"In the meadow there is a tree, very fair to look upon.
Its roots are of ginger and galangal, the shoots of zedoary.
Its flowers are three pieces of mace, and the bark, sweet-smelling cinnamon.
The fruit is the tasty clove, and of cubebs there is no lack."

“The Land of Cockayne,” an anonymous (Irish?) poem of the early thirteenth century

THE FLAVORS OF COCKAYNE

The medieval mystic dreamed of spices in Paradise; the gourmand, in Cockayne. Indeed, for the true gourmand, Cockayne was Paradise. For as Paradise soothed and delighted the weary spirit, so Cockayne was tailor-made for the empty or, for that matter, the merely greedy stomach. Here the only virtues were gluttony, leisure, and pleasure, the only vices exertion and care. Doing nothing earned a salary, work was penalized, women were rewarded for sleeping around. A decent fart earned half a crown. Even in church the truest form of worship was to stuff oneself. Conveniently, the church itself was edible, its walls made of pastry, fish, and meat and buttressed with puddings. There were rivers “great and fine,” flowing not with water — a rarity in Cockayne — but with “oile, milk, hony and wine.”

Yet for all this food there was not a single cook in the place, for the meals in Cockayne were at once ready-made yet delectable — a combination, evidently, as arresting then as now. Supper walked, flew, ran, or swam up to the plate. The larks obligingly delivered themselves, pre-spiced, to hungry mouths:

"The larks, already cooked,
Fly down to men’s mouths,
Seasoned in the pot most excellently,
Powdered with cloves and cinnamon".

Being a product of the medieval imagination, that there was a smell of spices to Cockayne’s miraculously self-serving larks was all but inevitable. Nor did the spices end there. One of the abbey’s wells was filled with spiced wine, another with a healing mixture of spices. The walls of the live-in gingerbread houses were nailed with cloves. In the garden grew the vegetable kingdom’s equivalent of the philosopher’s stone, an all-in-one spice tree, with roots of ginger and galangal, shoots of zedoary, flowers of mace, bark of cinnamon, and fruit of cloves. In one version of the poem, “Ginger and nutmeg, all one can eat / are what they use to pave the street.” Even the dogs shat nutmegs.

All in all, in all of its many versions in the various European vernaculars, Cockayne was a very spicy place. In the tongue-in-cheek judgment of one author, such attractions as the abundance of spices and the precooked larks made Cockayne not only comparable to Paradise but better: “Though Paradise is merry and bright / Cockayne is far the fairer sight.” The sizable share of medieval Europeans for whom an empty stomach was a daily concern would probably have been inclined to agree.

Satirical fantasy it may be, yet the various visions of Cockayne that survive suggest something of the depth of the medieval fixation with spices. They were objects of extraordinary charm and appeal, so enticing that they did not seem out of place among the pleasures of a dream. It was, moreover, a dream that cooks labored hard to turn into reality, for spices featured as conspicuously in the real-world smoke and grime of the medieval kitchen and hall as they did in the make-believe landscape of Cockayne. Other foodstuffs have at one time or another held a similar grip on the imagination — coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate — yet all were, in comparison, passing fads. None accumulated a comparable body of myth and lore nor carried quite the same social clout.

When the glutton’s paradise of Cockayne took shape, spices had already held a grip on the European imagination for centuries and would do so for centuries yet.

It is often claimed that spices returned to European cuisine with the crusaders, but this, we have seen, is manifestly not the case. They had never left. The first and most enduring taste, and throughout the Middle Ages far and away the most important spice, was pepper. In 946, there was a pepper sauce — poisoned, in this case — on the table of King Louis IV (ruled 936–954) of France. By the turn of the millennium, the spice was established as a regular feature of the noble and monastic diets. In 984, the monks of Tulle paid three pounds of pepper to their brothers of Aurillac to celebrate the feast day of their patron, Saint Gerald. At the Swiss abbey of Saint Gall the spice was sufficiently familiar that the monks nicknamed one of their number “Peppercorn” on account of his prickly personality.

Though spices were by now a taste shared by the elites across Europe, supply was a largely Italian affair. By the closing years of the millennium, traders from several Italian maritime republics were energetically expanding their presence in the Muslim Levant, led, as they were five hundred years later, by the Venetians. To safeguard their vulnerable position abroad, Doge Pietro II Orseolo (ruled 991–1009) negotiated commercial treaties with the Muslim North African powers. Even so, the trade remained a risky business, liable to periodic incarcerations, seizures of goods, and shipwreck. At the turn of the millennium, the Saxon chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg wrote of the loss of four Venetian ships crammed with many different spices. At this point the Venetians still shared the trade with merchants from Salerno, Gaeta, and Amalfi — the dominance of the republic still lay in the future. In 996, a traveler to Cairo counted 160 merchants from Amalfi alone; in Syria, there were hundreds of others from Bari and Sicily.

