SWEETS, SPICES, AND SAINTS
I spotted the two Zwarte Pieten just in time, as they were getting ready to pack up and lug their sweet-filled sack across the canal. The black-faced figures were the only splash of color in the fading December light, the velvet of their red, yellow, and green tunics glistening from the interminable Amsterdam drizzle. Across the street, I could see little of their dark-painted faces except for the broad carmine grins and the flash of fine Dutch teeth as they watched me slip and slide across the slick cobblestones. I looked neither left nor right and made a dash for it—like the fool that I am. A hurtling bicycle almost sent me headfirst into the canal. Luckily, the grandmotherly bicyclist swerved her steed at the last minute, even though I think her expert maneuver was less out of concern for my safety than to keep the tower of pastry-shop cartons from toppling out of her basket.
It was December 5, the eve of Sinterklaas, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Dutch grandmothers mark the occasion by spoiling their grandchildren with all manners of sweets. Parents hide presents in wooden shoes and broom closets. And numberless blond, blue-eyed Netherlanders paint their faces black and dress up like Renaissance house slaves, as Zwarte Pieten (“Black Petes”)—the name given to Saint Nick’s “African” helpers. They hang out on street corners and in shopping malls, distributing pepernoten to every passerby. The spicy cookies, the campy blackface—they’re as Dutch as windmills and wooden shoes. But they are also somewhat creepy souvenirs of the country’s colonial history, of Amsterdam’s once-great empire of sugar and spice.
Pepernoten are a kind of small, dark cookie made with brown sugar and a medley of spices that varies depending on the region and the manufacturer. Despite the name, and unlike Venetian pevarini, they are unlikely to contain any pepper to speak of, but no matter what their flavoring—some are now even being dipped in chocolate, to the horror of purists—they are as essential to Saint Nicholas Day as old Saint Nick himself and his swarthy sidekicks.
The white-bearded saint dressed in red would be familiar to any American child who has visited a mall in the weeks before Christmas. Our own Santa Claus is largely based on the Dutch original. In the Netherlands, though, he’s supposed to represent a semimythical fourth-century bishop from the balmy city of Myra (in today’s Turkey) rather than a frost-flushed elf from the wintry pole. In the Middle Ages, his claim to fame was as the patron saint of merchants and sailors, so it was only natural that the up-and-coming seaport of Amsterdam would appoint Nicholas as the city’s official saint.*39
Records as early as 1360 describe a Sinterklaas celebration for children. According to tradition he showed up in medieval Dutch convent schools, where he rewarded deserving pupils with spicy sweets and left behind a birch switch for thrashing ne’er-do-wells. Soon enough, the bushy-bearded visitor became associated with handing out presents, too. In medieval Amsterdam, the city’s central Dam Square was taken over each year by a Sinterklaas market, where the booths overflowed with sweets like cinnamon bark, honey tarts, and pepernoten, all distinctly flavored with the sugar and spices imported from the bishop’s home in the mythical East. All this fun was too much for the Calvinists when they took over during the Reformation, so they tried to ban the rotund saint, indicting him as an idolatrous Papist puppet. “The setting up of booths on St. Nicholas Eve where goods are sold, which St. Nicholas is said to provide, leads the children astray, and such a practice is not only contrary to all good order, but also leads the people away from the true religion and tends toward atheism, superstition and idolatry,” ran the text of one anti-Klaasinjunction from 1600. In town after town, measures were taken to ban the baking of spicy Sinterklaas cakes and setting out shoes for presents. But it was to no avail. Old Saint Nick was just too popular.
Nowadays, Sinterklaas supposedly arrives a few weeks before the December 5 holiday on a steamship from Spain—an event that is widely covered by every TV network. The saint is accompanied by a white horse and one or more Zwarte Pieten. You will hear that Zwarte Piet is supposed to be a Spanish Moor, but that’s a relatively recent idea. In earlier times, the black-faced Pete typically represented the Devil and was often shackled in chains. Today’s Pete, with his frilly outfit and campy wig, looks like he stepped out of a nineteenth-century minstrel show. The look is hardly coincidental. This particular incarnation of Piet was invented at about the same time as those racist cabarets, at just about the time Holland abolished slavery in its colonies in 1863—incidentally, one of the last European states to do so. The Surinamese government had no illusion about what Zwarte Piet represented when it gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and promptly abolished the black-faced figure. In the sugar plantations of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), they had their own opinion of dressing up black men in shackles. All the same, Piet was so popular that he was reinstated in 1992.
Of course, back in Holland, the Dutch would be no more likely to associate Zwarte Piet with the horrors of the Middle Passage than they would think of the genocide their forefathers perpetrated in the Indonesian nutmeg isles as they nibble their spice-scented pepernoten. In this, they are much like the Portuguese, mostly oblivious to the loss of their sugar colonies in the Americas and their Spice Islands in Indonesia, though, again like da Gama’s heirs, they remain adamant when it comes to their love of sweets. The Dutch sweet tooth has a taste for spicy sweets that is almost medieval when compared to the Portuguese—at least when it comes to the confections traditionally eaten around Sinterklaas and Christmas. If you can believe the statistics, the Netherlands’ fifteen million people consume some sixty-two million pounds of spice cake every year!
Everyone needs speculaas for the winter holiday. My favorite version of this medieval cake wraps gingerbread spiced by the sweet heat of cinnamon and the gentle glow of ginger and nutmeg around a core of moist, sweet marzipan. But speculaas takes many forms. I was first introduced to this particular Dutch obsession by the food historian Peter Rose.*40 Peter (in Dutch, it is a woman’s name) can list more varieties than a born-again preacher can count up sins. She has documented at least forty-seven different kinds of the gingerbread. She has even shared her recipe for speculaas with Gourmet magazine. That is more than most Dutch manufacturers will do. In Holland, the spices that go into gingerbread are something akin to a state secret. Without a doubt, the Dutch have a thing about speculaas. Typically, though, they buy their gingerbread ready-made. The supersecret speculaas spice mixture, however, can also be purchased, to be added to innumerable other recipes. Any supermarket will sell you a package of this sweet masala, which is likely to include cinnamon, mace, aniseed, cardamom, nutmeg, and cloves, as well as ginger.
This Dutch fondness for spice cakes—or peperkoek, as these sweets are generically known (whether they contain pepper or not)—is well documented as far back as the Middle Ages. You can look it up in a 1417 council decree from the eastern Dutch city of Deventer that prescribes just what could go into their compact honey and spice loaf. Anyone who made a Deventer koek that didn’t conform was faced with an astronomical fine of 666 guilders. It turns out the fine burghers of Deventer knew they had a good thing going, for by the end of the sixteen hundreds, the city was exporting 715,000 cakes a year (and this from a city of a mere seven thousand souls!). More recently, gingerbread has been used as a morale booster for the troops: Dutch soldiers have been issued spice cake rations in much the same way as American GIs receive Hershey’s bars.
In Amsterdam, the city’s heritage of spice isn’t just evident in December’s speculaas and pepernoten. You can also see it on grand buildings by the old waterfront emblazoned with the logo of the Dutch East India Company. You can smell it in the old warehouses. Construction workers sometimes report the sweet smell of nutmeg and cloves seeping out from the beams when they tear apart former spice depots to renovate them into trendy lofts. Of course, spice scents Dutch kitchens, too, often in ways that would make other Europeans cringe. But that’s because, in other places, tastes have changed. The penchant for spice cakes used to be shared well beyond Holland’s borders; those Deventer cakes were intended as much for export as for the local sweet tooth. As the last of the great spice-trading nations in Europe, Netherlanders never gave up their love of spices in the way most other Europeans did with the waning of renaissance fashions. This is most obvious in the traditional sweets that accompany holidays, in treats like Amsterdamse korstjes, spice crusts from Amsterdam; in Oudewijven, a tangy, light-colored loaf flavored with aniseed; in the now rare Kruukplaetje, old-fashioned spiced griddle biscuits made in South Holland. But spices, especially the sweet spices so favored by sixteenth-century Italian cooks like Scappi and Messisbugo, show up not only in cakes but even in sausages and stews. Per capita spice consumption here is comparable to Morocco and easily double the American average. The Dutch, of course, who don’t think much of, or about, their own food, are blissfully unaware of any of this as they shop at their local Albert Hein supermarket to buy a custom spice mixture for their evening chicken. In Holland, you find nutmeg sprinkled on asparagus, red cabbage scented with cloves, sausage rolls flavored with mace, and even eel topped with cinnamon. A visit to a butcher shop in a suburban shopping complex can unearth a treasure trove of Dutch culinary peculiarity. Hidden away among the preprepared schnitzel, Italian salami, and gloppy mayonnaise-dressed salads are blood sausages scented with pepper and mace, and a scrapplelike balkenbrij containing so much cloves it burns the tongue.
Even the cheese for which Holland is justly famous can be flavored with astonishing quantities of spice. If you need proof, walk west a few hundred yards from Dam Square to the westelijke grachtengordel (western canal belt), a district built to accommodate the mansions of spice and timber merchants in Amsterdam’s golden age. Here, on a little strip of quaint shops, hidden behind one of the plain shop façades, is one of Amsterdam’s cathedrals of cheese. Not that the Kaaskamer looks much like a high temple even when you’ve opened the front door. The modest space is more like a giant closet (kaas kamer means “cheese chamber”). Still, for Dutch cheese lovers, it is a place of devotion. Everywhere you look, the walls are lined with numberless wheels of cheese separated by plain pine planks. On the bottom layer are fat, yellow rounds of four-year-old boerenkaas (farm cheese), brittle and caramel-sweet with age. On the shelves near the ceiling are tubby, little red balls of creamy young Gouda. And in the middle are cheeses crammed with spice. Pepper, mild paprika, and hot chili season some of the boerenkaas. Cumin gives an almost Moroccan tang to cheeses both young and old. And perhaps most unexpected is the nagelkaas, packed with whole cloves, perhaps three or four in every bite. Oddly, the assertive presence of the cloves is tamed by the buttery cheese and the generally sweet undertone so characteristic of most Dutch cheeses. Admittedly, anyone who didn’t grow up with wooden footwear would most likely think it weird, but I rather like it. What’s more, a hunk of nagelkaas puts neatly to rest any skepticism historians of food might have about the amount of spice that Europeans could ingest, now or four hundred years ago.*41
DINING IN THE GOLDEN AGE
Whereas the side streets of the westelijke grachtengordel are lined with modest brick shops topped with plain stepped gables, the canals that give the district its name reflect a procession of imposing limestone-clad mansions embossed with baroque curlicues. When the neighborhood was conceived in the first flush of Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century golden age, it was specifically designed for the city’s wealthiest merchant class, who were awash with money from the trade in spices and other foreign goods. Appropriately, the inner canal, the one intended for the most splendid palazzi, was named the Herengracht, for the Heren XVII, the enormously powerful directors of the Dutch East India Company, which had wrenched the spice trade from the Portuguese.
When the wealthy timber merchant Jacob Cromhout went looking for a place to build a new house around 1660, he naturally chose the Herengracht. The East India trade had been good to many people, but especially to those selling lumber to the thriving shipbuilding industry. Cromhout had done well for himself and wanted to let the world know it. He hired a fine architect who designed a gracious double-gabled town house some four stories high. The building gives the impression of a harmonious pair of Siamese-twin grandfather clocks faced in genteel limestone. In recent years, the mansion has been turned into a museum, so anyone can go and see how Amsterdam’s other half used to live—and cook. Remarkably, the kitchens have been left unchanged since the seventeenth century. And what kitchens they are! If this was the McMansion of its day, these were most definitely trophy kitchens. The larger of the two has some fifteen running feet of marble counters, a marble floor, two wall ovens, a stovetop range, as well as a fireplace, and everywhere, tasteful blue and white delft tiles. The sink even has running water! Yet despite the kitchen’s high-tech appurtenances, there is every indication that the Cromhouts ate in a distinctly old-fashioned style.
To get an idea of what was served in the next-door dining room, it’s worth leafing through Peter Rose’s translation of De verstandige kock (The Sensible Cook), a popular cookery manual that saw at least ten editions between 1668 and 1711. Peter will be the first to insist that most people ate rather well in seventeenth-century Holland. She rapidly turns the pages of the cookbook pointing to recipes featuring veal, venison, suckling pig, turkey, partridge, heron, herring, turbot, sturgeon, endive, asparagus, and artichokes to prove her point about what you could get in Amsterdam in the 1600s. Not that this was the kind of food you’d find in the local beer hall. Like all cookbooks of its time, it was intended for the affluent, a point made obvious by the recipes’ abundant use of spices. The recipes are reminiscent of Italian cooking of about a century earlier, with a predilection for sweet-and-sour flavorings that use verjuice to provide the tang and plenty of sugar to sweeten the pot. Some combination of nutmeg, pepper, mace, cloves, and cinnamon appears in just about every meat preparation, though less often with fish and vegetables. Peter insists that the amount of spice was moderate, certainly compared to medieval standards. But if I’m right and medieval food was less spicy than commonly thought, it’s likely that Dutch food was actually more highly seasoned than its predecessors. What’s more, having tasted that nagelkaas, I have no illusions about Netherlanders’ appetite for spice. Admittedly, like most cookbooks of the time, it’s seldom clear how much cloves or nutmeg the cook is supposed to add. Nevertheless, in the few recipes where quantities are given, they are prodigious. A recipe for hase-saus (hare sauce) uses a sweet-and-sour base of about a cup of verjuice combined with a dozen sugar cookies, an indeterminate quantity of “whole cloves, pieces of cinnamon, a few blades of mace,” and a scant tablespoon of powdered cinnamon. To sweeten it further, the author instructs you to add a handful of sugar. In another recipe, for venesoen-pastey (a kind of meat pie), where quantities are specified, three pounds of beef are seasoned with almost two tablespoons of pepper, four of ginger, two and a half of nutmeg, and a half tablespoon of cloves before being baked in pastry. The fourteenth-century Ménagier de Paris could never compete with this!
Whether Jacob and his wife, Margaretha, ate like this every day or whether this sort of preparation was mainly meant for company is unclear. The Dutch population as a whole certainly consumed way more spices than the average European, but then many more Netherlanders could afford the exotic aromatics. By the late sixteen hundreds, pepper and ginger could hardly be considered luxuries, though cloves, nutmeg, and mace, if anything, increased a little in price.*42 But then most people would buy the spices in small quantities, a half ounce package or even less. Paintings from the period occasionally feature little paper cornets (apparently, these were recycled from newspapers or almanacs) filled with a few pennies’ worth of ground pepper.
You can learn a lot about the taste in food of Jacob Cromhout’s generation from the thousands of still lifes that were produced to decorate all those houses built to accommodate Amsterdam’s booming population. The Dutch bourgeoisie was mad for pictures, all sorts of pictures: landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, and still lifes. And food was a hugely popular subject. The paintings glitter with imported Chinese porcelain, sparkling Rhenish glass, and even the occasional polished brass mortar for grinding spices. Art historians who specialize in these glory days of the still life argue endlessly about how true to life they really were. Were these moral lessons disguised as luscious food displays? Were they vehicles to show off an artist’s virtuosity and therefore collected by connoisseurs of the finest brushstroke? No matter what the artists’ intentions, the results are undeniably sensuous, even prurient. The hams are spread out just waiting to be sliced into translucent rosy slivers, the ripe fruit oozes tantalizing juices, the oysters glisten with their briny liquor, so realistic you can feel them slipping down your throat. You can’t convince me that the pleasure of eating wasn’t foremost in the mind of the painter or the patron. That is not to say that what you saw on the canvas was exactly what people were eating. The relationship was probably no greater then than it is now between the picture-perfect recipes in food magazines and what actually lands on our tables. But some relationship surely existed, just as it must have between the instructions in De verstandige kock and the dishes assembled on the Croumhouts’ marble counters.
In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, even middling craftsmen could afford a few grams of pepper, sold freshly ground and packaged in recycled almanacs.
Looking at the pictures and reading the cookbook makes me a little suspicious of the opinions of Dutch food given by foreign visitors. How much of Abbé Pierre Sartre’s descriptions can be attributed to his Gallic blinders when he writes, “Their meat-broth is nothing more than water full of salt or nutmeg, with sweetbreads and minced meat added, having not the slightest flavor of meat”? (Admittedly, he was writing in the mid-eighteenth century, a period of Dutch decline.) Perhaps we would do better to listen to Sir William Temple, who visited the lowlands in the early sixteen hundreds. Though the Englishman has a decidedly mixed opinion of the Dutch, he does show some grudging admiration for Dutch enthusiasm at the table. “To a feast they come readily, but being set once you must have patience,” he warns, in contrast to the Frenchman. “They are longer eating meat then we preparing it. If it to be supper, you conclude timely when you get away at day-break.” He is also taken with the Dutch skill in fish preparation. Perhaps it is his English background that makes him so generous in this regard. But he is in full agreement with an Iberian contemporary who was shocked at the Netherlanders’ poor table manners. On a visit to The Hague, the Spanish ambassador came across a group of deputies to the States General ripping apart hunks of dark bread and gnawing cheese while waiting for the session to open. This was clearly a far cry from the highly formalized dining rituals of the Most Catholic King’s court, but in a way, he was impressed at the informal ways of his enemies, declaring, “Such a people is invincible!”
