SPICE HISTORY: A Fashion for Spice
A lot of blood has been shed over this little brown seed. "Nutmeg has been one of the saddest stories of history," says culinary historian Michael Krondl. This website was created to not only promote Michael Krond's book, The Taste of Conquest, but also to offer fascinating information about the history of the spice we call nutmeg. Content is from the site's archived pages.
About the Author
Michael Krondl is a food writer, culinary historian, cooking teacher and all-around foodie. And, oh yes, he is also an artist. (If you’re curious about that last one see http://home.earthlink.net/~krondl.) He has written article after article on food and travel for the likes of Condé Nast’s Traveler, Marie Claire, New York Newsday, Family Circle and Saturday Night. And there have been lots of others. You’ll find his name at the end of numerous entries in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink as well as the recently released The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries. Krondl is the author of Around the American Table: Treasured Recipes and Food Traditions from the American Cookery Collections of The New York Public Library. The long title pretty well describes the book which is a popular account of the history of American food. The book draws extensively on the spectacular collection of cookbooks in the stacks of The New York Public Library for source material. He is also the author of The Great Little Pumpkin Cookbook, a collection of some fifty recipes for those obsessed with those adorable rotund gourds (well, technically, they’re not gourds, but that’s a long story). Krondl lives in New York. He is currently working on a book that will enable him to travel the world and get really fat. See my blog Sweetspot for more on that!
Prices and Wages in Europe 1200-1800
There is an ongoing assumption among historians that (a) spices kept getting cheaper over time and (b) that they became more affordable as time went on. Both are vast simplifications as I hope this chart points out (see also the price chart on pepper, cloves and nutmeg) wholesale pepper prices remained surprisingly steady over the centuries--see the green lines. There was a modest dip in the second half of the 15th century, a modest rise as the Portuguese took over and then a gentle slide in price as the Dutch entered the market after 1600. Admittedly, retail prices (at least in the Netherlands and Austria) fluctuated much more wildly--see the blue lines. It’s worth noting the pepper gets relatively cheaper with regards to wheat and eggs in the sixteenth century and though wages also rise in most places the skyrocketing cost of the basics may have made the amount of disposable income available for spices disappear altogether. Pepper wasn’t exactly cheap but then it wasn’t so expensive as some have claimed. A worker could, on average buy anywhere from 200g (7 oz) to 500g (17 oz) of pepper for a day’s wage, an enormous amount if you’re cooking with it!
Keep in mind that the data before 1350 is highly speculative but the rest is fairly reliable, especially after 1400. The price and wage data are mostly gleaned from the Global Price and Income History Group and Datafiles of Historical Prices and Wages. Extensive price data on spices in Amsterdam can be found in database compiled by Posthumus. The early data on Genoa comes from a couple of merchants accounts and may or may not be reliable. (the numbers are from Jehel, Georges.
Les Génois en Mediterranée occidentale: fin XIème - début XIVème siècle: ebauche d'une stratégie pour un empire [Amiens: Centre d'histoire des sociétés, Université de Picardie, 1993]
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DID YOU KNOW how Australia figures in the Spice Trade
Info from https://plantspeopleplanet.org.au/l1/l2/
The British East India Company, a joint-stock company, was chartered by the Queen on 31 Dec. 1600, marking the beginnings of global mercantilism and the first of several European East India Companies, including the Dutch East India Company that would have a major influence on the early history of Australia. The British East India Company would dominate British finance and command half of global trade backed by a private army and their own coinage although weakened for a period during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Setting out to exploit the spice trade in the East Indies it would eventually influence the lives of over 400 million Indians, trade extensively with China, spreading the English language and the philosophy of enterprise and capitalism with the benefits of improved food, clothing and living standards for some, but also the adverse effects of profiteering, corruption, and colonial oppression..... Against the grand global plant lust for spices and the lucrative possibilities of Araucaria trees and Norfolk Island flax spied by England’s first voyage of discovery that the convict motivation for settlement takes on a reduced significance.
Clove trade between India and the Spice Islands began in April when the Royal Clove Ship sailed out of Goa arriving at Ternate in October just when the harvest of cloves was complete. Loading cloves at Ternate, nutmeg at Banda the ship waited in the Bay of Ambon for the May monsoon trade wind to arrive, returning to Goa where connecting ships would take the cloves to Portugal. Dutch influence increased between 1606 and 1663 and allied with the Sultan of Ternate against Spain and the Sultan of Tidore the Spanish withdrew to Manila.
