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Spice Tales: the Variety of Life -- and Then Some

Posted on: Saturday, 15 January 2005, 00:00 CST

money power intrigue sex

When Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain, seeking a westward route to India and its spices, "the great belt of Islam" dominated the spice routes, Jack Turner writes in his book, Spice: The History of a Temptation. Numerous middlemen along the journey raised the price as the spices traveled from Asia to Europe. By the time they arrived in the West, their worth had sometimes been inflated more than 1,000 percent.

Spain -- and the rest of Europe -- were enamored with those spices, but they wanted to pay less money for them.

Instead of India, however, Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. They, unfortunately, had only a few spices, and those could be cheaply transplanted around the world. Chile was the predominant offering, and Columbus informed the Spanish king and queen that he found Caribbean food to be "extremely hot." Those chiles might have created fascinating cuisines in various locations in the following years, but they made little money for Spain.

"In respect of spices, which is to say in respect of one of the primary reasons why it was discovered, the New World was something of a disappointment," Turner writes.

The author's introduction and first chapter -- in which Columbus is discussed -- are a fascinating read. But the book isn't a page turner. Nevertheless, Turner manages to drop interesting bits of information into his chapters, no matter how tedious and scholarly they might be.

The author contends his book is not a history of the flavoring's trade, although he provides fascinating tidbits concerning spice's history.

For example, scholars know the spice trade is thousands of years old. Archaeologists discovered the first indication of spices -- a handful of cloves -- in a charred ceramic vessel in a town in Syria in what had been the home of a man named Puzurum. Cloves are not native to Syria -- at the time, they grew only in Indonesia's Molucca islands -- and the spice trade had brought them to Puzurum. But a fire had destroyed Puzurum's house. And centuries later, archaeologists digging in the ruins found clay tablets, also burned in the flames, that referred to a local ruler, King Yadihk-Abu. That reference made it possible to date the cloves to around 1721 B.C.

Turner notes that other writers have pointed out that "food has played a huge role (and a curiously neglected one) in shaping the destinies of humanity." Nevertheless, in a time in which spices no longer contain their old allure, it is hard to remember they were once "an appetite that spanned the planet, and in doing so, transformed it."

The author writes, however, that his major concern is not how spices shaped history. He is, instead, interested in "how the world has changed around them: why spices were so appealing; how that appeal emerged, evolved and faded. In focusing on the appetite that the spice trade fed, this is not so much a study of the trade as a look at the reasons why it existed."

Today, we know spices primarily as a culinary ingredient. But in past years, they had other appeals, including religions ones. "Long before there is any evidence that spices were eaten," Turner writes, "they were put to applications variously described as religious or - - the distinction is largely a matter of perspective -- the magical." Cinnamon, in fact, was the food of the gods. And spices were used to summon gods and dispel demons. In fact, Western Christiandom had little idea where spices came from and at one time believed they grew in Paradise.

Spices were also employed in funeral ceremonies over the years. Nero -- one of Rome's perpetrators of domestic violence -- killed his consort Poppaea when he kicked her in the stomach after they quarreled over his coming home late from the races. When the emperor had her body cremated, so much cinnamon and cassia was burned, Turner notes, "her sendoff was as much an economic as a theological statement."

But "the most famous spiced corpse of them all was not a rich Roman but a poor subject of Roman Judaea," the author points out. "According to the gospels of Luke and John, the body of Jesus was wrapped in linen and anointed with spices, 'as the manner of the Jew is to bury.' "

In fact, he says, some early Christians seem to have believed that embalming the dead was a sacred duty. They believed the body needed to be preserved, because it would soon be physically resurrected.

Spices were still being used to anoint the dead in the Middle Ages. "It is probably no coincidence that the demand for Eastern spices coincides with the reemergence of the nobility as a distinct class around the tenth century," Turner writes. "With its steady emergence as a class apart, acutely conscious of its dignity and identity, the nobility relentlessly sought to advertise its superior status in ritual, not least the rituals of death." And burying someone drenched in high-priced spices apparently accomplished that task.

In addition, people thought spices could cure illness or help guard people against pestilence. "Not all drugs were spices, but all spices were drugs," the author says. In fact, the word apothecary and the word spicery were effectively the same during medieval times.

To give just one example, pepper was thought to cure a "bewildering array" of illnesses, including earache, paralysis, sore joints, toothache, cancer of the mouth, lung diseases and gangrene.

But spices had yet another use in the Middle Ages and earlier: They were used, as Turner writes, to "make a small penis splendid." Spices could restore, or so it was believed, the sexual energy of those with flagging abilities.

But lest you laugh, consider this: Saudi scientists, looking into the toxicity of cinnamon not long ago, discovered that rats stuffed with the spice "experienced abnormal genital growth, and the males experienced a dramatic increase in their sperm count." Turner could find no similar studies done on humans.

For countless years, spices contained "a whole swathe of potent messages, for which they have been both loved and loathed," Turner says.

Some people viewed spices with mistrust. "When the critics -- and they were many -- explained what was so objectionable about spices," Turner says, "they tended to single out the reasons that their admirers found for liking them: the merits of flavor, display, health, and sexual enhancement transmuted into the deadly sins of pride, luxury, gluttony, and lust. It is only by viewing spices in terms of this complex overlap of desires and distaste that the intensity of the appetite can be adequately accounted for."

Turner believes spices played a bigger, more important role in peoples' lives -- "a more conspicuous and varied one" -- than those living today might assume.

But ultimately, as spices proliferated, they became commonplace. In the 17th century, the Dutch viciously controlled the spice trade after they captured from Portugal the Indonesian islands, where nutmeg and mace grew. But that system ended in 1795, when the English navy made then-Ceylon a crown colony, and spice plants could be transplanted to other parts of the world.

By this time, the Dutch East India Co., which had controlled the spice trade, was bankrupt. "Spices were no longer the money- spinners they once had been," Turner notes. They had become affordable, and with affordability, they lost their charm. Other items, such as tobacco, coffee, tea and sugar swept the world.

"With the Renaissance there was a reordering of the cosmos along less theological, less allegorical lines," Turner writes, "with the result that spices lost their symbolism, their ancient significance of health and holiness."

By the late medieval years, using spices in religion was only "a faint though vaguely troubling memory for only a handful of learned theologians," Turner writes. The reformed religions threw out the spices as they got rid of the altars and whitewashed the churches. "The modern saint, unlike his medieval predecessor, is generally odorless."

Looking back, Turner sums up: "In the European imagination, there never was, and perhaps never again will be, anything quite like (spice)."

SPICE: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 (358 pages) $26.95.

Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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