The Taste of Conquest (24 page)

Opinions on the Lusitanian record when it comes to evangelization are sharply divided. (We’re talking about religion, after all.) Hernâni Xavier, for example, would point out that the missionaries sent by Lisbon were far less violent in imposing their religion in Asia than the Castilians were in the New World. In fact, official policy supposedly forbade forcible conversion, and the Portuguese methods did tend to be more subtle—if hardly less coercive—than was typical of the time. But perhaps more important, once Lisbon discovered that Eastern Christians were few and far between and Prester John had neither the means nor the desire to help conquer the infidel, the lure of India’s black gold shoved the proselytization effort to a sputtering back burner. The Christians just couldn’t keep up with the spices. A group of newly arrived clerics told the scandalized vicar of Malacca in 1514 “that the chief reason why they had come out to the East was to amass a fortune in
cruzados;
and one of them said that he would not be satisfied unless he had secured 5,000
cruzados
and many pearls and rubies within the space of three years.” Even if they were not all this greedy, the quality of the average clergyman did not improve until the arrival of the Jesuits in 1542.

Unlike the Spanish in America, where slaughtering the heathen simply facilitated the looting of temples, the Portuguese in India couldn’t be so cavalier. (Lieutenant Neves, who, like every Portuguese, will find any opportunity to put down the Spanish, adds the telling detail that the looting Castilians referred to their cargo as “treasure,” while Lisbon-bound pepper was always referred to as “merchandise.”) Unlike their Iberian neighbors, the Portuguese needed the Hindu and Muslim spice merchants alive to deliver the goods. Consequently, non-Christians in most Portuguese possessions were allowed to practice their religion more or less unhindered during the first thirty years after da Gama’s arrival. This, however, was to change as the winds of the Counter-Reformation propelled the foot soldiers of a newly proactive Rome to the eastern empire.

The Catholic Church in Europe had taken several decades to react to its Protestant critics, but by the mid-sixteenth century, a sweeping retrenchment was in full swing. The so-called Council of Trent, which met on and off throughout the middle years of the century, set a take-no-prisoners policy toward anyone who wavered from the rule book. Partly as a result of this uncompromising approach, Europe would be embroiled in a century of religious wars. In India, the new emphasis on toeing the Vatican’s line led to a much more aggressive policy of intolerance. In Goa, the Hindu temples that had previously been allowed to stand were burned to the ground. New, highly discriminatory laws were put in place, making the practice of religion and livelihood onerous for any non-Christian. Orphans were forcibly taken from their relatives and raised as Catholics. On alternate Sundays, Catholic enforcers rounded up Hindu families and corralled them in nearby churches, where they were subjected to interminable sermons. Non-Christians, arrested for breaching the religious laws, often sought to evade punishment by asking to be baptized. But, lest they go back on their word, the Jesuits “invited” the quaking Hindus to lunch. For a Brahman, to eat a meal prepared by untouchables was tantamount to being excommunicated from his religion. The practice is recounted in a letter to the queen in 1552, in which a crown official describes the Jesuits’ forcibly shaving their Hindu victims and compelling them to eat beef. Not that the correspondent found the practice itself particularly reprehensible; his complaint was that so many of the locals had fled due to this overzealous behavior that no one was left to work the fields! Obviously, not every Jesuit considered force-feeding heathens part of his job description, and, at least among the lower castes, many Indians came willingly to Christianity. They, after all, had nothing to lose by abandoning Hinduism with its discriminatory rules. What’s more, no matter how involuntary were the original converts, by the second and third generation, their descendants invariably turned into devout Catholics.

In Portugal, many Jews had also converted under duress, and there, too, most became sincere practicing Christians. Nevertheless, enough tried to hold on to the vestiges of Judaism that the Inquisition wouldn’t let them be. Much like the Brahmans forced to eat their sacred cows, the so-called New Christians were compelled to eat pork sausages to prove the authenticity of their conversion.
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Refusal to do so could land you in the clutches of the Holy Office. This would result, at best, in a life of disgrace and, at worst, in a fiery death at the stake.