The Dutch did eat plenty of cheese. The Germans called their neighbors “cheese-heads,” but there was a hint of envy in the moniker. Holland not only had enough cheese to feed the nation, but it could send it abroad for hard cash.
The Dutch, almost uniquely in Europe, had plenty to eat, and this was across the population as a whole. Again, the paintings of the period open a window into the ordinary kitchens and taverns of the time. No one shows the middling classes at table and country folk eating, drinking (and falling down) better than the painter Jan Steen. His versions of keg parties are particularly true to life, no doubt because he knew the subject firsthand: he started life as a brewer. The Joe Six-Packs in his pictures do not sip Rhine wine from delicate glass tumblers and dine on spiced hare off of Italian majolica as they might have on the Herengracht. They guzzle beer and chomp down on fat slices of cheese and ham with hunks of dark bread. Wages were higher in seventeenth-century Holland than anywhere else in Europe, and the grain brought in from the Baltic was relatively cheap. Consequently, the staple black bread cost little enough that a skilled laborer could pick up a three-pound loaf for a few pennies and still have change left over to spend on vegetables, cheese, and herring.*43 It’s one reason he could afford the imported spices, even if his family tasted the more expensive ones only once a year in the holiday gingerbread. The famine-prone peasants of southern Europe would have stood with gaping mouths in front of the paintings of plump children in Amsterdam orphanages receiving a weekly ration of meat or fish to supplement their everyday diet of bread, beans, and beer. As a result of this relative affluence, and unlike the rest of Europe, there were barely any food riots reported in the newly minted republic in the sixteen hundreds.
The market gardens surrounding Holland’s cities kept the urban population well supplied with vegetables, and cows grew nice and fat on the green grass that grew in the incessant Dutch drizzle. However, Holland’s quality of life could hardly be sustained on local supplies alone. “This country produces little wheat and not even rye because of the low ground and wateriness,” noted an impressed Italian visitor in 1567, “yet enjoys so much plenty that it supplies other countries…. It does not make wine, and there is more wine and more of it is drunk than in any other part where it is made.” All this is to say that every aspect of Dutch cooking was dependent on imports, whether of herring from the nearby North Sea, wine from the Rhineland, rye from the Polish plains, sugar from South America, or nutmeg from halfway across the world in the Moluccas. There is a Dutch expression, Wat men van veerst haelt, dat smaecket soetst, which means, “The things that you bring from farthest taste the sweetest” (or, more prosaically, the best). Since most of the land wasn’t much good for anything but grazing dairy cattle, anyone with ambition had to look beyond the dikes and polders. Just like in Venice and Lisbon, the path to riches led overseas.
As they say in the real estate business, location is everything, and the Low Countries occupied a plump spot. This is where wine and coal sent up the Rhine were repacked from river barges to seagoing ships, where the Portuguese delivered their oil and salt for the German market, where Genoan and Venetian galleys made their last stop before turning home. Early on, it was the southern Netherlands (today’s Belgium) that got to cream the profits from the passing trade. In the Middle Ages, the great Flemish metropolis of Bruges was the place to be if you wanted to swap English wool for Persian silks and Swedish furs for pepper from Malabar. In later years, when the torch of the spice trade was wrenched from Venice, and Lisbon ruled the waves, the action moved to Antwerp and then finally to Amsterdam in the late fifteen hundreds as a result of the war with Spain. But real wealth, the kind of money that could build the mansions on the Herengracht and make it possible for craftsmen to eat like gentlemen, only came later, in the seventeenth century, when—as a result of war, luck, and a generous pinch of savvy—Amsterdam became the spice capital of the world.
A DAM ON THE AMSTEL
If, like most people, you arrive at the city’s Centraal Station, take a moment to look north from platform 15 at the panorama just across the narrow neck of water. Not so long ago, everything that you see here—the high-rises and trees, the housing developments and children’s playgrounds, the parks and factories—all used to be swamp and sea. In order for the city to exist, Amsterdamers have never stopped digging ditches and canals, and draining boggy soil. Even the Victorian railway station was built on pilings right in the middle of what used to be the city’s great harbor. Seventeenth-century engravings show scores of ships anchored where the station now stands with a grand watery boulevard leading to the heart of the city at the Dam. No wonder the Dutch have a reputation for being tough and ornery. Can you blame them after all those centuries fighting the sea? Still, this watery cradle had its advantages. As one English visitor noted, “[They] all are seamen born and like frogs can live both on land and water.” This would come in handy as they transformed Lisbon’s Indian Ocean empire into a Dutch pond.
Compared to Lisbon, and even Venice, Amsterdam made rather a late arrival on the European stage. At a time when the cries of muezzin echoed through the alleys of the Alfama, and the Rialto rustled with gossip about the fork-wielding princess from Constantinople, the interior of what the Romans had called Batavia was a sparsely populated wetland crisscrossed by meandering rivers. Then, sometime in the twelfth century, a series of enormous floods turned the Netherlands into a giant water-filled bowl with an enormous bay, the Zuiderzee, at its center. At the southern edge of this inland sea, a small community dammed up the Amstel, a little river that connected to the mighty Rhine. Accordingly, people called the place Amstelredamme (Amstel Dam), later shortened to Amsterdam. The open area near the dam, today presided over by the Royal Palace and Madame Tussaud’s, started its life as a market, which eventually turned into the city’s main square. It is still called the Dam, even though the Amstel has long since been rechanneled and paved over.
Soon enough, the locals started to travel for business. We know this because some, at least, got into trouble along the way. Apparently, a ship from “Amstelland” was confiscated in the Baltic town of Lübeck as early as 1248. Those first traders brought back all sorts of goods—from leather and furs to grain and honey—but they would soon specialize in one critical commodity: beer. Especially German beer. Around 1365, an impressive twenty-five hundred tons, or about a third of Hamburg’s total beer export, was shipped into Amsterdam each month. And despite the Dutch talent for drinking, this was considerably more than the city’s three thousand inhabitants could consume. They sold what they could not imbibe.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Amsterdam merchants branched out from beer to herring to grain. In need of ships to carry all these commodities, Scandinavian timber was imported, too, and sawed into planks for a booming shipping industry. (You can still make out the crossed arms of the last of the old city’s wind-driven sawmills when you look east from the Centraal Station.) The little city grew by inscribing a series of semicircular canals in the surrounding bog, all centered on the Dam. All the same, a map from 1482 shows a town that would fit handily into one of Venice’s smaller neighborhoods.
Even as late as the 1560s, most of the world didn’t give much thought to Amsterdam—or, for that matter, any of the Dutch. Well, almost. There was one obsessive-compulsive personality who had become fixated with the Netherlands or, more to the point, with all the Hollanders who had signed up with the schismatic cults of the Reformation. In the early sixteenth century, the territories of what are Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had come under Spanish rule, and the ultraorthodox Philip II had no intention of allowing heresy to breed in his backyard. And he had the resources of five continents to prove it. The Dutch, for their part, were none too fond of “the Most Catholic King” either. The absentee monarch not only insisted on imposing Catholic orthodoxy on the population of newly minted Lutherans, Sacramentarians, Anabaptists, and above all, Calvinists, but he tried to pay for it by taxing the same people he was trying to reconvert. Naturally, the stubborn Dutch, especially the prosperous (and largely Protestant) towns of the province of Holland, would have none of it. In 1568, Philip decided to solve the problem by sending in a small fragment of his enormous army. What began as a police action turned into a vicious war that wouldn’t officially end for eighty years. The Spanish soldiers arrived like crazed crusaders, massacring whole towns and executing thousands. Yet while initially successful, their torch-and-burn strategy became literally bogged down in Flanders. Finally, the last Spanish incursion was crushed in 1574, when the citizens of Leiden broke open their dikes and drowned the Catholic army.
When the gun smoke had cleared and the dikes had been repaired, what emerged after 1587 were two de facto states. In the south, the so-called Spanish Netherlands (essentially, today’s Belgium) retained an overwhelmingly Catholic population, while in the north, the United Provinces of the Netherlands (or more commonly, the “Dutch Republic”) were a mix of Catholic and Protestant—though in the economically dominant provinces of Holland and Utrecht, the Calvinists ruled the roost.
The war was a stroke of supreme luck for Amsterdam, which, after 1575, had little personal experience of Philip’s shock troops. The city would certainly not have become involved in the East India spice trade as early if it hadn’t been for the Most Catholic Majesty’s jihad. After all, before the Spanish annexation of their neighbor’s empire in 1580, the Batavians had been free to sail down to Lisbon, where they would pick up all the spices they could carry. In those days, the spices were then distributed mostly through the southern Netherlands city of Antwerp. Why risk going all the way to India, even if the profits from dealing between Lisbon and Antwerp weren’t quite as plump? But all this changed with the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. The Dutch were cut out of the Lisbon market, and with the arrival of Philip’s battalions, Antwerp’s economy crashed and the city burned. The result was a huge windfall for Amsterdam as the bankers, merchants, painters, and doctors who had once flocked to Antwerp now fled north. In the booming city on the Amstel, they joined the crowds of recently arrived Protestant refugees from France and Germany, as well as Jews escaping autos-da-fé in Lisbon and Seville.
The ongoing war resulted in rivers of bad blood on both sides. Dutch captains felt completely justified in attacking any and all Spanish vessels, piling atrocity upon atrocity. In a typical move, when Dutch ships intercepted Spanish troop transports in the English Channel in 1605, the Dutch admiral, rather than take prisoners, had them all thrown overboard, tied back-to-back. All the same, while every one of Philip’s ships was considered a legitimate target, the Dutch privateers seemed especially diligent in carrying out their patriotic duty by hijacking galleons loaded down with American bullion. Not that they would turn up their noses at a lesser prize. Portuguese naus laden with pepper and cinnamon became almost as enticing after 1580, when Portugal came under Spanish rule. Now all of Portugal’s Indian spice empire was considered fair game—the entire Estado da Índia no more than one really big, fat prize for the privateer republic to seize from the iniquitous Papist tyrant. Amsterdam prospered as doubloons destined for Philip’s army were instead used to pay tavern bills on the Dam and cargoes of pilfered pepper scented warehouses once reeking with herring.
Yet even before the first Dutch prow was moistened by an Indian Ocean wave, the ambitious city was prospering. As early as 1596, Amsterdam could boast that the volume of trade and shipping controlled by the United Provinces was far greater than that of England and France combined! Customs documents show that the number of Dutch ships entering the Zuiderzee in the last hundred years had gone up 400 percent, and a good number of those were docking where the Centraal Station’s steeples now rise. So the motivations for getting into the spice trade had to be different here than they once were for the Venetians or the Lisboetas. In 1600, Amsterdam’s prosperous merchants, who had mostly made their money on decidedly unglamorous commodities like timber and herring, certainly had no illusions that the spice trade could be the mother’s milk of prosperity as it had been in Venice. No doubt the way Lisbon’s treasury depended on the pepper naus would have struck these practical Hollanders as preposterous. The profit margins were certainly tempting. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the gross profit on grain was some 30 to 40 percent, while on spices, it would be more like 300 percent (admittedly, with higher expenses). Yet in the early days, at least, these hard-bitten venture capitalists were surely also drawn a little by the whiff of glamour that had long been associated with the Orient’s smelly little berries, buds, and bark. And with the war, there was now a window of opportunity to muscle in on the enormous profits that the Portuguese were supposedly making. The trouble was, the Dutch financiers didn’t really know much about the business.
But then, in 1592, young Linschoten arrived home to Enkhuizen, still flushed from his tropical tan. Although Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was only in his late twenties when he returned from his long sojourn in Goa, he probably knew more about the Portuguese spice empire than any other Hollander alive. He had certainly collected enough material for a bestseller, something that the town surgeon, the self-promoting Berent ten Broecke, quickly recognized when he insinuated himself as a coauthor. The resulting Itinerario was just what the investors needed: a how-to book on getting into the exotic spice trade. Linschoten blew the lid off the decrepit state of Portugal’s far-off empire. The book was crammed with navigation charts, maps, sketches, and descriptions of the remote lands. It cataloged commodity prices in Cambay and spice prices in Malacca. Here were juicy descriptions not only of India but of Sumatra, Java, and the nutmeg isles to the east. When it came out in 1596, the Itinerario was snatched up not just in Amsterdam but also by would-be entrepreneurs all over Europe.
There was still the matter of money. How do you go about raising the venture capital for such a risky enterprise? When Dom Manuel sent Vasco da Gama off to Calicut, he didn’t have to answer to any investors, but the merchants on the Dam would be risking their own shirts. At the time, their solution was revolutionary, though it would be familiar to anyone taking a new company public on today’s New York Stock Exchange. After an initially lackluster attempt to form several regional business entities, they created a joint-stock corporation—the first ever, according to most historians—naming it the United Dutch East India Company.
Compared to the Portuguese—whose motives for getting into the spice trade intertwined dynastic, religious, and commercial ambition—and even compared to the Venetians, who saw fit to invoke God at every turn, the Dutch motivation was much more modern: it was about making as much money as possible. Though, even here, among capitalism’s nursemaids, a powerful dose of religious fervor nourished the expansion east. After all, the Dutch East India Company was born out of a battle of religions, even if the conflict with the Estado da Índia increasingly looked more like a trade war. But whatever the underlying motivations, the Dutch did not send their ships round the Cape of Good Hope in the pursuit of a crusade, the Company had no vice president in charge of proselytization, there was no expense line for churches and missionaries. Their spices were unsullied by any association with Eden. In other words, they were running a business, selling commodities not so different from lumber and beer. They were the kind of businessmen we’d recognize today, largely unencumbered by the ancient romance of their stock-in-trade.
LUNCH AND THE SPICE TRADER
“We don’t care what they do with them as long as we get a good price,” Lavooij responds to my question about how the spices he imports are used, no doubt echoing the opinions of his colleagues four hundred years back. Frank Lavooij is president of Rotterdam-based NedSpice and one of Europe’s largest spice dealers. “We don’t mind if they smoke it, eat it, or throw it away,” he continues, glancing at the commodity price numbers skidding across his computer screen. As an example, he mentions the tons of cloves that go up in smoke in the form of clove cigarettes. He is even more bemused with another important use for kruidnagel (literally, “spice nail” in Dutch). In South Asia, these little “nails” are used to fasten together the leaf used to wrap up pan, the mildly narcotic spice and betel nut packages chewed daily by hundreds of millions of Indians. Here, before popping the mixture into the mouth, the clove is just discarded. Indians have been importing cloves for this very purpose for hundreds of years. (It was the same type of narcotic mélange that the zamorin of Calicut chewed during his long interview with Vasco da Gama in 1498.)
If you want to learn about the spice trade today, you won’t get far in Amsterdam, where you are more likely to come across the scent of cannabis in the street than the sweet smell of nutmeg or mace. Rotterdam is where real business is done; the harbor here has long since replaced Amsterdam as Holland’s shipping powerhouse. And Frank Lavooij is the man to talk to.
The train from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station meanders through the typical Dutch landscape of reclaimed land, neatly partitioned into radiant green quadrilaterals by ribbons of reflected sky. You know you’ve arrived in Rotterdam when windmills and steeples give way to high-rises and brand-new minarets. Once you’ve stepped out of the central station here, you might as well be in Minneapolis. Whether you look left or right, all you see are bland office towers. After being almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, Rotterdam was rapidly rebuilt, and that hurry to get on with business still permeates the air. Lavooij’s office is a short walk from the station in one of these anonymous new blocks.
Yet here, at least, there is a whiff of why I’ve come: a faint but distinctive smell of pepper hovers over the polyester aroma of the newly installed carpeting in the NedSpice president’s office. The smell of pepper comes from a mill that sits on Lavooij’s desk. A nice touch, since the bulk of the company’s trade is in pepper. Cloves, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and allspice make up most of the remainder. “If you’re big in spices, you have to be big in pepper,” he pronounces from behind the expanse of his desk.
Frank Lavooij is not someone most people would notice in a crowded room. He is of moderate height and modest build, looking younger than his CV would suggest. Yet this fifty-eight-year-old spice merchant is about the closest you can come today to one of the directors of the Dutch East India Company who ran the city of Amsterdam in its golden age. As well as the co-owner of NedSpice, he is president of Rotterdam’s Chamber of Commerce. Later, when we are dropped off by his chauffeur at one of Rotterdam’s power broker restaurants, the other diners rise like a pack of wolves at the arrival of the alpha male. Not that Lavooij comes across as especially predatory; on the contrary, he exudes self-confidence in a quiet, almost painfully courteous way. His spot at the head of this pack means he must play the politician as well as the businessman. He is cool, calculated, cosmopolitan, and a little humorless—though a hint of a grin does break through when I get him on the subject of the raw herring he would eat growing up in a small town in the southern Netherlands.
