The Taste of Conquest (25 page)

Rui had promised me spice in a city that, given its history, is oddly devoid of spicy food. His eyes sparkle as he gestures to the platter of Goan
sarapatel
that arrives on the table. He assures me that it is simply a variation on a dish much like you’ll find in his hometown in the southern Portuguese province of Alentejo before he dips naan lustily into the (mildly) spicy sauce and spears the meat with his fork. I haven’t the heart to tell him that Goans don’t eat Indian flatbreads like naan, they eat
pãozinhos,
fluffy Portuguese rolls, with their curry, and that an Indian would have no use for all the flatware that clutters the table; like medieval Europeans, Goans eat with their hands. Nevertheless, when it comes to the
sarapatel,
I concede Rui his point. Portugal does in fact have several variations on the dish. In the Alentejan version, pork or lamb, with their respective offal, go into a stew seasoned with a small quantity of garlic, bay leaf, paprika, peppercorns, cloves, cumin, and vinegar—a mixture that, apart from paprika, could come from the medieval
O livro de cozinha.
The Goan version, which uses more spice, may be closer still to the lost Portuguese original. Even today, the state of Goa, which was incorporated into India only in 1961, remains as a remnant of Portuguese-influenced culture hemmed in by the multihued tapestry of the subcontinent. In Goa, only the tourists are sparing with the spice.

Sitting in Arco do Castelo while Rui riffed on Maoist paramilitaries and Portuguese mobsters, and eating the all-too-delicately seasoned chicken stew called
xacouti,
I kept thinking back to my last meal in Goa earlier that same spring. There, a basket on the table was piled high with fluffy
pãozinhos.
I had insisted that the chef season the giant prawns with as much chili as if he were eating them himself—despite the waiter’s skeptical eyebrows. It was Fat Tuesday, and the tall windows of the grand dining room of the Hotel Mandovi shuddered with the techno-beat coming from one of the many parties that announced the end of Carnival in Panjim, Goa’s capital. Earlier in the day, a parade of writhing naked abdomens had flowed along the reviewing stands just outside, one of the happier residues of colonialism as far as I’m concerned. Inside, the cavernous room, frosted with ornate blue and gold plasterwork like an elaborate gâteau, was almost entirely empty. I could just barely make out the whisper of Portuguese conversation emanating from a prim elderly couple seated in a secluded corner. Before long, the smiling waiter arrived with my order. The prawns were violently spicy, and delicious.

Panjim is reminiscent of a provincial town on the Portuguese seaboard. The architecture is more Mediterranean than South Asian, with window grilles of curlicues, and shaded balconies behind ornate metal balustrades. Here, though, the houses are dyed in colors of Indian intensity: the deep pink of watermelon; the russet of hot cinnamon; and, hotter yet, mango yellow and papaya orange. Red-tiled roofs top these confections, often supplemented by rusting sheets of corrugated metal. The colony’s capital was moved here in 1760, when the viceroys finally gave up on the original disease-ridden location several miles up the Mandovi River.

There are excursion boats that will take you the five miles up the languorous river to the old capital, much as the local dhows once ferried cargo from the
naus
that had to anchor at the river’s mouth. There is something oddly evocative of Lisbon in the way Goa Velha, “Old Goa,” nestles among low-lying ocher hills on the bank of the broad river. When the Portuguese viceroy relocated his capital from the tropical jungles of Cochin to this semiarid site so reminiscent of southern Portugal, I wonder if they didn’t settle here, in part, because it reminded them of home.

