Spice

The spice trade developed throughout the Indian subcontinent[5] by at earliest 2000 BCE with cinnamon and black pepper, and in East Asia with herbs and pepper. The Egyptians used herbs for mummification and their demand for exotic spices and herbs helped stimulate world trade. By 1000 BCE, medical systems based upon herbs could be found in China, Korea, and India. Early uses were connected with magic, medicine, religion, tradition, and preservation.[6]

Cloves were used in Mesopotamia by 1700 BCE.[note 1] The ancient Indian epic Ramayana mentions cloves. The Romans had cloves in the 1st century CE, as Pliny the Elder wrote about them.[10] The earliest written records of spices come from ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian cultures. The Ebers Papyrus from early Egypt dating from 1550 BCE describes some eight hundred different medicinal remedies and numerous medicinal procedures.[11] Historians believe that nutmeg, which originates from the Banda Islands in Southeast Asia, was introduced to Europe in the 6th century BCE.[12]

Indonesian merchants traveled around China, India, the Middle East, and the east coast of Africa. Arab merchants facilitated the routes through the Middle East and India. This resulted in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria being the main trading center for spices. The most important discovery prior to the European spice trade was the monsoon winds (40 CE). Sailing from Eastern spice cultivators to Western European consumers gradually replaced the land-locked spice routes once facilitated by the Middle East Arab caravans.[6]

Spices were prominent enough in the ancient world that they are mentioned in the Old Testament. In Genesis, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers to spice merchants. In Exodus, manna is described as being similar to coriander in appearance. In the Song of Solomon, the male narrator compares his beloved to many saffron, cinnamon, and other spices.

"The Mullus" harvesting pepper. Illustration from a French edition of The Travels of Marco Polo.

Spices were among the most demanded and expensive products available in Europe in the Middle Ages,^[5] the most common being black pepper, cinnamon (and the cheaper alternative cassia), cumin, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. Given medieval medicine's main theory of humorism, spices and herbs were indispensable to balance "humors" in food,^[6] a daily basis for good health at a time of recurrent pandemics. In addition to being desired by those using medieval medicine, the European elite also craved spices in the Middle Ages. An example of the European aristocracy's demand for spice comes from the King of Aragon, who invested substantial resources into bringing back spices to Spain in the 12th century. He was specifically looking for spices to put in wine, and was not alone among European monarchs at the time to have such a desire for spice.[13]

Spices were all imported from plantations in Asia and Africa, which made them expensive. From the 8th until the 15th century, the Republic of Venice held a monopoly on spice trade with the Middle East, using this position to dominate the neighboring Italian maritime republics and city-states. The trade made the region rich. It has been estimated that around 1,000 tons of pepper and 1,000 tons of the other common spices were imported into Western Europe each year during the Late Middle Ages. The value of these goods was the equivalent of a yearly supply of grain for 1.5 million people.[14] The most exclusive was saffron, used as much for its vivid yellow-red color as for its flavor. Spices that have now fallen into obscurity in European cuisine include grains of paradise, a relative of cardamom which mostly replaced pepper in late medieval north French cooking, long pepper, mace, spikenard, galangal and cubeb.[15]

Spain and Portugal were interested in seeking new routes to trade in spices and other valuable products from Asia. The control of trade routes and the spice-producing regions were the main reasons that Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed to India in 1499.^[8] When da Gama discovered the pepper market in India, he was able to secure peppers for a much cheaper price than the ones demanded by Venice.[13] At around the same time, Christopher Columbus returned from the New World. He described to investors new spices available there.

Another source of competition in the spice trade during the 15th and 16th century was the Ragusans from the maritime republic of Dubrovnik in southern Croatia.[16] The military prowess of Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515) allowed the Portuguese to take control of the sea routes to India. In 1506, he took the island of Socotra in the mouth of the Red Sea and, in 1507, Ormuz in the Persian Gulf. Since becoming the viceroy of the Indies, he took Goa in India in 1510, and Malacca on the Malay peninsula in 1511. The Portuguese could now trade directly with Siam, China, and the Maluku Islands.

With the discovery of the New World came new spices, including allspice, chili peppers, vanilla, and chocolate. This development kept the spice trade, with America as a latecomer with its new seasonings, profitable well into the 19th century.

It is often claimed that spices were used either as food preservatives or to mask the taste of spoiled meat, especially in the European Middle Ages.[15][18] This is false.[19][20][21][15] In fact, spices are rather ineffective as preservatives as compared to salting, smoking, pickling, or drying, and are ineffective in covering the taste of spoiled meat.[15] Moreover, spices have always been comparatively expensive: in 15th century Oxford, a whole pig cost about the same as a pound of the cheapest spice, pepper.[15] There is also no evidence of such use from contemporary cookbooks: "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."[22] Indeed, Cristoforo di Messisbugo suggested in the 16th century that pepper may speed up spoilage.[22]

Though some spices have antimicrobial properties in vitro,[23] pepper—by far the most common spice—is relatively ineffective, and in any case, salt, which is far cheaper, is also far more effective.[22]

A study by the Food and Drug Administration of shipments of spices to the United States during fiscal years 2007–2009 showed about 7% of the shipments were contaminated by Salmonella bacteria, some of it antibiotic-resistant.[25] As most spices are cooked before being served salmonella contamination often has no effect, but some spices, particularly pepper, are often eaten raw and present at table for convenient use. Shipments from Mexico and India, a major producer, were the most frequently contaminated.[26] Food irradiation is said to minimise this risk.[27][28]

• Czarra, Fred (2009). Spices: A Global History. Reaktion Books. p. 128. ISBN 978-1-86189-426-7.
• Dalby, Andrew (2000). Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23674-5.
• Freedman, Paul (2008). Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21131-3.
• Keay, John (2006). The Spice Route: A History. John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-6199-3.
• Krondl, Michael (2008). The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice. Random House. ISBN 978-0-345-50982-6.
• Miller, James Innes (1969). The spice trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641. Oxford: Clarendon P. ISBN 978-0-19-814264-5.
• Morton, Timothy (2006). The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-02666-6.
• Seidemann, Johannes (2005). World Spice Plants: Economic Usage, Botany, Taxonomy. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-22279-8.
• Turner, Jack (2004). Spice: The History of a Temptation. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-40721-5.

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