I was disappointed to learn that raw herring is not on the menu at the spice trader’s lunch spot. The restaurant is as generic as the rest of Rotterdam, located in an upscale strip mall and serving (admittedly well-executed) French cuisine that might have garnered its stars anywhere. As I nibbled on my roast venison with wild mushroom foam, Lavooij once again reminded me how little the spice business has changed since Linschoten’s time. Some of the details have been modified, of course. These days, the Malabar Coast no longer has a monopoly on the shriveled black berries that launched a thousand galleys, caravels, and naus, and even Java is no longer a player. Now the largest exporter of pepper in the world is Vietnam, followed at a distance by India, Indonesia, and Brazil. As a result, Lavooij’s partner is continually shuttling between the Netherlands and Southeast Asia to keep in touch with the company’s agents who are working to teach Vietnamese farmers how to grow this scruffy vine.
Most of the spices are still grown by small farmers in upland areas as a sideline, much as Thomas Thumpassery does in the hills above Quilon. Middlemen collect the product and send it to brokers in towns like Cochin. Today, however, instead of selling it to Gujarati merchants, the Estado da Índia, or the Dutch East India Company, they forward it to international spice-trading companies like NedSpice. The spices are then shipped to Holland, repackaged, and redistributed across Europe and the Americas. Perhaps the biggest change is that the transportation time has been cut from the six or seven months it used to take in the seventeenth century to some two weeks today—not a big deal, Lavooij points out, since the shelf life of many spices is measured in years. And, of course, nowadays, the ships arrive in Rotterdam rather than in Amsterdam or Lisbon.
Just like in the glory days of the Dutch East India Company, hardly any of the spices—no more than 5 percent, Lavooij estimates—stay in the Netherlands once they’ve landed there.*44 The rest are sent to Germany, Britain, and the United States, mostly to disappear into processed food. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the president of NedSpice isn’t entirely oblivious to the demand side of the business. The market for spices is steadily increasing year by year, which, in his opinion, can be directly attributed to people’s eating more processed food. Cooks at home are certainly not loading up their spice racks with mace and cardamom. “The spices in our kitchen,” the president of NedSpice says of Dutch cooking, “are black and white pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon. But there aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, I must add some mace.’” Yet they’ll be eating mace, turmeric, and cloves all the same. The spices are there in prepared food, the convenience food bought in Wal-Mart and Carrefour hypermarkets on both sides of the Atlantic. “We continue to see a steady, steady, steady increase in consumption, and the price doesn’t seem to affect it,” he notes of this subversive new golden age of spice. Given the way more and more consumers across the world are becoming dependent on convenience food, it would be hard to imagine the demand for pepper, say, collapsing or even sagging. Lavooij tells me this on the way back to the train station as a confident smile flits briefly across his deadpan face.
On the eve of the seventeenth century, Dutch businessmen couldn’t summon up the spot prices at the Cochin pepper exchange at the click of a mouse like today’s spice trader, nor could they present charts to demonstrate the growth in European fine-spice consumption at their stockholders’ meetings. But they did have Linschoten, who told them you could buy more than seven pounds of nutmeg for a guilder in Malacca while they knew they could sell it in Amsterdam for more than a guilder a pound. The competition—the underresourced, poorly managed Estado da Índia—was ripe for picking. In cities across the Netherlands, the venture capitalists gathered to plan a hostile takeover.
FOLLOWING LINSCHOTEN
If you’re anywhere near Nieuwemarkt square in central Amsterdam, the Oost-Indisch Huis is easy enough to find. Just follow the blond college students on their bicycles. They all seem to park their bikes—hundreds of them completely obstructing the sidewalk—in front of the imposing edifice. Like so many old buildings in Amsterdam, there is something of a gingerbread quality to the structure’s four-story, block-long façade, though here, you have to imagine sufficient gingerbread to feed a nation of Hollanders. As the bicycles make clear, this is now part of the university, but when the building was first erected around 1660, it was the nerve center of the East India Company in the days when Amsterdam was a company town.
When the original offices were set up here in 1603, they were modest enough. The Company made do by renting part of an arms depot from the city. But with success came the need to expand. The headquarters eventually took up an entire block facing Hoogstraat. In later, less prosperous years, it was deemed essential to have a grand façade to camouflage the oceans of red ink.
Back in 1600, the market for the more expensive spices seemed limitless. The demand for cloves, nutmeg, and mace, especially, had been growing by leaps and bounds. According to one widely accepted estimate, the consumption of these so-called fine spices may have gone up 400 percent in the course of the sixteenth century—admittedly, from a very low starting point. Pepper sales, on the other hand, at least on a per capita basis, remained sluggish. This makes sense in light of the economic situation of the times. Across most of Europe (Italy seems to be a bit of an exception here), the standard of living for the poor was slipping as wages stagnated, but the cost of staples like bread was going through the roof. Little wonder that the less advantaged would scrimp on life’s little luxuries and stop buying the pepper they could once afford. The rich, on the other hand, were barely affected by this inflationary spiral, since they never devoted more than a small percentage of their income to the staples. They spent most of their money on luxuries (books and servants come to mind), which, in contrast to the essentials, were getting cheaper by the day. No wonder more of them could afford to buy expensive Moluccan spices.
But the economic explanation only goes part of the way in explaining the resurgent fashion for well-seasoned food. Better to look at the influence of (increasingly affordable) cookbooks that were rolling off the presses in Venice, London, and Antwerp. Admittedly, it was Italian cookbooks that set the standard, but there were lots of local publications in much the same vein. The earliest printed cookbook in the Dutch language, Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (A Notable Little Book of Cookery), was already replete with recipes calling for not only inexpensive pepper and ginger but also for pricier spices such as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Much like other cookbooks published in the Netherlands both before and during the war of independence, this one attests to the ongoing popularity of a well-spiced, sweet-and-sour cuisine.
While the demand was certainly there, it took the Dutch investors several years to figure out the supply part of the equation. The earliest Dutch forays to South Asia were a mixed bag of abysmal failures and some modest successes. Among the former, perhaps the most misguided were several attempts to reach India via the Arctic Ocean! In the wake of Linschoten’s report, would-be spice traders organized some half dozen ad hoc companies all across the Netherlands. Not only Amsterdam but also Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Delft, and Rotterdam financed their own fleets and sent them east. In the resulting free-for-all, they had to devote at least as much energy to competing with one another as to fighting the Spanish monarch’s galleons. The government in The Hague may have been run by businessmen, but that did not mean they had any ideological investment in free enterprise. The cutthroat competition among the East India traders was bad not only for profits but also for the war effort, so the Republic’s leaders pressured the separate companies to join forces. The result was De Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (“the United East India Company”), or VOC, for short. Bringing these fierce competitors into a single organization wasn’t easy. After months of messy negotiation, a rather awkward board structure was established in 1602 in which each of the eight smaller towns got one member while Amsterdam itself got eight. One more rotating seat was added, for a grand total of seventeen, or the Heren XVII (the seventeen lords), as they would now be known.*45 The ornately penned company charter with its massive government seal was unusual in other respects, too. Interestingly, it gave a preferred status to smaller investors. (In this respect, it was a little like the ordinances in Venice, which required galley captains to take on cargoes of even small-time spice traders.) And the little guys rushed to invest their few stuivers in this sexy new start-up.
As any economic historian will be quick to tell you, irrational exuberance is hardly a modern phenomenon. The Dutch were just as susceptible to falling for an overhyped investment opportunity as any twenty-first-century day trader, perhaps even more so. Given the times, it’s not hard to understand. Put yourself in the shoes of the average Amsterdam taverngoer circa 1600. Every day, new books are being published full of the wonders of worlds revealed by Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, and Magellan. Your brand-new nation has beaten off the armies of the greatest (or at least the largest) empire the world had ever known. Dutch sailors have sailed right up to Gibraltar and sunk a good portion of the Most Catholic King’s fleet. Doesn’t that make it abundantly clear whose side God is really on? Rumor on the street has it that a group of rich and respected merchants is organizing a grand venture that will wrest the Portuguese spice empire from the Spanish tyrant and that small investors are especially welcome. Is it any wonder that grocers, masons, and midwives lined up to pour their pennies into the new company?
Just to be clear, though, when the governing States General granted the VOC its charter, they had more in mind than organizing a get-rich-quick scheme for the man on the street. The country was at war, and accordingly, the East India Company was seen as a potentially strategic asset. The charter makes this clear. Even while it deals mostly with financial affairs, one particular clause makes it evident that this was to be a special sort of corporation. The article authorizes the newly created company to make treaties with princes and potentates in the government’s name. Moreover, it allows the VOC directors to build forts and garrisons where they deem necessary and to appoint governors and judges to police these new possessions. In effect, the Dutch government created a state within a state, a paramilitary corporation designed to attack Spanish interests even while making a profit for the shareholders. In this way, it had a mixed mission, just like the Estado da Índia. But whereas the Portuguese organization often worked at cross-purposes when it came to the Christians and spices, with the VOC, there was no mistaking that profit came first. In this, the Dutch were much more like the Venetians than the Portuguese; while the organizational structure would have been unfamiliar to the crusading doge Enrico Dandolo, I’m sure he would have fully understood the need to secure the trading empire by any means necessary. The goal of building an empire in East Asia may not have been contemplated by the signers of the Dutch charter, yet the fine print made it almost inevitable. It certainly did not bode well for the current residents of the far-off spice archipelago.
THE SPICE ARCHIPELAGO
On today’s map, the tiny specks where nutmeg and cloves used to grow are lost amid the countless islands that make up Indonesia. The once-fabled Moluccas are a world away not only from Holland but from anywhere, some thousand miles south of Manila, a thousand miles north of Australia, and more than fifteen hundred miles east of the Indonesian capital at Jakarta. Some, like the clove-growing island of Ternate, rise to smoldering volcanic peaks, their rugged hillsides covered by shaggy jungle with palm trees thrust above like scruffy mops. The Banda group, once covered with tall and graceful nutmeg trees, is ringed with coral beaches that yield to transparent azure sea, surrounded by reefs unspoiled as a consequence of their isolation. The Europeans who were convinced that spices grew in paradise weren’t so far off the mark. This particular Eden, though, has seen a lot of strife since the Portuguese and Dutch arrived. Today, if you’ve heard of the Spice Islands at all, it is because you happen to follow State Department warnings on civil unrest. Ternate and the surrounding islands were the site of ethnic and religious conflict in 1999 and 2000, a vicious bloodbath that resulted in more than a thousand people killed and more than ten thousand refugees.
The few foreigners who set foot on Banda today mostly come to dive in the crystalline waters. Ternate sees the occasional intrepid vulcanologist. But almost nobody comes here for the spices. Most of the world’s cloves are now produced off the east coast of Africa on islands such as Madagascar and Zanzibar. Banda produces about one-tenth of the nutmeg it did a hundred years ago. Today, the nutmeg superpower is the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the spice has become so central to the economy that the country has even put a nutmeg on its flag. In the meantime, the Indonesian islands have been submerged by the tides of history. Their fate was set back at VOC headquarters on Hoogstraat, some seven thousand miles away.
When the Dutch ships set out on their first sortie to the spiceries, the locals had been in the spice business here for at least a thousand years. Even the Portuguese arrival had not shaken things up in Southeast Asia as it had in the western Indian Ocean. Most of the spices grown in what is now Indonesia continued to be sold to Asian customers. Javanese and Gujarati traders sold pepper to the Chinese and the Persians; Chinese cassia and Ceylonese cinnamon filled junks and dhows; and the cloves, nutmeg, and mace that grew only on the isolated Moluccas were distributed by Muslim and Chinese merchants from Kyoto to Cairo. The modest leftovers made it to the kitchens and pharmacies of Europe.
While pepper was by far the most widely traded of all spices, pound for pound, the Moluccan spices were vastly more valuable: perhaps three to six times as expensive, depending on the place and time.*46 It was simply a matter of supply and demand. Whereas pepper and ginger grew across thousands of acres in South India and Java, cloves (Syzygium aromaticum) were limited to a line of minor volcanic protuberances straddling the equator in the Molucca Sea. If you put together Ternate and its neighbors—Tidore, Makian, Motir, and Bacan—they wouldn’t be much bigger than Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket combined. Nutmeg and mace (Myristica fragrans) were more restricted yet, growing on the Banda group of islands, a collection of even smaller flecks of igneous debris some four hundred miles south of Ternate.
Over the centuries, the Bandanese had increasingly come to depend on nutmeg for their livelihood. Much like soybean farmers in Iowa, they sold off their solitary cash crop in order to buy their bread and butter—or, in this case, rice and sago. (The starchy interior of the sago palm is a local staple.) At times, they sailed their junks as far as Java to deliver their perfumed crop and pick up groceries.
Nutmegs grow much like lemons or plums on trees that, given the room, rise in handsome symmetrical cones of lustrous green foliage. When ripe, the apricot-sized globes turn the color of pale flesh, then split and fall. The fallen fruit is undeniably luscious. As the nutmeg ripens, its tan flesh spreads open into a deep slit, revealing the brilliant carmine filaments of the mace and, deeper yet within, the jet-black shell of the nutmeg itself. As is still evident from the name given to mace by several European languages (in French, it is fleur de muscade; in German, Muskatblüte), medieval Europeans mistakenly thought that mace was the flower of the nutmeg tree. (Technically, the membrane covering the nutmeg shell is called the aril.) The mistake, made by Marco Polo and others, is a natural one. As you would expect of a flower, when dried, mace is more aromatic than nutmeg and fades to a lovely pink color.
By the sixteen hundreds, Europeans could read plenty of more or less factual descriptions of this legendary evergreen. The Spanish colonial historian Argensola left us a particularly evocative image when he wrote about the spice in 1609 (the translation is from 1708):
Wood-block prints, such as this one from an herbal by the sixteenth-century Florentine Pier Andrea Mattioli, made plants like nutmeg much less exotic to the European public.
They are like the European Pear-Trees, and their Fruit resembles Pairs [sic], or rather in Roundness the Melocotones [peaches]. When the Nutmegs blosom, they spread a cordial Fragrancy; by degrees they lose their Native Green, which is original in all Vegetables; and then succeeds a Blew, intermix’d with Grey, Cherry-Colour, and a pale Gold Colour, as we see in the Rainbow, tho’ not in that regular Division, but in Spots like the Jaspar Stone. Infinite Numbers of Parrots, and other Birds of various Plumage, most delightful to behold, come to sit upon the Branches, attracted by the sweet Odour. The Nuts, when dry, cast off the Shell it grows cover’d with, and is the Mace, within which is a white Kernel, not so sharp in Taste as the Nuts…. Of this Mace, which is hot and dry in the second Degree, and within the third, the Bandese make a most precious Oil to cure all Distempers in the Nerves, and Aches, caus’d by cold…. With [the nuts] they cure, or correct stinking Breath, clear the Eyes, comfort the Stomach, Liver, and Spleen, and digest Meat. They are a Remedy against many other Distempers, and serve to add outward Lustre to the Face.
Whereas some confused mace with a bloom, cloves are, in fact, flowers—or, more accurately, the buds of a bushy tropical tree. The shoots grow in clusters, in a bouquet of some thirty yellow blossoms, each little bud looking like a tubby, lemon yellow clove. Surrounded by fleshy foliage, they are reminiscent of rhododendrons in bloom—except these trees may reach some fifty feet tall. The entire plant is intensely aromatic; not just the flowers but also the leaves have the unmistakable, slightly sickly smell of cloves. After a tropical downpour, the smell of a clove plantation is almost unbearable. The sixteenth-century Portuguese botanist da Orta reports smelling clove-laden ships from miles away:
The scent of the clove is said to be the most fragrant in the world. I experienced this coming from Cochin to Goa, with the wind from the shore, and at night it was calm when we were a league from the land. The scent was so strong and so delicious that I thought there must be forests of flowers. On enquiry I found that we were near a ship coming from Maluco [the Moluccas] with cloves.
The dried buds fetched the best price, but there was also a market for clove stems. While noticeably less aromatic, they were a lot less expensive—at times as cheap as pepper in the Mediterranean market.
While just about every spice has been used for its medical properties (real or imagined), both nutmeg and cloves have demonstrable pharmacological effects. Both the buds and leaves of cloves contain eugenol, which can be used as an effective local anesthetic, a fact long appreciated by dentists (and their patients). The little dried buds used to be made into a preserve with vinegar or with sugar for export to India. In South Asia, they were used for perfuming the breath, for chewing with betel, as well as for their anesthetic properties.
