The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

279 Pages·2008·3.51 MB·English

by  Michael Krondl

Contents
Title Page
Preface
•
First Taste: St. Albans
PART 1
Venice
PART 2
Lisbon
PART 3
Amsterdam
Epilogue: Baltimore and Calicut
•
List of Illustrations and Maps
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Michael Krondl
Advance Praise for The Taste of Conquest
Copyright
Preface
Writing this book has been a great adventure! I’ve gotten to eat in the homes of
Indian pepper growers and Venetian blue bloods. I’ve met Dutch entrepreneurs
and Portuguese sailors. I now know the difference between a triangular sail and a
square one, and I can explain how ginger is harvested and cleaned because I’ve
seen it done. What could be more fun than studying food?
Maybe that’s why the study of the history of eating has been beneath the
dignity of serious scholars for so long and why they never bothered to check
their facts when they claimed that the medieval gentry ate food drowning in
tsunamis of spice. Grudgingly, academia now accepts the study of culinary
history into its ranks. But the subject is still new, and enormous work has yet to
be done. Nevertheless, data are slowly accumulating that will eventually give us
a more complete picture of what people used to eat. And then maybe we’ll really
understand why spices, for example, were as much an integral part of the
European diet in the Renaissance as they are today in Morocco or India. And
then maybe we can truly understand Europeans’ taste for conquest.
I am not a specialist, which, because of the nature of this book, may have been
an advantage. It has meant, however, that I have had to substitute breadth for
depth. In certain cases, I have had to make deductions where the evidence is just
too scanty for solid proof and to depend on the work of others. On the occasions
when I have found that research to be self-evidently too shaky to stand, I’ve had
to dig under the foundations. Given how often the construction proved faulty, I
wonder how many authors I have taken on faith are just plain wrong. Which is
not to say that I can blame others for my mistakes. I have surely made plenty of
errors on my own. I hope and trust that others will come to correct them.
As with any project of this size, numerous people have given me assistance
and offered invaluable suggestions. Many have extended their hospitality on
little more than good faith. Others have held me back as I was about to place my
foot firmly in my mouth—though probably not often enough.
I’d like to begin by thanking my editors, Susanna Porter and Dana Isaacson,
for all their valuable suggestions. In addition, I am indebted to Elisabeth
Dyssegaard, who originally championed the book at Random House and without
whom it might never have taken flight. My agents, Jane Dystel and Miriam
Goderich, have been fantastic throughout, going way beyond their job
description at every stage of the project.
Then there are the dozens of people who helped along the way. In Venice,
there is Luca Colferai, who keeps amazing me by his boundless generosity. But
he was not alone. I am also grateful to Jurubeba Zancopè, Sergio Fragiacomo,
Dr. Marcello Brusegan, and Antonio Barzaghi.
The Portuguese, however, were not to be outdone. I don’t know what I would
have done without Mónica Bello, whose journalistic skills and friendship were a
godsend. I also want to thank Alexandra Baltazar, Bruno Gonçalves Neves,
Hernâni Amaral Xavier, Isabel Cruz Almeida, José Eduardo Mendes Ferrão,
José Marques da Cruz, and Rui Lis. Though he is not in Lisbon, my visit to
Portugal would have been a pathetic failure without Filipe Castro, the naval
archaeologist who opened up his personal Rolodex and thereby many doors in
Portugal’s capital.
When it comes to Holland, Peter Rose acted as my academic fairy godmother,
fulfilling every obscure inquiry and keeping me on the straight and narrow. In
the Netherlands itself, Cees Bakker, Christianne Muusers, and Anneke van
Otterloo were all generous with their time and expertise. I greatly appreciate the
time Frank Lavooij took out of his busy schedule, to say nothing of our lunch
together.
In India, too, people’s generosity was unbounded. In Cochin, C. J. Jose and
his staff at the Spices Board were terrifically helpful, as were Heman K.
Kuruwa, Jacob Mathew, K. J. Samson, Nimmy and Paul Variamparambil, and
Ramkumar Menon. Thomas Thumpassery was especially kind to open up his
home to me and show me the ways of the pepper grower. I am also grateful to V.
A. Parthasarathy and his eminent staff at the Indian Institute of Spices Research
for allowing me a glimpse of their inner sanctum. In Baltimore, James Lynn did
me a similar favor at McCormick headquarters.
A partial list of others who helped by word or deed would have to include
Amanda J. Hirschhorn, Ammini Ramachandran, David Leite, Gopalan
Balagopal, Kenneth Albala, and Paul W. Bosland.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and daughter for putting up with my
extended absences and weeks of monomania.
First Taste
•
ST. ALBANS
THE SULTAN AND THE ORGY
In my mind, flavor, smell, and memory are intertwined. To really understand a
distant time and place, you should be able to sample its antique flavors, sniff the
ancient air, and take part in its archaic obsessions. But how can you taste the
