Near a Thousand Tables (32 page)

Poland, France and parts of the Baltic had extensive salt deposits, on which the Dutch industries had traditionally drawn, but these were getting expensive and supply was unreliable in time of war. The most coveted supplies were controlled by the Spanish monarchy, in Portugal and the Caribbean, where salt said to be particularly suited to herring was produced. It was also cheap. Dependence on Spanish salt was one reason why the Dutch made peace with Spain in 1609. It
was want of salt that caused some Dutchmen to imperil that peace by trying to seize Caribbean salt for themselves. While the peace lasted, the salt trade with Portugal rivaled the traditional Dutch North Sea and Baltic trades. Andres Lopes Pinto of Lisbon freighted two hundred Dutch ships to carry Portuguese salt between 1615 and 1618. The quest for salt was a principal reason for the establishment of the Dutch West India Company in 1621, when the peace with Spain finally broke down, and the company's claim to a salt monopoly was one of the main causes of the ensuing dissension in the republic. In January 1622, twenty-seven ships from Hoorn and Enkhuizen—two of the most prominent herring industry centers—landed a large force at the rich Venezuelan salt pans of Punta de Araya, with the aim of seizing them and turning them into a Dutch imperial outpost; but like subsequent expeditions, they were bloodily beaten back.

In the late 1620s, the beleaguered Dutch food industry was saved by the exploitation of new salt pans at Tortuga, where Spanish rule had never been firmly established. In 1632, however, the Spaniards flooded the pans and over the following few years seized or destroyed all the Dutch garrisons in salt-producing areas of the Caribbean. The Dutch herring fleet was nearly wrecked by the ensuing crisis. The catch reported in the town of Schiedam fell by a third in the 1620s, and another third in the 1630s. The value of herring exports collapsed despite higher prices. Dutch customers for salt had to rely on licenses granted from Spain, where—fortunately for the Dutch—the costs of the war were also grievously felt and where the monarchy was obliged to get money from every possible source. It was beginning to look as though the Dutch would have to abandon the war when, in 1640, they were rescued by a new crisis within the Spanish monarchy: the revolt of the Portuguese, who elected a king from their own aristocracy and abjured allegiance to the king of Spain. By allying with the Portuguese rebels, the Dutch were able to recover control of trade in Portuguese salt, which they had been in danger of losing altogether to German competitors. In return, they supplied arms and provisions to the rebel armies in a system of exchange masterminded by David Curiel, a Jewish
agent for Portugal in Amsterdam
. By 1648, hostilities with Spain were over: the Dutch position was recognized in Madrid as unassailable. But salt did not cease to determine the pattern of diplomacy: the Dutch remained interested in getting a share of Caribbean salt and the long, slow, ultimately successful effort to effect a rapprochement between Spain and Holland, between 1648 and 1677, would have been unthinkable
without this inducement
.

By comparison with the high-bulk, high-value, vital trade in salt, a luxury commerce such as that in spices ought to be less important. But pepper, which accounted for about 70 percent of the world's spice trade in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, was close to being a vital product, for the menus of the world's elites demanded it. The other main constituents of the trade—cinnamon, mace and nutmeg—were exchanged in relatively small quantities but commanded such high profit margins for the merchants who shipped them that they acquired a disproportionate importance in the marketplace. Salt cannot be said to have changed cooking cultures: its effect is to enhance flavor, not subvert the integrity of traditional cuisines; spices, however, contributed to the creation of new food cultures in the areas that received them by way of trade. Moreover, the history of the spice trade relates fundamentally to the biggest problem in global history: that of the nature and shift of the balance of wealth and power between the West and the Orient—the rival civilizations at opposite ends of Eurasia.

