demystifying a change in taste spices, space, and social hierarchy in europe, 1380-1750 author(s)...

Demystifying a Change in Taste: Spices, Space, and Social Hierarchy in Europe, 1380-1750Author(s): Stefan Halikowski SmithSource: The International History Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 237-257Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40110784 .

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Demystifying a Change in Taste:

Spices, Space, and Social Hierarchy in Europe,

1380-1750

STEFAN HALIKOWSKI SMITH

Old English saying cHe hath no pepper' describes people who are 'nobodies'. Spices made one somebody. A set of natural products of shifting constitution, they helped to relieve the monotony

for medieval man of the flavourless staples of his diet and bestowed upon him the pleasures of tastes and smells, an aestheticization of his existence; they helped to preserve the bodies of his ancestors, to sacralize social and

religious rites, and, as heir to a rich pharmacopaeic tradition stretching back to pre-Galenic Alexandrian physicians, they gave him hope of con-

quering ailments and the will to live. Such products that commanded the

highest market prices were in every sense luxuries, and their use was a hall- mark of elevated taste and a ritual of civilized life from ancient Rome

through Renaissance Europe. The attributes of value and luxury may explain why spices have been

ignored by historians. Edward Gibbon dismissed cthe objects of orient traffic' as 'splendid but trifling', a view echoed by post-war Annaliste historians, whose quantitative studies of the early modern economy focus on

necessity and availability {devoir et avoir), and for whom even the Baltic

grain trade was 'infinitesimally small ... in relation to the number of mouths ... to feed'.1 Robert Lopez, for example, advises us not to allow 'the glitter and glamour of trade in luxuries ... to overshadow the heavy trade in cheap bulky goods'.2 Readings of spices' role as consumer goods were relegated to their functional uses: to preserve meat - in obscure his- tories of the Visigothic sausage - or, as Franco Borlandi maintains, to dis-

guise the failure.3 The disparagement of what Michael Pearson refers to as

1 E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1909), i. 62. Other-

wise, K. Glamann, 'European Trade, 1500-1750', in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, ed. C.

Cipolla (London, 1976), i. 466. For the principles of dever e haver, see B. Bennassar, 'A funcao do come*rcio e a teoria dos circulos de comunicacao', in Histdria Econdmica e Social do Mundo, ed. P. Le*on (Lisbon, 1984), i. t. II; N. Elias, The Civilising Process: The Development of Manners: Changes in the Code of Conduct and Feeling in Early Modern Times, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1978). 2 R. Lopez, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York, 1955), p. 116. 3 See R. Wernick, 'Men Launched 1000 Ships in Search of the Dark Condiment', The Smithsonian,

The International History Review, xxix. 2: June 2007, pp. 237-472. cn issn 0707-5332 © The International History Review. All International Rights Reserved.



238 Stefan Halikowski Smith

the 'mystique of the spice trade, its glamour, its aura' may have reflected the commercial downturn after the Second World War, perhaps a side effect of the economic dislocations affecting the global economy in the wake of decolonization. One report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1962 estimated a decline of 20 per cent worldwide, and as much as a half in most European countries.1

Today, following the revival of interest in ethnic cuisine and natural sources of flavouring, the term 'spice' has shed its negative connotations. If spicy implied 'problematic and open to various interpretations' in the late sixteenth century, 'over expensive' in the seventeenth century, 'caustic and mordant' in the eighteenth, and 'bawdy' in the nineteenth, its prospects have never seemed better.2 Perfumers long restricted to descriptors such as 'sweet', 'heavy', 'fresh', 'floral', and 'woodsy', have finally overcome the

Enlightenment prejudice against traditional spice fixatives such as musk, civet, ambergris, and castor, enabling Armani to describe his eaux pour homme as 'a very Italian sensation of freshness, combined with a selection of subtle, sensual spices'.3 But if we treat human beings as creatures of desire rather than need, we can re-examine the consumption of spices by applying Hans Teuteberg's classification of spices as Genufimittel, or 'hedonistic goods'.4 On the basis of this assumption and classification, this article explains the development of the taste for spices in early modern Europe.

*****

The term taste is used to describe the aesthetic that permeated the early modern consumption of spices. Not merely a physiological response through the five senses, taste expresses a form of sociocultural reproduc- tion on the basis of subjective experiences, judgement, and requirements. In this article, the aesthetic is deconstructed into the sensory, the cultural - which manifests itself in different patterns of taste according to one's geographical co-ordinates on the European continent - and the social, the articulation of tastes within a given society. The focus is on alimentary

xiv, 11 (Feb. 1984), 128-48; Fatti e idee di storia economica net secoli 12.-20.: studi dedicati a Franco Borlandi (Bologna, 1976). 1 Spices in the Indian Ocean World, ed. M. Pearson (Aldershot 1996), p. xvii; Food and Agricultural Association (UN), Spices: Trends in World Markets, Commodity Bulletin Series (Rome, 1962). 2 A. Goosse, 4Des mots epices', in Saveurs de Paradis. Les Routes des Epices, Caisse Generale d'Epargne et de Retraite (Brussels, 1992), pp. 36-7; T. Storey, 'Questo negozio e aromatichissimo': A Sociocultural Study of Prostitution in Early Modern Rome' (Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, April 1999), note following title page. 3 Armani free sample, license no. EMB 02340A. 4 G. Bachelard, La psychoanalyse dufeu (Paris, 1949); European Food History: A Research Review, ed. H. J. Teuteberg (Leicester, 1992), p. 5 and Table 1.1, 'Social and Psychic Functions of Foodstuffs and Luxuries'.



The Change in European Taste 239

taste, for the aesthetic of perfumes and scents, less apparent in the sources, lacks an equivalent genre of literary expression to the cookbook. Works on

sensory perception suggest that the nose is a less opinionated receptor than the mouth.1

Historians of food assert that the most startling characteristic of late medieval cookery, from the perspective of today, was its powerful aroma and strong taste - which may only reveal the blandness of our taste - and that the characteristic was ubiquitous across the culinary spectrum and the result of elaborate and eclectic combinations.2 The Renaissance, it is

rightly held, represents the golden age of the use of spices in cooking. Ginger, for example, figures in as many as 70 per cent of Pierre Pidoult's

(Pidoux) recipes in his Lafleur de toute cuysine of 1543,3 and sauces such as cameline - a mixture of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise, mace, pepper, and bread soaked in vinegar - were commonplace.4 But it is not clear what quantities of spices were used because recipe-books list, but do not dose, ingredients. Historians such as Margaret Wade Labarge rely on household accounts or public provisioning lists to gauge the quantities. She is impressed with the fact that the sheriff of Sussex was ordered in the

spring of 1254 to prepare 'thirty dozen chickens, thirty dozen fowl, and four thousand of cumin' for Queen Eleanor of England's journey to France.5 But, as with so many such sources, the lack of a unit of measurement leaves us none the wiser.6 Thus, while Wolfgang Schivelbusch, following Labarge, claims that Hhe dishes literally disappear under the

spices; the food is little more than a vehicle for the spices,' Madeleine Cos- man, more circumspect, replies that 'rather than wildly spiced, medieval foods were more likely mildly fragrant.'7

We are uncertain, therefore, as to how late medieval food tasted. Trad- itionalists maintain that the predominant tastes were hot, sharp, and tangy (Lat. amaritudo), owing to the acidic element commonly added to sauces

1 D. Sumner, 'On Testing the Sense of Smell', The Lancet, ii (1962), 895-7; H. L. Meiselman and R. S. Rivlin, Clinical Measurement of Taste and Smell (New York, 1986), ch. 11. 2 M. P. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York, 1976), 'Herbs and Spices', pp. 45 ff.; L. Plouvier, 'Et les epices pimenterent la cuisine europeenne', VHistorien, lxxvi (1985), 85. 3 This figure is devised from the five editions of the work printed at Lyon between 1567 and 1604. 4 The Vivendier: A Critical Edition with English Translation, ed. T. Scully (Totnes, 1997), recipe no. 6,P-35- 5 M. W. Labarge, 'The Spice Account', History Today, xvi (1965), 34. 6 See P. Aebischer, 'Un manuscrit valaisan du "Viandier" attribute a Taillevent', Vallesia, viii (1953), 73-100. ~l W. Schivelbusch, Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vemunft. Eine Geschichte der Genufimittel (Frankfurt, 1990), p. 15, and T. Zeldin, 'Why There Has Been More Progress in Cooking than in Sex', in An Intimate History of Humanity (London, 1997), pp. 95-6. Cf. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, p. 47. A. H. de Oliveira Marques talks, about spices, of 'a abusar do seu emprego', A Sociedade Medieval Portuguesa. Aspectos de Vida Quotidiana (Lisbon, 1971), p. 9.




