popular travel book of his time, in which he described a trip that took him from Norman England to Venice, Constantinople, the Holy Land—and all the way to paradise. The Voiage and Travayle of Syr John Maundeville Knight (as it was known in one English translation) was a huge international bestseller.

Like so many travel books of its time, Sir John’s story is a pilgrimage tale. The narrator, a Norman English knight, takes leave of St. Albans on Michaelmas Day, 1322. He voyages across the bejeweled Orient to famous shrines cluttered with miraculous relics. He treks through the sun-baked places where Jesus once trod. He hobnobs with the sultan of Egypt. But then comes the good part. After his grand tour of holy sites in the Levant, Sir John heads east—to mythical Christian kingdoms; to India, with its pepper groves; to the Spice Islands of Indonesia; indeed, all the way to Eden’s gate. The stories get increasingly fabulous as he travels toward the rising sun. But his medieval readers were not about to split hairs between the merely astonishing and the truly unreal. Some of Asia’s actual wonders were so unbelievable that many gave more credence to Sir John’s mythical rulers and mouthless dwarfs than they did to the equally amazing description of Kublai Khan in Marco Polo’s much more factual account. Not all of Mandeville’s stories of the wondrous Orient are made up. The report of the ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace of Java and the surrounding isles is more or less on the mark, as is the description of a forest where pepper vines cling to trees bearing fruit like raisins, even if the descriptions of rivers of gems and lands of one-eyed giants might strain our own credulity. It would be hard to say if Mandeville’s audience believed his stories or whether they just found him more entertaining, but the Englishman’s book consistently outsold Marco Polo’s narrative for a good two centuries.

Yet the book wasn’t popular merely for its stories of miraculous relics and kinky hermaphrodites. At least some travelers and mapmakers took Mandeville’s information altogether seriously. The German cartographer Martin Behaim used Mandeville as a source when he made the first globe of the world in the fateful year of 1492. Several of Columbus’s contemporaries aver that he had a copy of the book on him as he peddled his improbable ideas from court to court. The obstinate Genoan could point to Sir John’s Travels as proof that you could get to the fabled East Indian Spice Islands by sailing west.

But then the rigid lines between empirical data and received wisdom, between experience and revelation, between science and religion, were not as clearly delineated as they are today. When you went on a pilgrimage, as Sir John did, it was not merely a physical journey, it was a spiritual quest in search of paradise. And though the goal of the trip may have been metaphysical, the road signs pointing to every shrine and pilgrimage site were all too real. Even paradise was right there on the maps for anyone to see. When you traveled east, toward Jerusalem, you were on your way toward the earthly Eden. Then, beyond the Holy Land—as Mandeville describes in gripping detail—you needed to cross the infidel realms before reaching the great Christian kingdom of Prester John. Just beyond that, to the east of Asia, all the experts agreed, you would reach Adam and Eve’s original garden. Here was a country of joy and plenty, evergreen trees would whisper in the gentle wind, and verdant meadows were irrigated by fountains of youth. (The tourist boards of every Caribbean island are thoroughly versed in the same concept.)

Eden didn’t just have a location and an address, it had a taste and an aroma. Paradise smelled like spices, for it was there these precious commodities grew. The connection was made explicit when melegueta pepper was called “grains of paradise,” despite its African origin. The thirteenth-century travel writer Sire de Joinville describes the fishermen in the Nile dragging up nets “filled with the goods which this [distant] world produces, with ginger, rhubarb, sandalwood and cinnamon; and it is said that these come from the earthly paradise.” Purportedly, the spices that grew in Eden’s groves were shaken loose by that gentle elysian breeze and fell into the headwaters of the Nile. Saints and their remains supposedly smelled of spices, since they were already halfway to heaven. Moreover, this idea of an unearthly scent was not unique to Christendom. Persian and Arabic sources also describe a sweet afterlife filled with perfumed plants and food. Even the Chinese thought cinnamon was the bark of the tree of life. So it’s hardly surprising that when later European adventurers traveled halfway across the world in their quest for the precious seasonings, they were ever on the lookout for Shangri-La. Many, just like Christopher Columbus, brought along Mandeville as a guide. On the third voyage to his “Indies,” the Genoan adventurer wrote to his patrons, “There are great indications of this being the terrestrial paradise, for its site coincides with the opinion of the holy and wise theologians…all of whom agree that the earthly paradise is in the East.” You will recall that he still thought he was just east of Asia.

