The Taste of Conquest
Read The Taste of Conquest Online
Authors: Michael Krondl
Contents
•
Epilogue: Baltimore and Calicut
•
List of Illustrations and Maps
Advance Praise for The Taste of Conquest
Preface
Writing this book has been a great adventure! I’ve gotten to eat in the homes of Indian pepper growers and Venetian blue bloods. I’ve met Dutch entrepreneurs and Portuguese sailors. I now know the difference between a triangular sail and a square one, and I can explain how ginger is harvested and cleaned because I’ve seen it done. What could be more fun than studying food?
Maybe that’s why the study of the history of eating has been beneath the dignity of serious scholars for so long and why they never bothered to check their facts when they claimed that the medieval gentry ate food drowning in tsunamis of spice. Grudgingly, academia now accepts the study of culinary history into its ranks. But the subject is still new, and enormous work has yet to be done. Nevertheless, data are slowly accumulating that will eventually give us a more complete picture of what people used to eat. And then maybe we’ll really understand why spices, for example, were as much an integral part of the European diet in the Renaissance as they are today in Morocco or India. And then maybe we can truly understand Europeans’ taste for conquest.
I am not a specialist, which, because of the nature of this book, may have been an advantage. It has meant, however, that I have had to substitute breadth for depth. In certain cases, I have had to make deductions where the evidence is just too scanty for solid proof and to depend on the work of others. On the occasions when I have found that research to be self-evidently too shaky to stand, I’ve had to dig under the foundations. Given how often the construction proved faulty, I wonder how many authors I have taken on faith are just plain wrong. Which is not to say that I can blame others for my mistakes. I have surely made plenty of errors on my own. I hope and trust that others will come to correct them.
As with any project of this size, numerous people have given me assistance and offered invaluable suggestions. Many have extended their hospitality on little more than good faith. Others have held me back as I was about to place my foot firmly in my mouth—though probably not often enough.
I’d like to begin by thanking my editors, Susanna Porter and Dana Isaacson, for all their valuable suggestions. In addition, I am indebted to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who originally championed the book at Random House and without whom it might never have taken flight. My agents, Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich, have been fantastic throughout, going way beyond their job description at every stage of the project.
Then there are the dozens of people who helped along the way. In Venice, there is Luca Colferai, who keeps amazing me by his boundless generosity. But he was not alone. I am also grateful to Jurubeba Zancopè, Sergio Fragiacomo, Dr. Marcello Brusegan, and Antonio Barzaghi.
The Portuguese, however, were not to be outdone. I don’t know what I would have done without Mónica Bello, whose journalistic skills and friendship were a godsend. I also want to thank Alexandra Baltazar, Bruno Gonçalves Neves, Hernâni Amaral Xavier, Isabel Cruz Almeida, José Eduardo Mendes Ferrão, José Marques da Cruz, and Rui Lis. Though he is not in Lisbon, my visit to Portugal would have been a pathetic failure without Filipe Castro, the naval archaeologist who opened up his personal Rolodex and thereby many doors in Portugal’s capital.
When it comes to Holland, Peter Rose acted as my academic fairy godmother, fulfilling every obscure inquiry and keeping me on the straight and narrow. In the Netherlands itself, Cees Bakker, Christianne Muusers, and Anneke van Otterloo were all generous with their time and expertise. I greatly appreciate the time Frank Lavooij took out of his busy schedule, to say nothing of our lunch together.
In India, too, people’s generosity was unbounded. In Cochin, C. J. Jose and his staff at the Spices Board were terrifically helpful, as were Heman K. Kuruwa, Jacob Mathew, K. J. Samson, Nimmy and Paul Variamparambil, and Ramkumar Menon. Thomas Thumpassery was especially kind to open up his home to me and show me the ways of the pepper grower. I am also grateful to V. A. Parthasarathy and his eminent staff at the Indian Institute of Spices Research for allowing me a glimpse of their inner sanctum. In Baltimore, James Lynn did me a similar favor at McCormick headquarters.
A partial list of others who helped by word or deed would have to include Amanda J. Hirschhorn, Ammini Ramachandran, David Leite, Gopalan Balagopal, Kenneth Albala, and Paul W. Bosland.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and daughter for putting up with my extended absences and weeks of monomania.
First Taste
•
S
T
. A
LBANS
T
HE
S
ULTAN AND THE
O
RGY
In my mind, flavor, smell, and memory are intertwined. To really understand a distant time and place, you should be able to sample its antique flavors, sniff the ancient air, and take part in its archaic obsessions. But how can you taste the food of a feudal lord? Where do you meet a medieval ghost?
I came across a likely spot on a cobbled lane in the old English pilgrimage town of St. Albans. The Sultan restaurant is located here in the lee of a great Norman cathedral in a house that seems to stagger more than stand on the little medieval street. I had made my pilgrimage to St. Albans to track down the remains of a famous medieval travel writer—more on him later—but before searching for phantoms, I was in desperate need of lunch. To get to the Sultan’s dining room, you have to climb a set of steep and wobbly stairs to the second story, where the sagging, timbered attic has been fitted with tables, each separated from the next by perilously low rafters. The space cries out for blond, buxom wenches bearing flagons of ale and vast platters overflowing with great haunches of wild beasts showered with cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and cloves. And indeed, the kitchen door exudes sweet and fiery spice. But the waiter is skinny, male, and decidedly not of Norman stock, and if that weren’t enough of a clue, the Indian hip hop on the sound system and Mogul prints on the walls will quickly disabuse you of any illusions of stepping into Merrie Olde England.
The Sultan specializes in Balti cooking, a type of South Asian cuisine that swept Britain by storm some years back. The style originates in Baltistan, a place once identified with Shangri-La but now more likely to make headlines for its sectarian bloodshed. The mountainous territory stands astride a tributary of the Silk Road once used to bring spices from South India to China, Persia, and the Mediterranean. Accordingly, as is only appropriate for such a mythical land, Balti food is profoundly spicy. But is it as spicy as the food of Europe’s Middle Ages, I wonder?
I order
gosht chilli masala,
a lamb stew pungent with hot Kashmiri pepper. The stainless steel tray of meat looks quite innocent, and the first taste is gentle enough. It begins with sweet notes of coriander, cardamom, and cinnamon. Then the red peppers roar in. Chilies, both fresh and dry, are blended to such incendiary effect that the occasional black peppercorn comes along as a mild respite. I gulp down my wine and pile more stew onto the flatbread.
Take away the chilies (unknown in Europe until Columbus returned from his misdirected search for the pepper isles), and I bet this is food that any self-respecting knight in armor would recognize.
While most historians agree that the Middle Ages loved its food spicy, they differ on just how spicy. The problem is that the recipes of the time are frustratingly imprecise. Typical instructions call for sprinkling with “fine spices,” or as one early Flemish cookbook instructs in a recipe for rabbit sauce, “Take grains of paradise, ginger [and] cinnamon ground together and sugar with saffron mixed…and add thereto a little cumin.” It is assumed the cook already knows what he is doing. Nevertheless, other sources do give more specific quantities and scattered descriptions of feasts where seemingly enormous amounts of spices were supposedly consumed in a single meal. The great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote of what, to his Gallic sensibility, was a “spice orgy.” Some have recoiled in horror at medieval recipes that include handfuls of cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. (Today’s writers warn that an ounce of cloves suffices for the preparation of an efficient anesthetic and that too much nutmeg can be poisonous.) Others just can’t imagine that anyone could eat such highly seasoned cuisine. According to the Italian culinary historian Massimo Montanari, “These levels of consumption are hard to conceive of, and belong instead to the realm of desire and imagination.”