(typically verjus, the juice of the unripened grape); or, if not tangy, at least

strong (Lat. ardens)} This description follows the map of the sensory qualities of spices drawn by Theophrastus two thousand years previously, on which he designated hot (0epuxx), pungent (6pi(ieia), biting (&T]ictiic&), bitter (jtticpd), and astringent (orujrcim).2 But if tanginess characterized the flavour of savoury dishes, sugar and honey, too, were widely used, par- ticularly for the sick.3 There was a marked difference from later European cuisine, which distinguished between the salted and the sweet and served one after the other, but rarely together. In many languages, such as Portu-

guese, desserts, sweet by definition, are known as 'postres': that is, they are served after the main dish.

Sweet and aromatic characteristics were greatly prized in comestibles.4 Chretien of Troyes (fl. 1165-82) assured his readers that 'nothing there is sharp or sour/ Because the spices there/ Are sweet and smell good.'5 Pow- dered sugar was often flavoured with a spice or aromatic flower; in 1265, Eleanor, countess of Leicester, bought powdered sugar flavoured with mace, and between 1284 and 1286, Bogo de Clare bought jars of rose and violet sugars.6 Fourteenth-century Cyprus achieved great commercial success from blending its home-grown sugars with spices imported from the Levant to make sweetmeats, syrups, and jams; as did Alexandria - attributed a zenzeverata da mangiare by Pegolotti - and 'Barbary', the source of the pot of succade the successful Antwerp merchant Erasmus Schetz presented in 1525 to Desiderius Erasmus, an 'exquisite fruit jam, impossible to find in Basel'.7 European treatises and almanacs of all kinds were filled with recipes for spiced jams, which were a favourite present on ceremonial occasions or, in France, given in lieu of payment to judges.8

The sheer range of spices used warns us against too monolithic an inter-

1 For a caricature of the qualities associated with spices, see L. de Camoes, Os Lusiadas, Canto

segundo, 4th octave. 2 Theophrastus, On Odours, trans. Sir A. Hart (London, 1917), p. 10. 3 See, e.g., the recipe for 'a great plenty of sugar' to be added to a boiled and pounded chicken in a mould: Le Menagier de Paris, c. 1393, trans, as The Goodman of Paris: A Treatise on Moral and Domes- tic Economy, ed. E. Power (London, 1928), p. 295, 'coulis d'un poulet'. 4 For 'sweet spices', see B. Platina, De Honesta Voluptae, 1475, trans, as On Right Pleasure and Good Health (Tempe, 1998), p. 225. 5 Chretien of Troyes, Cliges, in Les Romans de Chretien de Troyes, edites d'apres la copie de Guiot(Bibl. Nat. II. 794), ed. A. Micha (Paris, 1957), ii. lines 3212-16 ff. 6 H. T. Turner, Manners and Household Expenses of the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1841); M. S. Giuseppi, 'The Wardrobe and Household Accounts of Bogo de Clare, 1284-6', Archaeo-

logia, lxx (1920). 7 F. di Balducci Pegolotti, La Pratica della Mercatura, ed. A. Evans (Cambridge, MA, 1936); The Cor-

respondence of Erasmus: II: Letters 1535-1657, AD 1525, ed. A. Dalzell and C. G. Nauert, Jr. (Toronto, 1994), P- 386. 8 Excellent & moult utile Opuscule a touts necessaire ... livre de Nostradamus, 2e partie, 1555, Lyon, Bibliotheque Municipale; M. de L'Hospital, 'Harangues', in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1824-5), u- 7°-




pretation of late medieval taste. The record of expenses (Ausgabebuchlein) Paul Behaim of Nuremberg kept between 1544 and 1568 records 'saffron, Zimmetsaffran [cassia or turmeric], pepper, ginger, cumin, cinnamon rind, cloves, ginger, powdered nutmeg, sultanas [Zibeben], capers, mala-

gueta, sugar, candied sugar, almonds from Venice and Provence [?] [pavenzich], figs, dates, raisins [weinperlein]\ all of them at the time classed as spices.1

Thus, even if the spicing of meat masked the taste of poor preservation and slowed down putrefaction, there existed a conscious aesthetic that went beyond the dressing-up of a monotonous diet of cooked meats, boiled as well as roasted, in an effort to keep microbes at bay.2 Spices were eaten to satisfy desire. In a sermon, Martin Luther employs spices as a

paragon of 'deliciousness'; he might have been thinking of the spiced honey cake, gingerbread, or pfefferkuchen that Fynes Moryson was so fond of, and that was widespread across central Europe despite its cost.3 Spices, even pepper, were added to desserts such as potage appele verzuse, and stewed with fruit into confitures. They were added to all types of drinks: hot ales, punches, liquors, mulled wine, hydromel. The ginger beer still drunk is a relic of the practice. The water in which many of the stronger spices had been soaked was sufficiently flavoursome to substitute in

recipes for the spices themselves. But spices were more than condiments; they were eaten in their own right, served up on platters laden with pepper grains, cinnamon sticks, crystallized ginger (gingebras), and perfumed sugar, and passed around the dinner table, often as a dessert, a digestif, or to clean one's breath, and traditionally accompanied by wine.4

* * * * *

Sources showing the distribution of spices suggest that pepper and the 'choleric' spices found a more ready market in northern Europe, par- ticularly in German- and Dutch/Flemish-speaking areas, no doubt because this is one area of the world in which meat is king.5 That choleric spices flowed primarily to these regions is as demonstrable for the sixteenth

century as for today, if we compare the quantities of pepper allocated to

1 [Nuremberg,] Gfermanisches] N[ational]m[useum] N[uremberg], Behaim Archiv, Schrank 102, Fach 1/22. 2 E. and T. Cohen, Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (Westport, CN, 2001), p. 228. 3 Luther's Works: II, ed. J. Pelikan (St Louis, 1986), p. 65; F. Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherlands Denmarke, Poland, Italy . . . (London, 1617). 4 See, e.g., F. Rabelais, 'D'un couste* sont apportez vins et espices . . .', Gargantua et Pantagruel, ed. P.