The earliest documented episodes precede that period by thousands of years. Cinnamon and its inferior cousin, cassia, were among the products shipped to Mesopotamia along the Persian Gulf from the Arab kingdoms of Dilmun and Magan, the exact whereabouts of which are still not known but which probably corresponded to Bahrain and perhaps Yemen, Similar exchanges belong to the context of ancient Egyptian trade with the mysterious land of Punt—an exchange of staples for luxury aromatics and flavorings. We do not know where Punt was, but the route involved a long voyage down the Red Sea. Any Red Sea voyage under sail tends to be long and hazardous because of the torturous sailing conditions; to judge from the plain and obvious meaning of the most detailed text—wall paintings in a temple endowed by Queen Hatshepsut, probably in the thirteenth century
B.C.—
Punt was a tropical or semitropical destination, near the sea, and had a recognizably African culture. Although scholars have never been able to agree on a single place of origin for all the products of Punt, Somalia makes a close match and allowance must be made for changes in the range of available biota over nearly three and a half millennia. We think of Somalia today as one of the most blighted and underprivileged places in the world. To the ancient Egyptians, it was a magnet for adventure and a spring of riches. The products were small objects of desire; but the Egyptians had to send five ships to get them because the products offered in return were of small unit value and great bulk. Whereas Punt specialized in precious luxuries, Egypt was a mighty food producer, with an economy single-mindedly geared to massive, intensive agriculture. The mission to Punt was more than a cultural encounter: it was a meeting of contrasting ecologies and an occasion of exchange between them.

Unless the Egyptian text is self-serving hyperbole—as it may well be—the people of Punt were duly astonished at the explorers' arrival. “How have you reached this land unknown to the men of Egypt?” they are made to ask, with
hands uplifted in surprise. “Have you descended hither by the paths of the sky or”—they added, as if it were equally improbable—“have you sailed the sea?” Columbus claimed that the islanders who greeted him at the end of his first transatlantic crossing used similar words, with a similar gesture. It later became a topos of travel literature, designed to show explorers' hosts as technically inferior and
easily gulled
. The Egyptian artists caricatured the people of Punt with other signs of savagery and simplicity: they made the king grotesquely obese, the aquiline courtiers were given pendulous lips. The exchange of gifts was said to be very much in favor of the sagacious Egyptians, who were reckoning the goods at their own valuations: from the point of view of the negotiators from Punt, the transaction may have been perfectly satisfactory. In any case, the treasures of Punt were of a different order of splendor from anything the Egyptians had to offer in return. Punt possessed “all marvels,” while Egypt offered “all good things.” Punt's principal products were the incense trees that yielded myrrh for rites of worship and death; these are clearly depicted in the wall paintings in Hatshepsut's temple. The gold of Punt was measured out with bull-shaped weights, and the live incense trees were potted and carried aboard the Egyptian vessels. The Egyptians paid for them with “bread, beer, wine,
meat, fruits
.” There was, however, no clear line between sacrifice and cookery or between aromatics and spices at the Egyptian court: pharaonic food was divine.

The Arabian and African spice trades of the Sumerians and Egyptians ultimately reached Greece and Rome. Yemen was regarded as a land “where men burn cassia and cinnamon for their everyday needs.” The earliest surviving report of a Greek explorer of the Arabian seas raved about the fragrance exuded by the coast of southwest Arabia:

It is not the sort of pleasure that is derived from spices that have been stored and become stale nor that produced by a plant separated from the stem which bore and nourished it, but that of one blooming at its divine peak and giving off from its own natural sources a wondrous scent so that many come to forget human blessings and think that they have tasted ambrosia, seeking a name for the experience that matches its
extraordinary character
.

The obviously romantic and mythical elements in this sort of rhapsodizing do not suggest firsthand acquaintance; and it may be that some of the spices handled by Arab middlemen—the Sabaeans, Gerrhaeans and Minaeans of Greek texts—deluded their customers about the provenance of their wares. The plant we now call cinnamon, for instance, is not known to have grown in Arabia. As ancient
gazetteers “of the Erythraean Sea” extended their range to embrace much of the western Indian Ocean, the name came to be reserved for a product Arabs imported from
India and Ceylon
.

