For reasons of both history and geography, the clove is often paired with nutmeg and mace. The latter two are produced by one and the same tree, Myristica fragrans. The tree yields a crop of bulbous, yellowy-orange fruit like an apricot, harvested with the aid of long poles, with which the fruit is dislodged and caught in a basket. As the fruit dries it splits open, revealing a small, spicy nugget within: a glossy brown nutmeg clasped in a vermilion web of mace. Dried in the sun, the mace peels away from the nutmeg, fading from scarlet to a ruddy brown. Meanwhile the aromatic inner nutmeg hardens and fades from glossy chocolate into ashen brown, like a hard, wooden marble. Legend has it that unscrupulous spice traders of Connecticut conned unwitting customers by whittling counterfeit ‘nutmegs’ from worthless pieces of wood, whence the nickname the ‘Nutmeg State’. A ‘wooden nutmeg’ was a metaphor for the fraudulent or ersatz. Schele de Vere’s nineteenth-century Americanisms cites the ‘wooden nutmegs’ of the Press and Congress who ‘have to answer for forged telegrams, political tricks, and falsified election returns’.
Adulteration, conned customers and mistaken identities are recurrent themes in the history of spice, bedevilling the historian’s sources just as they did, historically, the consumers. The problems were particularly acute with cinnamon – a fact, we shall see, with some considerable ramifications, and over which scholars continue to wage arcane debates to this day. The tree that bears the spice, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, is a small, unassuming evergreen, resembling a bay or laurel, native to the wet zone of Sri Lanka, in the island’s west and south-west. The spice is formed from the inner bark, which is stripped from the tree with knives, cut into segments and left in the sun to dry, curling into delicate, papery quills. Cinnamon’s best-known relative is cassia, the bark of Cinnamomum cassia, originally a native of China but in historical times widespread throughout South-East Asia. This and several other members of the family were long considered the poor relations – cassia has a coarser, ruddy bark, with a more pungent aroma. (It is also easier and cheaper to produce: much of the ‘cinnamon’ sold in the modern West is in fact cassia.) It is disconcerting, though hardly surprising, to find the medieval consumer more attuned to the difference.
For even the most indifferent there can be no mistaking the last major spice, ginger. Zingiber officinale has been cultivated for so long that it is no longer found in a wild state. Of all the spices it is by far the least fussy, and far the easiest to transplant. The plant will no longer go to seed of its own accord but must be propagated manually, with root-stalk cuttings. (During long oceanic voyages Chinese navigators grew the spice in boxes to ward off scurvy.) Provided the ambient soil and air are sufficiently hot and wet, the slender, reedy stems soon sprout, flowering in dense spikes coloured pale green, before maturing through purple and yellow. The spice is the root, or tuberous rhizome. But, amenable as it is to transplantation, before the technology of refrigeration, air travel and greenhouse, no European had eaten fresh ginger, at least not in Europe. The spice arrived after a long journey by ship and caravan, occasionally candied in syrup but more commonly and conveniently in dried form, either powdered or whole, in the distinctive, gnarly lumps still occasionally to be seen in a Chinese grocery.
These, the archetypal, tropical Asian spices, are the main subjects of this book – the dramatis personae. Occasionally the narrative strays beyond them, for as we have seen, ‘spice’ was never a clear-cut category. There were others that rose into and fell from favour, however these were foremost, whether on grounds of cost, origin, reputation or the sheer longevity and intensity of demand. They were in a class of their own. But while spices are the immediate subject, in a broader sense the book is necessarily about Europe and Asia, the appetites that attracted and the links that bound. For the most part, however, the scene and action of the following chapters are written from a European perspective, partly on account of my own linguistic limitations, but also in deference to what might be termed the law of increasing exoticism. A fur coat is standard in Moscow, a luxury in Miami. When the world was an immeasurably larger place so it was with spices, and particularly these spices. The further they travelled from their origins the more interesting they became, the greater the passions they aroused, the higher their value, the more outlandish the properties credited to them. What was special in Asia was astonishing in Europe. In the European imagination there never was, and perhaps never will be again, anything quite like them.
* Nard is an aromatic plant of the Himalayas used in ancient perfumes and unguents. Calamus is an aromatic, semi-aquatic perennial herb, widely distributed from the Black Sea to Japan, put to similar purposes. Frankincense and myrrh are powerfully aromatic gum resins native to southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Frankincense was primarily used in ancient incense. Myrrh was put to purposes as diverse as incense, seasoning and embalming.
* Spices can be toxic to humans too if taken in sufficient quantities. Protracted overdoses of nutmeg can cause cancer of the liver.
* Sometimes also called Eugenia caryopbyllata.
When I discovered the Indies, I said that they were the richest dominion that there is in the world. I was speaking of the gold, pearls, precious stones, and spices, with the trade and markets in them, and because everything did not appear immediately, I was held up to abuse.
Christopher Columbus, letter from the third voyage, written from Jamaica, 7 July 1503
The Taste that Launched a Thousand Ships
According to an old Catalan tradition, the news of the New World was formally announced in the Saló del Tinell, the cavernous, barrel-vaulted banqueting hall in Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic, the city’s medieval quarter. And it is largely on tradition we must rely, for aside from a few sparse details the witnesses to the scene had frustratingly little to say, leaving the field free for painters, poets and Hollywood producers to evoke the moment that marks the watershed, symbolically at least, between medievalism and modernity. They have tended to imagine a setting of suitable grandeur, with king and queen presiding over an assembly of everyone who was anyone in the kingdom: counts and dukes weighed down by jewels, ermines and velvets; mitred bishops; courtiers stiff in their robes of state; serried ranks of pages sweating in livery. Ambassadors and dignitaries from foreign powers look on in astonishment and mixed emotions – awe, confusion and envy. Before them stands Christopher Columbus in triumph, vindicated at last, courier of the ecosystem’s single biggest piece of news since the ending of the Ice Age. The universe has just been reconfigured.
Or so we now know. But the details are largely the work of historical imagination, the perspective one of the