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents. The Christian rules could never compare to the thicket of Talmudic jurisprudence that grew up around the laws of kashruth, nor the tangled hierarchy of dietary strictures of the Hindu caste system. Even so, there were plenty of regulations that obedient Christians were supposed to observe. The most notable restriction was on the consumption of warm-blooded animals. Birds, mammals, and their by-products—eggs, milk, butter, and so on—were restricted for something like a third of the year by the time you added up Lent, Advent, every Friday, and a basketful of other ecclesiastical fast days. Fashions in canon law and the practical considerations of the Vatican meant that there were usually plenty of exemptions made for certain individuals (the infirm and soldiers come to mind) and even for whole regions of Christendom. After 1365, parts of northern Europe were exempted from the no-butter rule on meatless days. (It continued to be banned during Lent.) But even in Europe, caste also played some part. Many of the religious orders, for example, had to adhere to more restrictive rules than laypeople. Much like several Indian religions, Christianity put great stock in the mortification of the body, and fasting was seen as a particularly effective tool for spiritual enlightenment. Peasants, on the other hand, made do with a mostly Lenten diet year-round, whether they liked it or not.

All this might be worth no more than an esoteric footnote in a history of medieval Europe if it weren’t for the fact that these religious rules and restrictions had an enormous impact on national economies and international trade—to say nothing of what ended up on the dinner table.

The church’s diet rules, like the religion itself, were invented in the Mediterranean, with its gracious weather, olive groves, and abundant coastline. An Italian would hardly take it as hardship that she was forced to cook with olive oil and eat fish one day in three. In the north of Europe, however, it was another matter. Here, cooks had only animal fats to cook with, and fishermen were at the mercy of months of miserable weather when they could hardly go fishing at all (notably during the winter months of Advent and Lent). One result of the fasting rules had been to encourage fishing where it was possible and fish-farming where it was not. In part, the Dutch were aswim in capital to invest in the spice trade because they had made a fortune off the herring fishery. To preserve the perishable catch, tons of salt had to be shipped across seas and up rivers, subsequently followed by a return cargo of the preserved fish themselves. The Portuguese, despite their renown as fishermen, imported dried fish from northern Germany. Along with the salt, thousands of barrels of olive oil made the trip north as well, accompanied by smaller quantities of almonds (to make almond milk) to provide a substitute for lard, butter, and milk. Southerners didn’t necessarily export their best. The English expression “as brown as oil” is noted as early as the fifteenth century and gives an idea of the quality of much of the oil arriving in the North. To add insult to injury, the imported oil could be at least double and sometimes as much as ten times the cost of local butter (itself an expensive commodity). Portugal was especially well located to profit from this religiously required trade, since, by sea, it was the closest to the needy nations of the North. Long before Lisbon was outfitting
naus
for the East India route, her merchants were already making a tidy profit sending salt, olive oil, and almonds to London, Bruges, and Hamburg.

Spices came into this religious framework rather indirectly. Since most pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and their like were considered “hot” and “dry” according to medieval dietary beliefs, they were especially needed on all those fast days to temper or adjust the “moist” and “cold” humors attributed to fish. (A quick look at any medieval cookery manual makes it evident that fasting was in no way related to abstemiousness; some of the fish dishes are even more over-the-top than meat preparations.) In general, the church did not particularly approve of spiced food, especially when cinnamon and ginger were added purely for reasons of taste. As the early medieval saint Bernard points out, you could sin by “taking carnal pleasure in smelling spices or potions or flowers or herbs or foods or other things with a good scent, not out of praise to God, but for immoderate sensual pleasure.” In a late-fourteenth-century diatribe, “Of Antichrist and His Followers,” the proto-Protestant preacher John Wycliffe describes the minions of Beelzebub wolfing down foods “seasoned with hot spices and extra-hot with sauces and syrups.” When taken for “medical” purposes, however, the use of spices was more excusable. Moreover, theological antipathy to the Asian imports waxed and waned. In the early Middle Ages, cinnamon and other aromatics were actually brewed up into an anointing oil used in church sacraments, but by Wycliffe’s day, spices were more likely to show up on a bishop’s pot roast than on his altar. The early medieval emphasis on mortification of the body was losing much of its appeal in those later years. Certainly, most of the Renaissance popes had no issues with pursuits of the flesh—culinary or otherwise. But then this is what led to the Protestant reaction, after all. To Martin Luther and his fellow travelers, the Roman church was a cesspool of corruption and moral turpitude; Christianity could be purified only by returning to its simpler origins. The abolition of pleasure, whether in the form of exotically spiced dishes or public baths where the genders mixed, was placed high on the new puritan agenda. Unfortunately, the Catholic reaction to this was to become even more puritan than the puritans, with sex and cooking falling as sacrificial lambs to the Counter-Reformation. Not that the religious reformers managed to ban fun entirely. People still licked their chops with pleasure, but now they worried more about going to hell for it.

