Further Reading

Further Reading
Here’s a fairly selective list of some books that deal with spice history from both an eating and economic standpoint. I’ve listed books that should be reasonably easy to get. For the more obscure (or hard to get) sources, have a look at the bibliography in The Taste of Conquest.

Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
A wonderful book about health beliefs and systems in pre-modern Europe. Gary Allen, The Herbalist in the Kitchen (University of Illinois Press, 2007)
Though much of this book is devoted to herbs, there is a hefty section on spices that goes into the botany, toxicity, and flavor chemistry of the plants, as well as a listing for nearly every name that they are known by around the world.
Filipe Vieira de Castro, The Pepper Wreck: A Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005)
A fascinating look at Portuguese shipping during the height of the spice trade. Parts of it are kind of technical for anyone but hard-core ship fanatics, but the rest is worth it.
Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)
Like many of Dalby’s books this one is both intriguing and frustrating. It is organized as a kind of spice mini-encyclopedia with a historical bent. It’s best on the really obscure spices like spikenard and ambergis.
R. A. Donkin, Between east and west : the Moluccas and the traffic in spices up to the arrival of Europeans (Philadelphia, PA : American Philosophical Society, 2003)
A fascinating if highly academic exploration of cloves, nutmeg, mace and sandalwood that serves as a useful corrective to the many Eurocentric studies of the subject.
Paul Freedman, Out of the East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
A very reliable guide to the history of spices in medieval Europe. In depth and readable. My one quible with it is that Freedman, like so many others, privileges the cooking of France and England over others.
Peter G. Rose, ed., The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989) trans. Peter G. Rose
A book that neatly puts to rest any idea that (at least some) Europeans stopped using spices by 1700. M. N. Pearson, ed., Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1996)
This is the classic collection of essays about the economic impact of spices from about 1400 to 1700. Academic but essential for anyone who’s deeply interested in the subject. Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Knopf, 2004)
Turner’s book is full of fascinating tidbits on the use of spices in religious ritual, embalming and as performance enhancers in the bedroom, especially in the classical world and medieval England and France. You get a sense the author doesn’t know much about cooking though, and he doesn’t have much to say about the period after 1400 when spice use really took off in Europe. E. A. Weiss, Spice Crops (Oxon, U.K., and New York: CABI Publishing, 2002)
Everything you ever wanted to know about every commercially-grown spice in the world, from consumption stats to every botanical detail. There is some history given of each spice though this is rather superficial and occasionally wrong.