Today, all that remains of the city that gave the state of Goa its name is a carefully manicured tourist destination, a scattering of churches circled by stray dogs, day-trippers, and the vendors who supply the visitors with the requisite liquid refreshments, simulated silver crucifixes, and miniature chess sets. I suppose I had expected to stumble upon the crumbling remains of a colonial empire rotting in the jungle, but instead, I found a carefully embalmed collection of brilliantly whitewashed buildings isolated by primly manicured lawns burned brown by the dry season’s sun. All the same, the churches are sensational. No wonder they called this place “the Rome of the East.” The Sé Cathedral is vastly bigger than Lisbon’s own, with a wildly gilded altar, outrageous chandeliers, and fantastically coffered chapels. The ceiling is denuded of its gold, but the red ocher sizing reminds you just how radiantly gaudy it must once have been. The altar of the Basílica do Bom Jesus remains an orgy of gilt with a giant relief of Saint Francis Loyola, like a giant gold egg, with arms upraised to another, smaller egglike orb that is supposed to represent the Divinity. The many other churches—São Caetano, São Francisco, São Augustin, Santa Mónica, Santo António, Santa Catarina, Nossa Senhora da Graça, Nossa Senhora do Rosário, and Nossa Senhora do Monte among them—are not as well preserved, with no more than a few gold flecks reminding you of the wealth that built the city the Portuguese called
Goa Dourada,
“Golden Goa.” How much African and then later American gold was diverted from buying pepper and cinnamon so that it could be beaten into acres of imperceptibly thin sheets to cover all these altars and ceilings and walls?

Back in Linschoten’s day, the city was much more than an ecclesiastical theme park. He describes a vibrant urban organism alive with the babble of barter and the chatter of a dozen nations: Persians, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Gujaratis, Jains, Brahmans, and “all Indian nations and people.” Streets were lined with shops selling everything from silks, satins, and damask to “a thousand sorts of clothes and cottons.” You could buy “curious works of [porcelain] from China.” Jewelers from the northern Indian port of Cambay specialized in “all sorts of precious stones.” Gold-, silver-, and coppersmiths had a street unto themselves, as did the carpenters and the wholesale wheat and rice merchants. Others sold vegetables and spices. And just as in Indian markets today, all this was intermingled with dust and trash.

In 1534, the Portuguese made Goa the capital of the Estado da Índia, the network of forts and trading posts that extended from the city of Moçambique in Africa to the island of Amboina in eastern Indonesia. Yet “the Queen of the Orient” reigned over territories that could hardly be described as an empire, at least when you compare it to the vast territories the Dutch and English would later conquer in these self-same waters. Although their
naus
and caravels sailed unchallenged on the sea-lanes, the Lusitanian kings never held more than a few flecks of the Asian landmass—often just enough property to build a fort or a warehouse to protect the precious, peppery cargo.

Even on the sea, the Portuguese mostly just forced their way into routes that had been traveled for hundreds of years. Europeans had never been the world’s main customers for the pungent berries and seeds of southern Asia’s jungles. Persia, the Middle East, North India, and China were all vast, populous markets for spice. It has been estimated that Europeans took no more than a quarter of the spices produced. My bet is that it was even less.

The decadent ways of Portuguese Goa are amply illustrated in this print from a Latin translation of Linschoten’s Itinerario.

When Vasco da Gama arrived on the scene, the intra-Asian spice trade was mostly in the hands of Muslim traders from the northern Indian state of Gujarat. A contemporary Florentine reporter estimated that fifteen hundred “Moorish” vessels arrived in Calicut during da Gama’s initial three-month sojourn. They brought their wares to China, too. At the end of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo had claimed that for every Italian spice galley in Alexandria, a hundred docked at the Chinese port of Zaiton (Quanzhou). And in the following centuries, Chinese demand for spices spiraled ever upward. According to one well-placed sixteenth-century source, China alone was importing three times as much pepper as the Europeans. Among the Ming elite, spices were as much a part of the privileged lifestyle as they were in Baghdad or Barcelona. North India itself was an enormous market for South Indian pepper and imported cloves and nutmeg as well. Here again, spicy food was associated with the court—in this case, the Muslim Moguls, who had grown up with sophisticated Persian cuisine. It’s worth remembering that spices were an exotic import here, too. Great caravans of mules and oxen had to transport the tropical spices across the high peaks of the Western Ghats to reach North India’s capitals; it is almost as far from Cochin to Delhi as from Alexandria to Venice.

Wherever the North Indian merchants loaded their junks and dhows with pepper and cloves, they left behind their religion as well. The diffusion of Islam throughout Southeast Asia can be directly credited to the spice route. (The story of the earlier spread of Hinduism is much the same.) As the Muslim merchants established trading posts, they eventually put down roots, erected mosques, and married local women. Moreover, what is remarkable about the spread of Islam is how peacefully it occurred here, especially in comparison to the violent methods employed by Muhammad’s immediate successors in the Middle East or, for that matter, when compared to the Portuguese conquistadores.