All this is not to say that the main reason for Columbus’s epochal voyage was a quest for the Garden of Eden. Most spice seekers were more interested in getting rich quick than in the rewards of the afterlife. But all the same, you can’t entirely discount the religious drive. Let’s not forget that Columbus was in the pay of Queen Isabella, the conquistadora of Granada, the last Muslim refuge in western Europe. The “Most Christian” monarch and her shock troops, the mounted conquistadors, saw themselves as heirs to the Crusaders, and, like those earlier warriors, their ultimate goal was to liberate Jerusalem. (Admittedly, they did get a little sidetracked.) The story of Columbus’s great rival Vasco da Gama is even more clear-cut. He was specifically charged with searching for the legendary Christian ruler Prester John when he headed for India’s spice coast. There, too, greed outshone more metaphysical aspirations, yet that does not mean that the people of the time did not take their religious motivations seriously. Indeed, the early Iberian expansion can only be understood when seen as a tale of armed pilgrimage in which the quest for spices is just one chapter.

The idea that you might reach paradise by traveling east has a certain logic to it, given the times. We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as Mesopotamian agriculture, the Phoenician alphabet, Greek philosophy, and Arab bookkeeping all flowed from east to west. Both Christianity and Islam followed the same route. So did wheat, olives, sugar, and spices. The historian Norman Pounds has depicted this flow of technological and cultural innovation from the Middle East as a “cultural gradient” that was tilted down toward Europe throughout the greater part of human history. It is certainly true that when Sir John traveled from England to Italy, Byzantium, and finally the Middle East, he would have been encountering progressively more advanced technologies, economic structures, and cultures, to say nothing of more sophisticated cuisines.

This gradient, however, was set to shift decisively in Europe’s favor some hundred years later, when Mandeville’s book was set in movable type. It is worth noting that while the slope of civilization went downhill from east to west, spices were desired, but just when that demand peaked, the slope reversed, and the mythical Oriental aromatics began to lose their allure in Europe. By the time of the Italian Renaissance, innovation, culture, and conquest began to flow in the opposite direction. The first tentative voyages in search of paradise and pepper gave way to the aggressive expansion of European power across the globe.

Unfortunately for Mandeville’s reputation, once actual travelers had seen the fabled Spice Islands, they found he had embroidered the truth. Pearls were common enough, and pepper was a scruffy weed that hardly merited cultivation. More recently, academics have even dismissed his very existence. My ghost may never have been more than a fiction. But whether he existed or not, the protagonist of the Travels had provided medieval Europe with a taste of paradise. The trouble was that once Eden had been ransacked and colonized, it lost its scent of spice. The transformation was in small part a result of Mandeville’s success, but it was also to be his undoing.