These broadened contacts are reflected in the exoticism of Roman recipes. Of the sixty condiments recommended in the recipes of Apicius, only ten came from
outside the empire
. But some of them—especially Indian ginger, cardamom and pepper, which were heavily used in the Apician tradition—represented the remotest reaches of the spice trade. One of Pliny's objections to spice-rich food was that it enriched the Indian economy and impoverished the Roman. “They arrive with gold and depart with pepper,” as a Tamil
poet put it
. The mystery of the spice market was deepened, and the value of its products increased, by the fact that production was a highly specialized and regional business. Cassia, perhaps, was available from native sources in Arabia in antiquity, but in the Middle Ages true cinnamon became a Ceylonese near monopoly. For pepper, merchants went to the Malabar coast of India. Nutmeg, mace and cloves were produced in only a few places in the Indian Ocean and what is now Indonesia—above all, in the twin “Spice Islands” of Ternate and Tidore. The vast bulk of the products of all these lands was exported to China, where the market was biggest and the economy richest. Marco Polo reckoned one thousand pounds of pepper a day entered Hangchow in his time. But if the European market was of small importance to the producers, it mattered greatly to the Western merchants who tried to take part in it.

The idea that the demand for spices was the result of the need to disguise tainted meat and fish is one of the great myths of the history of food. It is an offshoot of the myth of the progress—the assumption that people in earlier times were less competent, or less intelligent, or less capable of providing for their needs than we are today. It is more likely that fresh foods in the Middle Ages were fresher than today, because locally produced, and that preserved foods were just as well preserved in their different ways—by salting, pickling, desiccating and conserving—than ours are in the age of canning, refrigeration and freeze-drying (a technique which, by the way, was known in antiquity and developed to a high degree by Andean potato growers in what we think of as the Middle Ages). Both fresh and preserved foods were probably healthier in those days because they were not grown with chemical fertilizers. In any event, the role of spices in cooking was determined by taste and culture. Spice-rich cuisine was expensive and, therefore, socially differentiating (see above, p. 120). For those who could afford it, this made it an ineluctable luxury. It was liked because it was a defining characteristic of the era's model haute cuisine, imitated from the Arabs (above, p. 119).

The nature of the European love of spices—rhapsodical, romantic, enlivened by imagination—is captured by the story told by Joinville, Louis IX's biographer, of the fishermen of the Nile, whose nets filled with ginger, rhubarb and cinnamon dropped from the trees of the earthly paradise. In the most successful recipe book of the era, the Menagier de Paris advised cooks to add spices to their dishes at the last possible moment so that none of the flavor was impaired by heat. The profits that beckoned anyone ingenious or determined enough to buy spices at or near source inspired heroic efforts by medieval merchants to penetrate the Indian Ocean. The routes all involved hazardous encounters with potentially hostile Muslim middlemen: you might try to cross Turkey or Syria to the Persian Gulf or, more usually, attempt to get a passport from authorities in Egypt to ascend the Nile and transfer, via desert caravan, to the Red Sea at Massaweh or Zeila. Not surprisingly, few of these attempts succeeded and the merchants who did manage to effect them successfully became part of the existing trading networks of the Indian Ocean. Before the 1490s, no one in the Middle Ages succeeded in opening direct access from the European market to the Eastern sources of supply.

The great change which converted the world of the traditional Eastern spice monopolies into a new world—a global system in which Western powers controlled the trade and, to a great extent, the production of spices—happened in three stages: first, the westward transfer of the world's main centers of sugar production, which started in the late Middle Ages; then, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the development of new trade routes to which Western merchants had privileged access; finally, from the seventeenth century onward, the progressive takeover of control of production by Western powers, deploying violent methods.

The switch started with sugar, because, uniquely among the exotic condiments favored by palates in Latin Christendom, this sweetener could be grown in the Mediterranean with relative ease. Sugar is not normally classified as a spice today; it is, at best, an anomalous spice, since it has little fragrance; but, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, it was an exotic condiment which could only be obtained at great cost by way of trade. It proved, however, technically possible for merchants to exploit sugar in a new way, eluding the expensive end-purchaser role to which they were accustomed in the Oriental spice trade by growing it themselves. This was the basis of the Venetian experiments in sugar production in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century and of the Venetian Cornaro family's vast sugar operation in fourteenth-century Cyprus, The first Genoese-owned sugar estates on a commercially influential scale seem to have been in Sicily, from where, in the
fifteenth century
, the crop was taken first to the Algarve, then to the newly colonized
archipelagos of the eastern Atlantic, where (in Madeira, the western Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands and those of the Gulf of Guinea) it became the basis of the islands' economy by the end of the fifteenth century.