Jourda (Paris, 1962), bk. IV, ch. 14, ii. 81; Treatise of Walter of Bibber sworth, ed. A. Owen (Disserta- tion, Paris, 1929); other indications to be found in the Romance de la Rose, and in 'Le dit du prunier'. 5 I. de Garine, 'Modes alimentaires', in L'Histoire des Moeurs, ed. J. Poirier (Paris, 1991), i. 1586 ff.




various regions in 1577 by the Rott contract, or estimated in 1610 in the memoir presented to the Spanish government, with the traded imports re- corded for 1992. 1 At the same time, Mediterranean countries began to scorn the 'black deviF in favour, where called for, of the use of the Spanish pimento, or chili pepper.2 Malagueta pepper was less popular in southern Europe: in Italy and Catalonia, it was used mainly in recipes adopted from France,3 while in Castile and Portugal, it was not used at all.4

Conversely, sweets and fine spices were southern European predilec- tions. Garcia de Orta asserts that 'Spaniards do not eat any of the spices except cinnamon'; even if he exaggerates, Jonathan Israel estimates that two-thirds of the cinnamon the Dutch imported into Europe in the mid- seventeenth century was consumed in Spain and its American posses- sions.5 The large market for sugar in southern and south-eastern Europe is shown in the allocations for exports from Madeira listed in the Saragossa decree of 1498: more than half was allocated to the Mediterranean basin.6 Rhubarb, like cinnamon, Orta tells us, tended to be consumed in Iberia or else flow to Venice.7

European taste was marked by a north/south differential. The protagon- ist of Giovanni Delia Casa's A Treatise of Manners published in 1558, II Galateo, describes from a Tuscan perspective the habit of 'making game of drunkenness' as one of 'many other plagues which have come to us from beyond the Alps'.8 Venetians disparaged Germans' huge meals of highly spiced meats, according to the late fifteenth-century pilgrim Felix Fabri, an

1 See Konrad Rott, European market estimations for Atlantic pepper in 1579-80, Stadtarchiv Dresden, loc. 7411; European market estimation for Atlantic pepper by an 'expert', in the Spanish contract of 1611, Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 2852; 'Trade, Commerce: Statistical Synopses', FAO (UN) (X994)i table 79. Cf. P. Kaeppelin's assertion that France constituted 'the largest market for textiles and spices brought back from the East Indies', which can only hold for the latter half of the seventeenth century: Les Origines de VInde francaise, La Compagnie des Indes orientates et Francois Martin, etude sur Vhistoire du commerce et des etablissements francais dans VInde sous Louis XIV (1664-17^) (Paris, 1908), p. 3. 2 See, e.g., C. Durante, Herbario Nuovo (Rome, 1585), p. 344. 3 I. Elbl, 'The Portuguese Trade with West Africa, 1440-1521' (Ph.D. dissertation, Toronto, 1986), p. 512; Maino De' Maineri, 'De Saporibus', in 'A Medieval Sauce-Book', ed. L. Thorndike, Speculum, ix (1934), 188; Maistre Chiquart, Dufait de cuisine, ed. T. Scully, offprint from Vallesia, xl (1985), fos. 14, 20, 21, 37. 4 TracciSn espanola de un manuscrito anonimo del siglo XIII sobre la cocina hispano-maghribi, ed. A. Huici Miranda (Madrid, 1966); Un libro de cocina del siglo XIV, ed. J. Osset Meell, Boletin de la Sociedade Castallonense de Cultura, xvi (1935), 156-77; 'Urn tratado de cozinha do seculo XVI (MS. 1- E-33 of BN of Naples)', ed. M. J. da Gama Lobo Salema (Master's dissertation, Lisbon, 1956). 5 G. de Orta, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, ed. Sir C. Markham (London, 1913), i. 118; J. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford, 1990), p. 251. 6 H. da Gama Barros, Historia da Administracdo Publica em Portugal nos seculos XII-XV (2nd. ed., Lisbon, 1945"54), x. 156. 7 Orta, Colloquies, pp. 275 ff. 8 G. della Casa (Galateo), A Treatise of Manners (Amsterdam, 1969), originally published 1558, p. 100.




opinion echoed by the Catalan traveller Tafiir on his visit to Breslau in the 1430s: 'they fortify themselves by taking great quantities of food and drink, a custom which to us seems stranger than anything else. I believe that more

money is expended upon furs and spices than in half the world besides.'1 The Poles, though, were widely held to be the most extravagant race. Giovanni Botero, the Italian traveller, described the Polish nobility between 1586 and 1600 as Very gallant, prodigall in expences, spending more than their revenues in diet and apparell, and the seasoning of their meates

(for the Polanders use more spices than any other nation)'.2 The dinners served to professors at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow on such occasions as the commemorations of the college church, or the obiady kiernaszowy, attest to this, and foreign visitors such as Damiao de Gois in 1529 were shocked by the fondness for tobacco: 'never was so much smoked and with such passion as in Russia and Poland.'3

A line, nevertheless, may tentatively be drawn across east-central Europe between Poland and Muscovite Rus, where the petty nobility were isolated both from Western currents of taste - the 'Moscovians' were commonly viewed as barbarians - and the monetary economy. Thus a report from the

early seventeenth century on the prospects for Dutch trade in the Baltic lamented that 'they are not at all used to pepper, sugar, wine, and such delicacies, and are better off with their garlic, brandy, and honey.'4

The English seem, by contrast, to have been the exception to the rule. While heavily reliant on meat, and, according to works such as Ancient

Cookery (1381) and Form ofCury (c.1390), apparently connoisseurs of lesser known spices such as mace, cubeb, galangal, and cinnamon flowers, the

English found the German's diet to be overflavoured and his meals too big: 'many sauces and commonly sharpe, and such as comfort the stomacke offended with excessive drinking'. Meanwhile, in 1596, Sir Robert

Dallington reproached the Italians for their 'parsimony and thin feeding', a comment typical of Frenchmen as well as Englishmen on what they took to be an over-consumption of 'herbage'.5 Igor de Garine suggests that the British may have been unusual in the degree of similarity between their

1 Fratris Felicis Fabri Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. C. D. Hassler (Stuttgart, 1843-9), 3 vols. (1480-3); P. Tafur, Andancas e Viajes, ed. J. de la Espada (Madrid, 1874). 2 G. Botero, The Travellers Breviat (London, 1601), pp. 82-3. 3 A. Karbowiak, Obiady profesordw Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego w XVI I XVII wieku (Cracow, 1900), p. 11; D. de Gois, Crdnica de D. Manuel (Lisbon, 1566-7), pt. I, cap. 5, 217. 4 G. V. Forsten, Akty ipis'mak istorii baltijskogo vaprosa (St Petersburg, 1893), ii. 110. 5 Moryson, Itinerary, pp. 81 ff.; R. Dallington, Survey of Tuscany (1596), p. 34; see also, C. Howard, English Travellers of the Renaissance (New York, 1968); Montaigne, in J. G. Links, Travellers in

Europe: Private Records of Journeys by the Great and Forgotten (1980), p. 144. Both Ancient Cookery (1381) and Form ofCury (c. 1390) were published by G. Brander in The Forme ofCury: A Roll of Ancient

English Cookery (London, 1780).




country and elite cooking.1 Largely ignorant of southern spices such as the

pimento, and unimpressed with the traditional culinary spices favoured by Poles, the English sought consolation in beef with mustard.2

In conclusion, the oppositional discourses of moderation versus excess, of subtle, 'refined', or 'natural' taste versus strong, or harsh, taste suggest the growth in the sixteenth century of a critique of the use of choleric

spices in the culturally determining countries of Spain, France, and Italy. The critique was to lead during the seventeenth century to the development of a distinctly new culture of taste.

*****

As Lucien Febvre emphasizes, a preponderant role in the perceptual land-

scape of both the ancient and early modern worlds was played by the sense of smell.3 The difficulty of attempting to summarize the olfactory prescriptions of earlier ages is increased by the gradual atrophy since the Enlight- enment of the sense of smell in the West and the corresponding primacy of visual perception in the pursuit of reason and civilization. Paul Faure goes so far as to claim that our sense of smell is so underdeveloped in the modern West that we can no more appreciate the importance of odour in the ancient world than the blind can describe a colourful scene.4 Despite our fondness for classification, our attempts at olfactory classification are more elementary than those of most 'primitive' extant tribal cultures, such as the Kapsiki of Cameroon or the Serer Ndut of Senegal.5

Nonetheless, we have some idea of early modern Europe's olfactory preferences. Sweetness of smell was most admired, just as 'sharpnesse' was admired in taste.6 Sixteenth-century commentators such as Pieter Floris- zoon of Gonda were encouraged to describe the savour of cinnamon as 'sweet', even if that classification nowadays might seem strange.7 Most common were floral fragrances such as rosewater, most often distilled from flowers found locally, given that flowers did not travel well. Elizabeth I of

England's 'syrup perfume', for example, was produced on a base of rosewater.8 Another popular scent was calamus (or sweet flag), a plant of which