BLACK GOLD

While their mythical origins in the East gave Oriental aromatics a marketing advantage over local seasonings, the money you could make buying them in one place and selling them in the next gave traders more than enough motivation to get into the spice business. The pepper grown in the hills of India’s Malabar Coast could change hands a dozen times before reaching the shops run by the pepperers guild in Mandeville’s England. And each time the pepper changed hands, passed a customs checkpoint, or was subject to taxes, its price shot up. According to one study of the fifteenth-century trade, the Indian grower might be paid one to two grams of silver for a kilo of pepper; when it reached Egypt’s main port of Alexandria, the price had shot up to ten to fourteen grams; the traders at Venice’s spice market on the Rialto were charging fourteen to eighteen; and by the time it was offered to London’s gentry, the price had increased to some twenty to thirty grams of silver. Not that any individual link in this chain made a killing. It’s been estimated that the Venetians, who did as well by this trade as anyone, made a comfortable but not extortionate net profit of 40 percent. Still, that was twice the return on investment that Florentine bankers were getting at the time. It’s worth noting that today’s profit margins can be almost as plush: pepper was recently trading at about $1.60 per kilo wholesale in India, while an upscale grocer in New York was charging $5.49 for a 1.62-ounce jar (that’s $120.00 per kilo!) for McCormick “Gourmet” Black Pepper. But the big difference between then and now is that there were few other commodities with this kind of moneymaking potential. And once the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, entered the Asiatic trade, their profits could be even more spectacular. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese could earn net profits of 150 percent or more from the pepper they bought in South India and sold in Lisbon. Nutmeg could fetch a hundred times in Europe what it cost in Malabar. The margin was even greater when it was purchased at its source in the Spice Islands of today’s Indonesia.

AN ANCIENT TRADE

The fantastic profits to be made from the spice trade had attracted businessmen for millennia and not only, or even primarily, in Europe. A thriving spice trade existed among India, China, and the islands of Southeast Asia long before the Portuguese and Dutch bullied their way in. The Chinese ruling classes of the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.) were as fond of Indonesian and other spices as any Burgundian lord. Marco Polo claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou). By some estimates, the percentage of spices that reached the European market was never much more than about a quarter of what Asia produced.

If we can rely on the reporting of the Old Testament, Joseph was sold to a caravan carrying spices into ancient Egypt. Just what kind of spices we aren’t told, but chances are they brought at least a little pepper. A pharaoh who died in 1224 B.C.E. has been found embalmed with peppercorns up his nose. In later years, when the queen of Sheba made a courtesy call on King Solomon, she reportedly brought along camels bearing spices as a house gift. Perhaps a more trustworthy source is an archaeological dig in Syria that has unearthed cloves dating back to about 1700 B.C.E.—and that in the kitchen of an ordinary household! When the Romans arrived on the scene, they, too, imported spices from Asia, though at nothing like the later European rate. Pepper seemed to have been popular, as was cinnamon and its look-alike, cassia, though some scholars have argued that these last two were actually altogether different spices from the ones we recognize by those names today. In time, the western empire collapsed, and pepper was a rare sight indeed in the former Roman provinces. Elsewhere, though, spice merchants continued to keep the tables of the rich and powerful well supplied. China, India, Persia, and the Arab states of the Middle East still used spices just like they always had, as both tonic and seasoning. Even the Eastern Roman Empire—or Byzantium, as it came to be known—kept up its culinary habits more or less as before.

In Europe, things were different. With the collapse of Rome, the orderly territories north of the Alps were ravaged. Wheat fields were bludgeoned into wastelands, and vineyards were trampled into dust. Trade was throttled. Great cities shriveled to hamlets. Ordinary folk resorted to scavenging for roots and nuts, while the warrior class tore at great haunches of roasted beasts, swilling beer all the while. Or that, at least, is our image of the Dark Ages. Undoubtedly, there were pockets of polished civilization amid the roughened landscape, especially in the monasteries, where fragments of a Roman lifestyle remained. Italy, in particular, retained active ties to both the current “Roman” empire in Byzantium as well as the memory of the old stamping grounds of the Caesars. All the same, whatever else you might say about the invasions of the Germanic and Slavic tribes that swept across the continent in those years, their arrival was hardly conducive to the culinary arts.

