THE END OF THE SPICE AGE

The rarer something is, the more it is sought after. In India pennyroyal is dearer than pepper.
SAINT JEROME(ca. 347–419/420), “To Evangelus”

In February 1755, a battered frigate flying a French ensign and bearing the name of La Colombe hove into view off the remote Moluccan island of Meyo. The voyage had left the ship much the worse for wear; it was barely seaworthy, its ancient rigging so decrepit that it was incapable of sailing to windward. On board was a one-armed Frenchman with a cunning plan. His name was strangely appropriate to the task at hand: Pierre Poivre, a Gallic Peter Pepper. Like many others who had traveled to the Moluccas before him, he was there not to trade, but to steal.

The Moluccas had been the sole home of the clove since cloves existed, and so they remained, with some qualifications, when Poivre dropped anchor. Originally confined to five islands to the west of Halmahera, by Poivre’s day the spice grew on a few dozen islands of the surrounding archipelago, under the watchful eye of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC. After the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 1605, the VOC had set about making each and every clove on Earth a Dutch possession. Under Dutch rule the islands were exploited with a ruthlessness and efficiency never seen before. Gaps in what had been a porous Portuguese monopoly were plugged, and all clandestine trading was ruthlessly suppressed. The Moluccas were squeezed by a rule as harsh as the better-known plantation regimes of Caribbean sugar and cotton. The inevitable rebellions were mercilessly put down. In 1650, the Dutch governor, despite being bedridden, insisted on personally knocking out the teeth of a Ternatean rebel commander, smashing the roof of his mouth, cutting out his tongue, and slitting his throat.

To prevent all such uprisings and to stamp out smuggling, it was Dutch policy to concentrate the clove on the central Moluccan island of Ambon and a few outlying islands. The sultans of Ternate and Tidore were pensioned off and kept amenable by a combination of cash and the ever present threat of superior force. The clove groves were torched. From the VOC fortress on Ambon annual expeditions set off to destroy illegal clove trees and to punish renegades. Smugglers were blown out of the water; all unauthorized cultivation was punishable by death. Dutch troops crushed the smuggling center of Macassar, where English, Chinese, and Portuguese bought illicit cloves. By Poivre’s day, through cannons and subsidies, the spice was scarcely more widespread than it had been for thousands of years; as closely guarded, as one observer wrote, as ever a jealous lover watched his sweetheart.

Nutmeg, the second spice of the Moluccas, was guarded with a similar ruthlessness. The ethos was summarized by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, an early and particularly brutal governor-general: little profit would come from being “virtuous and good;” it was better “to ride the natives with a sharp spur.” And this the Dutch certainly did. By the 1620s, the VOC had worked to death or expelled practically the entire indigenous population of the Bandas. The company imported slaves to work the plantations; Javanese convicts and Japanese mercenaries were called in to mop up any local resistance, which was in any case more imagined than real. The headmen of the islands were tortured and duly confessed to all sorts of lurid conspiracies. From the battlements of their forts Dutch artillery looked over the world’s entire supply of nutmegs. To be doubly sure, after harvest all nutmegs were treated with lime so that none could be sown elsewhere.

Having themselves stolen the spices from the Bandanese, and having seen off their European rivals with bloody efficiency, Dutch paranoia was understandable. They had much to lose and much to gain. Throughout the seventeenth century the markup on cloves and nutmeg between purchase and final sale was on the order of 2,000 percent, a profit that brought yet more luster to the Dutch Golden Age and paid for many a burgher’s elegant house and fittings. To maintain the price at an artificially high level, the Dutch regularly staged spiced bonfires that unconsciously evoked the spiced holocausts of pagan antiquity. In 1735, 1,250,000 pounds of nutmeg were burned in Amsterdam alone. One witness saw a bonfire of nutmeg so great that the oil flowed out and wet the spectators’ feet. An onlooker was hanged for taking a handful of nutmegs from the flames.

It was to pilfer company spices on a grander scale that Poivre sailed to the Moluccas. The stakes were as high as they had ever been for earlier spice voyagers: success meant fame and fortune; failure, certain death.

The latter prospect seems not to have troubled Poivre unduly. He was the sort of figure who belonged only in the eighteenth century, his life a Candide-like succession of adventures and narrow scrapes, including several tangles with the Royal Navy, stints in prison, a flirtation with the priesthood, brushes with the ecclesiastical authorities, and flashes of entrepreneurial bravado and polymathy, spiked throughout with intense personal vanity, much of it played out in the swashbuckling surrounds of the Indian Ocean. He arrived off Meyo by a convoluted route. Born in Lyon on August 23, 1719, he was educated by the missionaries of Saint Joseph before continuing his education at the Missions Étrangères in Paris. It was under the auspices of this thoroughly internationalist institution that he developed an interest in natural science and an ambition to see Asia. At the age of twenty, while he was still a novice, the missionaries sent him east, where he spent two eventful years in China and another two in Cochin China (modern Vietnam). Here he had the opportunity to study Asian plants and had his first serious run-in with the authorities. At some stage his superiors began to have grave doubts about his vocation, sensing that his deepest instincts were not so much spiritual as commercial. A meeting at Canton with the Irish adventurer and entrepreneur Jack O’Freill set him thinking of more worldly opportunities in the East. His interest in the cloth wilted.

His superiors, sensing his disaffection, decided he should return to France. The superior at Canton concluded he was an opportunist who had joined the order merely to see the world on a free ticket. And so in 1745 he embarked on the Dauphin with his career under a cloud, headed for home and an uncertain future.

The voyage did not go as planned. As the Dauphin passed through the Bangka Strait, off the east coast of Sumatra, it had the extreme misfortune to run into the Deptford, an English man-of-war commanded by a veteran privateer with the suitably briny name of Captain Barnett. It was an unequal contest, and after a brief and bloody combat, the Dauphin was taken. Poivre was hit in the wrist by a musket shot, taken prisoner, and thrown belowdecks. His ruined right hand quickly turned gangrenous. Twenty-four hours later he found himself stretched out on what passed for an operating table, the blood-smattered surgeon of the Deptford standing over him, matter-of-factly informing him that his lower right arm was now bobbing on the waves, dinner for a hungry seagull.

More than any other moment, this gory encounter shaped Poivre’s subsequent destiny. Short on rations, the English were anxious to rid themselves of any extra mouths, so Poivre and the other captives were dropped at the Dutch town of Batavia (modern Jakarta), to await the arrival of a more friendly ship. Poivre’s enforced four-month sojourn in the capital of the Dutch empire in the East marked the nadir of his fortunes. It was clear that his missionary career, already troubled, was at an end—having only one arm, he was unable to consecrate the host. He did, however, have time on his hands (or hand) to reflect on alternative careers and give free rein to his fertile imagination. He began making plans for a brighter future.

The commercial vitality of Batavia soon set Poivre thinking. This mosquito-infested, unhealthy, but vibrant town was both the epicenter of Dutch trade with Europe and the hub of the still more lucrative trade of the archipelago and Asia. Ships came and went from Japan, China, Siam, Bengal, Malabar, Ceylon, and Sumatra. In an atmosphere of mingled squalor and opulence, merchants of all nationalities provided plenty of stimulation for his convalescence. In particular, he was struck by the prosperity of the Dutch spice merchants. He spoke with several Dutch traders who, confident in the company’s secure hold on the Moluccas, willingly shared information with the innocuous-looking invalid. Others painted a picture of lax safety measures, of smuggling and evasion that went on under the noses of the authorities, of clandestine spice plants that grew beyond the reach of the Dutch patrols. It struck Poivre that the company had, so to speak, left the house unlocked.

And so an idea took root in Poivre’s fertile imagination: he would steal spice plants from under the noses of the Dutch and transplant them to French colonies in the tropics, thereby shattering the VOC’s monopoly. (Although he was perhaps unaware of the precedent, in contemplating the transplantation of spice plants he partook of a tradition that stretched back to Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt more than three thousand years earlier.) By acquiring spices he would bring a potentially vast source of income to France, her colonies, and not least himself, in the process delivering a devastating blow to Dutch power in the Indies. He allowed himself to imagine that if all went as planned this would be the single greatest piece of industrial espionage of all time. In Poivre’s own words: “I then realized that the possession of spice which is the basis of Dutch power in the Indies was grounded on the ignorance and cowardice of the other trading nations of Europe. One had only to know this and be daring enough to share with them this never-failing source of wealth which they possess in one corner of the globe.”

It was to this end that Poivre found himself, several years of plotting and planning later, standing on the deck of his listing ship, peering through a telescope at the clove groves of Meyo. In the end he would succeed—after a fashion—but not this time. The winds were in the wrong quarter and his ship was in such a poor state that he was unable to make a landing. Like Moses in the wilderness, he was forced to content himself with gazing at the promised spice groves, tantalizingly out of reach. In his report on the mission Poivre blamed the ship and, by implication, the tepid support of his patrons, the authorities of the Compagnie des Indes: “Nothing will console me for having been a stone’s throw from this island, so fertile in cloves, and yet having been unable to set foot on land, recover these precious fruits, and carry off the much-desired plants which could have made the Compagnie’s fortune…. Why did I not have anything for an expedition of this nature besides the worst vessel that has ever put to sea?”

There was no option but to look elsewhere. With the monsoon gathering and the condition of his vessel rapidly deteriorating, he charted an erratic course around the Spice Islands, north to the territory of the modern Philippines, and south to Timor, scouring the islands in vain for the precious spice plants. Time after time promising openings came to nothing. At one point he hoisted the Dutch flag to prevent capture by a passing Dutch vessel. Finally he managed to obtain a few second-rate nutmeg plants from the Portuguese possession of Timor, which he succeeded in getting back to the other side of the Indian Ocean, to the French colony of Île de France (Mauritius).

It was, not for the last time, a false dawn. His seeming success rapidly unraveled as the plants failed to thrive. Relations on the island turned sour, and Poivre turned peevish. Poivre saw factional infighting, the tricks and jealousies of enemies both real and imagined. A rival botanist declared the nutmeg plants to be false; given that Poivre had obtained them from Timor, where relatives but not the real thing are documented, he was probably correct. In due course Poivre claimed that a jealous rival had killed the precious seedlings with boiling water or “some mercurial drug.” The authorities were uninterested at best, at worst actively hostile to the entrepreneurial, one-armed gadfly who was forever demanding money and ships to pursue his spiced schemes. No one seemed to care. It looked, for a time, as if Poivre’s plans had come to nothing.

And so, in 1756, he headed back to Europe, his career again under a cloud. Once more the English attacked and captured the ship he was traveling in, resulting in a stint in an Irish jail. After seven months in Cork, he returned to France. His plans and plants had apparently failed to thrive, but he did at least have time to write his memoir, the grandly titled Voyages d’un philosophe.

It was Poivre’s efforts with the pen that belatedly revived his project of purloining spices, deliverance coming in the form of an appreciative reader who also happened to be a minister in the government of Louis X V. Troubled by the parlous finances of France’s colonial possessions in the Indian Ocean, he was impressed by Poivre’s ideas and offered the mercurial entrepreneur the intendance of the islands. Perhaps Poivre’s scheme was the answer to the endless flow of subsidies to France’s costly colonies. Poivre headed back east in 1767. Now at last he could rise above the petty rivalries that beset colonial affairs; he could also employ others to take his risks. He settled on two reliable Indian Ocean hands, Evrard de Trémignon and le sieur d’Etcheverry, whom he placed in charge of two swift corvettes, the Vigilant and the Étoile du Matin. They sailed for the Moluccas in January 1770.

His deputies enjoyed better fortune than Poivre had the first time around. Shortly after making a clandestine landfall on Ceram, just to the north of the Dutch headquarters on Ambon, Etcheverry met a lone Dutchman mending his boat on the beach. Over a drink the Dutchman soon divined the intention behind his visitor’s questions but, fortunately for Etcheverry, was so thoroughly disenchanted with island life that he was willing to bare all. He directed the French to the island of Gueby, where the islanders kept illicit clove and nutmeg plants hidden deep in the jungle.

Bidding a grateful farewell but nagged by the suspicion that he might be double-crossed, Etcheverry duly made straight for Gueby. After some initial confusion—at first the islanders mistook the French for a Dutch raiding party—the locals were more than happy to help; anything to harm the Dutch. Though their plants had recently been detected and burned by a Dutch patrol, they directed the French to a nearby island. Here Poivre’s men carried off thousands of fresh young nutmeg seedlings suitable for propagation.

There was, however, still no sign of any cloves. Despite the assurances of the village headman, who had promised to bring some seedlings from a neighboring island, the French were getting jittery. After a further eight nerve-wracking days, with the monsoon building on the horizon and the risk of a Dutch patrol ever present, they resolved to sail with only half the task achieved, only to have their departure delayed by adverse winds. It was a fortunate development, for as they waited for the wind to shift, a small flotilla of islanders arrived with hundreds of young clove seedlings.

Their mission accomplished, the French promptly set sail for Île de France. Their last serious obstacle came in the form of a Dutch coastal patrol, which they fooled by pretending to be lost travelers. After an uneventful voyage west across the Indian Ocean, they made a triumphant return on June 25, their holds crammed with no fewer than 20,000 nutmegs and 300 clove seedlings. Their haul was planted in the Jardin du Roi on the Île de France, where, after a few years in which the majority of the seedlings died, a core group of plants successfully acclimatized. The first crop of cloves was produced in 1776 and nutmeg two years after. Each occasion was marked with great ceremony, “as the Romans were wont to celebrate their triumphs with the trees of the countries they had conquered,” in the words of a Parisian pamphlet. A ceremonial consignment of the first creole spices was dispatched to the king. Poivre foresaw more plantations in France’s other tropical possessions, the Seychelles, Cayenne, and Haiti. The contemporary Abbé Raynal compared Poivre’s feat to Jason’s theft of the golden fleece.

Yet despite all the accolades Poivre’s plants were never quite the success they had promised to be; his adventures, ultimately, packed more panache than punch. Though their descendants can still be seen today, Poivre’s core group of stolen spice plants on Île de France apparently never produced a profitable crop, plagued by official indifference and the local monkeys. On the eve of the Revolution, France was still importing some nine thousand pounds of cloves per annum, the entire proceeds of which went into Dutch pockets. Perhaps the most bitter defeat came in 1778. It was now nearly a decade since Poivre had transplanted a few of his beloved spice plants to the new colony of Mahé in the Seychelles, where they were kept and nurtured in conditions of the utmost secrecy. But all came to naught when a warship flying the Union Jack appeared in the harbor, whereupon the gardeners torched all the spice plants so as to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. They turned out to have been a little too enthusiastic in carrying out their orders, for the ship was nothing more threatening than a misdirected slaver—and a French one at that. Its crew had hoisted the Union Jack under the mistaken impression that Mahé was a British possession.

In the longer run, however, Poivre’s overanxious gardeners had good reason to fear the Royal Navy. During the Napoleonic Wars the Moluccas were twice occupied by British forces, first from 1796 to 1802 and again from 1810 to 1816. Industrious officers had time to spare in which to transplant the spices to British possessions around Penang and Singapore, where, with the encouragement of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, plantations were laid out with full state subsidy and support. In 1843, the nutmeg was introduced to the Caribbean island of Grenada by Captain John Bell, “because he liked his punch.” Poivre’s efforts paid dividends only when he was long in the grave, although France derived no profit therefrom. Around 1818, descendants of Poivre’s stolen cloves were transplanted from Mauritius to Madagascar, Pemba, and Zanzibar, where they did spectacularly well. Nearly two hundred years later, the flow of spices across the Indian Ocean has been reversed, with Indonesia now a net importer of cloves.