Nutmeg has more psychedelic effects. Taken in small doses, it can act as a sedative. When I had lunch with Frank Lavooij, he recommended taking nutmeg in a glass of warm milk to put you to sleep, though it is just as well he is a trader rather than a pharmacist—the quantity he suggested would have sent me tripping.*47 A chemical in nutmeg called myristicin is believed to account for the spice’s hallucinogenic effects. Though I can’t vouch for it from personal experience, the spice’s psychotropic effects are apparently a widely shared secret. Both American prison inmates and hippies grooving on Goa’s beaches have gotten high on nutmeg. In Zanzibar local women will chew nutmeg in lieu of smoking the local marijuana. The Spanish missionary Frei Sebastien Manrique describes how in Bengal in the early 1600s, junkies would mix opium with nutmeg, mace, and other aromatics to supercharge their fix. Apparently, the response to nutmeg intoxication is extremely varied: some individuals experience a profound distortion of time and space, while others have visual hallucinations. The first recorded hallucinogenic effect was noted by the Flemish physician Lobelius in 1576, when he described a pregnant English lady who “became deliriously inebriated after eating 10–12 nutmegs,” apparently while trying to induce an abortion. For readers looking for a cheap high, it should be noted that tripping on nutmeg can have all sorts of nasty side effects, such as vomiting, headaches, and prolonged disorientation.
Back in Europe, people had known about the Spice Islands with their drug plantations at least since Marco Polo’s day. They even had a rough idea of their location. The peripatetic Venetian had his facts more or less right when he wrote, “[The sea] lies towards the east and according to the testimony of experienced pilots and seamen who sail upon it and are well acquainted with the truth it contains 7,448 islands, most of them inhabited. And I assure you that in all these islands there is no tree that does not give off a powerful and agreeable fragrance and serve some useful purpose.” His numbers were a little off; the actual count is more than 25,000. But he never made it that far. The first Europeans to arrive were Portuguese.
What they found was a world very different from India. Here, there were no great kingdoms or empires but rather hundreds, if not thousands, of minor principalities and a handful of great port cities that had grown rich off the spice trade. Malacca, Macassar, and Achin were comparable to cities like Genoa and Antwerp in size and importance, though the volume of spices that passed through their gates could only be compared to the great entrepôts like Venice or Alexandria.
Despite bullying their way into the neighborhood in the early 1500s, the Portuguese had little influence here. Sure, they grabbed a few strategic spots—mainly, the city of Malacca, which, like today’s Singapore, had a stranglehold on the principal route between East and South Asia. And the conquistadores did put up a fort on Ternate, where they attempted (unsuccessfully) to control the clove trade. But a hundred years later, when the first Dutch ships nosed round the Cape of Good Hope, the Southeast Asian spice trade was, to all intents and purposes, the same as it had always been. A gaggle of sultans, princes, and local chiefs controlled the sale and production of spices while the usual suspects redistributed them across the region. Even most Portuguese vessels were manned almost entirely by local Malay sailors. The Estado da Índia had become just another player among many. But a profound change was in the offing, for neither the Portuguese nor the wealthiest of the sultans were a match for the cutthroat business practices of the Dutch.
THE COMPANY DROPS ANCHOR
Today, the forty-eighth sultan of Ternate still presides over his two-hundred-year-old palace on the principal clove island. He is attended by courtiers who strain their necks to keep their heads below his in the name of tradition. His faithful address him by the divine title Jo’o, or “Lord.” And whenever the smoldering peak of Gammalama threatens to erupt, the semidivine dignitary rides out on a dugout canoe in order to calm the island’s volcano by a ritual circumnavigation. Not that he has any political power under Indonesia’s constitution. This is a pity, at least according to the current sultan, Dr. Mudaffar Sjah (who holds a PhD from the University of Indonesia). In an interview given to the South China Morning Post on the royal back porch, he suggests that the current religious conflict would go away if people just returned to the old ways, to the traditions of the past. Between sips of lychee juice, the Muslim VIP muses about the golden era when his ancestors had real power, when they were the rulers of the spice archipelago. The would-be monarch has his detractors, though, the ones who remember the sultan’s long tenure in the corrupt Suharto regime. Local villagers accuse him of fomenting the sectarian bloodshed. And they are quick to remind you of the centuries when the sultans of Ternate collaborated with the Dutch colonial regime. True enough, yet after their experience with the Portuguese, could Mudaffar’s forefathers have imagined that the Dutch could be worse?
The first locals to come face-to-face with the Europeans lived several hundred miles south of the sultan’s capital. In 1511, Admiral Afonso de Albuquerque had just barely restocked his fleet after conquering Malacca when he sent out three ships to search for the fabled isles. This mini-armada, under the command of Captain António de Abreu, presumably hired (or shanghaied) Malay pilots to guide their two-thousand-mile sail past Java, Bali, and Timor, for they found the tiny Banda Islands without any trouble. They were apparently well received by the inhabitants, who were familiar enough with foreign visitors, even if these bushy-bearded Europeans were a little out of the ordinary. They were happy to sell the Portuguese nutmeg, mace, and even some imported cloves for what the Europeans considered a bargain price. Back in Lisbon, they figured, they would make a 1,000 percent profit. Interestingly, one of the sailors on the expedition was Fernão de Magalhães (better known to the world as Magellan). It was his personal experience in Banda that later helped him convince the Spanish king to finance his trip round the world.
The next hundred years or so were less amicable, at least on the clove islands to the north. In 1522, the Portuguese built a fort at Ternate, spitting distance from the sultan’s palace. They then proceeded to depose or kill one ruler after another, poison the heirs, and remove whole royal families to the Estado da Índia’s stronghold in distant Malacca. Finally, the assassination of the ruling sultan in 1574 proved to be one murder too many for the locals. They rose up the following year and expelled the foreigners from their island. Not surprisingly, when the Dutch arrived in 1599 promising help against the Portuguese, the Moluccans jumped at the opportunity of an alliance.
The Dutch had a knack for getting people to cooperate; it was a system that would be familiar to any mafioso working the garbage-collection business in Lower Manhattan. Ships bristling with guns anchored a stone’s throw from the headmen’s villages (or royal palaces) and offered “protection” in exchange for the right to buy up all the local spice crop at prices set by the Company. A typical example was the agreement signed by several Banda orang kaya (local headmen) invited on board the armed merchant ship Gelderland on May 23, 1602. No doubt the chiefs were given a selective tour of the ship and taken down the narrow staircase onto the gun deck for a thorough examination of some two dozen polished cast-iron cannon aimed at their fragile homes. They may even have been treated to a demonstration of their lethal effect. Surely they grasped this better than the sheet of parchment scrawled with legal jargon that the pink-faced interlopers thrust at them. They certainly couldn’t have understood the terms of the Dutch-language contract, which specified that, in exchange for protection against the Portuguese and English, the Bandanese granted the Dutch an irrevocable monopoly on nutmeg. Under the circumstances, few of the headmen refused. But it’s hardly remarkable that the islanders also tried to evade the contracts. After all, had the locals taken the agreement too much to heart, they would have starved. By this era, the nutmeg islands were totally dependent on imported food, yet the Hollanders had no interest in transporting bulky and perishable commodities such as sago and rice. Instead, they brought Indian calico, which they insisted the islanders exchange at fixed prices. Of course, as far as the legal counsel of the VOC was concerned, these agreements were all aboveboard and perfectly lawful—if the natives had nothing to eat, that was their own affair—so when the locals did not live up to the letter of the documents, the Dutch felt completely justified sending in their enforcers.
This worked smoothly in Southeast Asia, where the Estado da Índia was thin on the ground. There, the Dutch were easily able to fend off a Portuguese invasion of Banda in 1600, and a year later, the company’s ships sank a Portuguese fleet in a full-scale naval battle in the Bay of Bantam, which assured access to Javanese pepper. In 1605, the VOC nabbed the Portuguese fort of Amboina, strategically sited between the clove islands and the nutmeg archipelago. India was another matter. The original plan had been to evict the Portuguese from the entire subcontinent, but the decrepit empire had more kick in it than the Dutch had counted on. After several unsuccessful attacks on Golden Goa, the VOC satisfied itself with a temporary treaty of alliance with the rulers of Calicut, who were still fuming about Vasco da Gama and his lot.
Back in Amsterdam, news of the VOC’s successes and failures sent the Company’s share prices on a roller-coaster ride. The rapid ascent of the initial stock offering turned into a free fall when news trickled back that the clove island of Tidore had been recaptured by the Spanish and that the Moluccas might be a lost cause. The situation in Holland was actually made worse by the fact that arriving VOC ships continued to unload bales of pepper on every wharf. Not only the Netherlands but all of Europe was awash with Dutch, Portuguese, and now even English pepper. (The English East India Company was chartered in 1600.) In Amsterdam alone, according to Buzanval (the French ambassador as well as a VOC shareholder), warehouses were packed to the roofs with pepper worth more than a million guilders that went begging for customers. In a short time, shares that once seemed like they would zoom into the stratosphere were being dumped at 60 percent of their face value. In the Oost-Indisch Huis boardroom, it was plain to see that the Company could not depend on pepper alone to keep its shareholders happy. The Heren XVII decided to rework their business plan, to focus their attention on the islands ruled by the sultans of Ternate.
After my long, civilized lunch with the genteel Frank Lavooij, I could only wonder how much the world of business has changed. Just how many of today’s mouse-wielding financiers would have the stomach or the audacity for what VOC employees were expected to carry out? When I hear Lavooij discuss his company’s well-regarded policies, according to which he encourages farmers to produce organically and builds processing plants in third-world countries (all because it is more profitable, he readily admits), I think back to the well-regarded practices of 1600, pondering what decisions Lavooij might be making were he sitting in the chamber with the Seventeen. When you look into the eyes of the many portraits of the East India Company’s functionaries, it’s hard to conceive of them condoning slave trading and genocide in the name of their shareholders.
Well, that’s not quite right: there’s one face that is all too telling.
THE COMPANY MAN
Of all the original towns that made up the “chambers” of the United Company, none is as delightful as Hoorn. Unlike Amsterdam, this small city has never had its second life, so nobody found it necessary to tear down street after street of pert seventeenth-century town houses to put up something more up-to-date after the town’s harbor silted up in the eighteenth century.
It was an unusually sunny afternoon when I left Amsterdam’s Centraal Station for the forty-minute trip to Hoorn so that I could look into the eyes of the town’s most notorious son. The pale winter sun turned the polders a particularly luminous green; wooly clumps of sheep plodded contentedly between the sky blue canals. As I left Hoorn’s railway station behind, it became immediately evident how important the East India Company used to be here. You see it in the VOC insignia that peek out from under eaves, in the impressive old Company warehouses that tower five stories above the town’s principal canal, in a street named Peper Straat, but perhaps most poignantly in the faces of former company officials who peer from the walls of the local history museum.
The quirky Westfries Museum presides over Roode Steen, a postcard-perfect rhomboid of a medieval square a few steps from the old harbor. The museum is fronted by a stepped façade plastered with a busy display of insignia, giving it all the appearance of an overwrought sports trophy—in an endearing, Renaissance sort of way. Inside, it is all crooked passageways and leaning stairs filled with dusty portraits of plump and jolly militiamen (the town had to pass an ordinance to limit the duration of parties thrown by these seventeenth-century weekend warriors to no more than three days, a museum guide tells me) and cluttered with souvenirs from Holland’s glory years.
Up the creaky stairs, pride of place is given to a high, timbered room devoted to the East India Company. Here, the musty stench of ancient stuff is made even thicker by the slightly sickly smell of cloves mingling with nutmeg and mace. The curators had the clever idea of installing rough burlap sacks of sweet spices to remind you of what put their city on the map. It’s a clever conceit, especially when you read that each sack would have been worth the price of a house in seventeenth-century Hoorn—a rather nice house at that. The hall’s walls are lined with group portraits of men who look as if they didn’t party much with the militiamen downstairs. These are the businessmen who ran the East India Company. Up on the left is the fleshy figure of the VOC officer Cornelis de Groot, his image the cliché of the capitalist fat cat with his pencil-thin mustache, double chins, and bland smile. Nearby stands the Hoorn chamber director and sometime mayor, Francois Van Brederhoff, looking as if he were late for a meeting. Others lounge and lean, surveying the room. There’s one person in the room who doesn’t seem as if he much liked having his portrait painted. But that would have been typical of the man whom many consider the greatest villain (and some, a towering hero) of the Dutch spice trade.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for his portrait after he became the Company’s chief operating officer in the Far East. His crew-cut, chiseled, leathery head pokes out of a fashionably frilly collar like an ill-tempered tortoise dressed for the prom. He looks across the room at a group portrait of luxuriantly bewigged and chubby-cheeked VOC functionaries arranged around a long table draped with a splendid carmine Turkish rug. It may be irritation at the painter’s slowness that shows in Coen’s hard eyes, but I can’t help but imagine scorn when I follow his gaze.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for at least two portraits. This one belongs to the Rijksmuseum.
What did these young and comfortable upstarts know of Coen’s distant world filled with armed, recalcitrant natives unwilling to submit to his business plan? To these well-fed gentlemen, the festering jungles and pirate-filled bays were no more than marks and scratches on globes and maps. What did it matter to them how Coen dealt with the assets and liabilities in the Far East as long as the investors were happy? Did they not, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders? Jan Coen has been systematically vilified by modern Dutch historians, but as far as he was concerned, he was simply carrying out the Company’s policies to their genocidally logical conclusion even as the boardroom barons claimed plausible deniability. As he looks across at these boys of privilege, you can almost hear him say (as he did in letter after irritated letter to headquarters), You may not have liked my methods, but where would you be now without me?
Coen began his company career after serving a seven-year accounting apprenticeship in Rome, where he had studied the latest in Italian finance. He came home in 1605, just around the time the first spice-loaded VOC ship returned to Hoorn with a cargo worth more than a million guilders (equivalent to something like two hundred million dollars today). That shipment alone gave the shareholders a 75 percent return on their investment! The same year, VOC shares were trading at 200 percent of their face value on the Amsterdam exchange. No wonder all the ports in Holland were feverish with excitement. Though it’s hard to conceive of the Coen of the Westfries portrait being swept up in any sort of frenzy, he clearly saw the opportunities in the spice trade that an overgrown village like Hoorn could never offer. With this in mind, the twenty-year-old managed to get himself a job on the lowest rung of the VOC corporate ladder, as submerchant, at a monthly salary of thirty-five guilders plus room and board. His bosses recognized his talent and quickly promoted him. By the age of thirty-one, he had the top job in the Far East. Leave it to the Dutch to pick an accountant to build their empire.
A SAILOR’S LIFE
In Amsterdam, the naval museum has at least as many models of the old ships that traveled the spice route round the Cape of Good Hope as Lisbon’s fine collection of miniature galleons and naus, but at least in one respect, the Amsterdamers can lord it over the Lisboetas: they have a life-size reproduction of an East Indiaman. The ship, appropriately enough named the Amsterdam, lies at anchor by the waterfront, several canals east of the Centraal Station, just about where the seventeenth-century VOC shipyards used to be. Naval historians will scoff that it’s a copy, and of an eighteenth-century ship at that, but that would make it only a little more luxurious than earlier models. This is decidedly no cruise ship. The quarters assigned to merchants like Coen wouldn’t pass muster as a walk-in closet, and the ship’s galley would qualify as such only in a New York studio apartment. The downstairs deck is about half the size of a basketball court, which seems spacious enough until you realize it had to accommodate more than three hundred rowdy and bored sailors.
The men who boarded ships like the one carrying Jan Coen to the East Indies in 1607 would have been a motley and unruly bunch. But at least they were free men—unlike the slaves and convicts who populated the Carreira da Índia’s later crews. The Dutch seamen were assembled by professional recruiters—known as zielverkopers, or “soul merchants”—who trolled the taverns and back alleys of Holland’s slums. One favorite ploy was to advance wages to the impecunious recruits, who typically drank the money at the nearest bar. Now they were not only broke but in debt. They had no choice but to go east. Some never got out of arrears to the Company and remained free men in name only. Later, when the alehouses proved inadequate, the VOC regularly turned to the governors of orphanages and workhouses to supply additional souls to man the Company’s ships. Like the Portuguese, Dutch sailors died by the hundreds from accidents, violence, and disease, with the result that the soul merchants were never out of work.
The discipline aboard Dutch ships was perhaps even more brutal than on other European merchant ships of the time. Maybe people were more hardened after the atrocities of the Spanish war, or perhaps commanders were just desperate to keep their brawling, drunken, malnourished, and often sick crew from murdering one another. The official rule books allowed captains to punish any seaman who injured another by pinning him to the mast with a knife through his hand until he tore himself free. Anyone who killed another was to be bound to the dead victim and thrown overboard. You have to wonder, though, just how often a skipper would resort to punishments that would leave him with even fewer sailors to run the ship.
Yet, in spite of the crowded conditions, the population of a ship like the Amsterdam was far smaller than that of the virtual floating cities that set out from Lisbon. For one thing, the early Dutch vessels carried neither settlers, priests, nor colonial functionaries with their attendant slaves and servants. From the standpoint of quantity, the average sailor was probably better fed than his Portuguese counterpart, at least once the Dutch had figured out what would make it through the equatorial heat. (In the first voyage to the Indies and back, half the crew died.) The officers did have the occasional culinary perk, but they were hardly living it up like the Carreira da Índia’s elite. If the Amsterdam’s kitchen is in any way representative, all the cook had to work with to serve some 333 bodies was a modest grill and a built-in cooking basin just big enough to submerge one big turkey. Any sort of baking was out of the question, so scheepsbeschuit, or hardtack (the tough, crackerlike bread universal to all sailing nations), was the only bread for officers and crew alike after the first few days out. (To make it palatable, it was often soaked with beer and sweetened with treacle.)
