It's a spicy world
New book shows how matters of taste affected history
By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- And to think, they're just parts of plants, their oils, their chemicals. Nothing more than that.
"Chemically, the qualities that make a spice a spice are its rare essential oils and oleoresins, highly volatile compounds that impart to the spices their flavor, aroma, and preservative properties," writes Jack Turner in "Spice: The History of a Temptation" (Knopf). "Briefly, the chemistry of spices ... is, in evolutionary terms, what quills are to the porcupine or the shell to the tortoise."
But the lengths to which people have gone to obtain these plant defense systems -- or used them in everyday life -- has had a profound effect on history. Or, as Turner notes, perhaps history has had a profound effect on our use of spices, which makes it all a big circle anyway.
"I am less concerned with how spices shaped history than with how the world has changed around them," he writes. "In focusing on the appetite that the spice trade fed, this is not so much a study of the trade as a look at the reasons why it existed."
"Spice" may seem a somewhat odd commingling of histories -- political, economic, culinary, even religious -- from literally all over the planet. But that's also Turner's point, he says in an online interview from China (where he's at work on a film about technology): you can't tell the story of spices -- and their influence on humanity -- in a straight line.
"I have always felt that history, and especially cultural history, is best when it takes the broad view," Turner says. "In the case of spices, much of the fascination of the subject lies precisely in its intoxicating variety; I felt that to do it justice the writing had to be anything but narrowly focused, dry and dusty itself. I was determined to put some of that variety into my writing."
Highly prized
One of the upshots of Turner's undertaking is how it pushes the known temporal boundaries of spices' importance both backward in time as well as up to the present.
Spices have been found stored in a Syrian excavation that unearthed material almost 4,000 years old. The Egyptians placed spices in their pharaohs' tombs: Indeed, Turner notes that "the first known consumer of pepper on whom we can hang a name did not use his spice to season his dinner. ... He was, in fact, a corpse: the royal skin and bones of Ramses II, arguably the greatest of Egypt's pharaohs, up whose large, bent nose a couple of peppercorns were inserted not long after his death on July 12, 1224 B.C."
Spices have also played a role in sex games -- the Kama Sutra makes mention of placing pepper on a man's private parts, "in which event the lucky recipient of his spiced attentions will be entirely at the disposal of the owner" -- and, of course, in the kitchen. For these and many other reasons, spices were highly prized, and the pursuit of them led many an explorer to the far ends of the earth.
Much of this information came as a surprise to the author.
"The subject turned out to be much bigger and better (and harder to manage) than I ever imagined on setting out," he says. "Initially, my interest in spice was limited the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries. ... [But] as I looked further into these voyages the conventional explanation -- profit -- seemed to raise more questions than it answered. Why were spices valuable in the first place? To answer this question I found I had to look at far older and richer traditions, and so I found myself burrowing into areas of research I never would have imagined."
'Sublime in heaven ... sacrilegious on earth'
 Jack Turner |  |
Of particular interest is the curious dichotomy between allure and revulsion in which spices were held by the Catholic Church.
"Unlikely as it may sound, the Church has an ancient and deeply ambivalent attitude to spices," he says. "On the one hand, spices were seen as symbols of godliness and the divine. Time after time poets and priests invoke spices in a mystical sense; they were used as incense and anointing oils (in some places, they still are). ...
"But on the other hand, in the world of the here-and-now, the Church was adamantly opposed to their consumption, largely because spices represented something close to the pinnacle of luxury. They were regarded as decadent and, perhaps worst of all, powerfully aphrodisiac," he says.
"A medieval poet or priest saw no contradiction in praising spices as sublime while at the same time condemning their use. It was precisely because the divide between this world and the next was so extreme that what was sublime in heaven was considered sacrilegious on earth."
Which gave religious adherents something to shoot for. When you died -- assuming you'd lived a worthy life -- there were spices awaiting you in the Great Beyond.
That's true in other religions as well, Turner says. "A Muslim friend of mine who has just read the book points out to me that Islam retains a similar duality over paradise. In paradise the righteous are rewarded with precisely what is forbidden on earth."
In modern times, of course, spices are commonplace, though not always inexpensive. (Saffron, for example, can cost in the neighborhood of $15 an ounce -- but then it takes 75,000 blossoms to make a pound of the stuff.) And still science is finding new uses for them. Turner writes of a recent experiment which showed cinnamon stimulating sexual development in mice.
"Spice" offers a lot of information, but it's told with an economy of form that animates the material and its reader alike. The book is, in a word, spicy.