Even more indirectly, the popularity of spices fell victim to the religious conflicts that wracked Europe during the years of the Reformation and its Catholic response. The split in Christendom affected life far beyond the limits of Sunday morning. Borders were sealed to foreign ideas. In Portugal and Spain especially, Catholic censorship eviscerated the local presses. The censors did not target merely nonorthodox religious material, they went after anything even vaguely scientific, which included diet books. Not only did the doctrinal divide encourage the rise of national churches, it also promoted the use of the English, German, and French vernacular, from the pulpit and the poet’s pen as well as cookbook authors. What’s more, the rift also meant that Protestants and Catholics would now follow different rules when it came to dinner. Protestant northerners dumped the Catholic fasting regulations faster than you can recite a Hail Mary. And though it might be overreaching to claim that the butter eaters of boreal Europe rose up against popish Rome just because they were sick of overpriced, rancid olive oil and months of salted fish, getting rid of the diet rules certainly didn’t hurt the Protestant cause. Whereas once medieval Europe had adhered to a common Catholic religion, a common Latin language, and common well-spiced cuisine (at least, for the elite), the balkanization of the Christian world along national lines now meant that nations could no longer gather around the same table as easily as before. Even though it would take some years, the Europe-wide fashion for spices—as much as Latin—would be a casualty of Martin Luther’s squabble with the bishop of Rome.

The irony of Europe’s splitting asunder even while the Iberian voyages were bringing the world closer together was not lost on contemporary commentators. Camões excoriated his fellow Christians—the Germans, who, “devising a new pastor, a new creed…wage hideous wars” the Italians “enslaved by vice”—bent more on mutual destruction than on uniting to defeat the Turk. Accordingly, it was up to “this little house of Portugal” to carry the Catholic seed across the earth.

Many of the early sailors who prayed at the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos before setting off halfway across the world sincerely believed this, yet if you look around Asia, the impact of Portugal’s evangelization effort is thin on the ground. Today, in Goa and Malacca, great Catholic churches rot in the tropical sun. But other reminders of Lisbon’s conquistadores grow and flourish. The Portuguese seeds that took root in Asia and Africa had little to do with religion. One of the unremarked, yet most significant, corollaries of the spice trade is the transfer of foods from the Americas to the African and Asian continents. The pepper ships that passed from the New World to the Old brought cashews, cassava, chilies, tomatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, and other unknown foods along with the friars and the
fidalgos.

G
OLDEN
G
OA

When you step out of the main gate of Lisbon’s hilltop Castelo de São Jorge, you can’t help but notice a small restaurant on the square opposite. With its timbered ceilings and racks of dusty wine bottles, Arco do Castelo has that quaint, rustic look that is usually a sure sign of more
caldo verde
(potato kale soup) and
bacalhau,
those ubiquitous clichés of the Portuguese kitchen. Yet, surprisingly, a small sign above the door reads “Cozinha de Goa,” and a quick look at a menu listing shrimp curry and pork vindaloo tells you that the chef is a long way from home. I had been invited to the exotic bistro by Rui Lis, the childhood friend of a Portuguese naval archaeologist. He had commended Rui to me as a fascist, a raving lunatic, and a very good person. A sound judgment, it would seem. It turns out that Rui divides his time between defending local mob figures and working as a human rights lawyer. He often finds himself in Portugal’s former African colonies (the ones established in the wake of the pepper
naus
) taking unconscionable risks on behalf of political prisoners. Portuguese missionaries apparently still carry some weight in Africa. Totally deadpan, he tells me how he used to dress up as a priest in order to dodge Angolan guerrillas. I can see it, too. He looks the part of one of those rotund Jesuits sent to convert the heathen, though I somehow can’t see him force-feeding hamburgers to recalcitrant Hindus. Filet mignon, perhaps. In Lisbon, the renegade lawyer’s enthusiasm for tossing rhetorical Molotov cocktails is exceeded only by the relish he takes in eating well.