Near a Thousand Tables (37 page)

While maize and sweet potatoes conquered China, potatoes established a kind of mastery in Europe. Montignac has designated them “killers” because the genus they belong to also contains deadly nightshade; but, as noted above (see p. 100), if eaten in sufficient quantities, potatoes can supply all the nutrients man needs. For calorific value, they beat all other staples except rice. This was both their blessing and their curse: they could conquer hunger, but the temptation to rely on them exposed whole populations to the threat of famine in the event of crop failure. They were introduced first in the Basque country, then Ireland. Essayed in Belgium in the 1680s during Louis XIV's drive toward the “natural” frontiers of France, they worked their way eastward, supplanting rye as the basic food of a vast swath across the northern European plain to Russia. They were spread by war, for peasants, eluding requisition with the aid of a crop that could be left concealed in the ground, survived on potatoes when other food was in short supply. Eighteenth-century troubles sowed them in Germany and Poland and the Napoleonic Wars took them to Russia, where they conquered a territory Napoleon was unable to subjugate with the entire Grande Armée.

The range of the potato increased with every European war down to and including the Second World War. On its way, it was helped along by savants and monarchs, whose patronage helped dignify a despised vegetable. Count Rumford, as we have seen, fed it to Bavarian workhouse inmates, taking care to have it boiled to pulp in case they recognized and rejected it. Catherine the Great praised it. Marie Antoinette—usually unfairly cast as a promoter of cake for the masses—advertised its merits by wearing potato flowers in her dress. Did the potato “cause” the prodigious growth of Europe's population which began in the eighteenth century? The question is important, since, at its peak, Europe housed a fifth of the world's population, with obvious effects on the sustainability of European empire
building. The answer, however, is not easily determined. The rise of population may have caused the rise of the potato, rather than the other way around. Potatoes intruded slowly and patchily. Many potato-less areas experienced
population growth
. Still, the new tuber certainly fed some of the new people and helped sustain the industrializing urbanizing societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany and Russia, In Ireland its failure in 1845-46 killed a million people, released emigrant labor for the British and North American industrial revolutions and, in total effect, reduced the population of the island by nearly half (see below, p, 204). It can therefore be said to have helped to make possible the new means of production which gave the nineteenth-century West an advantage in competition with the rest of the world.

Without attaining the status of a staple, a world-pervading food of Brazilian provenance was the legume misnamed “peanut.” It is 30 percent carbohydrate and up to 50 percent fat and makes a protein- and iron-rich human food—indeed, with a higher proportion of protein by weight than any other crop. It is easy to harvest and fairly versatile in the kitchen. Yet, for elusive reasons, it has always remained marginal in food history. At one extreme, it is undervalued and fed to livestock: the renowned Virginia ham is produced from peanut-fattened pigs. At the other it is treated as a rare delicacy, as in China, Presumably, its route there was by Spanish galleons via the Philippines. It fascinated the Chinese because its subterranean fruit was “born from flowers fallen to the ground” and the seeds resembled silkworm cocoons. Peanuts were ideal for planting in the sandy loams south of the Yangtze and are nutritious enough to have become a staple: but perhaps because of their mysterious generation they remained, in China, a luxury of reputedly magical powers, greeted as “longevity nuts” at banquets in eighteenth-century Peking. Meanwhile, in most of the world they became something of a specialty dish, favored usually as a snack, garnish, confection or sauce. La Condamine carried pocketfuls around to nibble in Quito “asserting that they were the best treasure he had
seen in America
.” In Southeast Asia they achieved a
succès d'estime,
in combination with the piquancy of chili, as the basis of satay. Portuguese ships took them to India and Africa, where they are an important product today, providing most of the world's peanut oil. Half the U.S. crop goes into peanut butter—one of the few genuine survivals of pre-Columbian gastronomy to be widely appreciated in modern America.

Cane sugar is, perhaps, the first food to have conquered unaccustomed markets by the power of PR. It was the first of a series of “supply-side” phenomena in the globalizing
market of the late Middle Ages and early-modern periods: tropical products which were recommended by their availability and to which European tastebuds became enslaved. Coffee, tea and chocolate followed where sugar led; but it was bigger than all of them, partly because it was essential to their success: for, while none of the peoples who originally infused those beverages necessarily included sugar in their recipes, it was unusual for European samplers to accept them unsugared. Sugar was in the vanguard of the “hot drinks revolution” of the eighteenth century. It is now the world's biggest food product, beating even wheat.