food of a feudal lord? Where do you meet a medieval ghost?
I came across a likely spot on a cobbled lane in the old English pilgrimage
town of St. Albans. The Sultan restaurant is located here in the lee of a great
Norman cathedral in a house that seems to stagger more than stand on the little
medieval street. I had made my pilgrimage to St. Albans to track down the
remains of a famous medieval travel writer—more on him later—but before
searching for phantoms, I was in desperate need of lunch. To get to the Sultan’s
dining room, you have to climb a set of steep and wobbly stairs to the second
story, where the sagging, timbered attic has been fitted with tables, each
separated from the next by perilously low rafters. The space cries out for blond,
buxom wenches bearing flagons of ale and vast platters overflowing with great
haunches of wild beasts showered with cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and cloves.
And indeed, the kitchen door exudes sweet and fiery spice. But the waiter is
skinny, male, and decidedly not of Norman stock, and if that weren’t enough of a
clue, the Indian hip hop on the sound system and Mogul prints on the walls will
quickly disabuse you of any illusions of stepping into Merrie Olde England.
The Sultan specializes in Balti cooking, a type of South Asian cuisine that
swept Britain by storm some years back. The style originates in Baltistan, a
place once identified with Shangri-La but now more likely to make headlines for
its sectarian bloodshed. The mountainous territory stands astride a tributary of
the Silk Road once used to bring spices from South India to China, Persia, and
the Mediterranean. Accordingly, as is only appropriate for such a mythical land,
Balti food is profoundly spicy. But is it as spicy as the food of Europe’s Middle
Ages, I wonder?
I order gosht chilli masala, a lamb stew pungent with hot Kashmiri pepper.
The stainless steel tray of meat looks quite innocent, and the first taste is gentle
enough. It begins with sweet notes of coriander, cardamom, and cinnamon. Then
the red peppers roar in. Chilies, both fresh and dry, are blended to such
incendiary effect that the occasional black peppercorn comes along as a mild
respite. I gulp down my wine and pile more stew onto the flatbread.
Take away the chilies (unknown in Europe until Columbus returned from his
misdirected search for the pepper isles), and I bet this is food that any self-
respecting knight in armor would recognize.
While most historians agree that the Middle Ages loved its food spicy, they
differ on just how spicy. The problem is that the recipes of the time are
frustratingly imprecise. Typical instructions call for sprinkling with “fine
spices,” or as one early Flemish cookbook instructs in a recipe for rabbit sauce,
“Take grains of paradise, ginger [and] cinnamon ground together and sugar with
saffron mixed…and add thereto a little cumin.” It is assumed the cook already
knows what he is doing. Nevertheless, other sources do give more specific
quantities and scattered descriptions of feasts where seemingly enormous
amounts of spices were supposedly consumed in a single meal. The great French
historian Fernand Braudel wrote of what, to his Gallic sensibility, was a “spice
orgy.” Some have recoiled in horror at medieval recipes that include handfuls of
cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. (Today’s writers warn that an ounce of cloves
suffices for the preparation of an efficient anesthetic and that too much nutmeg
can be poisonous.) Others just can’t imagine that anyone could eat such highly
seasoned cuisine. According to the Italian culinary historian Massimo
Montanari, “These levels of consumption are hard to conceive of, and belong
instead to the realm of desire and imagination.”
I’d love to invite these academics to the Sultan restaurant. Perhaps then they
would understand how perfectly credible is the medieval account that records the
use of a seemingly spectacular two pounds of spices at a single bash. The figure
comes from a manuscript called the Ménagier de Paris penned by an affluent,
bourgeois functionary for his young wife in the late thirteen hundreds and
includes all sorts of advice, including just what you needed to buy to throw a
party. As an example, the writer describes an all-day wedding feast consisting of
dinner and supper for forty and twenty guests, respectively, as well as some half
dozen servants. The shopping list does indeed include a pound of ginger and a
half pound of cinnamon as well as smaller quantities of long pepper, galingale,
mace, cloves, melegueta, and saffron. But it also calls for twenty capons, twenty
ducklings, fifty chickens, and fifty rabbits as well as venison, beef, mutton, veal,
pork, and goat—more than six hundred pounds of meat in all! What’s
extraordinary about this meal is not the quantity of spice—at most, about a half
teaspoon of mostly sweet spices for each pound of meat—but the extravagance
of the entire event. If this is an orgy of food, the spices would hardly qualify as
more than a flirtation.
Still, even that half teaspoon of spice would be unusual in contemporary
French or Italian cooking, though it would scarcely merit mentioning at an
Indian restaurant. To make the Balti gosht, you use way more seasoning, about a