Spice: The History of a Temptation

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Summary: An aromatic feast
Review: I loved this book. Jack Turner's prose style is irresistible, and his subject endlessly fascinating: the central place occupied by spices, not just in the diet, but in many of the great set-pieces of European history. I have never read a book that caused me to rush to the kitchen, empty out the pepper grinder and figure out which peppercorns are real, and which are fakes introduced for color. (You can taste the difference.) Nor was I aware of the persistently strong associations between spices and corpses - extending far beyond fankincense and myrrh - or some of the more hilarious sources of erotic stimulation that evidently inspired spice-consumers in many cultures and eras. A brilliant debut, and a hugely satisfying read.

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Summary: The not so tempting history of spices
Review: Jack Turner's book has been showered with unusual advance praise ('a brilliant, original history of the spice trade'), but its content is of rather mixed quality. The Introduction alone contains numerous errors, beginning with a reference to cloves in Syria 3,700 years (briefly published 20 years ago, but never substantiated) and an incorrect description of a nutmeg (the author failed to notice that nutmeg is not 'surrounded' by the mace, but sits inside a shell). For all the hard work the author put into this, too often he falls for the spectacular and exaggerated in a 'sex-sells' history of spices. While it makes for entertaining reading, it cannot be relied on as a balanced or scholarly piece of work. In contrast, I would recommend Andrew Dalby's 'Dangerous Tastes - The history of spices' - maybe a trifle less thrilling, but written with far greater competence.


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Summary: A multi-faceted adventure story as much as a history
Review: Other histories of the spice trade have appeared over the decades, but Jack Turner's Spice: History Of A Temptation is more accessible to non-history buffs than most: it provide a very lively narrative told through the intimate human impulses that drove the search for spices, incorporating medicine, religion and magic in the process. History, myth, literature and archaeology alike creates the structure of the journey, turning Spice into a multi-faceted adventure story as much as a history. Recommended for both college-level collections and for public library browsers alike.


Rating:
Summary: A page-turner
Review: This is a marvellous book. Two parts cultural history, one part travelogue, and one part culinary guide -- stirred together gently. This is a very engaging chronicle of the history of spices, and the mercantile system that brought them to all corners of the world. The book is witty and informative. Turner does for spices what Mark Kurlanksy did for cod and salt.

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Summary: A Little Bit Of Everything.
Review: This is a nice, well written history of spices and their effects on humanity. Much of the book deals with the spice races of the 1400s and 1500s and the impact on the world and on Europe's rising power. Other sections deal with spices and their roles in history, cooking, romance, politics, religion, and war. The book is not arranged chronologically but instead in broad categories devoted to spices' various uses.

Turner is scholarly but also witty and informal in his writing. You will learn a lot and also have a lot of fun while reading his book.

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Summary: The History of Spice, and Spice in History
Review: Three thousand years after one of the greatest of Egypt's pharaohs, Ramses II, was embalmed and put into his tomb, he was discovered to have a couple of peppercorns up his nose. This was in some ways unsurprising. The Egyptians used all sorts of spices to preserve the body so that the soul might wander back into it. But regarded historically, this is an astonishing use of pepper; the peppercorns were not any African species, not anything Ramses's lands had grown. The only source at the time was the tropical south of India; there must have been a previously unsuspected direct or circuitous trade route between the regions. No details about the route can now be known, except that it was part of the lucrative spice trade that for centuries powered economies and exploration. In _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (Knopf), Jack Turner includes the story of the first known consumer of pepper along with hundreds of other facts as a way of looking at a part of human history that was vital and has been influential into our own times, but is now merely curious. Spices are high on the list of goods that have made the modern world.

Spices were costly and mysterious, and people thought that they came from Paradise itself, the place in the East from which Adam and Eve had been banished. It was to gain spices that Columbus sailed, and spices he did bring back, but they were disappointments; that did not stop the continued search for them, and the resultant expansion of the world. Turner shows that spices were not really used to help make old meat palatable; fresh meat was cheaper than spices. But they were used to improve wine, a use that became unnecessary after bottle and cork technology came in the sixteenth century. Though spices were not really responsible for warding off decomposition, they were thought vital for warding off disease. In medieval medical logic, sweet fragrances might drive off the bad vapors, and spices (most thought of as hot and dry) might drive off a cold (thought of as a disease of cold and wet). Millions of spam e-mails every day are sent to tell how to enlarge male sexual equipment; those who believe in such cures would do well to invest in the simpler, cheaper, and just as effective formulas given here from the chapter of the ancient treatise, _The Perfumed Garden_, "Prescriptions for Increasing the Dimension of Small Members and Making Them Splendid" The priapic value of spices is just one reason the church has had wildly ambivalent notions about them. There is scriptural documentation that the God of the Bible likes to be sent good smells, as have many gods before him, but Turner's quotations from theologians indignant over the eagerness of their parishioners (and, gasp, their clerics) to partake in spicy foods are among the most amusing parts of the book.

Ministers just don't care anymore about the theological implications of spicy food. The reduction of their interest in such things parallels the reduction in importance of spice as a focus of world economic effort. It became easier to import spices, and more importantly, it was possible to transplant them to places where it was easy to turn them into simple cash crops on farms. In medieval times, the rich showed off by giving feasts that had every course heavily spiced, but jewelry and houses (for instance) eventually filled the role of ostentatious consumption. When spices became cheap, it became a virtue to use just a little of them, and that to bring out inherent flavors in the main ingredients. When anyone could purchase them, spices lost not only economic cachet, but also the sort of mystical qualities that, say, Columbus sailed for. While it lasted, the fuss about spices made history and created our world as it is now; Turner's book is splendid at explaining what all the centuries of fuss were about.


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Summary: Important Explanation of the Rise and Fall of Spice Envy
Review: `Spice - The History of a Temptation' by historian Jack Turner is a work of cultural and culinary history which is `culinary' in much the same sense as the writings of M.F.K. Fisher are not about cooking, but about hunger or desire for food. History of food is not as useful to the average amateur cook as food science, but ignorance of food history can lead to misstatements about food as easily as ignorance of food science can lead to misstatements about how cooking works. One of my most fascinating observations in my reading of several books on Medieval and Renaissance cooking was the pervasive appearance of spices in recipes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. And, this prevalence was not only in the Mediterranean, but also as far north as England and Scandinavia. Conventional wisdom regarding modern cuisine says that the cookie spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger) are common in savory dishes of the southernmost reaches of Europe such as Sicily, Crete, and Greece plus the great Renaissance trading ports such as Venice. Yet, here we have French kings and nobles in Paris using as much of these spices as the merchant kings of Venice and Genoa.

Our author and scholar answers this question and a lot more in this delightfully written and thoroughly researched book. Mr. Turner's writing may not be up to the level of M.F.K. Fisher, but it is every bit as good as the quality of writing in the typical journalism in depth pieces which appear regularly in The New Yorker. We can thank the wisdom of the editors at Knopf for giving us an excellent work of popular history on a subject which turns up now and then on food shows such as `Molto Mario' and Alton Brown's `Good Eats'.

One piece of conventional wisdom that the author dispels is the claim that spices were used to mask the bad taste and odor of spoiling food. In fact, it is much more logical to believe that food preservation by drying and salting was far advanced by 1200 CE The problem was not with spoiled food as with dull, salty, dry food in the winter. And, this problem was primarily a problem of the rich. Before 1600, the diet of the wealthy landowner was based almost exclusively on meat, preferably game. Fruits were avoided except as themselves a type of spice, since they were thought to be the source of undesirable humors. Vegetables were avoided as being the food for the common folk. This happens to be an eminent confirmation of the description of modern European cuisine, especially Italian cuisine, which is heavily vegetarian, as the cuisine of poverty.

So, the oriental spices were commonly used widely throughout Europe to liven food. And, my reading of aforementioned Medieval and Renaissance cookbooks with recipes from England and France confirms that these spices were used in virtually every dish. While much of the use was done to enliven salty, dry meats, an equal attraction of these spices, including pepper and citrus fruits was simply because they were rare and expensive. This situation is almost identical to the great interest in tulips in the 17th and 18th centuries, when people would pay the price of a comfortable house simply to own a single unusual tulip bulb. And, spices were expensive because they were almost all available from a very few south Asian islands, appropriately named the `Spice Islands'. And, as we all know, this was one of the major forces behind the Age of Discovery which opened with the voyages of Italian Christopher Columbus to the West and Portuguese Vasco da Gama to the South and East. Turner covers the relative success of these two explorers in some detail, but this book is about the spices, not about the explorers.

While my interest is primarily culinary, the book devotes two sizable chapters to spices used as perfumes and medicines as, for example, aphrodisiacs, and spices used as aids to spiritual rituals, as spices in incense censors. Both of these chapters maintain the high level of scholarship and readability. The author also covers in detail the roles of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English in the struggle to control the spice trade. That the Dutch won this explains the tact that much of Indonesia was once a Dutch colony.

So, if, as the author thoroughly explains, spices have been transplanted around the world and are now much cheaper than they once were, why are they not even more commonly used than they were 500 years ago? Two reasons for the drop in spice interest are evident in their original attraction. If spices are much less rare, they are less interesting as a medium of conspicuous consumption. This interest, along with the interests of merchants, moved on to gold, jewels, furs, tea, and coffee. Also, the rise of better methods of food preservation lowered the need for spices to perk up dull meats. This was joined by a rising interest in the nobility for vegetables in their diets, prompted by Renaissance cooking writers (see `The Art of Cooking' by Martino of Como). But, the most interesting reason for the disappearance of the infatuation in the rich with Asian spices was the arrival of foods from the New World, most especially coffee, chocolate, tobacco, and the capsicum peppers or chiles. I was immensely pleased by the author's statement that the strength of heat from these little New World lovelies simply blew Asian black, white, and green peppers clear out of the water. Their cultivation spread so fast that some Europeans even thought they originated in Asia, since they grew so well in any reasonably hospitable climate.

If you are keen on having a good understanding of culinary history, you must read this book. If you just happen to like history, you will enjoy every page and wish there were more. I look forward to scholar Turner's next book!