Yet if Poivre was ultimately more flamboyant than effective, he remains something of an iconic figure in the waning of the spice trade. For however belated or mixed the fruition of his efforts, they nevertheless encapsulate some of the deeper trends already under way, trends that account for the rapid fading of spices’ ancient attraction. Their proliferation meant that they were on the road to being commonplace.

Poivre, as we have seen, was far from alone in dreaming of spreading spices around the globe. By a royal order of 1678, the Portuguese, robbed of their Asian possessions by the Dutch, had tried to send cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper to Brazil, efforts that continued through the eighteenth century. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish had attempted the same in their Central American possessions, though only ginger and cinnamon seem to have done well at this early stage. There was an early attempt, two hundred years before Pierre Poivre, to filch the clove. The other spices had started their steady diffusion much earlier. Pepper is generally believed to have moved east from its native Malabar to Sumatra and through the archipelago as early as the first centuries of the Christian era, accelerating rapidly thereafter. At this time cassia already grew through much of southwest China, Assam, and Southeast Asia.

One of the last spices to set off around the world was the cinnamon of Ceylon. After the fall of the island to the Dutch in the 1630s, the VOC maintained the high price of the spice with a combination of monopoly and blockade, in its essentials the same system as applied to the clove and nutmeg, with a similar pattern of hopeless local revolts and pitiless Dutch reprisals. In June 1760, visitors to Amsterdam witnessed the conflagration of some 16 million French livres’ worth of cinnamon. The fire, which burned for two days outside Amsterdam’s Admiralty House, gave off a fragrant cloud that passed over all of Holland. The system came to an abrupt end in 1795, thanks once more to the guns of the Royal Navy. Ceylon became a Crown colony, the monopoly system was abandoned, and the plants were transplanted to other tropical possessions.

The hermetic isolation of the spices had been shattered; the ancient combination of rarity and value was now a thing of the past. And as the means of supply was transformed, so too demand was changing. Even as Poivre drifted around the Moluccas, spices were being overtaken by newer and more profitable goods, such as tea, silver, rubber, and textiles. When the British arrived, the VOC was already tottering and bankrupt; spices were no longer the money-spinners they once had been.

This was a process, arguably, that had its beginnings in the earliest days of Europe’s eastward rush to the spices. The apex of the Spice Age was the beginning of the end of their attraction. It was, admittedly, an end that took several hundred years to play itself out, but thanks to the very success of the Portuguese and Spanish discoverers, as well as the English and above all the Dutch East India companies that came after, spices were on the way to becoming affordable and familiar. Market manipulation slowed but could not halt the trend. Although the spice lands remained prizes to be fought over (or to be robbed), their ancient glamour and mystery were long gone. Now they were studied, mapped, horse-traded, their products reduced to commodities. Mandeville and Marco Polo made way for tales of surviving and making it big in the perilous, profitable East; of extracting a fortune among the grafters and mosquitoes, the drink and dissolution, of Batavia or Colombo.

By the discoverers’ succeeding too well in acquiring the spices, then, the legacy they left was the erosion of their charm. The old myths and legends died hard, but spices were never the same again. In 1556, Francisco de Tamara claimed that cinnamon and laurels covered the water when the Red Sea rose, but by now this sort of thing was sounding increasingly medieval. The tone of the future was set by Garcia da Orta, who as a subject of Portugal’s Estado da India had ample opportunity to inspect the reality for himself. With cool Renaissance precision his Colloquies dismantle the ancient myths one by one. The most glamorous of the flavors that spices brought to the table—the heady mix of profit, danger, distance, and obscurity—was fading fast.

All of which was a far cry from the Middle Ages, when spices had arrived in Europe from beyond the known world. Spices were now a means of getting rich for anyone willing to take his chances with the perils of the voyage and the deadly monotony of tropical life, with all its loathsome, strange diseases. They had been dragged into the modern world, and with modernity came that deadly quality, attainability.

“The East,” ejaculated an old Scotsman once—“the East is just a smell!”
—DAN MCKENZIE, Aromatics and the Soul, 1923

As spices lost their attractions across the spectrum of their many former uses, from the temple to the bedroom, their most significant fall from grace occurred in the kitchen. As with any discussion of changing tastes, it is extremely hard to pin down a specific reason. Early modern cuisine was no less spicy than its medieval predecessor, but much had changed. Spices had ceased to be the last word in taste, sophistication, and health. Even as the East India Company and the VOC brought spices to Europe in ever increasing volumes, there emerged a current of thought that looked on the highly spiced cuisine of the Middle Ages with mingled disgust, condescension, and amusement. More became less.