Food preservation methods were just as limited as they had been in Vasco da Gama’s day. Moreover, to the great consternation of the Dutch crew, beer would not last more than a month or two in the tropical heat. The men were stuck with fetid water washed down with a little wine, which held up better. And not even enough water at that. Shipboard diaries report that sailors had to subsist on something like a quart of water a day, a minuscule quantity when you consider the sweaty work, salty food, and sultry climate. In the first few weeks, they occasionally got to taste a little fresh meat to relieve the monotony. Official VOC provisioning lists allow for several live pigs on board as well as several dozen hens to provide fresh eggs for the sick. But the shelf life of the livestock on board wasn’t much better than the beer. Once the fresh meat had been consumed, the crew was stuck with a diet of boiled salted beef, boiled salty bacon, boiled gruel, and boiled peas. The officers did have it a little better, at least in one intriguing respect. Whereas the only seasoning included on an official VOC provisioning list for the sailors was mustard and horseradish, the officers had a substantial allowance of both domestic and Asian spices to season their gruel—something on the order of three ounces a week.*48 This may be the best indication yet of just how much spice middle-class Netherlanders really ate around 1700.
One source of Dutch protein that was denied to Portuguese seamen on the pepper naus was, of course, cheese. The weekly three-quarters of a pound of cheese each India-bound sailor received may alone explain why the Hollanders were considerably taller than the Portuguese and better fed than their competitors. Still, by the time they rounded the cape, the ships’ supply of fuel—most likely, dried peat or German coal on the outbound voyage—would often have run out, so, unable to cook, the dehydrated sailors were stuck with little more than worm-infested biscuit to gnaw with their Gouda.
Is it any wonder that the half-starved, alcohol-deprived sailors disembarking at Cochin headed straight for the public houses, where they drank themselves insensate? As the partying ordinances in Hoorn make clear, Calvinist society did not condone indulgent behavior—or at least, not too much of it. Admittedly, even back home, Dutch sailors were notorious for their drinking, fighting, and whoring, but in India, half a world away from nosy neighbors and purse-lipped ministers, the seamen could indulge in every vice without a look back. (Though, if the small number of mixed-race offspring produced by the Dutch in the Far East is any indication, their consummate skill with the tankard may have made them less successful in other indulgences—at least, when compared to the Portuguese.) Knowing full well what fueled a Dutch sailor, Linschoten had reassured his readers that a distilled liquor called arrack existed in plenty in the Indies; he particularly recommends the arrack from Malaysia. In India and Indonesia, arrack was made by distilling the fermented nectar of the palmyra palm (though fermented sugarcane and rice were also used), resulting in a relatively neutral-tasting white firewater.*49 A Portuguese visitor to India in 1587 commented that that “araca” is very strong but improves with age, and that raisins were thrown into it to take off its roughness and sweeten it. A commercial version of this same liquor is sold today in little corner shops all over Goa, where it is called feni. Goans usually drink it straight, though, for the tourists, they mix it with lime soda. There is also a homemade version, which regularly kills people.
The arrack naturally led to every indiscretion you could think of, and not by common sailors alone. At the Dutch “factory” in Jakarta, the senior Company official made no friends by repeatedly sexually harassing the wives of high-ranking Javanese. This was apparently not an isolated incident. An anonymous journal from a few years later reads like a kinky novel. According to our reporter, the entire senior staff of the same fort behaved in a most un-Calvinist way, with the dominie (pastor) jumping right in. It apparently all began with Spanish wine (rather than the local tipple) when four Indonesian/Portuguese mulatas were invited to the officers’ mess to partake of the evening meal. But more was to come:
After the sub-merchants and assistants had left, Raey, the Captain, Dominie Hermans, the Lieutenant, and the Cornet [another officer] remained with the women. They were gay and happy and drank Spanish wine and dallied with those women, singing: Tabe, tabe, Signora moeda—bawa bantal tikar—betta mau rassa! [Greetings, young signora—do bring your sleeping mat and pillow!] What the Dominie had preached during the day was already forgotten; all were too busy with those luscious women…The pleasures lasted until one or two in the morning when everyone went to his bunk and three women slept upstairs…The Cornet took [one of the women] home and had his fun with her in her house.
No wonder Coen would later harangue the Heren XVII to send a number of “solid Protestant clergymen, not such stupid, uncouth idiots as you have sent heretofore.” All the same, this rowdy, unruly atmosphere dominated the Dutch trading posts throughout most of the early years of the VOC. “It is human beings Your Honors have here, not angels!” Coen repeatedly pointed out to his superiors.
As Coen ascended the Company’s ranks, this sober Calvinist found all the undisciplined behavior not merely distasteful but a drag on the bottom line. He wanted God-fearing families to come establish some sort of core of decency. “Even if they come naked as a jaybird we can still use them,” he wrote to Amsterdam. He was particularly in favor of sending young women to the Indies, which would have the twofold advantage of emptying the orphanages back home and providing wives to Dutchmen overseas. How morally uplifting these “company maidens” would prove to be is highly debatable, but they were to be a feature of the East India trade for centuries. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch never made much of an effort to convert anyone to Christianity. As a result, marriages between Dutchmen and locals were rare. In another letter, Coen harps on the fact that the local Muslims will not allow their women to marry Christians, and what’s more, they “kill their children or abort them so that the mother won’t bear heathens.”
“A THOROUGH GRASP OF COMMERCE”
“This Coen is a person with a thorough grasp of commerce as well as statecraft,” wrote the outgoing governor of the Dutch East Indies in 1613 about the newly appointed president and “bookkeeper-general” of the Company’s Indonesian offices. “He is honest, well-balanced, and does not waste any time. I am certain that there has never been anyone here, nor will there be, who surpasses him in efficiency, as Your Lordships will be able to judge from his letters.”
We can learn a great deal about Hoorn’s best-known son from his profuse letters. (He issued so many reams of correspondence that the ships returning to Holland around the first of every year became known as “book ships.”) Impatience and conceitedness are the leitmotif of his correspondence. “I am almost weary, my voice weakens and the pen falters, to have to repeat that while in some cases you show great courage, there is always something in which you fall short.” Then again and again: “I swear to you by the Almighty that the General Company has no greater enemies than the ignorance and shortsightedness, pardon my words, which seems to prevail among Your Lordships and outvotes the intelligent.”
While he may have been impertinent, Coen delivered, and the directors were quick to promote him up the company ranks. Between 1607 and 1613, he went from humble clerk to chief merchant in charge of two ships to bookkeeper-general (essentially, the chief financial officer). When he got this last promotion, his assignment was to compile a comprehensive financial report of all the activities of the VOC from Cochin to Nagasaki, a job that he fulfilled with such alacrity that headquarters immediately promoted him to the number two position in the field, director-general. Though he did not get the top post of governor-general for another five years, this effectively put the twenty-seven-year-old Coen in charge of the East India Company’s operations across Asia. All he lacked was the title and the salary—points on which he harped with great regularity in his missives back to Hoogstraat.
As far as Coen was concerned, the company’s efficiency was not impeded merely by the degeneracy of its workforce and the doltishness of the leadership in Amsterdam but by the uncooperative producers of the very spices that were the whole point of the enterprise. In all probability, Coen had personally witnessed just how disobliging the natives could be. It is almost certain that he was part of a 1609 fleet under Admiral Verhoef sent to build a fort on the Bandanese island of Neira to make sure the natives understood just how seriously the Dutch took their contracts. Needless to say, the Bandanese had not been consulted about the building project and showed their displeasure by massacring the admiral and some thirty members of his staff. The last time Coen saw his commander’s head, it was likely skewered on the end of a Bandanese battle lance. Of course, the Dutch took their revenge, and the fort was built after all. Subsequently, at least some of the local chieftains, the orang kaya, agreed (once again) to Dutch demands for a mace and nutmeg monopoly throughout the archipelago. The island of Neira itself was seized outright in the name of the Company and the States General “to be kept by us forever,” making it the Netherlands’ first official East Indian colony. It seems that Coen learned two things from this encounter: that you could not trust the “perfidious Moors,” as he tended to call the natives, and that a little bloodletting yielded results. At the time, he was in no position to do anything about it, but years later as governor-general, he took these lessons to their chillingly logical conclusion.
He got the top job in 1618. Now he had the authority to carry out the Company’s mission as only he saw fit. His first move was to transfer his base of operations from Bantam, where the ruling sultan wouldn’t play by Dutch rules, to Jakarta. When the locals there objected, he had their town burned to the ground. On the ashes of Jakarta’s mosque and marketplace, Coen built a brand-new city named Batavia. (Coen originally wanted to call it Nieuw Hoorn after his hometown, but headquarters wouldn’t go for it.) The inspiration for Batavia was supposedly the Estado da Índia’s capital at Goa, though the VOC base could hardly compare to the gilded “Rome of the East.” The company town looked like it had sprouted from some polder in Holland. Narrow houses topped with stepped gables sat at the edge of straight canals while windmills towered above the city walls. The locals called this tropical Hoorn “Kota Djankong,” the city of Jan Coen; people in Amsterdam and The Hague referred to it as an “honorable prison.” It must have been a pretty lively prison, though, the streets a menagerie of local Javanese and VOC employees, overseas Chinese settlers and Indian merchants, voluntary migrants from Europe and slaves forcibly transported from Madagascar—all drawn here by the smell of money emitted by ships loaded with sweet spice.
Once the obstinate Javanese had been put in their place, the governor-general turned to the Moluccas. As years had stretched to decades and the stubborn Lusitanians refused to make themselves scarce, the directors of the Dutch East India Company had regretfully come to the conclusion that a pepper monopoly wasn’t in the cards. But the case of nutmeg and cloves was a different matter. Now the trouble was the English, who had begun to butt into the spice trade, even setting up a trading post in the Bandas. Needless to say, Coen was not going to let those sorts of details get in his way. In spite of specific instructions not to use force, the impatient governor-general sent in his troops. They not only sent the English packing but in the process massacred or expelled the entire population of the Bandanese island of Ai. A happy consequence of this (for the VOC, at least) was that the Dutch could now impose a new, 20 percent lower price for nutmeg on the producers. But that was a mere Band-Aid applied to a festering sore, as far as the governor-general was concerned.
It would appear that Coen had the glimmerings of a final solution to the supply problem at least as early as 1618. In a letter of that year, he notes that Laurens Reael, the company’s rep in Banda, had suggested that the VOC pay a higher rate for nutmeg so that the locals would not be tempted to sell it to others. “But I say NO!” thundered the governor-general. “Do not give in or the whole business will go to the devil. It were better that all the Bandanese leave their islands; then we could plant Dutch colonies there.” Not everyone was quite as single-mindedly devoted to the Company’s bottom line as Jan Coen. The same Reael who recommended paying more for nutmeg had the temerity to suggest that strict enforcement of the monopoly would result in the wholesale destitution of the natives. “We are so much concerned with profits,” he wrote, “that we do not allow anyone else to make a penny.” In a similar vein, a Dutch admiral on the scene complained that by eliminating local traders, the Company had driven the Moluccans to the brink of starvation. “It can be done, but with what right?” was his comment. Others spoke up for a more equitable solution in the East Indies. But how could the bean counters on Hoogstraat object to Coen’s tactics when they were so effective in shoring up the VOC’s share prices?
Coen waited until 1621 to strike. His flotilla dropped anchor in the crystalline waters off Lonthor (Banda Besar), the largest island in the archipelago, in early March. On board were close to two thousand men, including slaves and some one hundred Japanese mercenaries. As the dawn of March 21 dabbed the crowns of the nutmeg trees pink, Coen’s troops tumbled onto the coral beaches and clambered up the island’s dark volcanic cliffs. The sweating, armored soldiers marched through the scented forest of the interior and up narrow footpaths into the sticky jungle as the inhabitants scattered to escape the invaders. Where the Company’s steel and bullets failed, Dutch silver managed to do the trick. In one case, a bribed Bandanese defector guided the attackers to a strategic victory for the handsome sum of 250 reals.*50 Other, less amenable natives plunged from cliffs into the roiling breakers rather than surrender. By the end of the day, as the red-dyed sun dipped behind the smoldering peak of the Gugung Api volcano, Jan Coen could tick off item number one on his strategic plan: the island was effectively his.
Item number two fell in his lap quickly enough when a delegation of orang kaya arrived on Coen’s ship to sue for peace. The governor-general demanded that the natives level all their fortifications, give up their weapons, hand over their sons as hostages, and, from now on, pay a tribute of 10 percent of the nutmeg harvest. The rest had to be sold exclusively to the VOC at prices fixed by the Company. Hardly in a position to argue, the chiefs submitted—though, not surprisingly, there was little good faith on either side of the bargain. By his own admission, Coen neither expected nor wanted the Bandanese to honor the commitments; he was merely waiting for an excuse to finish what he had started.
By now, the Bandanese had fled to the hills, leaving mounds of fleshy nutmegs to rot as they fell to the ground. After failing to entice the inhabitants out of the hills, Coen could now justify his endgame. He sent soldiers to torch what remained of the abandoned villages and to hunt down the inhabitants on every one of the Banda Islands. Anyone who could be captured was herded onto troop transports and shipped off to Batavia, where they were sold as slaves—the ones that made it, that is. In at least one consignment of 287 men, 356 women, and 240 children, 176 died on the way. Others, trapped in hilltop crevices with no access to food, died by the thousands—of exposure, starvation, and disease. Then, finally, just to make sure that no one could come back to interfere with his agenda, Coen blockaded the islands to cut off any escape. The accountant’s genocidal program was highly successful. It appears that no more than about 1,000 Bandanese out of an original population of about 15,000 survived.
Ever meticulous, Coen gave his actions a legal underpinning by holding a trial of some two score prisoners before his final assault. The men, after being subjected to torture (a routine tool of seventeenth-century jurisprudence), confessed that they had broken the terms of the peace treaty and conspired against the life of the governor-general. Yet even some of the Dutch were appalled at the ensuing injustice. “The condemned victims being brought within the enclosure, six Japanese soldiers were also ordered inside, and with their sharp swords they beheaded and quartered the eight chief orang kaya and then beheaded and quartered the thirty-six others,” wrote a naval lieutenant who witnessed the sight. “All that happened was so dreadful as to leave us stunned. The heads and quarters of those who had been executed were impaled upon bamboos and so displayed. Thus did it happen: God knows who is right. All of us, as professing Christians, were filled with dismay at the way this affair was brought to a conclusion, and we took no pleasure in such dealings.”
So far, the plan had proceeded like clockwork, the governor-general could inform headquarters on his return to Batavia. Back in the cool and clammy chambers of the Oost-Indisch Huis, however, the Seventeen were a little taken aback by Coen’s bloody methods. Still, they sent back the expected letter of commendation, even if it was a little diluted by pious reservations about his tactics: “We had wished that it could have been accomplished by more moderate means.” Two years later, though, just to make sure there were no hard feelings, they awarded Coen a compensation package worth close to forty-five thousand guilders, three thousand of which was specifically assigned for the conquest of the spice archipelago.
The Banda genocide did not solve all of the Company’s problems. The Dutch faced the same situation the Spanish had experienced when they wiped out the indigenous population of their Caribbean conquests: there was nobody to work the plantations. They also came up with the same solution, importing African slaves and Asian coolies to do the work. There was also the perennial issue of smuggling. Despite the Company’s ruthless enforcement of its monopoly, nutmeg continued to leak onto the world market, though in a much more limited fashion now that the Bandanese had been extirpated.
When it came to cloves, the East India Company had a more intractable problem. Unlike nutmeg and mace, which were limited to the minute Bandas, clove trees grew all over the Moluccas, and the trade in cloves was way beyond the limited policing powers of the corporation. Smugglers could easily get double the Company’s fixed price if they could slip by the guns of the enforcers. But here, too, the Netherlanders showed their business acumen. If they couldn’t control the clove plantations, they would simply burn them down. In 1625, some sixty-five thousand trees—and the lives, villages, and livelihoods of thousands—were destroyed on Ceram’s Hoamoal Peninsula alone. Agents went in with axes and torches to wipe out clove plantations elsewhere on Ceram, on Tidore, and on Ternate. (The sultan was paid off with “extirpation moneys” to keep mum.)
The contraband trade thrived partly because there were harbors willing to take it in. So the Company went after the Portuguese, with whom, incidentally, they were no longer at war; Malacca fell in 1641, Ceylon in 1658, and finally even Cochin in 1663. In Indonesia, the VOC seized the independent ports of Aceh, Macassar, and Bantam. It took a good part of the seventeenth century, but by the late 1660s, the Dutch could claim a virtual monopoly on nutmeg, mace, cloves, and cinnamon. And their price by century’s end reflected it. In Amsterdam, all these spices (except nutmeg) were selling for easily double what they had been in 1600.
