The Spice Trade (file under Sugar n’ Spice and everything nice)

It can’t of taken humanity long to try experimenting with various flavours of foods and methods of preparations. If you think about it we live in age now that makes it so easy for us to walk into a supermarket and get any of a million different flavours. But what about the trials and experimentation that must have taken place to come up with the fact that fennel can be a spice, a vegetable and a herb? Or that garlic could taste so good if it was roasted? The Spice Trade opened up our senses to a cornucopia of flavours, colours and even textures.

Cinnamon seems to be the first example of a trade staple. Its trade peaked somewhere around 100 AD with an insatiable Roman demand. In fact it accounted for more than 50% of imports to the Mediterranean from Asia and East Africa. As I’ve said before the Arabs (due primarily to geography) controlled much of the Spice Trade. In order to justify their prices the would come up with clever myths making the spice all the more luxurious (think of it as a pre modern Nike ad). These myths also served to protect their trade from rival factions and protected their near monopoly.

Eventually the monopoly was upset (though not shattered until much later) by the fact that Rome realized that it could usurp the Arabs control by building their own ships and undertaking their own spice “missions.” This fact and the discovery of the ‘monsoon winds’ made an already flourishing trade in Rome expand even more as what had taken a long time before could now be accomplished in less than a year. Pliny estimated that prior to the discovery of the ‘monsoon winds’ that the trade imbalance was as much as, if not more than $100,000,000 a year. In today’s dollars that would be a ridiculous sum of money exponentially greater than that. Due to the discovery of those winds 5 pillars emerged as ‘luxuries’ in Roman society; Indian Pepper, Chinese Silk, African Ivory, German Amber and Asian Incense.

The importance of spices and the other luxuries is clearly understood when one remembers that when the Barbarians were at the gates (No not the Nabisco ones) in the 5th century AD they were demanding not only title and lands but also 3000 pounds of pepper. As the Barbarians were rushing toward the gates there was a rush out of Rome and other cities as the dwellers there realized that there was a greater threat to them personally living in a city than there would be if they were living away from it. Civilization itself became threatened by this fact, as cities became a natural magnet for invaders. Civilization depends on large urban centres and could not survive easily with a free for all return to the land.

As I touched on in the previous blog post, the rich in Rome started to feed differently than the poor. In fact in Rome the wealthy were now the proud owners and keepers of fish farms and aviaries which kept them fell fed and probably also gave rise to new methods of income as well.

These advances in food availability and supply led to the development of new menus not just for the rulers of countries, or city-states but also for the priesthood and the members of religion. From the fall of Rome until around the 12th century there is a large gap in our understanding and knowledge of food history.

For Monarchs as well as “Monks” there was a massive dependence on the “people.” In a Monarchs case they would travel from place to place collecting tribute, as was their “birth” or “conquest” right. For example an eighth century Monarch who stopped to rest in one of his villages was entitled to;

300 loaves
10 Sheep
10 Geese
20 Chickens
10 Cheeses
10 Measures of Honey (It is still unclear to me what a measure of honey is though I would suspect it was quite large)
5 Salmon
100 Eels.

As such you can imagine how a traveling Monarch stopping unannounced in a village might cause quite a hardship for his citizens. By contrast ‘Monks’ in this same period were living on approximately 1000 calories a day.

Around this same time there was a horrible spread of crop failures due to the spread of ergot. With this crop failure was a rise in tales about and in fact real truth behind massive cannibalism. This truth is probably what led to the development of both the Vampire and Werewolf myths of central Europe. I wonder what spices go well with the human heart.

Around the 15th Century the Mongol Hordes devastated the once Arab monopoly. This takeover sent the Spice trade into chaos. As a result of this chaos Europe began to realize that it could bypass (just as the Romans had several centuries before) the monopoly and travel to and return with spices at a greatly reduced rate. However the opposite was true in Italy where the great fortunes of Florence and Venice were built on trade (not to mention Rome) where with the European bypass spices lost their relatively low prices and became so great that a new food style was born in Italy; “Nuova Cucina.” Light spices and simple ingredients benchmarked this style. Something which still holds in regions of Italy today though the reasons have changed.

Next post I am going to speak about the full history of food and where we are today.

I am reminded of a quote from Jane Stanton Hitchcock; “The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination... you can make feast of straw.”

If you think about it it is so true. Be inspired and dream big.

A la prochaine

SDM