In the meantime, as Europe spiraled down into a recurring cycle of war, hunger, and pestilence, the Middle East flourished under a Pax Arabica. In Baghdad, the imperial capital, Persians, Arabs, and Greeks sat down at the same table to argue about medicine, science, the arts, and, naturally, what should be served for dinner. Arab merchants sent their agents to China, India, and Indonesia to shop for silks and jewels, but most especially for the spices that were the essential ornament to any sophisticated cuisine. Incidentally, it was those same spice traders who brought Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, in the West, Muslim armies had overwhelmed the Iberian Peninsula and penetrated deep into France. They took Sicily and all but a fragment of the Byzantine Middle East. In Jerusalem, mosques towered over Christian remains. For a time, the cries of muezzins calling the faithful to prayer could be heard from the dusty plains of Castile to Java’s sultry shores.

Quite reasonably, Christian Europe felt under siege, and its response came in a series of assaults on the Middle East between 1096 and 1291 that we call the Crusades. Yet the short-lived military success of the Crusaders in the Holy Land (they held Jerusalem for just eighty-eight years) pales in comparison to the ideological, cultural, and economic aftershocks that followed those first Catholic jihads.

Cultures typically gain their identity not only from what unifies them but, more important, from what sets them apart from their neighbors and foes. Today, for example, Europeans are united as much by the way they grouse about Americans as they are by the euro. In much the same way, the early medieval idea of Christendom—given the enormous political and economic differences within Europe—could not have been possible without the outside threat. On a more everyday level, the Crusades also changed tastes and fashions. The Norman knight who returned to his drafty St. Albans manor brought back a craving for the food he had tasted in sunny Palestine, much like the sunburned Manchester native does today when he returns from his Turkish holiday. In the Dark Ages, spices had all but disappeared from everyday cooking. With the Crusaders’ return, Europeans (of a certain class) would enjoy well-spiced food for the next six hundred years.

HARBORS OF DESIRE

Over the centuries, people across the globe made piles of money from the European desire for pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Merchants from Malacca to Marseilles built fabulous fortunes in the spice business. Monarchs in Cairo and Calicut financed their armies from their cut of the pepper trade. London, Antwerp, Genoa, Constantinople, Mecca, Jakarta, and even Quanzhou could attribute at least some of their wealth to the passage of the spice-scented ships. But nowhere were the Asian condiments the lifeblood of prosperity as in the great entrepôts of Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam. Each took her turn as one of the world’s great cities, ruling over an empire of spice. Venice prospered longest, until Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India rechanneled the flow of Asian seasoning. Then Lisbon had her hundred years of wealth and glory. Finally, Amsterdam seized the perfumed prize and ruthlessly controlled the spice trade in the century historians call the city’s golden age.

There are probably as many similarities among the three cities as there are differences. All of them ran (or at least dominated) small, underresourced countries, and so they didn’t have much choice but to go abroad to make good. Kings and emperors sitting on fat, tax-stuffed purses never had the same kind of appetite for the risky spice business. The great harbors were renowned for their sailors and shipbuilders (and, not coincidentally, their prostitutes). Nevertheless, they prospered in different times and in different ways. Venice was, in some ways, like a medieval Singapore, a merchant republic where business was the state ideology and the government’s main job was to keep the wheels of commerce primed and tuned. Pepper was the lubricant of trade. Lisbon, on the other hand, lived and breathed on the whim of the king, who had one eye on the spice trade even as the other looked for heavenly salvation. In the fifteenth century, Portugal had the good fortune to have a run of enlightened, even inspired monarchs who figured out a way to cut out the Arab middlemen by sailing right around Africa. Whether this pleased God is an open question, but it certainly gratified the pocketbook. The Dutch were much more down-to-earth. In Amsterdam, they handed the spice trade over to a corporation, which turned out to be a much more efficient and ruthless way to run a business than Lisbon’s feudal approach. Decisions made at the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company would transform people’s lives halfway across the globe. By the time the Hollanders were done, the world was a very different place from the one Mandeville wrote about in his Travels.

