At Home - Bill Bryson [93]
People have fought wars over it and been sold into slavery for it. So salt has caused some suffering in its time. But that is nothing compared with the hardship and bloodshed and murderous avarice associated with a range of tiny foodstuffs that we don’t need at all and could do perfectly well without. I refer to salt’s complements in the condiment world: the spices. Nobody would die without spices, but plenty have died for them.
A very big part of the history of the modern world is the history of spices, and the story starts with an unprepossessing vine that once grew only on the Malabar coast of southwestern India. The vine is called Piper nigrum. If presented with it in its natural state, you would almost certainly struggle to guess its importance, but it is the source of all three “true” peppers—black, white, and green. The little round, hard peppercorns that we pour into our household pepper mills are actually the vine’s tiny fruit, dried to pack a gritty kick.* The difference between the varieties is simply a function of when they are picked and how they are processed.
Pepper has been appreciated since time immemorial in its native territory, but it was the Romans who made it an international commodity. Romans loved pepper. They even peppered their desserts. Their attachment to it kept the price high and gave it a lasting value. Spice traders from the distant East couldn’t believe their luck. “They arrive with gold and depart with pepper,” one Tamil trader remarked in wonder. When the Goths threatened to sack Rome in 408, the Romans bought them off with a tribute that included three thousand pounds of pepper. For his wedding meal in 1468, Duke Karl of Bourgogne ordered 380 pounds of black pepper—far more than even the largest wedding party could eat—and displayed it conspicuously so that people could see how fabulously wealthy he was.
Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask. So when people had spices they used them carefully and sparingly, and not as a sort of flavorsome cover-up.
Pepper accounted for some 70 percent of the spice trade by bulk, but other commodities from farther afield—nutmeg and mace, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and turmeric, as well as several largely forgotten exotics such as calamus, asafoetida, ajowan, galangal, and zedoary—began to find their way to Europe, and these became even more valuable. For centuries spices were not just the world’s most valued foodstuffs, they were the most treasured commodities of any type. The Spice Islands, hidden away in the Far East, remained so desirable and prestigious and exotic that when James I gained possession of two small islets, it was such a coup that for a time he was pleased to style himself “King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon.”
Nutmeg and mace were the most valuable because of their extreme rarity.* Both came from a tree, Myristica fragrans, which was found on the lower slopes of just nine small volcanic islands rising sheer from the Banda Sea, amid a mass of other islands—none with quite the right soils and microclimates to support the nutmeg tree—between Borneo and New Guinea in what is now Indonesia. Cloves, the dried flowerbuds of a type of myrtle tree, grew on six similarly selective islands some two hundred miles to the north in the same chain, known to geography as the Moluccas but to history as the Spice Islands. Just to put this in perspective, the Indonesian archipelago consists of sixteen thousand islands scattered over 735,000 square miles of sea, so it is little wonder that the locations of fifteen of them remained a mystery to Europeans for so long.
All of these spices reached Europe through a complicated network of traders, each of whom naturally took a cut. By the time they reached European markets, nutmeg and mace