1 De Garine, L 'Histoire des Moeurs, ed. Poirier. 2 W. Thomas, The Pilgrim (1546); A. Ma^czak, Viaggi e viaggatori nelUEuropa modema, ed. Laterza and Figlia SpA, Rome, 1994), p. 2; M. Wade Labarge, A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (London, 1965). 3 L. Febvre, Le probleme de Vincroyance au XVIe siecle (Paris, 1942), pp. 461-72. 4 P. Faure, Parfums etAromates de VAntiquite (Paris, 1987), p. 13. 5 C. Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London, 1994), pt. 2, ch. 3. 6 See, e.g., the definition of 4Od[o]res' and 'Od[o]r[i]f[e]rus' in T. Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae etAnglicanae (Cambridge, 1587). 7 Cited by J. Verberckmoes, Schertsen, schimpen en schateren: geschiedenis van het lichen in de zuide-

lijke Nederlanden, zestiende en zeventiende eeuw (Nijmegen, 1998), p. 85. 8 Cited by F. Kennett, A History of Perfume (London, 1975), p. 122.




there were two varieties, one native to Europe, the other, the truly prized one, calamus verus, imported from India and redolent of roses. Dried and reduced to a powder, calamus was used in a number of the most precious perfumes.1

II Galateo's advice to young men interested in acquiring courtly bearing (buona creanza) was 'I do not say that at your age certain simple fragrances made from distilled waters are not suitable.'2 Behind such water-based scents, however, stood a range of stronger scents that probably had not

changed much since the Comedies of Plautus (254-184 bc) had eulogized myrrh, cinnamon, saffron, and cassia. The fruit of the cinnamon, for

example, when boiled together with coarser pieces of the bark, yielded a

fragrant oil. Arnau of Villanova describes a typical perfume, constituted of an ounce of amber(gris) mixed with cassia, three grains of lignum aloes, one scrupolo of musk, and sixteen grains of camphor.3 Ambergris, along with similar animal products such as musk, civet, and castor, acted as fixatives. Prepared as alcoholic tinctures, and added in small quantities to the base fragrance after blending, they rendered the odour more permanent.

Any survey of European taste prompts one to ask how far taste and smell constitute a social phenomenon. We have traced elsewhere the way in which spices were endowed with the qualities of the marvellous and, in-

creasingly, the exotic.4 The process set the eastern pharmacopeia on a different demand footing from commonly found European substitutes, even after the spirit of rationalism that nurtured the Scientific Revolution forced the exotic to assume different forms, as the poor record in Europe of ex-

pensive medical treatment through exotics made itself ever more evident.

Spices fitted into wider social currents of taste, both owing to their civil-

izing associations and as objects of value, symbols of prestige. Spices, as aromatics both rare and of inherent aesthetic pleasure, had been considered luxuries and thus a manifestation of civilization and a symbol of

high society since the age of Sumerian legend (c.3000 bc). Erasmus, for

example, lists as luxum ac delicias those goods consumed only by the rich: 'cotton, silk, dyed cloth, pepper, spices, ointments, jewels'.5

At the same time, value, if represented universally through the price matrix, operates as a mark of social distinction and emulation, 'an eternal

1 See, e.g., The Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice &c, ed. R. Brown (London, 1854), i. 67. 2 Delia Casa, // Galateo, ch. 28. 3 Amaldo di Villanova, 'Del modo di fare un profumo', in // De Conservanda juventute (Leipzig, 1511), trans, as // Libro sul modo di conservare la gioventu e ritardare la vecchiaia (Genoa, 1963), p. 52. 4 S. Halikowski Smith, 'The Mystification of Spices in the Western Tradition', European Review of History, viii (2001), 119-36. 5 D. Erasmus, 'Institutio Principis Christiani' (1516), trans, and annotated N. M. Cheshire and M. J. Heath, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1974), xxvii. 262.




class struggle' in Fernand BraudeFs words.1 Spices, as luxuries, were protected throughout Europe during the Middle Ages by rigorously applied sumptuary laws that regulated consumption by prescribing which groups could consume which goods in a society in which the status system was under threat from an increase in the number and availability of commodities.2 But sumptuary laws were powerless to prevent hoarding, especially of spices such as pepper, with a long shelf life, which in Portugal, France, and England were often used as ersatz currency in times of shortage of

precious metals as late as the end of the seventeenth century.3 Count Guil- laume de Limoges (1400-56) complained of the insolent display of wealth

by a rich commoner who piled up peppercorns in his storerooms 'as if they were so many acorns (des glands) for his pigs'.4 The role of spices as

prestige goods was underlined by their use as gifts on political occasions:

by towns such as Bruges to visiting dignitaries such as the chancellor of

Brittany, Jean de Malestroit, in 1426, or by the town of Koloszvar to the princely court at Gyulafehervar in Transylvania during the second half of the sixteenth century.5

The prestige or status value of spices was expressed by means of con- spicuous consumption, principally at meals. At the sumptuous banquets Manuel Cirne gave in Antwerp between February 1537 and July 1540, he burnt logs of cinnamon instead of plain wood.6 They were used as fashionable table and clothing accoutrements, and often were kept and presented in expensive cases. In 1543, Francis I of France commissioned the Italian Mannerist painter and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, to make him a set of condiments. Of chased gold and enamel on an ebony base, it represented the Sea and the Earth as a finely wrought model ship (to hold the salt) and a richly decorated temple (to hold the pepper).7

Ambergris was stored in 'golden apples' or sculpted into crucifixes, buttons, rosaries, encrustations on wooden furniture, and even statuettes, while the pedra bazar, a large ovoid stomachic concretion of certain herbi-

1 F. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life (London, 1974), p. 123. 2 A. Apparadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), intro. 3 For Portugal, see the king's payment for a series of Flemish tapestries, Lisbon, Arquivos Nacionais do Torre do Tombo, Corpo Cronologico, pte. 1, m. 23, doc. 43; for France, see J. Racine, Les Plaideurs (1668), act ii, scene 7. 4 Nobiliaire du diocese et de la generality de Limoges, ed. J. Nadaud, A. Lecler, J.-B. L. Roy de Pierrefitte (Paris, 1974), iii. 78. 5 Scribal entry of Heltai G£spa>, 1595, Koloszva>/Cluj, Municipal Archives, KvSziim 6/XV-XVI. I thank Emese B£lint of Central European University for her help. 6 A. de Magalhaes Basto, 4No tempo dos feitores da Flandres', sep. no. 2 da Dionysos, Porto. 7 Benvenuto Cellini, Salt-cellar, 1543, K[unst]h[istorisches] M[useum, Vienna], www.khm.at. J. Kyba- lov£ places Cellini's work in a wider genre tradition, 'Nddoby na Korenf , Umeni a Remesla, issue 1 (1980), 49-55.




vores, principally the Himalayan goat, which was used against poisons, was entwined with overlapping threads of gold filigree and fixed to a ring designed to be attached to a piece of clothing.1

If the social and exhibitive power of certain spices gradually took precedence over their acknowledged curative properties, the relationship between social and functional value was loosened. For example, the elaborate beaker of 'unicorn' horn made by Jan Vermeyen for the imperial court at Prague around 1600 was fashioned as an exotic curio in which the gold- work, and the pair of cameos on the lid, surpassed the value of the horn, previously highly valued as a powdered antidote to poison. The seventeenth century's obsession with spices such as nutmeg led silversmiths across Europe to fashion pocket graters and receptacles for travellers and

gave a new lease of life to the pomander, a ball of mixed aromatics carried as a preservative against infection, and a fashionable silver accoutrement in seventeenth- century England.2

Spices were not consumed solely in public for the purpose of exhibiting status; they appear equally often in more intimate milieux, the private sphere, as Spices de chambre, kept typically in a small box known as an

Spicier (-e), in the case of the niece of the last Piast king of Poland, Jadwiga (m. 1385), even a jewel-box locked with a key.3 Thus, spices were distin-

guished, even in the way they were stored, from other, common domestic

goods and the distinction conferred social value. In noble households, for

example, spices were kept in leather pouches alongside the family's furs and robes and, in the case of the royal family, with other valuables of the

royal wardrobe including arms. In both cases, spices were stored away from the kitchen, and out of reach of thieves.4