In the meantime, the role of spices in European culture gradually shifted, from the talismans of the mysterious East carried on Venetian galleys, to exotic treasure packed in enormous carracks emblazoned with the Crusaders’ cross, and finally to a profitable but rather mundane commodity poured like coal into the holds of Dutch East Indiamen. All this as Europe was transformed from a continent joined (if intermittently) in its battle against Islam, united in its religion, and with an educated class conversant in the same language to a battleground of nation-states, divided by creed and vernacular. People still used plenty of pepper and ginger in post-Reformation Europe, but that’s mostly because they had become relatively cheap. The trendsetters had grown tired of spices, though, and the cuisine favored by generations of Medici, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Tudors was about to fundamentally change.

It was just around the time when the road to European world domination opened for business that Europeans’ tastes began to come home. Crusades and pilgrimages went out of fashion. And the orgy ended. Certainly not overnight and not everywhere, but in the fashion centers of Madrid and Versailles, spices no longer made the man. The vogue that had built Venice from a ramshackle fishing village on stilts into Europe’s greatest metropolis, the transient tastes of a few cognoscenti that had transformed Lisbon from a remote outcrop at the edge of Christendom into the splendid capital of a world-spanning empire, the culinary habits of a minute fragment of this small continent’s population that had lifted Amsterdam out of its surrounding bog and briefly made teeny Holland one of the great powers of the world—all this was over. Fashion had moved on.

A NEW WORLD

The voyages in search of the spiceries, whether successful like da Gama’s or misdirected like Columbus’s, had effects both profound and mundane. We all know of the disastrous fallout for Native Americans once Europeans arrived and the subsequent horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps less well known is the genocide perpetrated by the Dutch East India Company in the nutmeg isles of Indonesia. Or the slave trade that flourished in the Indian Ocean to provide the Portuguese with sailors for their spice ships and to supply workers for Dutch nutmeg plantations. The Afrikaner presence in South Africa, the Boer War, and even the subsequent apartheid regime would never have existed if the Dutch hadn’t sent colonists to the Cape of Good Hope to supply their pepper fleets. Other consequences of the spice trade were more narrowly economic. The European appetite for Oriental luxuries meant that money kept flowing ever eastward. Armadas of silver sailed from Mexico and Peru to Europe but then, just as assuredly, kept going all the way to Asia to pay for the pepper that was sent back home. Asians wanted silver pieces of eight for their black gold. But the pepper ships weighed down with silver brought another kind of cargo on their outbound voyage. Franciscans and Jesuits came in the lee of the spice trade, and although their proselytization efforts could never keep up with the Muslim spice traders, at least Christianity was added to Asia’s assortment of religions. A cargo of perhaps even greater consequence was the foods brought along with the priests and the doubloons. New World crops such as corn, papayas, beans, squashes, tomatoes, and chilies were all transported in Portuguese ships bound for Africa, India, and the Spice Islands. Not that all the aftershocks of the spice trade were of seismic proportions. Everyday fashions were influenced by contacts with the East. The Portuguese penchant for blue and white tiles, for example, came about when they tried to imitate the Ming porcelain brought back with the pepper, and in Amsterdam, Indian fabric embroidered in the Mogul style was all the rage in its day.

We have been taught that history moves on great wheels, on world wars, on Napoleonic egos, on the revolutions of the masses, on vast economic upheavals and technological change. Yet small things, seemingly trivial details of everyday existence, can lead to convulsions in the world order. In trying to find a modern commodity that has the same transformative role played by spices in the expansion of Europe, historians have tried to make the analogy with today’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But that comparison is deeply flawed, for petroleum is absolutely critical to the day-to-day functioning of virtually every aspect of modern existence. Great oceans of petroleum are sent around the world every day. By contrast, in the early fifteen hundreds, almost all of Europe’s pepper arrived in a yearly armada of a half dozen Portuguese ships. It’s easy enough to understand why nations would go to war to safeguard oil, the lifeblood of their economy, but to risk life and limb for a food additive of virtually no nutritional content that only a tiny fraction of the population could even afford? Spices have about as much utility as an Hermès scarf. Yet it is precisely this inessentiality that makes them a useful lens for examining the human relationship to food. Once people no longer fear starvation, they choose to eat for a whole variety of reasons, and these were not so different at the court of the Medici than they are at the food courts of Beverly Hills. Food is much more than a fuel; it is packed with meaning and symbolism. That ground-up tree bark in your morning oatmeal once had the scent of heaven, the grated tropical nut kernel topping your eggnog set in motion a world trading network, and those shriveled little berries in your pepper grinder gave the cue for Europe’s entry onto the world stage and its eventual conquest of the world. The origins of globalization can be traced directly to the spice trade.