Swamping the European market in the 1650s resulted in a clove glut, Director Jan Coen ordering destruction of trees on Ternate and other drastic measures that would restore high prices.
With France and England obtaining nutmeg plants plantations were set up in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Granada spices became commonplace and relatively cheap, much as they are today. Through the 17th and 18th centuries the one-time mystery and magic of spices that enhanced the exotic cuisine of the aristocracy faded as their use passed into broader society. Nevertheless, the anticipation of fortunes to be made from plant commodities was a factor high on the list of reasons to delve into the last global frontier Terra Australis Incognita.
I mention Australia's somewhat peripheral relationship to the spice trade since that was my home till I moved to NYC to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park located just outside of New York City. I spent 2 amazing years there pursuing my bachelor’s degree. When I first arrived I tried to sign up for an online casino at an affiliate site called Online-Casino-party.co that I discovered when I did a google search for online slots us. In Australia we call slots, pokies, but I figured that slots would be a better choice since I was in the US. Turns out that if you reside in New York State, you can’t play slots/ pokies for real money at any online casino. Bummer. I ended up playing a lot of free slot games instead. I’ll be returning to Australia soon with a sous chef’s position lined up in Melbourne. I can’t imagine what the culinary landscape would look like today if there were no spices such as pepper, cloves, or nutmeg. It’s rather stunning to realize at one point these spices were once worth their weight in gold and were synonymous with extreme wealth.
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Timeline
c. 1700 BCE — Estimated date of cloves found in an archeological dig in Syria. 1224 BCE — Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II embalmed with peppercorns up
his nose.
c. 1000 BCE — Queen of Sheeba visits King Solomon bearing spices as a house gift (?).
476 — Rome falls to the Barbarians.
550 — Byzantine merchants reported in Ceylon buying spice. 946 — Poisoned pepper sauce reported on the table of King Louis IV of France. 1095 — First Crusade proclaimed by Pope Urban II to “liberate”
Jerusalem from Muslim rule. 1204 — sack of the Christian Orthodox city of Constantinople by Venetian and Frankish troops in the course of the Fourth Crusade.
1298 — Marco Polo claims that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred dock at the Chinese port of Zaiton(Quanzhou).
1348 — The Black Death sweeps Europe following the same routes as the spice trade. 1488 — Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope.
1492 — Genoese mariner Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus), financed by the Castilian queen Isabel, reaches the Caribbean, insists that he has arrived in the East Indies. He does find chilies though noting “The pepper which the local Indians used as a spiceis more abundant and more valuable than either black or melegueta pepper.”. late 1490s — Chilies introduced into Europe by Spanish.
1498 — Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut, trades in his silverware for spices—see map.
1500 — Portuguese fleet led by Cabral “discovers” Brazil. Returns to Lisbon (1501) with a paltry 2000 quintals (roughly
120,000 kg) of spice.
1501 — Venetian spice trader Girolamo Priuli writes in his journal: “[to Venice, the loss of the spice trade] would be like the loss
of milk and nourishment to an infant.”
1503 — Returning from his second trip, Vasco da Gama and his men arrive in Lisbon with some 26,000 quintals of pepper and 6-7,000 quintals of other spices, chiefly cinnamon (about 1,800,000 kg in all).
1510 — Goa seized by the Portuguese.
early 1500s — Chilies introduced into India by Portuguese.
1511 — Portuguese Captain António de Abreu, leads the first European expedition to reach the Banda Islands, home to nutmeg and mace. 1568 — Spain invades the Netherlands, beginning of
“Eighty Years War.”
1580 — Portugal is absorbed into the Spanish Empire.
1597 — First Dutch expedition returns to Holland after having reached Bantam in what is now Indonesia.
1600 — English East India Company chartered by Queen Elizabeth I.
1602 — Dutch East India Company (VOC) chartered.
1609 — Island of Neira (in the Banda archipelago) is seized by the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch government“ to be kept by us forever,” making it the Netherlands’ first official East Indian colony.
1618 — Thirty Years War begins in Central Europe.
1619 — Founding of Batavia in Java as headquarters of the Dutch East Indies.
1621 — The inhabitants of the nutmeg producing Banda islands are massacred by the troops of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) under the leadership of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. c,
1670 — European pepper imports reach 7,000,000 kg, the highest they would be until the 19th century. Following the 1670s imports fall by almost half .
1625 — The Dutch destroy some sixty-five thousand clove trees in Ceram’s Hoamoal Peninsula (today’s Indonesia)to maintain their monopoly. 1640 — Portugal regains independence from Spain.