Different spices permeated the social hierarchy to different degrees. Eliyahu Ashtor suggests that spices entered the social hierarchy of the medieval Levant at the level of the skilled artisan (les ouvriers spScialisSs), whereas in western Europe, monastic and hospital records testify to the

regular purchases of spices for their members.5 Andrzej Wyczanski sug-

1 For a description and history, see A. Weixlgartner, 'Die weltliche Schatzkammer in Wien\ Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, ii (1928), 267-315. See also, Indian Bezoar stones, decorated in the Indo-Portuguese style of the 17th century. Probably from the stomach of the Himalayan goat or chamois, Viennese Schatzkammer (Inventory of 1750) KHM, inv. P. 996, 1001. 2 For examples , seej. Brierley, Spices: The Story of Indonesia's Spice Trade (Kuala Lumpur, 1994), pp. 23, 24, and P. Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1990). 3 M. Lemnis and H. Vitry, Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table (Warsaw, 1979), p. 45; J. Zyliftska, Piastowny i zony Piastow (Warsaw, 1967), p. 273. 4 P. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocer's Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000-1485 (New Haven, CN, 1995), p. 74. 5 See, e.g., those of Kloster Vinnenberg in G. Wiebe, Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution desi6. undi~j. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1895), p. 343, and the Hospital of Lier's accounts between 1526 and 1602 in H. van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market (The Hague, 1963), i. 533 ff., most famously




gests that, in Poland, sugar was reserved for the royal court and rich nobles.1 Eastern Europe, however, which often only enjoyed some of the benefits of a monetary economy, needs to be considered a special case; a set of Croatian estate accounts suggests that only during the sixteenth cen-

tury were sugar, salt, and oil, the standard entries, supplemented with

pepper, clove (Klynchafi), and mace (Oryskow cwyt\ a development con- firmed by the prescriptions of Zrinski's cookbook.2 Even in the West, emulation was circumscribed by the limited quantities of spices that reached the European market in the Middle Ages, when, in England, the royal family, ecclesiastics, and favoured nobles were given pre-emptive rights to purchase.

By the sixteenth century, the market had opened up in what the German

sociologist Max Weber called the universal trend to Demokratisierung des Luxus, a development that confirms Gabriel Tarde's theory of cultural

progress, by which luxury goods cater to the whims of an elite before

becoming a necessary acquisition by the wider public seeking respect- ability.3 The relative abundance of pepper, as well as ginger, cinnamon, and saffron, all except cinnamon indispensable to medieval cooking - as we find in the mid-fourteenth-century German Buck von guter Speise - led to the phenomenon of their being snubbed in the households of the noble- men in favour of more exotic and expensive spices.4 The Haushaltbuch of the successful High German merchant Anton Tucher, and the book of expenses of Paul, nephew of the famous Nuremberg cosmographer Martin Behaim, show that between 1544 and 1568, approximately 4-8 per cent of their household expenditure went on spices.5 Does the large sum reflect

published in Annales: Economies. Societes. Civilisations, xxiii (Sept.-Oct. 1968), 1017-1301. 1 E. Ashtor, 'Essai sur ralimentation des diverses classes sociales dans l'Orient medieval', Vie Materielle et Comportements Biologiques, bulletin no. 16; A. Wyczanski, 'Les Aspects Sociaux de la Recherche sur la consommation alimentaire a Pe"poque pre*statistique', First International Conference of Economic History. Contributions . . . Communications (Paris, i960), pp. 474 ff. 2 Vinodol and Ozalj, Hrvatski diiavni, Arhiv, Zagreb, Arhiv obitelji Sermage, Kutija 44-1.1 and 44 -

1.9, 1.19. 1 thank Natasa Stefanec for this information. 3 M. Weber, Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 1923), p. 156; G. Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (New York, 1903). Tarde's theory is applied by R. Austen and W. Smith, who consider the desire for re- spectability as the primum mobile of expanding consumption of sugar among the poor: 'Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrial- isation', Social Science History , xiv (1990), 95-115. 4 See L. Plouvier, cEt les Epices pimenterent la Cuisine Europeenne', UHistoire, no. 76 (March 1985), 84-5; Nightingale, Medieval Mercantile Community, p. 74. 5 Anton Tuckers Haushaltbuch, ed. W. Loose (Tubingen, 1877); Paul Behaim's book of expenses, GNMN, Behaim Archiv, Schrank 102, Fach 1/22, analysed by J. Kamann, 'Aus Niirnberger Haushaltungs- und Rechnungsbiichem des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts', Mitteilungen des Vereins fur Geschichte der Stadt Nurnberg, vi (1866), 57-122 and vii (1888), 39-168. The accounts of the Hospital of Lier between 1526 and 1602 also reveal that 3-6% of expenses went on sugar and spices: see Van der Wee, Antwerp Market, pp. 533 ff., while the rich Antwerp merchant Gerard Gramaye set aside 6% of his expenses on food for condiments: R. Van Uytven, 'Herbes et Epices dans les Villes des Pays-Bas du




the amount consumed or only the high cost? If we extrapolate from the

purchasing power of an Antwerp mason's daily summer wage, we can conclude that his salary was equivalent to 105 grams of pepper at market

price. For this sum, he could buy four and a half kilos of salted beef.1 Or to take another example, after a day's work, a manual worker in Soissons in 1543 would have been able to afford precisely three ounces of ginger, that is, less than one hundred grams.2

*****

It remains to be explained why spices were left behind during the growth of a mass market for consumption in the critical period of its development between 1500 and 1750. Notwithstanding Peter Kriedte and David Orm- rod's stress on supply, the issue of the substitution of the spice trade calls into question the structures and motivations that originally underpinned the demand for spices.3 First, a qualification is in order. 'Left behind' must be taken here to mean a relative decline in the volume of imports rather than an absolute one for, despite the sharp fall in imports of pepper and Moluccan spices that Anthony Reid charts from the 1670s and 1620s, respectively, imports of spices grew slowly but surely throughout the

eighteenth century.4 If, for example, the English were importing around 1.18 million kilograms of pepper during the first half of the seventeenth

century, by 1872 statistical records reveal imports of 12.56 million kilo-

grams, although almost 3.8 million kilograms were re-exported to con- tinental Europe.5 The decline in the spice trade, a relative one, has to be

Sud', in Saveurs de Paradis: Les routes des Spices (Brussels, 1992), p. 86. 1 J. H. Munro, 'The Coinages of Renaissance Europe, c. 1500', in Handbook of European History in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 1400-1600, ed. T. Brady Jr., H. Oberman, andj. Tracy, I: 'Structures and Assertions' (Leiden, 1994), pp. 671-8. Munro continues this line of analysis with respect to fifteenth-century-London building craftsmen and their wages in his lecture 'The Consumption of Spices and Their Costs in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Luxuries or Necessities?', http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/SPICES1.pdf (13 Feb. 2006), p. 4. 2 P. Masson, Les Compagnies du Corail (Paris, 1908), p. 196; L. Febvre, Life in Renaissance France, trans. ofPourune histoire a part entibre (Cambridge, MA, 1977), p. 128 n. 18. 3 P. Kriedte, 'Vom GroBhandler zum Detaillisten. Der Handel mit Kolonialwaren im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert', Jahrbuchfur Wirtschaftsgeschichte, i (1994), 11-36; D. Ormrod, 'Northern Europe and the Expanding World Economy: The Transformation of Commercial Organisation, 1500-1800', in Prodotti e tecniche d'oltremare nelle economie europee secc. XIII-XVIII: atti della ventinovesima settimana distudi, [Prato] 14-19 aprile 1997, ed. S. Cavachiocchi (Florence, 1998), pp. 671-701. 4 A. Reid, 'The System of Trade and Shipping in Maritime South and South-East Asia, and the Effects of the Development of the Cape Route to Europe', figs. 1 and 2.5. in The European Discovery of the World and Its Economic Effects on Pre-Industrial Societies, 1500-1800, Papers of the 10th International Economic History Congress, ed. H. Pohl (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 76-7. 5 H. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis, 1976), p. 236; F. A. Fliickiger and D. Hanbury, Pharmacograpkia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin Met within Great Britain and British India (London, 1874), p. 523.