Its own rise, however, was as a culinary additive, independent of the hot beverage triad. The context of the story of the sugaring of European cuisine belongs rather to the spice boom of Europe's late Middle Ages. At that time, as we have seen, sugar was an exotic condiment, properly classifiable with pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and mace: a flavor of the Orient which could transmute food and elevate it out of the ordinary. Transplanted to the New World it rapidly became the most important item of transoceanic trade. The first mill opened in Hispaniola in 1513. The Brazilian industry was launched by Portuguese enterprise in the 1530s. By the 1580s three effects were evident. First, Brazil had become the world's major producer and the economies of the sugar islands of the eastern Atlantic (above, p. 156) went into eclipse. Secondly, the competition for sugar-producing lands was becoming a major cause of imperial rivalry between European states. Finally, the need for labor in the sugar plantations and mills caused an explosion in the transatlantic slave trade. Yet the sugar trade was still to experience its greatest revolution, which would transform it into one of the world's most popular products: the popularization of the taste for hot sugar-sweetened beverages in Europe.

Coffee arrived in France in 1644 with sieur Jean de la Roque, who brought some to Marseilles on his return from a visit as ambassador to Constantinople, along with old porcelain cups of great beauty and small napkins of fine muslin, embroidered in gold, silver and silk. His habit of drinking it in his Turkish-style study was thought “a real curiosity.” It took “50 years to overcome all the obstacles” to coffee's general acceptance as a beverage, though the new habit found avantgarde patrons within a few years. In 1657 Jean de Thevenot noticed that Parisian aristocrats hired Moorish and
Italian coffee makers
. Armenian importers and street brewers popularized it. Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli made it the toast of his café, which had formerly specialized in cordials, like “sun dew”—fennel, anise, coriander, dill, caraway, in brandy—and “
perfect love liquor
.” It became the counteropiate of the Rococo West, the potential home-breaker satirized in Bach's Coffee Cantata. Once the popularity of the new beverage was established the next stage was transplantation to new lands where Europeans could control the supply.
The great coffee boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took it to Brazil, to the French islands of the Indian Ocean, and to Santo Domingo, which for a while, until the blacks rebelled and proclaimed the Republic of Haiti in 1802, was the most productive island in the world for coffee and sugar alike. The most enduringly successful of the new coffee lands was Java, where the Dutch introduced the plant in the 1690s, gradually expanded production during the eighteenth century and, in the nineteenth, fought wars to boost production on ever more marginal soils. Peasants were forced to grow unsuitable crops, of which coffee was the chief, in a vicious system. It was denounced in 1860 by Eduard Douwes Dekker, under his pseudonym, Multatuli, in the most famous of Dutch novels,
Max Havelaar, Or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company:

The government compels the husbandman to grow on his land what pleases it. It punishes him when he sells the crop so produced to anyone but it. And it fixes the price it pays him. The cost of transport to Europe, via a privileged trading company, is high. The money given to the Chiefs to encourage them swells the purchase price still further, and … since, after all, the entire business must yield a profit, this profit can be made in no other way than by paying the Javanese just enough to keep him from starving, which would decrease the producing power of the nation…. It is true that famine is often the outcome of these measures. But … merrily flutter the flags … on board the ships which are being laden with the harvests that make
Holland rich
!

Coffee can hardly be called a source of food. Whether chocolate could properly be so called was long a matter of dispute. Early doubts, among Westerners who tried it, are illustrated by a seventeenth-century controversy over its permissibility during fasts. In a work of 1648, which is usually credited with introducing England to the merits of chocolate, Thomas Gage reported the repercussions of this controversy in a remote diocese of New Spain, where the bishop had tried to prevent ladies from refreshing themselves with cupfuls during mass. When excommunication failed, he provoked a riot in the cathedral by ordering the priests to prevent chocolate from being served. When he died mysteriously rumor insisted that a cup of poisoned chocolate was responsible. “And it became afterwards a proverb in that country, ‘Beware the
chocolate of Chiapa!
'”