Not that Jan Pieterszoon Coen would live to see the empire built upon his bloodstained foundation. Life expectancies were brief in the East India trade no matter what your rank. The governor-general died in Batavia on September 21, 1629, at the age of forty-two, reportedly from a sudden seizure of “dysentery” (probably cholera). The following day, he was buried with great pomp and ceremony, at company expense. Apparently, when word got back to Hoogstraat that they had picked up the bill, the Seventeen were incensed that they had been charged. Yet no doubt their anger was short-lived, as they saw profits rolling in.
One of the effects of the Dutch entry into the spice trade was that the price of the spices in which they did not gain a monopoly, such as pepper and ginger, plummeted, while the price of the “fine spices” of the Moluccas as well as Ceylonese cinnamon rose. So now pepper and ginger, which had never been exceptionally expensive, became commonplace condiments, while the others became rarer as the VOC strangled the supply at its source to guarantee a high price. In the seventeenth century, cinnamon was still very popular among the cognoscenti, but the “it” spice, especially in France and England, was increasingly nutmeg.
The sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century explosion in the demand for the rarer spices can at least partly be attributed to their use as nutraceuticals. Asian aromatics—and in particular, the “fine spices”—had been used to cure ailments of all kinds at least since the days when Romans used to send their merchants to Cochin. But the printing revolution of the sixteenth century created a whole new market for diet books trumpeting the use of spices as a dietary supplement to balance and “correct” other foods. Any doctor worth his salt had to know the many uses of pepper and, more important, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg in his practice. The directors of the Dutch East India Company had only to walk out the front door of company headquarters and glance up the Kloveniersburgwal Canal to Amsterdam’s spice market on the Nieuwemarkt to see perfumed bales dispatched to apothecaries across Europe. What they didn’t see, or understand, was that the current diet advice was headed the way of the grapefruit diet.
PRESCRIBING SPICE
After all I had read about the Nieuwemarkt, I suppose I had expected the square to be lined with picturesque Dutch façades and have a whiff of nutmeg in the air as I wandered by one foggy Tuesday morning. Instead, the broad plaza is framed by a jumble of plain shops and modern office buildings. The square would be almost homely were it not for the pointy-towered, cinnamon-colored fortress that squats at its center. When this fortified gate was built in 1488 to protect the up-and-coming hamlet of Amsterdam, it was planted with its feet in the canal that encircled the city like a moat. Then, when the city burst its walls in the early sixteen hundreds, the authorities constructed this nieuwe markt (“new market”) by paving over a section of the canal. The new market specialized in the aromatic treasure brought from the East, and the tower became a weighing station for the spices that canal boats brought down from the harbor.
The perfume of that time has dissipated over the centuries, but not entirely. At the edge of the Nieuwemarkt, you can still detect a hint of spice in the air in an old house that leans gently toward the Kloveniersburgwal Canal, as if tired out by standing here so long. The sign identifies the building as the Apotheek Jacob Hooy, which claims to be the city’s oldest pharmacy, founded in 1743. The interior sure looks it. Ancient yellowed drawers are inscribed in florid Latin script—Piper nigrum, Piper alum—to indicate their contents of black and white pepper. Chocolate brown barrels line the shelves like the brown cheeses at the Kaaskamer, though these, unlike the spiced cheeses, are just for show. All the same, you know you’re in the twenty-first century quickly enough when you see the display of herbal pastilles on the counter promoting stress reduction.
Yet despite the shelves of organic bug repellent and world music CDs, the store is still primarily an apothecary, and the pharmacist’s job is still to consult with his customers on just which herbal cocktail will best combat their flatulence or common cold. Ginger and mace are certainly still for sale here, but the attendant tells me that spices are now used mostly in Ayurvedic medicine, not the traditional European medicine that is Jacob Hooy’s stock-in-trade. The Dutch are much more eclectic than Americans in their approach to healing. So-called “natural” remedies exist side by side with more “conventional” allopathic practices, while homeopathy is also commonplace. Ayurvedic medicine, however, is relegated to a fringe of medical connoisseurs. This is somewhat surprising, since a system much like it dominated European medical practice for more than a thousand years. It was in this, the so-called Galenic system, that spices used to hold pride of place. When the pharmacy first opened its doors, the chamomile and mint sold at Jacob Hooy would have been considered good enough for chambermaids and fishwives, but for the more cultured classes, only the likes of expensive nutmeg and cloves would do.
In 1600, the Galenic system was the conventional medicine of the day and, after more than a millennium of elaboration, consisted of a vast and esoteric body of knowledge. It had all started with the writings of a second-century Greek physician named Galen, who began his career employed in the ER of a gladiator school in Asia Minor and worked his way up to attending to Caesars. By the early Middle Ages, his writings had been preserved mostly in Arabic compilations, which were, in turn, translated into Latin. In the Renaissance, the Galenic school got a new shot in the arm when classics scholars unearthed Galenic writings in the original Greek. Leading the way was the Venetian university town of Padua, with its links to Greece (recall that Greek exiles flooded into Venice after the fall of Constantinople), but other centers of learning, including the University of Leuven, in the southern Netherlands, were part of the trend.
Ironically, it was university-trained academics, not practicing physicians such as Galen, who now compiled the medical manuals. No wonder that the attraction of the Galenic system, particularly in its later incarnations, was more metaphysical than practical. (This may, in part, explain the appeal of esoteric spices brought from mystical lands.) Because the scheme was not dependent on empirical data that might cloud its clarity, the medical theoreticians could build a model of transparent symmetry and logic.
The system that underlay Galenic theory could be compared to the workings of a compass, where anything can be mapped according to its four points. North, south, east, and west correspond to four elements (water, fire, air, and earth); which, in turn, match up to four bodily humors (phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile); which are associated with the four seasons; which reflect the four ages of man, the four periods of the day, the four colors, the four flavors, even the four Evangelists…Anyway, you get the idea. By definition, any and all phenomena could be plugged into this paradigm. So, a fish would naturally be cold and wet because of its watery habitat, a spice hot and dry because of its biting flavor and torrid growing conditions. As far as people went, the temperament of any given individual was determined by his or her particular mixture of humors. We occasionally still use these terms when we describe a person as phlegmatic, bilious, or sanguine, though psychiatrists nowadays generally don’t treat depression by prescribing mace to purge their patients of black bile.
In the old days, when a physician was called in, his first job was to diagnose his patient’s temperament so he could calibrate the diet. Most experts believed that everyone’s humors were a little out of whack and needed correction, which, in all but the most extreme cases, could be done by fiddling with the nutritional regimen. So someone with a phlegmatic (that is, cold and moist) “distemperature” could be corrected by prescribing a hot and dry diet that might include an abundance of heating nutrients such as cinnamon or mustard. The spices would increase the person’s “choleric” humors, his temperament would return to balance, and all would be well. Incidentally, the concept of “diet” was seen rather broadly. Depending on the authority, it might include not only food and drink but also air quality, exercise, sexual activity, emotional state, and lots of other factors believed to affect nutrition. For example, our phlegmatic patient could also crank up the choleric humors in the body by standing in a hot and dry wind, exercising vigorously, or even getting really angry. The charm of the system was that you could explain anything to anyone. Once all the inputs were considered, a well-read doctor could tell you just what to eat before going for a walk on a rainy spring day, or the dire consequences of indulging in sex too early on a humid summer morning.
The tricky part of the diagnosis was to first determine a person’s temperament, since everyone was made up of a cocktail of all of the humors, and a clear-cut case of, say, a completely sanguine personality was rare. Sex, age, lifestyle, and climate were all factored into the analysis, as was profession. (Poets and prophets are notoriously melancholy, as we all know.) The physician often resorted to even more nebulous criteria, such as personality, body type, and physiognomy. You could tell a lot from a person’s complexion: sanguine people, having an abundance of blood, were supposed to have ruddy skin, while phlegmatics looked pale and watery.
This was all very well for the purposes of prescribing diet (in the broadest sense), but to make a diagnosis of an actual illness based on a person’s profession and complexion was harder still. In the absence of blood tests and X-rays, medieval doctors depended to some degree on external indicators such as a high fever or an abnormal pulse as a sign of disease. Urine analysis was also a favorite diagnostic technique. By examining, smelling, and even tasting a patient’s urine, much could apparently be learned and the appropriate measures applied. Bleeding was always a big favorite. (It’s why medieval doctors were often called “leeches.”) This was a quick, efficient way to relieve the many illnesses caused by an excess of blood. As you might imagine, the success rate of this sort of medical practice was rather uneven, and consequently, wiser physicians stuck to Hippocrates’s injunction, “First do no harm,” limiting their advice to diet tips or at least reasonably harmless potions.
Of course, the Renaissance doctor’s authority, much as it does today, depended on keeping the system as arcane and jargon-filled as possible. For this, physicians required fat Latin volumes filled with humoral system analyses of Talmudic complexity. Publishers were happy to oblige. However, more popular interpretations of Galenic theory were a big hit as well. Platina’s bestselling De honesta voluptate, for example, was intended to be as much a dietary guide as a cookbook and provided all sorts of advice on judicious humor balancing. Even Linschoten’s Itinerario was packed full of advice on the dietary uses of the Eastern commodities. Along with data on the cost of cinnamon and the mating habits of Portuguese fidalgos, Linschoten’s collaborator (a graduate of the prestigious medical school in Padua, no less) adds, “Cinnamon warms, opens, and tones up the intestines.” He writes, “It is good for catarrh, making it move down from the head to the lower parts. It cures dropsy as well as defects and obstructions in the kidneys. Oil of cinnamon strengthens all organs: heart, stomach, liver, etc.” Nutmeg is just as much a wonder drug, according to the good doctor: “[Nutmegs] fortify the brain and sharpen the memory; they warm the stomach and expel winds. They give a clean breath, force the urine, stop diarrhea, and cure upset stomachs.”
Writings on diet circulated widely in manuscript before printing came around, but those laboriously copied volumes of bound parchment had only been available to a tiny elite. As with Bibles and cookbooks, the revolutionary impact of Gutenberg’s invention brought this highly specialized subject to the attention of a much wider public. Much as it does today, the market for dietary self-help books seemed insatiable. From the 1470s to 1650, a flood of dietary literature rolled off the presses across Europe. As with so many other subjects, Venetian publishers led the way. By the mid-1520s, even editions of Galen in the original Greek were printed by the Aldine Press in Venice. With Venice’s decline, the presses in Amsterdam and other northern cities took up the cause.
In Amsterdam, Margaretha Cromhout, the wealthy timber merchant’s wife, could now instruct her cook on the fine points of balancing the phlegmatic and the bilious humors much the way diet-obsessed Americans calculate their grams of fat and carbohydrates. Others of a less exalted status followed suit. In Protestant Europe, the reading public was not limited to the wealthiest classes, even though they probably had more time to worry about their diets than seamstresses and shoemakers. One of the unintended but profound aftereffects of the Reformation was an enormous increase in literacy, since everyone was now supposed to read the Scriptures. The middling classes could purchase cheap pamphlets and almanacs much like the flimsy little diet books you find today in supermarkets. The fact that the perennially popular “book of secrets” by the sixteenth-century Dutch surgeon (and cookbook writer) Carolus Battus was expressly intended for the “common folk” underlines just how broad-based the reading public was in the Netherlands.
As in the case of Platina, the line between cookbooks and health manuals was as blurred as it is today, and the advice seemed similarly confusing and contradictory. Who couldn’t use the advice of experts in negotiating all the complexities of this arcane dietary system? And didn’t everyone need a little fine-tuning of their humoral makeup? Yet how could a layman even begin to gauge the delicate balance among nutriments? Chicken might be too sanguine for spring because of its airy temperament, pepper too fiery for someone with a sanguine makeup, turnips too dry and cold for an old man with a young wife. The diet guides had all the solutions, even if the specifics varied from author to author. They explained in great detail, for example, how you could correct fish’s watery (phlegmatic) nature by roasting it or serving it with an appropriate sauce. The term often used is to temper a dish or a sauce with an appropriate seasoning to make it digestible. (The Portuguese still use the verb temperar for “season.”) For this, spices were seen as particularly effective. The following advice is typical:
Sauces should be made according to the nature of the season, for in summer sauces are composed of relatively cool ingredients, whereas in cold weather they are made of warm ingredients. Consequently in summer the proper ingredients are verjuice, vinegar, citrus and pomegranate juices, with sugar and rose water…. In cold weather the proper ingredients are mustard, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, sage, mint, parsley, wine, meat broths and vinegar that is so weak it approaches the nature of wine. Between times, when neither too warm or too cold, you make sauces of tempered warmth and cold.
In light of the need to continually correct a recipe according to all these factors, it’s hardly surprising that medieval and Renaissance cookery guides were so imprecise when it came to quantities. Just how much ginger went into the ubiquitous carmeline sauce often depended on the intended consumer. That is not to say that cooks didn’t also spice food for reasons of taste or that people didn’t eat what they liked in defiance of every dietitian’s advice, just as they do today. Platina, for one, is continually adding comments to Martino’s recipes that make you wonder at first how anyone could eat them. Typical are the notes that follow instructions on how to make torta ex riso, a kind of rice pudding. First, the Vatican scholar recommends the dish for being nourishing. Then, in the same sentence, he adds, “It delays for a long time in the stomach, dulls the eyes, creates stones, and induces blockages.” Perhaps the diners experienced that same guilty titillation we get from forbidden foods like Häagen-Dazs and triple-crème cheeses. How else to explain the medieval popularity of melons despite their being roundly decried by every professional?
In general, fine-tuning your diet was sufficient to get you on the straight and narrow, but in the case of illness or other physiological dysfunction, the healing professions turned to what might be loosely described as drugs. While common people depended on the kinds of herbs sold today by Jacob Hooy, the wealthy preferred more exotic remedies. Typically, these included all sorts of precious ingredients, spices being only the most digestible. An early Italian nostrum for “soothing the heart” includes gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones, along with cinnamon, cloves, aloeswood, saffron, cubebs, cardamom, amber, coriander, camphor, and musk. The ingredients were to be finely ground, mixed with sugar, and taken in wine.*51 Once again, the demand for these cure-alls escalated after the printing revolution. One of these “books of secrets,” titled the Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontes, was first published in Venice in 1555. Shortly thereafter it appeared in Latin, French, English, Dutch, and German translations. By 1575, fifty editions had been printed, promising to deliver the recipe for a fountain of youth. An English edition opens with a prescription “to conserve a manne’s youthe, and to hold backe old age.” The secret lies in a “miraculous” distilled cocktail of Asian spices, saffron, sugar, citrus, minerals, and alcohol, which was to be stirred into veal, chicken, or pigeon broth or diluted with white wine.
Both physicians and cooks frequently turned to spices to fix humoral imbalances because they were considered a particularly concentrated corrective. Accordingly, a relatively small amount of hot and dry pepper could make dangerously cold and moist fish safe to eat. Given the quantity of fish eaten in pre-Reformation Europe, it is not surprising that a sufficient supply of pepper was needed to maintain public health—at least, by those who could afford it. For more careful adjustments, spices could be combined to reach just the right balance. Thus black pepper, not surprisingly, was considered hotter than cinnamon. By combining the two, a more nuanced effect could be achieved.
There were, of course, more cheaply available correctives, such as garlic and even salt, but it was generally accepted that people of a “finer” composition needed more refined seasoning. This was explained by the self-evident fact that the humoral makeup of a peasant was necessarily different from that of a merchant or scholar. Numerous writers warned of the pains and illnesses that came about from eating foods inappropriate to a person’s social position. The ruling classes could suffer just as much from eating thick peasant soups as common folk from ingesting more refined foods. Suffice it to say that oat bran never would have made it into upper-class medieval diet books.
Not that spiced food was deemed appropriate for everyone, even if class and cost were not at issue. Women, for example, were often warned off spices because of their supposedly delicate nature. With obvious disapproval, the sixteenth-century surgeon William Bulleyn describes how some women used pepper to “dry up” their complexion to make it seem more fashionably pale: “Although pepper be good to them that use it well, yet unto artificiall women that have more beastliness then beauty and cannot be content with their natural complexions, but would fayne be fayre: they eate peper, dried corne [grain] and drinke vinegar…to dry up their bloude.” Another seemingly contradictory explanation about why women should avoid hot spices was for just the opposite reason: that they stimulated blood flow that might lead to sexual arousal. If the number of recipes purporting to cure performance problems is any indication, men, on the other hand, seemed to need all the help they could get in this regard. According to contemporary theory, spices, with their concentrated heating ability, were just the potions to get the job done. Cloves “augment miraculously the force of venus,” as one writer puts it. The way the mechanism was supposed to work is that heating foods would agitate and engorge the penis, while an increase in the circulation of blood would aid in the production and eventual delivery of the sperm. Applying the same reasoning, cold foods should have the same effect as a cold shower, so accordingly, bachelors and priests were supposed to eat plenty of lettuce. Even in the Middle Ages, real men did not eat salad. Interestingly, today spices are still widely used in men’s colognes, aftershaves, and so on, whereas the preference for women’s scents tends toward the floral.
Dry and heating foods were not seen merely as a performance enhancer in the bedroom, they were also supposed to increase mental acuity. It was common knowledge that sanguine and phlegmatic people were slow-witted and forgetful; thus, a dry constitution would seem to guarantee intelligence. Here again, it was upper-class men, who were presumably the only ones making the big decisions and thinking deep thoughts, who were more likely to benefit.
Does this mean that rich people ate spices only because they thought they were good for them? This theory has been popular of late among food historians as a way of explaining the late medieval penchant for imported spices. And while there is probably something to it, the spice-balancing explanation has probably been overplayed. Certainly, if the reaction of today’s public to nutritional pronouncements is any indication, adherence to humoral principles was at best mixed. What’s more, a plethora of sixteenth-century literary parodies from Shakespeare to Rabelais seems to indicate that physicians, dietitians, and the diets themselves were often a subject of ridicule.
It’s worth noting that humoral medicine wasn’t the only game in town. Much like we turn to herbal medicine and yoga when more conventional medicine fails, people in medieval Europe turned to prayer, miracles, and magic when the humoral system couldn’t deliver the goods. Not surprisingly, this happened a lot. In any case, the line between healer and magician was often fuzzy. In 1403, five “sorcerers” were allowed to attempt to cure Charles VI of France. Unluckily for them, the king’s idea of a malpractice award was to burn the quacks at the stake. Other healers were accused of employing sorcery, astrology, and an assortment of other unorthodox medical techniques, though that didn’t stop them from having a successful practice.
During the Renaissance, spices had their place in everyday medicine, but they also had more esoteric uses. In the sixteenth century, alchemy was all the rage. Alchemists operated on a more metaphysical plane than ordinary doctors and nutritionists, but their arcane insights often trickled down into general dietary theory. These protochemists are often caricatured as obsessed with turning base metals into gold, but many were more preoccupied with discovering a prescription for eternal life, while others had even more transcendent goals. One influential school, led by the Florentine physician and humanist Ficino and his protégé Paracelsus, came up with a notion of hyperawareness that they called the “spiritus,” which could be achieved through a very particular alignment of the humors. Through this “spiritus,” the melancholic individual (refined melancholia was naturally the prerequisite for genius) would be able to perceive the world without having to resort to more ordinary senses. In other words, transcendent genius could be achieved if you carefully calibrated the intake of your micronutrients. Of course, the highly concentrated humors in spices made them perfect for the job. Paracelsus, for one, was fond of a kind of metaphysical aromatherapy in which his spice-scented concoctions were meant to be inhaled rather than consumed. In one recipe intended to kick-start this “spiritus,” a potion of potable gold was perfumed with cardamom, cinnamon, mace, and cloves, along with flower and animal gland extracts.
While the obscure concerns of Paracelsus were hardly of interest to the man in the street, many of the ideas filtered down to the popular press. Who wouldn’t want to find out the secret formula of a long and healthy life, especially in an era in which pestilence and disease were all too commonplace and a fifty-year-old person was considered a doddering relic?
Yet even as the details of the venerable humoral system became available to the widest public ever, Galen’s theories increasingly came under attack from rival camps.
SPICES LOSE FAVOR
In one of Rembrandt’s more famous paintings, a group of lace-collared men huddles around a limp body entirely naked except for a skimpy loincloth. They are all bathed in a ghostly light that seems to emanate from the white cadaver at their center. One of the men, the only one with a plain collar and a hat, pries apart the dead man’s left arm with a pair of forceps, exposing the meat, muscle, and sinew beneath the skin. The picture, painted in 1632, is known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and depicts a scene that took place in the old spice-weighing tower in Nieuwemarkt. By this point, the building not only served to regulate the traffic in nutraceuticals like cinnamon and nutmeg but was also used by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons for their annual public dissection. Dissection had been made legal only a few years earlier, and there was still a level of prurient titillation to the rare occasions when the public was invited. The rule was that only the cadavers of convicted criminals could be pried open for inspection. This one had just been hanged for armed robbery. As the tangled innards of the thief ’s arm dangle from the end of the doctor’s instrument, the famed surgeon Nicolaes Tulp looks out, presumably to the assembled audience in the operating theater. Apparently, he was as skilled at wooing an audience as wielding a scalpel. He later held the position of city treasurer eight times and of burgomaster (mayor) four times.
Surgeons did not used to be this highly esteemed. In medieval Europe, the messy business of surgery was often a sideline practiced by barbers and dentists, lowly professions compared to the learned ranks of physicians, who kept their clothes clean and handed out carefully penned prescriptions. People turned to surgeons only as a last resort. The Catholic Church had long had an issue with dissecting corpses, with the result that most surgeons had to learn on still-living patients—obviously with variable success. Yet once Holland had declared itself for the Protestant side, the taboo against cutting open cadavers was slowly relaxed, and doctors could finally study the subcutaneous world.
In the Middle Ages, the inside of the human body had been as much a terra incognita as the far-off Indies, and the first explorers of hearts and spleens made discoveries that were often just as surprising as those made by da Gama and Columbus. What they found often contradicted what they’d read in the erudite textbooks of Galen’s apostles. But perhaps more important, it was the empirical approach of Tulp and his colleagues that made the Galenic model—that exquisitely constructed house of cards built of deductive reason—wobble at its foundations. Over and over in seventeenth-century texts, you read the revolutionary refrain that since the ancients had lived in another time and place, they could hardly be regarded as the source of all knowledge. The humoral system was not yet thrown out the window, but it was precariously balanced on the ledge, with competing systems making its hold on medical orthodoxy ever more tentative. What happened then is just what happens today when medical opinion begins to shift: the public got confused. As far as spices went, who knew where they were now supposed to fit in the people’s diet?
Whereas spices’ overseas origin had once been a selling point, now it became controversial—at least, in some quarters. The Portuguese and Castilian voyages in search of Christians and spices had come home with reports of hundreds, if not thousands, of plants nobody in Europe had ever heard of and plenty of specimens, too. Dietitians and naturalists had the prodigious task of sorting them all out so they could be plugged into the humoral system. Many of the new plants were viewed with suspicion. (Famously, tomatoes and potatoes were long considered toxic.) Arguments simmered about whether imported plants and medicines were well suited to Europeans. According to the xenophobic camp, when God created the world, he had provided all that was necessary for each group of people in their own backyard—thus, local medicines like chamomile and henbane were better for curing local ills than exotic cloves and nutmeg. Conveniently, this happened to align with the opinions of those Calvinist preachers who regarded the likes of cinnamon and cloves not as missives from paradise but as the harvest of a pagan and hedonistic soil. As such, they were sure to beguile men away from a decent, God-fearing life, a life that could come only from a diet of homegrown turnips and spice-free cheese.
While the religious climate in the Netherlands may have become more tolerant toward slicing into cadavers, Protestants and Papists alike became ever more puritanical when it came to the pleasures of living flesh. Eating well (however that was defined) was increasingly seen as the problem rather than the solution, as it had been earlier. The diet books make this change in medical opinion abundantly clear. Ken Albala, an American food historian who has studied the early nutrition guides, points to a shift from fifteenth-century books—which are generally tolerant and, at times, even promote the pleasures of the table (Platina’s bestselling De honesta voluptate et valetudine means “On Honest Pleasure and Good Health,” after all)—to a more preachy and uptight approach that has no use for fine cooking. In 1530, Luis Lobera de Ávila, a Spanish dietitian, could still advise his readers to “eat all that is most delectable and delicious for it is also the most nourishing.” By the seventeenth century, you are more likely to read opinions such as those of Leonard Lessius, the author of a popular lifestyle guide, who ranted against “lickorish cooking” and “curious dressing of meats.”
The change in medical fashion was no doubt accelerated by the technology of printing itself. The arrival of mechanical printing didn’t merely mean a cheaper, quicker alternative to hand-lettered manuscripts. It bore about as much relationship to the earlier technology as Google does to a card catalog. Printing fundamentally changed the way people learned about the world. Without (relatively) cheap Bibles, the Reformation is unthinkable; without copies of cookbooks rolling off the presses by the hundreds of thousands, the coming Europe-wide revolution in fine dining would likely have been no more than a localized uprising.*52 Because of its volume, the business of printing books always needs new products, new ideas. By its very nature, it cannot recycle the same information over and over—as was the case in the days of few and precious manuscripts. After all, just how many reprints of Galen can your customers buy?
It’s more than likely that the same mechanism we see in today’s diet-book racket got its start in the Renaissance. Then, as now, publishers were always on the lookout for someone with a bright idea that would resonate with the public. If the book sold, other authors imitated it. As consumers tired of the same old thing, a new (or repackaged) idea came along, and everybody jumped on the new bandwagon. This may explain, at least in part, why, long before anyone could imagine an Atkins diet, nutrition trends came and went for no reason other than a shift in fashion. Naturally, the changes came faster and faster as more publishers increased production and as more people could read and afford to buy books.
By the middle years of the seventeenth century, it seems that readers were fed up with diet books, and the market for these self-help works dried up. It may be that all the competing medical systems of the time just made the public throw up its hands and give up on the experts. Maybe people were sick of being nagged about what they should eat and just stopped listening. Or perhaps it was merely that another cycle of the publishing business had come full circle.
All this religious, scientific, and intellectual ferment was going on as Europe was embroiled in yet another round of her murderous wars. Philip’s crusade against the Dutch was only one among many. In the center of Europe, what had begun as a campaign against Czech Protestants in 1618 spun out of control, drawing in every major power in Europe. The Thirty Years’ War, as it would come to be known, careened across the center of the continent like an insatiable tornado. In its wake, cities lay devastated, fertile plains burned to ashes, whole economies collapsed. When it wiped out the Republic’s customers in central Europe, it was the war, not the Portuguese or Dutch, that delivered the coup de grâce to Venice’s ailing spice trade. But everywhere in Europe, the political system was realigned. Christendom had entered the seventeenth century dominated by one militantly Catholic superpower, Spain. By the time the bloodbath was over, the states that emerged—most notably, France and Austria—were much more interested in keeping their borders intact than in crusading against Protestants or Moors. Europe’s lines of demarcation hardened along nationalist lines. Countries increasingly came to be defined by language and cuisine as much as by creed.
The wars of religion had implications for scientists, cooks, and publishers as they had for politicians and priests. In Catholic Italy, the proudly independent medical faculty in Padua was brought to heel by the pope’s Jesuit watchdogs. As a result, it quickly lost its primacy to more progressive Protestant European schools, such as the Dutch university of Leiden. Notoriously, Galileo was forced from Padua after repeated run-ins with the Inquisition. Many alchemists and astrologers went underground, lest they be accused of practicing necromancy—a serious charge that could get you sent to the stake. Then, in concert with the religious zealotry, witch trials swept the continent during the later years of the Reformation. This wave of persecution peaked in what some historians have called a “witch-hunting craze” of the hundred years between 1550 and 1650. (The Salem witch trials were a distant echo of this Europe-wide phenomenon.) Not surprisingly, physicians who knew what was good for them tried to distance themselves as much as possible from any of the occult arts that had once been part of their medical kit.
So what did all this tumult mean for the consumption of spices in Europe? In the short term, not much. Outside of France, late-seventeenth-century recipe collections seem just as enthusiastic about cooking with spices as they had a hundred years before. Just look at the penchant for spice in De verstandige kock. Nutmeg and cloves also still show up regularly in physicians’ medical kits. But increasingly, national cuisines started to diverge. And in France, which had now overtaken Italy as Europe’s style-setter, the fashion in spicing was changing. In Versailles, well-spiced cuisine lost its cachet. Elsewhere in Europe, fashionistas took note. None of this happened overnight or everywhere, but the seeds of what we might call modern European cooking (and consequently, American cooking, too), with its emphasis on local seasonings, were planted just as the Dutch East India Company was raking in its greatest profits from the bloodstained nutmeg groves.
THE GOLDEN AGE LOSES ITS LUSTER
Despite Jan Coen’s mostly terrible reputation today, there is no shortage of streets and other landmarks named after him across the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, he has lent his name to a major tunnel and a harbor nearby. Coenhaven (the harbor) is a short bicycle ride from the Centraal Station. The route takes you past the old wood harbor where the timber for the East Indiamen arrived. These days, the old jetties are lined with crusty barges converted into houseboats, festooned with planters and children’s swing sets that glow magenta against the leaden sky. When you look ahead, giant cranes hover above container ships, like enormous praying mantises readying for combat. Coenhaven is like any other modern harbor, with rows of low, sprawling warehouses painted with gray and more gray. But sniff the air. The usual salt and diesel harbor smell mingles here with the darker, loamier scent of cocoa. Amsterdam long yielded preeminence to the superior modern harbor at Rotterdam, but it nonetheless manages to lead the world in cocoa imports. Still, Coen’s harbor with its scattering of cargo ships is no more than a shadow of the old port packed with hundreds of ships, in the radiant days when Amsterdam’s spice imports made her the envy of the world.
In the beginning, the VOC business model worked sufficiently well to make a lot of seventeenth-century Amsterdamers rich enough to build fancy houses and fill them with exquisite paintings, but it had a fundamental built-in flaw. It did not take into account that spices are not the same kind of trade good as herring and beer, that the demand for luxuries like pepper and nutmeg was not based on price but rather on more ineffable, even metaphysical, attributes; fashion is fickle. Once the Dutch had figured out how to take over the supply side of the equation, they assumed that demand would just keep on growing. The trouble was that spices, once they had been turned into an ordinary commodity and lost their symbolic resonance, had only a marginal place in the modern, postmedieval world.
In the seventeenth century, the chocolate that scents Coenhaven’s briny breeze, as well as tea and coffee, came to be the new darlings of the in-crowd. The new tropical imports were sometimes even hyped in the same words as the old Asian seasoning. In much the way that some spices had earlier been prescribed to increase mental agility, the stimulating effects of tea and coffee in particular were recommended to the movers and shakers of the new rational age. They certainly had none of the fusty and sensuous associations of the Oriental scents or the soporific effects of spiced wine and beer. Heavily spiced beverages, in particular, lost market share to the modern stimulants. Admittedly, chocolate (the drink) had a reputation that was a little more ambiguous than the other brews, perhaps because it had arrived in Europe by way of the decaying Madrid court, but as Amsterdam came to dominate the cacao business, it, too, became a staple in any modish drawing room. The VOC got into the coffee and tea business as well, but it was never able to control the market as it had for the fine spices. As the demand for the East Asian condiments sagged, the shine began to wear off Amsterdam’s golden age.
There were many factors that led to Amsterdam’s slow slide from her perch atop the world. In much the same way that the city’s initial ascent was not wholly dependent on the East India trade (compared to Lisbon, say), her tumble down had many causes. But the drop-off in the spice business was symptomatic of problems all around. Unlike Venice, which managed to reinvent herself as an amusement park, giving the city its long half-life, or Lisbon, which rose again in the eighteenth century on an updraft of Brazilian gold dust, Amsterdam mostly lapsed into obscurity and relative poverty by the mid-1700s. The ambitious expansion plan for the ring of canals that built the Herengracht for the booming seventeenth-century city was left uncompleted and only partially populated until the industrial age.
Given the fact that Amsterdam had made its fortune during the years of conflict with Spain, the trouble began with a short-lived fashion for signing peace treaties. The first bit of bad news came in 1648, when word circulated on the Dam that an end had been declared to the Spanish war. To make things worse, the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe had finally ground to its weary conclusion that same year. Three years later, the English stopped slaughtering one another in their Civil War. Now, all of a sudden, Europe’s great powers could pause to turn their greedy heads upon the riches of the minute republic.
Spain was out of the picture for good, but now England was feeling her oats. In a series of wars between 1652 and 1678, the new naval superpower gnawed off chunks of the Dutch empire from Malaysia to Manhattan. In mainland Europe, the French invaded the Netherlands itself. Wars against Louis XIV’s armies were bad enough, but what really hurt the economy of the Hollanders was when one Dutch business after another was expelled from the Sun King’s realm in the name of French protectionism.
All over Europe, absolutist monarchs and their ministers were entranced with the economics of mercantilism, subsidizing exports and cutting off imports. The French founded their own East India Company so that they wouldn’t have to buy spices imported by foreigners. They set up a little colony at Pondicherry, on India’s southeast coast, to supply their pepper ships and even tried to seduce the ruler of Ceylon away from the embrace of the Dutch. But as one Frenchman pointed out, “No lover is as jealous of his mistress as the Dutch are of their trade in Spices,” and the maneuver ended in failure. Virtually all of Europe’s pepper continued coming through Amsterdam and London, and the Netherlands alone controlled all the cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves that reached Europe’s shores. And yet, while it does not appear that Dutch spices were particularly singled out for sanctions by the Versailles government, it does seem awfully coincidental that heavily spiced cooking loses favor among the elite in France, and only in France, during just this period. You have to ask, how seemly would it have been to serve food highly seasoned with the foreigners’ spices to the king and his mercantilist ministers? Still, mercantilism can at best offer only a fragment of the explanation for the French revolution in cooking of the sixteen hundreds.
It’s hardly surprising that Europeans would give up medieval cookery just as they were abandoning feudalism, counterpoint, egg tempera, and a Ptolemaic universe. But why was France the hotbed of this innovation? The court of Louis XIV was hardly known for its revolutionary spirit. Renaissance France had no Galileo or Monteverdi, no Spinoza or Rembrandt. But it had La Varenne.
A glance at François Pierre La Varenne’s seminal 1651 cookbook, Le cuisiner françois, reveals how much things had changed in France.*53 Gone are the generous helpings of sugar and exotic spice of the Italian Renaissance masters, replaced by local herbs and mushrooms. Though this nouvelle cuisine was definitely more delicate (or blander, depending on your point of view), the French chef still includes nutmeg or cloves in plenty of his recipes, though he does so in stingy quantities. A typical recipe will call for “two or three” cloves and a grating of nutmeg. Pepper and ginger are mostly absent, and cinnamon has been quarantined in the dessert chapters.
There are a number of reasons why the seventeenth-century culinary revolution sprouted in French soil (even while it was pollinated by Europe-wide trends). To a greater degree than elsewhere, the old and once-powerful French aristocracy was increasingly dependent on the whim of the king. As early as 1586, a Spanish commentator (admittedly, not the most impartial source) mentions that in France, the courtiers and grandees are such slaves to royal fashion that they will ape the king even if he has a taste for foods that are “vile and common, which even the poorest wretches would not consent to eat.” (Was he referring to truffles and mushrooms?) To some degree, feasting in the new absolutist monarchies now had a fresh purpose. Whereas, in the olden days, lavish feasts were put on to impress a noble’s underlings, they now headlined an aristocrat’s talents as a sycophant. Ostentation took on a slightly revised form. One thing is sure, though: French aristocrats certainly did not stop using spices because they were now cheap. The fine spices were at least twice as expensive at the end of La Varenne’s seventeenth-century revolution as they had been at its beginning. But it is true that with the establishment of a worldwide colonial system that produced bulk commodities instead of aromatic missives from paradise, spices lost much of their cachet.
Yet just how quickly the new style penetrated beyond the kitchens of Francophile gourmets is impossible to pin down with any precision. Looking at cookbooks, you would deduce that the upper classes of eighteenth-century England, Italy, and Spain were taking their cues from the French, and probably by the nineteenth century, so were the Portuguese and central Europeans. But when you look at the import numbers, you realize that the decline in spice use must have been very gradual. There was certainly no sudden drop in spice imports in the age of Louis XIV, for even as La Varenne was revising his radical manifesto, other cookbooks of the old-fashioned, well-spiced persuasion kept being published. What did happen, however, was that the astonishing increase in spice use that had taken place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slowed and then halted, even while the population surged. Even today, French butchers still flavor their pâtés with a mixture called quattre épices, which includes pepper, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, and English hams are still studded with cloves. But that is now the exception. Outside of Holland, the spices that used to be stewed with capons and sprinkled on roast sturgeon are now typically used only in sweets. While it is true that the Europe-wide appetite for spices certainly abated after the seventeenth century, that is perhaps the less dramatic transformation. The big change is that Europeans invented sugar-based desserts.
In the Middle Ages, sugar was simply another spice, used in increasingly greater quantities in meat pies and roasts. There were certainly “sweetmeats,” which we might call dessert, but they were mostly served right along with the meat, fish, and vegetable dishes. There was no distinction to speak of between “savory” and “sweet” courses. An Italian Renaissance pigeon pie might include as much sugar as a typical American apple pie today. As the Portuguese set up their overseas sugar colonies in the fourteen hundreds and the other Europeans jumped aboard a hundred years later, sugar became something everyone could afford. At the same time, a barrier was gradually erected between sweet and salty. As La Varenne’s book so clearly illustrates, cinnamon, so often partnered with sugar in meat-based Renaissance recipes, was now segregated to the sweet side of the wall, penned in with ginger. At least for a while, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper were allowed to roam free among soups and ragouts, though their quantities were severely circumscribed. This exclusionary fashion was uneven across Europe (witness the idiosyncrasies of Dutch cooking, for example) and across the culinary repertoire, but the trend is the same everywhere throughout Christendom. People continued to use the imported aromatics, but since many were now restricted to desserts while others were just plain restricted, there was less and less demand.
This would explain, at least in part, why the market for VOC spices stagnated, even as Europe’s population surged. As best we can tell from the numbers, the European demand for pepper had been increasing by modest increments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then, when the price war among the Dutch, English, and Portuguese sent the price tumbling, demand doubled within a few decades. But that was it. Even as Europe’s population surged in the eighteen hundreds, the hunger for pepper crashed into a rock-solid ceiling.*54 Just why that occurred may be connected to the continually declining standard of living that regular folk—the ones who had long consumed most of the pepper—experienced up until the Industrial Revolution. The other spices followed much the same boom-and-bust trajectory, though for a different reason. Here, the Dutch may have strangled their own golden goose. In order to maintain high prices, they controlled just how much cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace made it to their European customers. Their profit margin may have been higher, but the overall amount of fine spices available to Europe’s cooks was artificially restricted. There was actually less spice on the market in 1700 than there had been half a century earlier. When torching spice plantations in Asia didn’t do the trick, the Heren XVII burned their stock in Amsterdam. Close to 2 million pounds of stored (and admittedly stale) nutmeg and mace were burned in the 1730s alone—and this at a time when annual sales were in the 250,000-pound range! Consequently, even those who wanted to cook in the old-fashioned style had no choice but to use less of the Moluccan spices.
When it came to pepper, the VOC couldn’t control the supply. As a result, in the waning decades of Amsterdam’s golden age, the European market was awash with more Dutch (and English, French, and even Danish) imported pepper than could be sold. All the while, the English East India Company kept right on the VOC’s heels, increasing its pepper cargoes year after year. The VOC’s declining profits, however, could not be blamed just on the pesky English. There is some question whether the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie ever made money, even in the early years when the appetite for spices seemed insatiable. Whatever the fine print of the balance sheet, it seems the Company had a good run for the first ninety years or so of its existence. Perhaps more dividends were paid than might have been justified by the profits, but those payments kept the Amsterdam economy humming, even if the VOC needed to borrow more and more money to keep itself solvent.
In the early days, the directors had tried to save cash by handing out dividends in the form of actual spices. In 1610, shareholders were left holding a bag of peppercorns and mace instead of hard currency (only about 7.5 percent was paid in cash). Altogether, some 40 percent of the declared value of all VOC dividends in the first fifty years took the form of cloves, mace, and pepper. For some of the larger investors who were in the spice-trading business anyway, this was no hardship, but the cobblers and barkeeps who owned no more than a share or two were about as happy as the stockholders of Heinz would be if they got their dividends in the form of pickles. Those who didn’t want to dump all their investment into the stewpot had to peddle their odiferous dividends at fire-sale prices. Eventually, there was such a backlash from investors that, after 1644, the VOC was stuck with paying in cash. As a consequence, by 1692, the company was four million guilders in debt. The problem was that the cost of maintaining a private empire in order to support the spice monopoly was absorbing all but a tiny fraction of the gross profit.
Then there was the issue of the workforce. The VOC had always suffered from incompetent and greedy employees, but there were enough trustworthy people at the top to keep the rest at least moderately honest. Now corruption within the company’s ranks increasingly siphoned profits away from Hoogstraat. There had been plenty of fraud in the Estado da Índia, too, but not every employee of the Portuguese crown was in India just for the money. Most were, of course, but a large minority had come for fame or for salvation, too. The Dutch, on the other hand, were there for lucre alone, and, at the low wages paid by the VOC, no one was likely to get rich quick from just his salary. Whatever charges have been leveled at Jan Coen, no one ever accused him of graft. In the next century, though, corruption reached into the highest levels. When Governor-General Van Hoorn resigned from his East India post in 1709, his fortune was estimated at ten million guilders. The kickbacks and profits raked in from the illicit trading of spices became an open secret. In parts of India, the Company’s officials pooled the spoils and redistributed them in proportion to the salary each received, to assure each employee an appropriate share of the embezzled cash. In the early eighteenth century, annual losses mounted from two to four and even six million guilders. Before long, the Company was technically bankrupt.
If the VOC had been merely an ordinary joint-stock corporation, it would surely have gone under. But the Dutch East India Company was much more than that: it was effectively a state within a state. And like many governments do today, it was able to continue functioning simply by borrowing more cash. It could get away with it in the eighteenth century because, in spite of its relative decline, Amsterdam was still the prime capital market in the world. Investors from all over Europe kept propping up the Company, and the VOC continued to pay out dividends year after year, even if its imposing shipyards and perfumed warehouses had little more substance than crumbly gingerbread. This might have worked even longer than it did if the Company’s mainstay—the clove and nutmeg monopoly—hadn’t been broken. But finally, around 1750, the French East India Company succeeded in breaking the Dutch lock on fine spices. One of its employees, Pierre Poivre (appropriately, “pepper” in French), stole nutmeg and clove seedlings, which he then successfully propagated on the French Indian Ocean colonies of Mauritius and Réunion. Finally, after years of sagging profits and government bailouts, the VOC was liquidated in 1799, and the Dutch government took over the East Indies. In the Banda Islands, Dutch planters continued to rule over their nutmeg plantations until 1950, when, despite armed Dutch opposition, Indonesia gained its independence. Almost all of the ethnically Dutch population left or was expelled. Batavia became Jakarta once more.
As it had during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, Holland’s cities had to deal with and assimilate a flood of immigrants and refugees. And that was just the start. Over the last fifty years, the Netherlands has morphed into a multicultural society, with all the variety, tensions, and new flavors that such transformations bring.
NASI GORENG
When I asked the president of NedSpice about what Netherlanders eat at home, Frank Lavooij listed the traditional staples: erwtensoep (pea soup), stamppot (sausage and potatoes mashed with kale), and nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice). “My wife is just as comfortable making nasi gorengas pankoeken (Dutch pancakes),” he assured me. Nasi goreng is as much a fixture of the Netherlands as Queen Beatrix.
The degree to which the Dutch colonial experience has infiltrated everyday food becomes immediately evident if you visit any Amsterdam supermarket. Take the Albert Hein market just off the Dam, for example. The Albert Hein devotes as much space to Indonesian and other Asian products as an American market would to breakfast cereals. Not that most Dutch cooks would ever consider making the Indonesian food so popular now from scratch. No, they go to their local supermarket for the appropriate spice and seasoning mix, adding meat, chicken, or whatever the package instructs. In aisle 1, you have at least seven types of mixes for nasi goreng. Some call for almost no expertise, while others you actually have to cook. Shelf-stable saté stokjes (skewered chicken in peanut sauce) need only have a brief encounter with the microwave, while others require you to buy fresh chicken and chop vegetables before adding the packaged seasoning. To make the meal complete, shelves are crowded with bags of kroepoek, puffy Indonesian cassava and shrimp chips. (These taste—not altogether unpleasantly—of puffed grease with a counterpoint of fish flavor and, occasionally, hot pepper.) All told, these kinds of products number in the hundreds. While some come from niche Asian food specialists, most are manufactured by multinationals such as Heinz, McCormick, and Knorr.
Even when not cooking specifically Indonesian food, Hollanders turn to ready-made spice mixes. In aisle 2, dozens of these Dutch masalas come ready-mixed. There is vleeskruiden for beef (coriander, black pepper, chili, ginger, marjoram, and thyme) and kipkruiden for chicken (paprika, white and black pepper, nutmeg, coriander, mace, curry powder, cardamom, and oregano) as well as seasoning mixes for oysters, mussels, chili con carne, spaghetti, gyros, and, naturally, nasi goreng. The display holds some twenty-seven spice mixtures in all!
Immigrants arrive in Holland every day now, bringing seasonings from the four corners of the world. The new mix of race and creed is not always harmonious, and the Dutch, despite their fabled tolerance, have become less welcoming to dark-skinned migrants than they used to be. People’s everyday food choices, however, are being increasingly influenced by the corner stand selling döner kebabs or skewers of satay.
Just like the Crusaders of yore, the Dutch are coming home after their frequent vacations abroad with a taste for more pungent flavors. “I remember going to Spain for the first time in 1961 and bringing our own food,” Lavooij recounts with an ironic half smile, explaining how the Dutch vacationers worried they might have to eat food cooked with olive oil and garlic. “Now it’s almost the opposite,” he adds. Nowadays Amsterdamers, just like well-off Londoners and Angelinos, take for granted that dinner might be Thai one night and Italian the next. Much as in the United States, these flavors in particular—the vaguely Italian combination of garlic, olive oil, and herbs on the one hand and an Asian sweet and spicy approach on the other—have captured foodies’ imaginations. You’ll find these tastes as ubiquitous among the affluent classes of the developed world as the mixture of cinnamon and sugar once was in the Renaissance.
The Dutch were introduced to fusion cooking earlier than most when they were forced out of newly independent Indonesia in the 1950s. Not that dishes from the East Indies were entirely a novelty in the mother country. A Dutch manuscript from 1790 includes recipes for achar (a spicy condiment) and other Indonesian dishes. Throughout the colonial period, there was always a trickle of people coming back with tastes acquired in the Spice Islands, but this was nothing compared to the flood of the 1950s. That was when some three hundred thousand refugees arrived in Holland with what little they could carry. Crammed into their luggage, along with all the resentments and nostalgia, they had packed a menu for an elaborate meal they called the rijsttafel.
The rijsttafel is a peculiar invention of colonial cuisine in which dishes from Bali, Java, Sumatra, and other Indonesian islands are combined into an enormous buffet. The idea is loosely based on the kind of elaborate banquet you might be served at an Indonesian wedding, though in prosperous colonial households, it became a much more everyday affair. The cooks were often ethnic Chinese, which affected not only the flavors but also the ingredients. In particular, they added lots of pork to what was originally a Muslim feast. Meats of all kinds, whether skewered as satay or cooked in a spicy stew like babi ricah, became the focus of the meal.
There are dozens of places to eat rijsttafel in today’s Amsterdam, from neighborhood take-out joints that give you a choice of some two dozen dishes arrayed in steam tables to white-tablecloth restaurants where the waiters smile and gently guide you through the smorgasbord. I chose, one night, to splurge at a restaurant called Puri Mas. The restaurant is just inside the Singelgracht, the last canal that was incised around the city in the sixteen hundreds, down a honky-tonk street where you have to dodge restaurant hawkers pushing everything from pad Thai to spaghetti Bolognese. It is a couple of bridges away from the Rijksmuseum, so not surprisingly, it is packed with tourists recovering from too much Rembrandt. Yet a kind of genteel atmosphere fills the room, mingling with aromas of fish sauce and spice. You can choose a modest rijsttafel for a succession of thirteen small plates, but better to opt for Rijsttafel Royaal, with a deluge of sixteen dishes. Plate after plate after plate arrives. The table is set with kroepoek, cassava shrimp chips, along with a little bowl of the chili- and ginger-spiced sambal sauce that is as common as mayonnaise in every Amsterdamer’s refrigerator. Egg rolls and batter-fried shrimp come with little turnovers exuding a sweet and savory aroma of coriander, black pepper, cumin, and turmeric. There is an assortment of satays, chicken, pork, and lamb on skewers, hot with chilies, sweet with sugar, and sour with tamarind. Then come little plates of stew: pork scented with chilies and ginger; chicken with chilies and coriander; lamb in a dense masala of cardamom, cumin, turmeric, fennel, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. There are a few vegetables and then the obligatory coda, nasi goreng. This nasi goreng has a few flecks of chicken amid the fried rice with just a suspicion of spice.
If you stop for a moment to analyze the avalanche of flavors, you realize that the dominant tastes are of sweet and of sour, along with a judicious sprinkle of exotic spice—the same kind of flavor combination (setting aside the chili) you might have found in medieval Venice or sixteenth-century Amsterdam. No wonder that the seventeenth-century Dutch who arrived in Indonesia took to this style of cooking: it had a lot in common with what they ate at home.
We seem to have come full circle. Today, the spiced cooking of the Renaissance seems no more exotic than the Puri Mas’s rijsttafel. Certainly, the old way of cooking is much more comprehensible than it was even fifty years ago, when French historians rolled their eyes in horror at that earlier era’s “orgy of spice.” Now there is no more mysterious East, Prester John, or miraculous spices as precious as gold. The cuisines of every corner of the earth are as familiar as jet travel—or a visit to a shopping mall food court. Americans import more spices per capita than the medieval ruling class ever did, and many Europeans are not far behind. Flavors that were once exotic imports—the very scents of paradise—are now common, everyday, and ubiquitous. The Dutch are perhaps more responsible for this than anyone. Under their watch, spices became an ordinary—if not quite cheap—commodity, as common as herring or lumber or beer.