The exact border between medievalism and modernity is a fuzzy one, and this is as true of cuisine as of any other area. Spices still figure prominently in a selection of cookbooks published across western Europe late in the sixteenth century. The English Proper New Booke of Cookery (1576) and Diego Granado’s Libro de arte de cocinar (1599) contain dozens of classically medieval spiced sauces and confections— much as is to be expected of an age that expended such prodigious energies in acquiring spices. Meanwhile, in absolute terms, the spice trade more or less doubled in volume through the course of the hundred years after Columbus, peaking around the end of the eighteenth century.

Yet as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, in some circles the heavy use of spices was seen as something of a culinary joke. In 1665, the French satirist Boileau produced a barbed lampoon entitled The Ridiculous Meal, in which the narrator makes fun of the ancienne cuisine. The host of Boileau’s meal is a pretentious boor who likes to pose as a man of taste and refinement when in fact he is nothing of the sort: “In the whole world, no poisoner ever knew his trade better.” Noting that the guest has barely touched the disgusting meal set in front of him, the host inquires if he is unwell and encourages the reluctant diner to partake: “Do you like nutmeg? It has been put into everything.” The reference may be to a historical figure, the abbot of Broussin, a nutmeg addict who was mocked for putting the spice in all his sauces. Having long since anesthetized his taste buds with excessive spice, he was always in need of a stronger flavor that his jaded palate could recognize.

Boileau’s satire is, then, not so much a sign of the widespread use of spices as it is evidence of their fall from grace. The host’s heavy hand with the nutmeg is indicative of his tastelessness. He was a culinary dinosaur, presenting unsophisticated medieval slop as the latest in nouvelle cuisine, comically unaware of his failure to keep up with trends. Tastes had moved on.

It is probably no coincidence that this fall from favor occurred just at the time when spices had to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace. The world was getting smaller, and its bounty was coming to the dinner table. The advent of potatoes, squash, tomatoes, and peppers created new possibilities for cooks, at the same time lessening the workload of spices. American chili was both cheaper and stronger than pepper, and it could be grown practically anywhere. After Columbus first returned with a sample, the plant spread so fast around the world that many Europeans assumed it was of Asian origin. Paprika put down roots from Spain to Hungary. Pepper, for which there had long been no substitute, could now be outgunned.

The chili was only one of several new stimulants competing for attention. A craving for tobacco swept the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with coffee and tea following not far behind. Although sugar had been known in the Middle Ages (classed, incidentally, as a spice and used largely for medical purposes), its consumption began to increase dramatically from the sixteenth century on. Late in the century, sugar began to be mass-produced in Brazil and somewhat later in the West Indies, the apparent result a general sweetening of the Western palate, an upward curve that has continued, much to the cost of our teeth and the profit of our dentists, to this day. The carousing cavaliers of the great Dutch artists endured a dental hell. Sugar had something of the glamour and forbidden attraction formerly reserved to spices, and its air of dangerous newness probably did no harm to its attraction.

Meanwhile, the social setting that had so long shaped aristocratic cuisine was gradually but utterly transformed. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented convergence of aristocratic and bourgeois tastes, the effects of which are still very much with us. By the 1700s, the distinctions between food for great princes and food for the middling sort of person looked increasingly antiquated; in a word, medieval. The new spirit was captured by the publication in England in 1665 of The Queen’s Closet Opened, offering a glimpse into the food and manners of the monarchy but aimed at a wider audience—a taste of royalty, however vicarious, in the bourgeois home. Across the Channel, in 1691, François Massialot published his Cuisinier royal et bourgeois— a title that little over a century earlier would have sounded as offputting to one class as absurd to the other. By the end of the century there were 100,000 copies in print. A little later the pioneering La Cuisinière bourgeoise was a runaway success, running to thirty-two editions between 1746 and 1769.

The aesthetic of this distinctively middle-class cuisine was radically unlike its precedents, marked above all by a shift away from the color, cost, and elaboration that had been the hallmarks of Roman and medieval cuisine. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that food became classless and therefore spiceless; it was rather that spices were no longer as appealing, medically, socially, even spiritually. With the Renaissance there was a reordering of the cosmos along less theological, less allegorical lines, with the result that spices lost their symbolism, their ancient significance of health and holiness. (Gold, also common in aristocratic medieval cooking, went the same way, for much the same reasons.) Meanwhile, the conspicuous outlets for consumption were increasingly channeled away from the table, to jewelry, music, dress, houses, art, and carriages. The modern dinner was a more private affair than its medieval predecessor. The coded messages of land and money remained the same, but refinement and affluence were expressed by different means.

Although some of the hallmarks of aristocratic cuisine—game, in particular—lingered on, even aristocrats turned to simpler, fresher flavors. Across all orders of society (except the poor, who had never had much choice), there was a shift to simpler and more local flavors. In place of the transmutation sought after by the medieval cook, the new ideal was that food should taste of itself. The new cookery stressed natural, inherent flavors, the ingredients cooked in such a way as to enhance their particular character. In the cookbooks of the later seventeenth century food begins to appear recognizably modern. Often the new taste took the form of an appetite for supposedly rustic food: the idea of the “rustic” table, however contrived, became a good thing. An upper-class fascination with a supposedly Arcadian peasant life brought country cuisine to the upper-class table—the same instinct that saw Marie Antoinette build faux cottages and cowsheds in the gardens of Versailles. The medieval or Roman delight in witty or exotic subtleties, fish trussed as flesh, came to seem artificial and overwrought.

