Print

Mail

wiki links

Spice was once coveted, but not just for its taste

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Nov 06, 2005, Page 18

The Spice Route: A History By John Keay 286 pages John Murray

This is by any standards an outstanding book. John Keay is the author of a large number of other works on Asia in general and India in particular, as well as being the general editor of the UK Royal Society's History of World Exploration. His productivity, though, doesn't seem to have affected the quality of what he writes -- The Spice Route: A History -- is an astonishingly impressive book, combining (unusually) vivid prose and scholarly acumen with a light touch that makes for easy but highly informative reading.

The subject is the European trade in Asian spices, something that goes back to Roman and even Greek times, and probably antedates even these, but which reached a pinnacle of volume and profitability in the age of European maritime expansion 500 years ago.

"In a sea of halogen clarity, turquoise depths shade to the milky ramparts of a sub-aqua wonderland where liveried fish glide and dart through fretted coral palaces."

This is an example of one of Keay's many styles. "Unlike China's tea, South America's rubber or the Middle East's oil -- all of which were first discovered, then tapped, cultivated, traded and processed, spices were first tapped, cultivated, traded and processed, then discovered." This is an example of another Keay style. And here is a third: "Geography ordained a paradise; history made it a killing-field."

Quite why spices were deemed so important, and commanded such high prices in the 16th century markets of Lisbon, Amsterdam and London, is not an easy question to answer. Keay largely discounts the old view that they were so especially valued because they preserved meat from putrefaction. This belief held that there was a European shortage of winter feed for farm animals, and so enough had to be slaughtered in the autumn to last until the early summer (non-meat-eating Lent providing a convenient respite from the crisis). Spices preserved the meat in the days before refrigeration.

Probably not, says Keay. Recent research has shown that sticking a joint of beef with cloves, say, or rubbing it with cinnamon does little to prolong its edible life, and Mrs. Beeton's famous Victorian cookbook effectively concurs. An alternative theory that the spices merely made palatable what would otherwise have been foul-tasting is also dismissed -- practical tests have suggested the resulting concoctions taste even worse.

The real reason people for two, perhaps three, thousand years were prepared to pay so much for spices originating in mysterious places far over the horizon (in reality mostly in modern Indonesia) was that they were markers of status for the consumer. You were a more classy person if you ate your food spiced, Keay argues.

"Our ancestors seemingly had no economic excuse for their pursuit of exotic foodstuffs. They, like we, craved edible spices simply because they made food more enticing and implied cosmopolitan tastes. Spicy aromas stimulated the appetite, spicy flavors excited the palate, and perhaps most important of all, spicy extravagance impressed the neighbors ... Like fine silks and acknowledged works of art, exotic fragrances and flavors lent to aspiring households an air of superior refinement and enviable opulence."

Spices were certainly widespread. The French word for grocers is still epicier, stemming from epiciers or spice merchants. Spices, in other words, became equated with food in general, and to eat at all was to eat spices.

Ginger, cardamom, turmeric, saffron, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and cloves -- these and more were the driving forces of an enormously lucrative trade. Black pepper dominated, and had done since Roman times. It was such a common ingredient of Roman cooking, Keay speculates, that only its ordinariness can account for its otherwise inexplicable absence from a Roman list of tariffs on goods imported via Alexandria, a key port for commerce to and from the East. (Goods were carted the short space between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean for millennia before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869).

Spices were originally traded between Asia and Arabia and the Mediterranean using a combination of sea and land routes. Goods were characteristically brought by sea to the Malay peninsula, carried on mules across it, then taken by sea to southern India where they were transported overland again before being put back on ships and taken to the Middle Eastern ports. But the arrival of transport wholly by sea once the route round the Cape of Good Hope had been pioneered by Vasco da Gama in 1497 changed everything.

"When performed in a single vessel [the trade was] quicker and substantially cheaper. Bulk shipments meant economies all round. They eliminated the exactions of middlemen -- carters, cameleers, customs posts [and] less bellicose competitors and so ensured the lowest possible purchase price and the highest possible resale value."

And the Europeans were bellicose indeed, possibly to a degree previously unknown in Asia, despite the tales of horrendous Asiatic cruelty so popular in the West. Vasco da Gama, "burning-eyed and black-hearted," shot, burned, mutilated and raped his way round the globe. The Portuguese may have been the first to employ his brutal methods but the Spanish, Dutch and English were not far behind, and thought nothing of committing equal atrocities -- hands, noses and ears lopped off, captives fixed in the rigging for "cross-bow practice," ships burnt and their crews casually killed in the water with spikes and spears.

With its combination of historical detail, broad scope, intelligent appraisal, engaging narrative style and fascinating color illustrations, this is a wonderful book. Indeed, it's hard to see how it could possibly be bettered.
This story has been viewed 3390 times.