RETROFITTING EDEN

It is often assumed that people’s taste preferences are conservative, and while this may be true for a particular individual, the cuisines of societies are regularly transformed within a generation or two. The fondness that many adult Americans exhibit for that sugary mélange of Crisco and cocoa powder called Oreos was most surely not shared by their parents. Italians as a whole were not obsessive pasta eaters until after the Second World War. Today, the eating styles of entire nations are in flux. And they are converging. It could be argued that the world—at least, that part of it that doesn’t fear starvation—is eating more alike than it has since the Middle Ages. Of course, food is only a small part of this phenomenon. There is a kind of modern-day, international gothic, not only in art and architecture (as the term is typically used by art historians) but also in food, music, fashion, and language. English is the new Latin. Hip-hop emanates from clubs in Nairobi and Mumbai. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and their imitators dot the globe.

Of all the world’s great cities, it is perhaps London that has undergone the most dramatic culinary transformation over the last generation. Good food is surprisingly easy to find here, much of it imported from halfway across the world.

As I set out one evening to explore London’s cosmopolitan vibe, it appeared I had not entirely left St. Albans’s ghostly knight behind. How else to explain that I stumbled onto the hundred yards or so of pavement named Mandeville Lane? Up the block, the lane changes its name to Marylebone High Street. With its parade of French pastry shops, nail salons, Starbucks, and other multinational chain stores, it is typical of contemporary English main streets. Here, the upscale pubs are filled with a tanned crowd sporting that lightly disheveled look that passes for well groomed among the English in-crowd. The trendiest of the local watering holes is a spot called Providores, renowned among London foodies for its New Zealand variant on jet-set fusion cuisine. I think Sir John would have liked the place, especially the Tapa Room (it is decorated with a large Polynesian tablecloth called a tapa). It is a rambunctious space vibrating with percussive laughter, where aromas of distant tropical gardens waft from the passing dishes.

Kiwi chef Peter Gordon has actually visited the places mentioned in Mandeville’s medieval travel guide. The restaurant’s website credits the New Zealander’s extensive travels through Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal as the source of his culinary inspiration. Gordon, like many of his generation, is a television celebrity; he’s a draw at charity events across the land and a consultant on at least three continents. He epitomizes the globe-trotting style that has become the standard upper-crust cuisine from Miami to Bangkok. It, too, is spicy, if in a different style from the dishes eaten by the lords and ladies of Sir John’s Europe.

Still, the exotic flavors of the Providores kitchen titillate as much as the stories Mandeville brought back from his fictional voyages through the Indies, and in much the same way. Here, too, the exotic Orient is repackaged for its Western consumer. Where the itinerant knight gave his audience stories of industrious pygmies in the employ of the Chinese emperor, the traveling chef gives us crab laksa, a spiced crab cake aswim in Thai curry sauce. And in place of fantasies of wife-swapping inhabitants of an unnamed isle, we can indulge in the flavors of an imaginary land where French-cooked fish are served on a bed of Indian-spiced vegetables. But the food here is as much of a fiction as Mandeville’s tales. The exotic tropical flavors spirit you away from the English drizzle to a far-off isle where the sun is always shining and azure water laps gently on rosy coral shores. We, too, want our paradise. And if we can’t board a plane to get there, at least we can sip a Caribbean cocktail and nibble a spicy Balinese hors d’oeuvre. It’s a quest I think Sir John would endorse.