In this respect, changes at the table reflected trends in the wider world. The age of the emergent nation-state was also the age of national cuisines, none of which had much room for spice. Nowhere was the new trend more fully or more successfully expressed than in Italy, both regionally and nationally, where the delight in fewer, simpler, and fresher tastes remains the quintessence and genius of Italian cooking. Anglo-Saxon cuisine went down a different and bleaker route, but one that led equally far away from spices. In the cookbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elaboration and costliness make way for economy and practicality. In Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery of 1747, for nearly a hundred years the most popular cookbook in the Anglophone world, the use of spices is strictly limited. Pepper survives in much the same role as it has today, no longer the central element as in medieval black pepper sauces. Across the Atlantic, the trend was much the same. There were relics: galantine survived, now transformed from the original spicy sauce into a jelly. The general trend was to relegate spices to desserts such as mince pies and puddings. Which is where, until very recently, they remained.

It was an outcome that would have gratified a Saint Bernard or a Peter Damian, and indeed some of their more puritanical successors may have played a part in marginalizing spices in the modern Western kitchen. For as social and economic change pointed in the direction of bland food, so too did religion. Insofar as diet was concerned, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation succeeded in popularizing what had hitherto been strictly monkish debates on diet; and unlike the Jeremiahs of the previous chapter, they seem to have had a good deal of success in taking that message beyond the cloister. The Puritans felt the ancient Christian wariness of cooking on a visceral level, a fact that goes a long way toward accounting for Protestant cuisine’s well-deserved reputation for blandness. There was no small irony in the fact that the Protestant powers were also the leaders in the spice trade. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, even as the VOC brought back cargoes of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, Calvinist preachers railed against the corrupting influence of Eastern spices and their redolence of pagan sensualism. In Cromwell’s England, propagandists took aim at seasonings along with bear baiting and theaters. Dull food was on the way to becoming both a religious and a patriotic duty, as one poet lamented:

"All plums the prophet’s sons deny,
And spice-broths are too hot,
Treason’s in a December pie,
And death within the pot."

The Commonwealth soon faltered, but its legacy in the kitchen endured long afterward. After the Restoration, the scent of treason still lingered over spices, and in due course what had apparently begun with mercantilist economics and religious belief acquired the force of habit. In the cuisine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bland was beautiful. This is the age when the English travelogue acquires the figure of the Englishman abroad, complaining about the unpalatable spiciness of foreign food. In 1679, the writer John Evelyn thought the food served at the Portuguese embassy “not at all fit for an English stomac which is for solid meat.” More bluntly, his contemporary Lord Rochester expressed his preference for “our own plain fare … hard as the arse of Mosely.” (Mother Mosely was a famous London brothel keeper, evidently a hard bargainer.)

Spices hung on in isolated pockets, but they were not what they had once been. Today the astute culinary archaeologist can still find such relics as spiced bread in Devon, and further north there is a plethora of richly spiced puddings—Scotland’s national dish, the spicy haggis, is essentially a medieval pudding. Scandinavia and the Baltic have preserved several remnants of medieval cooking, largely in biscuits, breads, cakes, and liqueurs. One of the most interesting and unexpected survivals lives on in Mexico’s mole poblano, a fusion of American ingredients with the flavors of medieval Spain: turkey, chocolate, vanilla, and chilies married with almonds, cloves, and cinnamon. If tradition.

is to be believed, the combination was dreamt up by a nun of Santa Rosa Convent in Puebla, asked to come up with a meal for a visiting viceroy. It is as though the tastes of Montezuma and the Catholic kings meet on the plate.

Yet such survivals represent the exception, and they tend to be confined to peripheral areas. Perhaps more to the point, there was an acute consciousness of this fact. Western European visitors to more spicy climes did not hesitate to regard spices’ longevity as a symptom of provincialism or backwardness. When the Abbé Mably visited Kraków in the late eighteenth century, he snootily dismissed the locals’ best effort, “a very plentiful meal which might have been very good if the Russians and the Confederates had destroyed all those aromatic herbs [sic] used in such quantities here, like the cinnamon and nutmeg that poison travelers in Germany.” His scorn was more than an isolated instance of the still-flourishing French tradition of lofty contempt for cooking à l’étrangère; rather, it marks a more general shift. The perception had taken hold that spices were all power and no subtlety, best left to the coarse palates of Easterners.

And the further east one got, the hotter and coarser food became. In an age of intensifying nationalism, food came to be seen as a projection of national virtues—or, looking elsewhere, vices. What you ate was a proclamation of national authenticity or, alternatively, decadence. Dryden, we have seen, translated the satires of Juvenal and Persius, in which the importation of Eastern or fancy foods was repeatedly scorned as degrading and debilitating. Spices were increasingly associated with oriental habits; they were exotic and mysterious, effeminizing and voluptuous. An early example was the “cruell Sarazin” of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a character who prefigures the opium-smoking Chinaman or hashish-addled Turk of the nineteenth century, in this case deviously bolstering his strength with illicit stimulants, “dainty spices fetched from furthest India, secretly to kindle their machismo”—not playing it straight like his gentle Christian knight.

