William Woys Weaver
"Exploring the World of Spices," pp.22-23
The Saturday Evening Post
 
      Columbus set sail to seek the spices of the Orient--he found
instead a whole new world of seasonings.
      At first, Christopher Columbus was puzzled.  This was
clearly not Japan.  Nor were these people the gold-laden citizens
of the Seven Cities of Atlantis.  In fact, when they came down to
the beach, they were puffing on dead leaves.  The odd-looking
welcome meal they prepared seemed likewise to be smoking.  There
was something in it called aji and it made Columbus and his men
feel extremely hot.  With smoke in their nostrils and fire in
their bellies, no wonder these strange people went about stark
naked.  Was this Eden, or some offshore island of the fabled
Cipangu?
      Columbus, obsessed by his "enterprise of the Indies" and his
goal of beating the Portuguese to the spice capitals of the
Orient, never realized that the fiery pods in that Arawak stew
would eventually alter the diet of all mankind.  Neither Columbus
nor his royal backers, least of all the gentle Arawak natives,
ever suspected that this modest New World banquet and the grand
quest for spices that led up to it would completely reset the
course of human history.
      Columbus would never have been there on that island in the
1490s had it not been for Bartholomeu Diaz, who in 1488 had
discovered that Africa had a point at the bottom and that it was
possible to sail around it.  That revelation set in motion a rage
of activity in which nearly every European nation engaged: the
gold rush for Asian spices.  To get to Asia, one needed maps, and
to get maps, one needed to explore, thus the spice race and
exploration went hand in hand.  The reason for all of this could
be calculated in royal ledger books: today in the Computer Age,
oil is the lifeblood of the world's economy; in the Age of
Columbus, that lifeblood was spices.
      Since Roman times, Alexandria, Egypt had been the great
spice emporium of the Western World.  Cloves and nutmeg from the
Molucca Islands, cubebs from Java and Panang, cinnamon from
Ceylon, peppercorns from Malabar were all gathered by Chinese
traders, exchanged for goods from the Indians, and then traded
further along in their westward journey to the Arabs.  Until late
in the Middle Ages, the Arabs held a virtual monopoly on this
spice exchange.
      This long and tangled trade route, with many middlemen and
markups along the way, ensured that the spices were extremely
expensive when they finally reached Europe.  Yet spices were
considered vital necessities in the practice of medicine, in
unguents and aphrodisiacs, in holy oils, and in the rituals and
magic rites of many religions.  There was also an appreciation of
the role spices could play in food preservation, in retarding
rancidity or the deterioration through oxidation, as, for exam-
ple, the use of peppercorns to entirely coat hams and brined
meats.  And for the rich, there was obvious status in flavoring
one's food with exotic tastes and textures, as in the use of
comfits or spices and seeds in cakes.  Consider, too, medieval
gingerbread cookies and their rich flavorings of ginger root,
cinnamon, clove, mace, and cardamom.  Or mincemeat pie, another
medieval spiced dish that is still with us today, thanks to its
long association with Christmas feasting.  In short, all sorts of
the body's demands, from health-giving elixirs to the simple
pleasures of eating were in some manner connected with spices.
      When the Byzantine Empire began to fade in the 10th century
as Europe's middleman with the Arab spice traders, Venice quickly
filled the vacuum.  By the middle of the 1400s, Venice controlled
all spice shipments out of Alexandria.
      When Spain and Portugal broke free of Moorish rule in the
1400s both kingdoms began looking for ways to breach the Venetian
grip on spices.  Europeans knew where the spices came from, and
if there were a way around Venice and around the Arabs, there
would be vast profits to be won; profits, as it later developed,
that would run as high as 700 percent or even 1200 percent.  Not
a bad risk.
      The opening of the New World brought with it an array of new
taste sensations: sassafras, which Sir Francis Drake introduced
to England in 1586; the tomato, which marries well with Old World
nutmeg; vanilla; pineapple; chocolate, discovered by Cortez in
Mexico in the 1520s; and, of course, the huge family of capsicum
peppers, which Columbus introduced to Europe and which have in
many cultures supplemented or even taken the place of black
pepper (piper nigrum).
      The cookery of colonial America was much spicier than that
of the Victorian Age.  In the 19th century, hot, spicy food came
to be equated with Third World shortcomings, lack of refinement,
racial inferiority, and even laziness.  Many faddist health
movements, like those connected with phrenology and homeopathy,
railed against spices as an inner road to moral and cultural
decay.  Today, we know that some spices, such as black pepper,
actually aid in digestion, and a century of white gravies and
overboiled vegetables has given American cooks a new reason to
rediscover and experiment with the zestiness of the past.
 
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