Though to Gage, who knew chocolate in its natural habitat, it seemed a good, cheap stimulant, he also conveyed its adaptability to a luxury market. He described concoctions mixed with cinnamon, cloves and almonds, which would appeal in Europe, as well as the stews of bitter chocolate and hot chilies which were traditional
indigenous recipes. The Lacandona tribe of the Chiapa forest still produce the foaming effect apparent in preconquest depictions by whipping the liquid with a
wooden stick
. The custom of sweetening it with sugar and vanilla, instead of drinking it bitter or adding the savory and spicy ingredients favored in preconquest recipes, helped the development of a European market, which, for most of the eighteenth century, was supplied chiefly from Venezuela. The elevated status of the beverage in eighteenth-century Europe surrounded the consumption of chocolate with rituals of social differentiation and images of wealth. In Barcelona's ceramics museum, painted tilework of the time in honor of the chocolate cult shows cups of the stuff being offered by bewigged gentlemen, on bended knee, to sumptuously attired ladies, beside the fountains of a pavilioned
hortus condusus.
It could change from a luxurious beverage to a concentrated source of energy for mass consumption in the West only by a process that would make it eatable as well as drinkable. This was not perfected until the mid-nineteenth century—an episode that belongs to the story of the industrialization of food processing, told in the next chapter. Meanwhile, the shift of the center of production began for reasons quite different from those that had spread coffee growing to new lands in the previous century. It was a fall in demand, as a result of competition from coffee, which led to the decline of the Venezuelan industry and the marketing of cheaper varieties grown in Ecuador. Chocolate is not easy to acclimatize in new environments: it has to be pollinated by midges and, like coffee, demands a hot but shady environment. The problem of finding a location where superior varieties could be cheaply cultivated was solved in 1824, at a time when the Spanish trade was disturbed by the independence struggles of the future South American republics. Portuguese speculators planted it in the former sugar islands of Sāo Tomé and Principe in the
Gulf of Guinea
. Eventually West Africa became the world's principal chocolate provider, especially after the Gold Coast began to be exploited to supply the greedy English market from the 1920s. Meanwhile, thanks to the expansion of supply, sugary tea, coffee and “cocoa” completed their descent from upper-class exclusivity to become proletarian hunger killers for the labor force of
the Industrial Revolution
.

The Pacific was the last frontier of the great ocean-borne exchange of foodstuffs. In 1774 a Spanish expedition tried to annex Tahiti. It failed, but left Spanish hogs behind, which first improved, then replaced, the native breed. By 1788, when Captain Bligh arrived on the island, the small, long-legged, long-snouted native pigs had disappeared. In consequence, Tahiti had an advantage in the pork trade which soon transformed the Pacific as a result of two developments: first Captain Cook's
perfection of a method of salting pork to keep it edible after a long sea voyage; secondly, the development of Australia as a penal colony. In 1792 George Vancouver shipped eighty live pigs from Tahiti to Sydney in an attempt to create a food source for the convicts; but it proved more economical for Australia to import pork ready salted than to breed pigs. In the first year of the trade, 1802-3, independent Sydney merchants—Australia's first bourgeoisie—handled 300,000 pounds of the meat. By the time the trade waned a quarter of a century later, ten times that amount had changed hands. The muskets that paid for the pork stimulated civil war and turned Tahiti
into a monarchy
.

Cook, who was responsible for so many more famous initiatives in Pacific history, was also the prophet of pigs and potatoes in New Zealand. His first efforts were resisted by the Maori, who preferred their own food. “All our endeavours for stocking this country with useful animals are likely to be frustrated by the very people we mean to serve.” But potatoes were being traded in the north by 1801 and pigs became a trading item by about 1815. Other attempted introductions, such as goats, garlic, cattle and cabbage, failed because they did not fit into traditional Maori agronomy, but potatoes were sufficiently like the kumara or sweet potatoes that had long been familiar on the islands and pigs could be grazed and culled. Cook's shipboard scientist, Johann Reinhold Forster, suffered for his efforts to introduce sheep and goats to the islands, especially when they were billeted in the cabin next to his in an effort to protect them from the weather: