The Taste of Conquest (47 page)
Read The Taste of Conquest Online
Authors: Michael Krondl
*45
Financial historians point to the VOC as perhaps the first modern corporation. Needless to say, the resulting innovations in corporate structure are beyond the scope of this work, to say nothing of way beyond my ken.
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*46
To give just a random sampling of numbers: in the early twelve hundreds, the Genoese sold cloves and nutmeg to their customers for something like four times the price of pepper; in Alexandria in 1347, ten kilos of pepper could be had for 7½ ducats, while cloves were more than 22; and according to Linschoten, even in relatively nearby Malacca, pepper cost about half the price of cloves and a third the price of mace. Here, though, nutmeg was actually cheaper!
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*47
According to Paul Gahlinger, the author of
Illegal Drugs,
“Eating twenty grams of ground nutmeg can produce very severe physical and psychological effects varying with the person.” Prolonged nausea is replaced by silly feelings and giggling, and then a feeling of euphoria accompanied by hallucinations. Motor functions may be confused and speech incoherent. He goes on to say, “the after-effects are usually quite unpleasant: aching bones, sore muscles, painful eyes, runny nose, tiredness, depression and headaches.”
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*48
Admittedly, more than half of the spice consumed was domestically produced aniseed and cumin (the officers’ mess even offered cumin cheese), but the rest—about a pound of pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and mace for each officer for the duration of the trip—were exotic imports.
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*49
Palmyra palm nectar ferments naturally in the blossoms, yielding a mildly alcoholic beverage called toddy to anyone who makes the effort to tap the flowers. The same sap is also boiled down to make palm jaggery, or sugar.
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*50
This was roughly equivalent to Coen’s monthly salary at the time.
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*51
In Portugal, at least, badger powders had their day as a cure for the plague. In a letter written in 1430 to King Duarte, his doctor gave specific instructions on concocting one of these nostrums. First, you had to get a badger drunk on wine filtered through camphor and blended with a compound of gold, seed pearls, and coral. You then decapitated the animal, drained it of its blood, and removed the heart and liver. The blood was mixed with 2 ounces of very fine cinnamon, 1 ounce of
geuaana
(Guinea/melegueta pepper?), ½ ounce of verbena, ¼ ounce of ginger or saffron,
1
/
8
ounce of fine clove,
1
/
32
ounce of myrrh,
1
/
16
ounce of aloes, and
1
/
64
ounce of fine “unicorn horn,” and this mixture was dried out under a “slow sun” or in the “heat of a fire.” Into this, you would stir 2 ounces of the poor badger’s pulverized heart, liver, and even teeth. To serve, the mélange was dissolved in wine or in water seasoned with vinegar. Once the remedy was consumed—“the best possible thing against the pestilence”—the patient had to lie down, cover up warmly, and perspire for some six hours, without sleeping, eating, or drinking. He could then drink and eat, but only water and bread soaked in cold water. If the pain of the swellings persisted, it was permissible to bleed him in the aching leg or arm.
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*52
While it is impossible to quantify the number of cooking and dietary books that were printed between 1550 and 1700, historians have estimated that perhaps four hundred million books were printed overall. Even if we conservatively assume that food books made up a paltry 0.1 percent of the books produced (today, it’s more like 10 percent), we’re still talking four hundred thousand books, and the number was surely higher.
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*53
The book’s immense influence was seen not only in France, where it went through some thirty editions in seventy-five years, but also in reprints and translations in Holland (1653), England (1653), and even Italy (1690).
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*54
Roughly speaking, pepper imports were a scant 1.2 million kilos in 1500, when Europe held some eighty million people; about 1.5 million in 1600, when the population had risen to one hundred million; and perhaps as much as 7 million in the 1670s, when the population was roughly the same. But this volume of pepper could not be sold, no matter how low the price went. In 1688, the
Heren XVII
estimated that the European demand was only 3.5 million kilograms. Fifty years later, European imports had dropped to just that number and stayed there until the early nineteenth century. Clove imports peaked in the 1620s at about 350,000 kilos, a number they would not recover until the mid-twentieth century.
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