measured against the increasing trade in new luxuries such as coffee, chocolate, and tea that the market brought in its train.1

French historians claim that the changing aesthetic climate in eighteenth-century France led to the formulation of a set of carefully denned

practices and preferences that passed as good taste (bon gout) in polite society.2 Joan Corominas argues that their antecedents are to be found in

Spain of the Golden Age, while Luiz Diez del Corral argues that changes in what one ate at table was only one of many cultural leads given in the sixteenth century by Italians 'emphatically and wholly committed to aesthetic values' that the rest of Europe adopted to a greater or lesser degree.3 The notion of taste, intrinsically hedonistic, was symbiotic with the abandon- ment of the medieval preoccupation with Aristotelian dietetic oppositions that dictated what was good for one at any moment for reasons of health. Good taste, which was a social as much as a dietetic injunction, renounced the 'barbaric' practices of previous eras; the 'squalid' eating habits and the

gluttony: in line with Renaissance prejudices, it self-consciously distanced itself from the culture of the immediate past. Despite pronounced cultural differences, most marked between North and the South, the development, like the Renaissance, occurred throughout Europe, if at different speeds and with many local exceptions.

The most important works published in the country that did most to

adopt Italian innovations, France, were the Cuisinier francais of Francois de la Varenne (1651), Le Cuisinier of Pierre de Lune (1656), L'Art de bien traiter (1674), and Massialot's Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691). To-

gether with institutions such as the Ecole des officiers de bouche, they showed that France had inherited the mantle of Florence's academy 'de la Marmite'.4 One of their reforms was the consigning of the 'choleric' spices such as pepper, but also the favoured ginger and saffron, to the rubbish bin of defunct medieval culture. G. P. Marana referred to them, at the end of

1 For the arrival of tea, tobacco, sugar, and coffee, see C. Stammas, 'Changes in English and Anglo- American Consumption 1550-1800', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. J. Brewer and R. Porter (London, 1993), pp. 177-206; R. Perren, 'The Marketing of Agricultural Products', in The

Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. J. Thirsk: VII, Part IV: Trade, Commerce, and Industry, ed. J. Chartres (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 959-99. 2 J.-L. Flandrin, 'La revolution culinaire du XVIIe siecle', intro. to F. de la Varenne, Le cuisinier francais (repr. Paris, 1983), p. 14, and 'La distinction par le gout', in Histoire de la vie privee, ed. P. Aries and G. Duby (Paris, 1986), iii. 290. 3 J. Corominas, Diccionario critico etimoldgico castellano e hispdnico (Madrid, 1954"7)> 'Gusto'; L. Diez del Corral, El Rapto del Europa, trans, as The Rape of Europe (London, 1959), p. 232. For Grecian's role in the eighteenth-century conception of taste, see K. Borinski, Baltasar Gracidn und die Hof- literatur in Deutschland (Halle an der Saale, 1971). 4 De Garine, UHistoire des Moeurs, ed. Poirier, i. 1586 ff. For the reassessment of early modern taste in light of Le Cuisinier francais, see M. Dembinska, 'Kuchnia srednowieczna. Nowozytna czy Narodowa?', Kwartalnik Historii Cultury Materialnej, xxxii (1984), 549-56.




the seventeenth century, as those 'spices from hell' (epicerie d'enfer); ac-

cording to Alexandre Dumas (1802-70), writing about nineteenth-century country fare, pepper was 'a rude' (grossiere) spice; and, according to the Abbe Raynal writing in the 1770s, such spices equated with barbarian

gluttony and a cult of excess.1 The path to such a position can be traced through the denunciations of

luxury and decadent consumption by spokesmen for the Reformation in

Germany, and in England by the Puritans. Although Jean-Louis Flandrin shows that the seventeenth century's obsession with gluttony was invented

morality, to be placed alongside the censure of such practices as kissing in

public, Michel Jeanneret exaggerates in attributing the repression and mar-

ginalization of Renaissance exuberance to the 'fell swoop of classicism'.2

Raynal's moral vocabulary was typical in contrasting good taste, paired with honestas and civitas, with the crude instincts of the masses.

Braudel argues that the emphasis on quantity and show when eating, an obsession with abundance and satiation evident in any description of a medieval banquet, changed during the period to the qualitative expression of taste.3 Rather than serving whole animals as large as calves at the

banqueting table, tasty morsels and favoured cuts were pre-selected for the

guests. Plates, like the tastes themselves, were changed regularly during the meal: Pierre Belon declared that 'at a simple bourgeois meal you will see two, three, or four dozen dirty dishes, enough to occupy two men for a day in cleaning them.'4 Tastes increased in number from the Aristotelian two

(sweet and bitter) to ten and, in the rationalizing spirit of the philosophes, were assumed into the doctrine of 'proportions in the geometry of the

spirit' (proporzioni nella geometria dello spirito).5

1 Abbe Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans, from the French byj. Justamond (London, 1777), i. bk. 1, p. 22; A. Dumas, Le Grand Dictionnaire de la Cuisine (Paris, 2000), p. 452; indictments are also to be found in S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1782-3), 8 vols. 2 Flandrin, 'La distinction par le gout', p. 290. Such themes were closely linked to the mercantilist position as far as the political economy was concerned and which sought to minimize the expenditure of national bullion on the profligate luxuries of the East: M. Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Table Talk in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1991), p. 4. 3 F. Braudel, Civilisation materieUe, economie, et capitalisme: XVe-XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1966), i. 139-44; B. K. Wheaton, Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (Philadelphia, 1983), chs. 3-4. For an example of the medieval obsessions with satiation and abundance, see G. de Resende, Cronica de-El Rei D. Jodo //(Lisbon, 1902), ii. cap. XXIV, 88-90 and CXXV, pp. 90-2. The orthodoxy is challenged by Flandrin who, after counting the dishes presented between the Menagier de Paris (c.1393, repr. Paris, 1846) and F. MassiaJot's Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois . . . ouvrage tres-utile dans les families (Paris, 1691), challenges the claim that quantity diminished and suggests that medieval feasts had less to do with finesse or vulgarity of tastes than with competition for social prestige: 'La distinction par le eout', p. 282. 4 P. Belon, L'Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, avec leurs descriptions et naifs portraicts retirez du naturel (Paris, 1555), p. 62. 5 T. E. Acree et al., 'Basic Dimensions of Taste in Man', in Handbook of Sensory Physiology, ed. L. M.