Spices became a mark of the exotic and a decadent, incompatible Other. The sensuous Easterner was pictured sauntering through spice bazaars or reclining on his velvet couch, feasting on aromatic banquets as the houris danced around him. In “Hermione,” Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined an Arab “drugged with spice from climates warm;” Swinburne’s Laus Veneris oozes

"Strange spice and flavour, strange savour of the crushed fruit
And perfume the swart kings tread underfoot,
For pleasure when their minds wax amorous,
Charred frankincense and grated sandal-root".

Intriguingly, this sense of the foreignness of spices was most acute in the nineteenth century, precisely when exposure to “swart kings” and their perfumes was greater than ever before. In the early days, Europe’s pioneers in the East had had little choice but to assimilate, Portuguese, Dutch, and English alike eating Indian food and developing their own fusion cuisine, of which vindaloo is perhaps the classic example. Whereas in the days of the Raj there evolved a parallel white man’s cuisine, the dreadful white and brown sauces that still linger on in some of India’s wealthy households and boarding schools. Meanwhile, in Europe, Antonin Carême (1783–1833), the founder of the French style of grande cuisine and arbiter of nineteenth-century taste, regarded the abuse of spices as the antithesis of good cooking. The sense of spices’ inherent Eastern dangers was summarized by the dour Scots writer Dan McKenzie, who was repelled by the “strange vices” of those “outlandish Eastern aromata, redolent rather of vice and its excitements than of virtue, and its placidity.” Fortunately, his native land had undergone a thoroughly Presbyterian fumigation: “I may, therefore, with justice, raise a song of praise to our fathers who have had our country thus swept and garnished, swept of noxious vapours and emanations and garnished with the perfume of pure and fresh air, to the delight and invigoration of our souls.” Even as Western penetration of the East reached new levels, East and West went separate ways at the table. In that sense, at least, Kipling got it right.

But historically, of course, Kipling was wrong, for nowhere is the history of East and West more incestuous than at the table. For the sake of spices East and West had an ancient relationship. In light of the appearance of spices in the most remote periods, it is a reasonable possibility that it was because of spices that they first met. Yet so thoroughly implanted is the sense of the otherness of spices that native Mediterranean aromatics such as cumin, coriander, saffron, and fennel have come to be associated more with the cuisine of the countries that adopted them than with the lands of their origin—a reminder that the cultural traffic that traveled along the spice routes went both ways. Outside the Essex town of Saffron Walden, few would guess that in medieval times England was long Europe’s greatest producer of saffron. Today, when spices are making a comeback, with an upsurge of interest on both sides of the Atlantic, it is often claimed that spices were introduced with the great wave of migration from the former colonies. It is a claim that would have startled the first Europeans who went to Asia, particularly since it was spice that lured many of them there. The Englishmen and Portuguese who ate at the courts of India’s Moghuls and rajahs in the sixteenth century found there a cuisine which, in spite of several unfamiliar ingredients, they immediately recognized as showing all the hallmarks of refinement and taste, in its qualities of spiciness and elaboration not at all dissimilar to the cuisine their kings and nobles ate back home.

"But what is myrrh?
What cinnamon? What aloes, cassia, spices, honey, wine?
O sacred uses! You to think upon
Than these I more incline.
To see, taste, smell, observe is to no end,
If I the use of each don’t apprehend"
THOMAS TRAHERNE(1637–1674), “The Odour”

In the 1660s, the English physician Thomas Sydenham, once hailed as “the Shakespeare of medicine,” claimed to have found a wonder drug. His laudanum, he boasted, was an unrivaled “cordial.” Made from a pint of sherry or Canary wine, its chief added ingredients were saffron, cinnamon, and cloves, beefed up with a two-ounce slug of opium. For a long time Sydenham’s laudanum was immensely popular with his fellow physicians. The spiced opiate was regularly prescribed for restless children, nervous orators, light sleepers, pregnant women, a string of prime ministers and their wives, poets, and artists. It helped them sleep, brought relief from pain, and made them feel terrific.

Like opium, spices had a future after Sydenham’s day, but not, for the most part, as medicines. Here too spices went into eclipse no less thoroughly than at the table, for similarly diverse reasons. Only very recently, when spices have come to attract increasing scientific attention, has it once more become possible to justify their use in medical terms, although modern discoveries seldom correlate with the claims historically made on their behalf. No longer is it credible to claim cinnamon as a panacea.

As with cuisine, the decline did not come overnight. In the seventeenth century, it still made sense for Milton to write of Ternate and Tidore, “whence merchants bring their spicy drugs.” In 1588, Walter Baley wrote a book dedicated purely to the merits of pepper; in 1677, the Scottish savant Matthew Mackaile wrote another on mace. Pierre Pomet, druggist to Louis XIV, said of cinnamon that “we have few drugs that we use so much of;” he regarded cinnamon oil as “the greatest cordial [remedy] we have.” Nutmeg was so widely used that “it would be needless to say any Thing of it.” Even in the nineteenth century, sweet smells were still used as a defense against disease, although the practice came to be seen as increasingly folksy. Describing the trial of Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens pictures the court “all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever [typhus].” The Galenic theory of olfactory sensation came under attack during the second half of the seventeenth century, but it was only with Pasteur’s discovery of the microbe that the old fallacy of bad air was finally taken out of the equation. With the advance of empirical methods of medicine, subject to verification, humoral theory was dealt a deadly blow. Smells and miasmas, the invisible death-dealing airs that had hung over medical thought since antiquity, were dismissed as fallacious. As bad air and humoral theory were on the way out, with them went spices.