In spite of Manuel’s stated intention to wrest the Indian spice trade from these “Moors,” the king’s men never managed to achieve anything close to the wished-for monopoly. In the early years, they had some small successes in disrupting the old route when Admiral Albuquerque took Ormuz, the critical link between the Persian overland route and the subcontinent, but by the middle years of the century, realpolitik had made it necessary to placate the Persian shah in order to support the Portuguese against the Turks. As a consequence, Persian merchants, soon followed by Arabs and Venetians, were able to come to Ormuz to buy as much spice as they liked. And increasingly, the pepper wasn’t coming from Portuguese-controlled territories at all. Once they had gotten over the initial shock of the Europeans’ arrival, the Gujaratis had figured out how they could bypass the Estado’s strongholds in India and ship pepper directly from Sumatra to Egypt. Among the Lusitanians, the crusading spirit that had launched the early voyages seems to have faded, too. The seek-and-destroy impulse toward any Muslim that had characterized da Gama’s generation was eventually replaced by a grudging entente. By midcentury, trade within Asia itself had settled down to a pattern familiar before the Europeans’ arrival. The Portuguese contented themselves with playing the racketeer, skimming a small percentage of all the trade that passed within cannon-shot of their vessels. The
fidalgos
had learned that there was more money to be made selling spices to local merchants than filling up the king’s ships. As a result, long caravans loaded with aromatic cargo would trudge again across the dusty Arabian desert, and the warehouses of the Campo San Bartolomeo were filled once more with the sharp scent of Asian pepper.

Yet, while the Portuguese never achieved anything near a monopoly in pepper, it was a different story with cinnamon. In the sixteenth century,
Cinnamomum verum
(“true” cinnamon) was limited to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and although it had been traded for at least a thousand years, only relatively small quantities ever left the island. What most of the world knew as cinnamon was actually a closely related spice called cassia (
Cinnamomum cassia
), which grows in numerous locales in southern Asia. Even today, most of the “cinnamon” sold in the United States is in fact cassia. True cinnamon is recognizable by its lighter color and softer bark. It has a more floral aroma hinting of incense and resin. Both spices are distinctly sweet, but cassia has a much more noticeable burn in its aftertaste. They are produced by stripping the second bark from either species’ tree shoots. As the bark dries, it forms the characteristic stick. The spice grown on Ceylon was long considered superior. Writing in Goa in 1563, the Portuguese botanist Garcia da Orta noted in his vastly informative
Colóquios dos simples e drogas a cousas medicinais da Índia
(Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India) that, “as a fruit is better in one country than in another, so the cinnamon of Ceylon is better than all others…. They do not send any other cinnamon than that of Ceylon to Portugal.” At the time, the aromatic bark was collected in the wild, while the Ceylonese monarch controlled its sale and distribution. The Portuguese, using their usual persuasive ways, convinced the king to grant them a monopoly, with the result that a ship was dispatched each year from Ceylon to meet up with the
Carreira da Índia.

Lisbon had entered the spice trade at a time when Christendom’s tastes were in flux. In southern Europe, in particular, the medieval fashion for sharp flavors dominated by pepper and ginger with the sour tang of vinegar or verjuice seemed to be giving way to a decidedly sweeter flavor complex by the middle years of the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, ginger had also been planted in the Caribbean and had now become cheap and commonplace. Documents record that Jamaica alone exported more than two million pounds of ginger to Spain in 1547! Other spices, such as turmeric and cardamom, disappeared almost entirely from the European repertoire. Pepper at least seemed to retain its previous popularity, though mainly in the north of Europe. The new fashion was to pair sugar with the sweet spiciness of cinnamon, whether on the Piazza San Marco or the Terreiro do Paço. Da Orta has the following to say about his countrymen’s favorite spice: “One cannot eat any spice with pleasure except cinnamon. It is true that the Germans and Flemings eat pepper, and here our negresses eat cloves, but Spaniards [that is, Iberians] do not eat any of the spices except cinnamon.”