Piero Camporesi describes the dominant aesthetic that emerged as a 'mixed repertoire of tastes orchestrated upon variety and on the play of flavours that meet and chance upon each other but are not blended', in which the delicate and the sensitive took precedence.1 Thus, the 'violent flavours' (sapori violenti) of the hot spices were rejected together with

bingeing on highly flavoured potpourris. The more esoteric spices used to exoticize such concoctions also fell out of use: grains of paradise, long pepper (popular in the Vivendier), and galangal. The seventeenth century recommended the consumption of 'fine', delicate spices that lingered on the palate, in particular enlarging the repertoire of dessert recipes for

sugared pastries and intricate confectionery.2 Flandrin shows that cloves, which figured in only 4-16 per cent of recipes from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, figure in 40 per cent of the recipes contained in Le Cuisinier Francais. 3 From the time of the thirteenth-century Viandier de Taillevent, cloves tended to be used with cinnamon, which figured in 1549 in 62 per cent of Messisbugo's recipes.4 Nutmeg, too, appeared for the first time in 40 per cent of recipes in Lancelot de Casteau's Ouverture de cuisine

(1694), while the subtle, sweet, aromatic flavour of vanilla spread rapidly across Europe from Spain during the last third of the seventeenth century. The commercial success of 'fine' spices despite the political upheavals that marked the seventeenth century - manifest, as Heinrich Mauruschat shows, in buoyant prices - can be traced back to the popularity exempli- fied in such treatises on cooking.5 It gave Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) the

subject for one of his famous satires: 'You like nutmeg, it's put on every- thing!' (Vous aimez la muscade, on en a mis partout!).6

New sensibilities led to the development of cuisine au beurre, recipes for elaborate sauces, the 'marriage' of drink with food and colour with taste, the separation of the sugared from the salted, and a reduction in the intake of acids. Its precepts lay strongly with 'natural' flavours. Writers like Nicolas de Bonnefon(u)s, author of Delices de la Campagne (1654), led a

campaign against long-established practices that denaturaient, or dis-

Beidler (Berlin, 1971), iv. pt. 2; for the pretensions of a philosophe of taste see, e.g., F. Algarotti, 'Pensieri diversi', in his Ofiere (Venice, 17Q2), vii. 57. 1 P. Camporesi, // brodo indiano. Edonismo ed esotismo net settecento (Milan, 1990), pp. 7-10. 2 See P. Gillet, Par mets etpar vins. Voyages et gastronomie en Europe, XVI-XVIII siecUs (Paris, 1985), pp. 157-67- 3 Flandrin, 'La revolution culinaire du XVIIe siecle', p. 16. 4 The Viandier of TaiUevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts, ed. T. Scully (Ottawa, 1988); C. da

Messisbugo, Libro Novo net quale si insegna il modo di ordinare banchetti, apparechiare tavole etc.

(Venice, 1581), though the work first appeared in Venice in 1491. 5 H. Mauruschat, Gewilrze, Zucker und Salz im vorindustriellen Europa. Eine preisgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Gottingen, 1975), tabelle 2: 'Preise in Frankreich'. 6 N. Boileau, 'Le Repas ridicule', 'Satire IIP, in Oeuvres, ed. S. Menant andj. Vercruysse (Paris, 1969), i. line 119.




guised, tastes by spicing food heavily, overcooking it, or adding super- fluous ingredients.1 Instead, popular texts such as Thomas Tryon's Treatise of Cleanness (1682) and his The Way to Health (1683) promoted 'the Lovers of Wisdom and Health to the more innocent use of Grains, Fruits, and Herbs'*.2 The tendency towards naturalism in taste in place of spices promoted the use of local seasonings, not necessarily the ones used in the medieval kitchen like mint and hyssop, but new ones like chervil, tarragon, basil, and especially thyme, bay leaves, and chives. Parsley became almost universally popular, as did a number of alliaceous root

seasonings (onion, shallots, Spanish garlic) and new categories such as condiments de Provence: capers, anchovies, olives, lemons, and sour and Seville oranges. Many of these seasonings worked better with a lighter diet: between 1500 and 1650, the consumption of meat declined, to be replaced as a staple by bread.3 Florate perfumes were preferred not merely to dis-

guise unpleasant bodily odour, but as an alimentary enhancer; extracts of amber, iris and rosewater, orange petals, even flowers of nutmeg, were added to stews, pastries, and sauces.4 Finally, the tradition of expressly colouring dishes, through the use of substances such as saffron to attain a

yellowish effect, cedar a vermillion, and orchanet (also known as Bugloss of Languedoc) a dark red, and especially the use of substances that sig- nificantly altered the flavour of the dish such as lapis lazuli, and gold leaf and silver leaf (or tin), died out. By the eighteenth century, colour was of interest cfor what it revealed of the nature and taste of the foodstuffs'.5

Within the world oiaromata, or scents and perfumes, we can observe a similar trend away from the heavy base essences of medieval Europe that would once have been considered spices. Animal products such as musk, civet, and ambergris, inherited from Greece and Rome, had been almost

1 A line of criticism of 'disguised', 'titivated', and 'complicated' foods can be traced through P. Boaistuau, Le Theatre du Monde (1558; repr. Geneva, 1981), as well as L. Fioravanti, Miroir universel des arts et sciences en general, trans. P. Cavellat (Paris, 1586), i. 10A; du Verdier, Les diverses Lecons: contenans plusieurs histoires, discours, et faicts memorables; Receuillis des auteurs Grecs, Latins, et Italiens (Lyon, 1592), ch. 23. 2 T. Tryon, Treatise of Cleanness in Meats and Drinks, of the Preparation of Food, the Excellency of Good Airs, and the Benefits of Clean Sweet Beds (London, 1682); idem, The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness (London, 1683), p. 59. 3 Food in Change: Eating Habits from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. A. Fenton and E. Kisbdn (Edinburgh, 1986), following W. Abel, 'Wandlungen des Fleischverbrauchs und Fleischversorgung in Deutschland', Bericht iiber Landwirtsckaft, xxii (1938), 411-52. These are contrary to the findings of the Vie section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes published in Annales (ESC) between 1958 and 1965 as reported by P. Chaunu, European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages (Amsterdam, 1979), p. 298. 4 F. Braudel, 'The Decline in the Vogue for Pepper after 1650', Capitalism and Material Life, pp. 152- 5; Flandrin, 'La revolution culinaire du XVIIe siecle'. 5 Flandrin, 'La distinction par le gout', iii. 290. For colourants, see A. Grieco, The Meal (London, 1992).




completely eliminated by the late eighteenth century. They were thought to be too strong, too animalistic; their 'excremental' odours repulsed rather than attracted. The change was partly attributable to the new fashion -

that, along with culinary taste, began in Italy over the course of the sixteenth century and was passed on to France - for delicate floral and herbal scents to be found locally: lavender, rosemary, violet, pine, thyme, daffodil, and rose. Eighteenth-century accounts record that mouths, feet, and private parts were washed in rosewater, and the breath was scented with iris paste. The most popular scent sold seems to have been poudre a la marechale, a blend of iris, clove, lavender, rose, orange, and marjoram concocted by the marechal d'Aumont, and poudre d'oeillet, of carnations, a favourite during Louis XV's reign.1 As one reads in the Encylopedie, 'amber, civet, and musk have fallen out of fashion ever since our nerves became more delicate,' while Simon Barbe, a widely esteemed French perfumer, urged the 'abundance of flowers' in the manufacture of perfumes.2 Technological developments such as the invention of enfleurage -

coating flower petals with fat in order to extract oils - helped reinforce the momentum towards florate scents. As Peter Kennett explains, the picture is complicated by a difference between the genders: men chose non-erotic scents such as fir, pine, and lilac essences, while women chose stronger scents such as lavender and rose thought to be sexually arousing.3

The transfer of this new set of aesthetic priorities to the colder regions of Europe, far from the centre of culinary fashion, occurred very gradually. It took some of the new arrivals, such as chocolate, almost two hundred years to travel from Spain, where it was being drunk in the 1520s, to Scandinavia and Russia. In 1648, Jean Le Laboureur could still complain that pates at the Polish court were call black inside from the spices and saffron' [tout noirs au dedans d'epices et de safran). And a hundred years later, we find the same critique expressed in even stronger terms: Abbot Mably ate a meal in Cracow in 1776 which he described as 'a most copious meal, and which might have been very good had the Russians and Confederates [Poles] destroyed all the aromatic herbs that they use lavishly here . . . and which poison travellers'.4 Differences in taste would seem to reflect, at least

1 A. Corbin, Le miasme et lajonquille. L'odorat et I'imaginaire social, i8e-ige siecles (Paris, 1982), p. 90; in the Pindaric ode of Lady Winchilsea (1661-1720): 'Now the Jonquille o'ercomes the feeble Brain . . . faint beneath the aromatick pain': 'The Spleen', in Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions: Written

by a Lady (London 1713), p. 90. 2 Encylopedie (1765), entry under 'parfum'. 3 Kennett, A History of Perfume. 4 Braudel, Civilisation materielle, ii. 188-91. Mauruschat, in his analysis of German cake recipes, suggests that the application of spices diminished markedly between the Leipziger Kochbuck/vorgestellet von SE (Leipzig, 1706) and the Neues hannb'verisches Kochbuch, in zwey Theilen (3 Aufl.) (Hanover, 1803): Gewilrze, Zucker und Salz im vorindustriellen Europa, p. 162.