1648 — End Thirty Years War.
1656 — Ceylon (Sri Lanka) is conquered by Dutch. c.
1750 — Pierre Poivre steals nutmeg and clove seedlings from Dutch Indonesia and plants them on the French Indian Oceancolonies of Mauritius and Réunion.
1795 — Jonathan Carnes sails from Salem, Massachusetts for the East Indies, bringing Americans into the spice trade. Connecticut comes to be known as the “nutmeg” state, though it is unclear whether this is due to her sailors taking part in the spice trade or to the reputation of it’s woodworkers in fashioning counterfeit nutmegs out of wood
1799 — Dutch East India Company disbanded.
1803-15 — Napoleonic wars.
1843 — The Caribbean British colony of Granada starts producing nutmeg—today it is the world’s premier producer.
1939-45 — World War II.
1950 — Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) gains independence.
1961 — Portugal’s last Indian colony, Goa, is annexed by India.
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SPICE MYTHS
MYTH No. l:
SPICES WERE USED BY MEDIEVAL EUROPEANS TO MASK PUTIUD AND SPOILED FOODS.
Let's face it. the people who could afford spices were precisely the ones who could throw out the rotten venison haunch. The manuals are replete with instructions on cooking meat soon after the animal is slaughtered. If the meat was hung up to age, it was for no more than a day or two. but even this depended on the season. Not that had meat did not exist. From the specific punishments that were prescribed for unscrupulous traders. it is clear that rotten meat did make it into the kitchens of the rich and famous, but then it also does today. The advice given by cookbook author Bartolomeo Sacchi in 1480 was the same as you would give now: throw it out.
MYTH No. 2:
SPICES WERE USED MY PREMODERN PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY HAD UNREFNED, BARBARIC TASTES.
This is the subtext of much 20th century French writing on the subject. Anyone who doesn't use spices the way the modern French do (i.e. not at all) must be a barbarian. Tell that to the Indians. Moroccans, Vietnamese and others who use way more spice than any medieval European did! Some cultures happen to like the way spicy food tastes and think that mold-covered putrefied mill: (i.e. Camembert) is vile. I happen to like both.
MYTH No. 3:
SPICEs WERE USED TO PRESERVE FOOD.
Not only is this an affront on common sense, it completely contradicts what's written in the old cookbooks. Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration. food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting, and preserving in acid. Think prunes. prosciutto. and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn't so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici. or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette. even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. What's more old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren't used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices toward the end of the cooking process where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. In at least one renaissance Italian cookbook the author suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage!
MYTH No. 4:
SPICES USED TO BE WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD.
Pricey perhaps but nowhere near their weight in gold. In Venice, in the early fifteenth century, when pepper hit an all-time high. you could still buy more than three hundred pounds of it for a pound of gold. And while it's true that a pound of ginger could have bought you a sheep in medieval England, that may tell you more about the price of sheep than the value of spice. Sheep in those days were small, scrawny. plentifil, and. accordingly, cheap. You will also read that pepper was used to pay soldiers' wages and even to pay rent. But once again. this requires a little context. Medieval Europe was desperately short of precious metals to use as currency, and if you needed to pay a relatively small amount (soldiers didn't get paid so well in those days), there often weren't enough small of common salt were used even more routinely as a kind of currency in the marketplace. Cloves and nutmeg were perhaps two or three times the price of pepper and ginger depending on the time and place but that still made them aflordable to the more than just the royals.
The origin of this particular myth may originate with Martin Behaim's I492 globe. One of the annotations. no doubt hyperbolic. notes that 'One must know that the spices from the islands in East India must pass through many hands before they come here to our land....No wonder spices for us cost their weight in gold.”
MYTH No. 5:
FOOD was SEASONED WITH ENonMOUS QUANTITIES or SPICE IN THE
MIDDLE AGES.
Well perhaps enormous if you are a French historian born in l900s. Fernand Braudel once referred to the medieval fashion for spiced food as an "org of spice.” More likely the very wealthy in medieval and renaissance Europe used about as much spice as an average Moroccan does today. And perhaps a third or less of the typical Indian dish. Hardly an org.
MYTH No. 6:
COOKS STOPPED USING SPICES IN COOKING AFTER THE IGOIJS.
The drop off in spice use was certainly much more gradual than this, at least outside of France. You find lots of recipes in most non-French sources throughout 17 00s and even 1800s that harken back to the middle ages in the way they use spice. What probably did occur after about 1700 though is the well- spiced meat and fish dishes became less and less trendy.