In the medical schools of Europe and America the study of pharmacy became vastly more empirical and accordingly far less reliant on traditional herbal remedies. By the start of the eighteenth century, the divorce between the physicians and apothecaries, descendants of the medieval spicers, was already well advanced, with the reputation of the former in the ascendant. In London the “Chymists” and druggists split from the apothecaries; in Paris in 1777, the pharmaciens of Paris split away from the épiciers. With their chemical and synthetic medicines the newer disciplines were seen as more scientific, credible, and trustworthy. The apothecary was viewed as an increasingly bogus purveyor of folk remedies. In London the College of Physicians denounced the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper as a “physician-astrologer”: a quack.

As spices fell from favor with the living, so it was with the dead. Robert Herrick (1591–1674), we have seen, makes numerous references to spiced embalmings, and a little later Louis Pénicher used spices on the dead dauphin en route to Saint-Denis. It was not until the nineteenth century, with the development of formaldehyde and the improvement of techniques of arterial embalming—first discovered by Dr. Frederick Ruysch (1665–1717)—that the practice was finally rendered obsolete.

Spiced aphrodisiacs lived on awhile longer. Pécuchet of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet fretted that spices would “set his body on fire.” In at least some parts of the world the faith survived until relatively recently. Writing of early-twentieth-century Morocco, one authority knew of a restorative mix of ginger, cloves, galangal, and honey, for which one of his interlocutors made grand claims: “My grandfather has never failed to take this remedy, since his youth, and now that he is extremely old and full of years, he remains as solid and as lively as a young man. He keeps himself busy with his business, he travels, he has several wives, and they bear children every year.” Even in the bedroom, however, spices had to compete in a more crowded field. They regularly crop up in modern books of aphrodisiac cooking, but they have become just one aphrodisiac among many, long since shorn not only of the medical logic but also, and perhaps more important, of the costliness and rarity on which faith in aphrodisiacs has always depended.

Something similar occurred with perfumes, although anyone who wears perfume is likely to have splashed on a little spice at one time or another. In the eighteenth century, perfumery tended toward fresher, more floral aromas, and with the advent of organic synthesis in the nineteenth century, perfumery became vastly more complex, accordingly reducing the perfumer’s reliance on spices. As spices became less expensive, they lost much of the cachet upon which top perfumes have always depended; today they can be substituted or even re-created with artificial substances, new combinations, and, perhaps most important, a barrage of imagery proclaiming this or that scent to be more exclusive, more expensive, more luxurious, worn by celebrities. Cinnamon oil, once the absolute top of the line, is now just one ingredient among thousands.

Last, and perhaps most significant, spices lost their mystical, quasi-magical quality. Already by the late medieval period the religious applications of spice were a faint though vaguely troubling memory for only a handful of learned theologians. With the Reformation, even incense was banished from some (but not all) churches as Protestant polemicists revived old worries about aroma in worship:

"As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor
Of gums and spices could the Unseen One please"

The true, reformed religion stripped the altars, scrubbed and whitewashed the churches, and threw out the censer. Even the purely figurative force of spices went into abeyance. The modern saint, unlike his medieval predecessor, is generally odorless.

With irrelevance came innocence. The sense of spices’ latent temptations, long framed in the medieval moral matrix of gluttony, lust, avarice, and worldliness, was downgraded to strictly individual issues of personal consumption. Falling costs and widespread availability would combine to strip spices of the potency of their symbolism, to the point that the idea of their incompatibility with Christian doctrine or for that matter a life of poverty now seems faintly absurd. In the modern world it tends to be the poor, not the rich, who eat spices.

In short, spices lost their air of dangerous attraction. Yet, as I have tried to point out through the course of this long ramble through their past, spices undeniably do still have a certain something. Faint reminders and echoes are still with us. Most are, admittedly, more literary than literal, the faint cultural echoes that still reverberate around this charged word. The allure of the exotic remains as alive as when Keats wrote in 1819 of

"Lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon"

The nouveau gourmet who savors the cross-cultural mix-and-match of fusion cuisine is not so far removed from the self-consciously exoticizing aesthetic of the medieval nobleman; indeed, some of the more postmodernist combinations of the trendier restaurants of London and New York recall the culinary chiaroscuro of medieval food more directly. Spices may even lie at the heart of modern capitalism’s most closely guarded secret. Mark Pendergrast concluded his history of Coca-Cola with a leaked copy of the formula of the world’s most popular and symbolic soft drink, which is, it would seem, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. Earlier leaks of the formula, while differing among themselves, suggest the same. If Pendergrast’s source can be trusted, it would seem that spices remain as much the flavor of the age as they have ever been, albeit in disguise, hidden away in the basement of Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. Is Pendergrast right? It would, one feels, be wholly appropriate.

By Jack Turner in "Spice",Vintage Books, USA, 2004, excerpts pp.316-338. Adapted and illustrated to be pósted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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