in part, a conflict between social values. While the French were cultivating their sensibilities, sense of aesthetic, and application of reason, the Poles, hemmed in by the Ottomans and struggling to sustain the bulwark of Christendom (antemurale Chris tianitatis) boasted that their 'marshal valour, fierceness, and prowesse' was reflected at the dinner table in what would, to the French, have seemed to be the medieval values of impulsive- ness and excess.1

The new taste not only differentiated itself spatially, but it also permeated society at different speeds. Or rather, probably we cannot understand the discourse of refinement and savoir-vivre without allowing for its

distancing from the ignorance, and the vulgarity of the alimentary habits, of the masses. Flandrin comments on the gradual segregation among diners; servants being banished from the common table. Alfred Franklin, from his

study of civility treatises, dates the rise of the rustic {le rustre) as a figure of contempt only from the sixteenth century.2 Boileau's satire, for example, was aimed specifically at the cuisine fruste des auberges, the unpolished fare supplied by inns. Thus, whereas pepper figured in only 20 per cent of Varenne's recipes in 1661, in La Nouvelle Maison Rustique, a housewife's handbook published in 1755, it figured in 60 per cent of the recipes.3

The new taste accompanied the rapid increase in new products im-

ported from overseas colonies. The most notable was coffee, which from the time of Linnaeus's Hortus Cliff ortianus, published in Amsterdam in 1737, replaced the clove branch found, for example, in Peter Plancius's Orbis Terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus, published in 1594, as the preferred emblem of Asia on frontispieces. Coffee was closely followed by tea, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco. Together, they eclipsed the traditional spices, and must be seen as their direct successors as luxurious, incidental, stimulative, and comestible properties. The old and the new were often consumed together. Pierre Pomet attested to the mixing of cinnamon with coffee and Michel Morineau to the consumption of cinnamon with chocolate in New Spain.4 But coffee and tea were not spices: by the

l G. Botero, The Travellers Breviat (1601; repr. Amsterdam, 1969), p. 84. Attempts have been made to link the aesthetics of culinary taste with feminine beauty: thus, the pudgy archetypal Rubens model is associated with the prevalent taste for les sauces grasses: J.-L. Flandrin and M.-C. Phan, 4Les meta- morphoses de la beaute feminine', L'Histoire, lxviii (1984), 50-7. 2 A. Franklin, La vie privee d'autrefois: arts et metiers, modes, moeurs, usages des Parisiens, du XHe au XVIII siecles (27 vols., Paris, 1887-1902); Flandrin, 'La distinction par le gout', p. 270. P. Freedman traces both contempt for rustics and a link to their consumption of pepper in the fifteenth-century poetry of Eustache Deschamps and a fifteenth-century medical writer commenting on the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, 'Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value', Speculum, lxxx (2005), 1215. 3 Flandrin, cLa revolution culinaire', p. 16. 4 R. K. Miiller and O. Prokop, 'Geschichte der GenuBgifte', in Gifte. Geschichte der Toxicologie, ed. M.

Amberger-Lahrmann and D. Schmahl (Heidelberg, 1988), p. 266; M. Morineau, Ces incroyables




sixteenth century, spices had become a closed group.1 With the diffusion of new commodities across Europe following the Discoveries and Euro- pean expansion, former categories were reformulated, and new ones invented. But coffee, tea, and chocolate were not given a group name. In

discussing them historically, we have to devise our own typology: works in German use the term Genvfimittel (luxuries), while English-language works refer to 'colonial groceries', a term derived from the grocers who sold them.2

Can we build a bridge between the arrival of the new commodities and the precepts of the new culture of taste? Historians have tried to situate the enthusiasm for coffee and tobacco during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the discussion provoked by Norbert Elias of the long-term cultural changes that affected Europe and coined the civilizing process.3 Hasso Spode postulates that these commodities play their part in the emer-

gent culture of 'sobering indulgence' (niichterne Rausche), that challenged the destabilizing influence of alcohol consumption.4 This role may explain why commodities such as betel, chewed in the mouth alongside the areca nut for a strong stimulative effect, never took off in Europe. The new commodities were not consumed at meals, but before, after, or between meals, and often elsewhere; thereby, they created their own, new, forms of socia-

bility. Easily prepared and swiftly consumed, they were suited both to the new regimes of work, and to the evolving public sphere constituted of social engagements that reunited polite society. Finally, the commodities paired off: tea with sugar and coffee with tobacco.

* * * * *

The transition from one set of tastes to another, and the shift in para- digms, centred on the spice trade, which lost its position as the world's foremost long-distance luxury trade to rival goods. The change is more easily demonstrated than explained. Flandrin fails to explain why taste should have changed so profoundly over the seventeenth century, breaking with a deeply entrenched and centuries-long tradition of good living. Economists focus on cthe snob effect': the formula that when a rare product

gazettes etfabuleux metaux . . . (Paris, 1983), p. 264. 1 S. Halikowski Smith, 'Portugal and the European Spice Trade, 1480-1580' (Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, 2001), p. 5. 2 Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter, p. 81; M. Berg, 'Manufacturing the Orient: Asian Commodities and European Industry (1500-1800)', Prodotti e Techniche d'Oltremare nelle Economie Europee, secc. XIII-XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Florence, 1998), p. 393. 3 Elias, Development of Manners. 4 H. Spode, 'Der groBe Erniichterer. Zur Ortsbestimmung des Kaffees im Prozesse der Zivilisation', in Kaffee im Spiegel europdischer Trinksitten, ed. D. U. Ball (Zurich, 1991), p. 219. The phrase niichterne Rdusche is that of E. Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich, 1927).




comes within the reach of the masses, its consumption rises sharply, only to fall off conclusively as it 'loses its attraction'.1 But the formula neither explains the unseating of several millennia of collective practice, nor accounts for the numerous exceptions. The story of paprika in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hungary, for example, suggests that a commodity introduced as a cheap palliative for the mealy and repetitive diet of the poor rapidly was taken up by middle-class households, impressed with its 'irresistible taste' (ellendllhatatlan iz). It quickly became a national institution.2

The transition may be explained best by a theory of demystification.3 Spices lost their privileged phenomenological status in the European canon, both medicinal and hedonistic, following the revelation that there was nothing marvellous, God-given, or paradisiacal about them.4 The

ways demystification came about were manifold. These include the out-

pouring of printed descriptions and ever more realistic cartographic depic- tions of the world in the wake of the Age of Discoveries, as well as the birth of botany as a scholarly discipline. Botany, which set itself the task of re-

interpreting the classical world's understanding of the natural world, con-

sciously distanced itself from the fanciful medieval ascriptions attributed to

spices. Finally, the scientific breakthroughs unveiling the micro-organic world heralded a shift to the cellular unit of scientific analysis by which the

mystification in plant research migrated to the cellular unit of botanical

study. Once spices were demystified, demand for them slumped. Such a set of arguments might explain the paradigm shift in European taste and sensibilities, while anchoring the collapse of the European spice trade within the matrices of demand rather than the extractive economic

strategies in the colonies.

University of Swansea

1 See Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, p. 122; H. Leibenstein, 'Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand', in Quarterly Journal of Economics, lxiv (1950), 183-207. 2 Caption in an exhibition on paprika, Budapest, Orszagos Mezogazdasagi Muzeum, Nov. 1998. 3 The most famous theory of demystification is the Entzauberung or disenchantment theory of M. Weber, Essays in Sociology (London, 1948), p. 155. 4 For the marvellous, God-given, and paradisiacal attributes of spices, see Halikowski Smith, 'Mystification of Spices', passim.



demystifying a change in taste spices, space, and social hierarchy in europe, 1380-1750 author(s)...

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