From Mediterranean ports spices were dispersed over the Alps and across the breadth of Christendom. In 973, Ibn Jaqub, a Jewish merchant from Andalucia, was astonished to find Indian spices for sale at the German town of Mainz. Under King Aethelred II “The Unready” (ruled 978–1013, 1014–1016), German merchants in London paid their customs duties in pepper. In England spices were a sufficiently common feature of the commercial scene to find their way into a school textbook, a set of translation exercises written around 1005 by Aelfric, abbot of Eynsham, in Oxfordshire. Spices feature as part of the cargo of a merchant returning from across the sea, among his silks, gems, gold, oil, wine, ivory, metals, glass, and sulfur: a detail to fire a bored schoolboy’s imagination but one that he—or the abbot — must at the very least have recognized.

By such means the absence of pepper was becoming more noteworthy than its presence, at least for a certain class. Toward the middle of the century, the Italian Cardinal-Bishop Peter Damian wrote of a blasphemer who sprinkled his chicken with pepper “as is customary.” At the century’s close, Ademar III, viscount of Limoges, hosted a visit by Duke William IX of Aquitaine, only to find his larder bare of pepper “for the count’s sauces”—with such an exalted visitor in the house, an intolerable situation. Ademar sent his seneschal to a neighbor, who showed him great mounds of pepper piled on the floor, so that it had to be shoveled out “like acorns for pigs.”

The same William was the first of the Provençal troubadours, a Falstaffian character of prodigious appetites who on account of his riotous living managed the rare feat of being both excommunicated and going on crusade. His poem “I’ll do a song, since I’m dozing” tells of a ménage-à-trois in the castle of two noble ladies who waylaid him one summer’s day as he rode through the Auvergne. Mistaking him for a mute and so unable to tell of their escapades, nor write of them — William’s literacy was a rarity among the nobility ... they kept him at their pleasure for a week, in which time the lusty count bedded them 188 times, primed for this Herculean effort by “a lordly meal” of two fat capons, white bread, good wine, “and the pepper laid on thick.” “I nearly broke my tool and burst my harness... I can’t express the remorse that overtook me.”

By now pepper was well on the way to being considered obligatory, a highly visible and highly esteemed hallmark of the nobility. Yet if spices were becoming more familiar with every year, it was a familiarity that rested on a network of trade and travel that few could have comprehended. The reality was scarcely less wonderful than the fantasies of Paradise and Cockayne. A Rhineland nobleman in the eleventh century could order furs from Siberia, spices and silks from Byzantium and the Islamic world beyond, pepper from India, ginger from China, and nutmeg and clove from the Moluccas. Individuals such as Nahray ibn Nissim, a Tunisian Jew settled in Egypt, were dealing in products as diverse as Spanish tin and coral, Moroccan antimony, Eastern spices, Armenian cloths, rhubarb from Tibet, and spikenard from Nepal. By this stage the trading guild known as the Karimis, a group of Jewish spice merchants based in Cairo, had their agents scattered across the Old World, from China in the east to Mali in the west.

Thus when Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, both the taste for spices and the trade that fed it were already on a firm footing. When the crusaders made their bloody entry into the markets of the Levant and looked bedazzled at the spices and other Eastern exotica, they knew exactly what they were seeing. Religious zeal aside, this was a prospect that made crusading as attractive to the body as it was beneficial to the spirit.

In another sense the Crusades did transform the way spices were used and acquired in the West. The establishment of a foothold in the Levant helped drive a great quickening of economic life. New industries brought new spending power, and the demand for Eastern luxuries grew steadily. The chief movers and profiteers remained much the same as they had been four centuries earlier: chiefly, the Italian maritime republics, joined now by Barcelona, Marseilles, and Ragusa. By nature inclined more to commerce than to crusading, the Italians had initially heard the call to holy war with diffidence, but they soon changed their tune when the Franks seized towns and fortresses along the Levantine coast and, for a time, Jerusalem itself. Shortly after the First Crusade, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice all sent fleets to the East, where, in return for providing naval transport and protection, they extracted commercial concessions in several of the captured towns and seized what shipping they could lay their hands on. A Venetian squadron cruising off Ascalon in 1123 seized a rich Egyptian merchant fleet, plundering a fortune’s worth of pepper, cinnamon, and other spices. They meant to continue as they had begun. For the first time since the fall of Rome, European merchants had a substantial presence at one end of the ancient caravan routes.

Although the crusaders’ most spectacular conquests were soon whittled down and their enclaves pushed into the sea, the deepening and broadening of a commercial presence in the Levant marked a shift of enduring significance. Midway through the twelfth century, the earlier trickle of Eastern luxuries had become something approaching a flood.

Early in the twelfth century, Anselm of Laon could write of pepper as a traveler’s “necessity,” to be carried on a journey along with cheese, bread, candles, “and other such things.” In the 1170s, William Fitzstephen saw spices in the markets of London, a town that though blighted by “the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires” had cosmopolitan appetites:

"Gold from Arabia, from Sabaea spice
And incense; from the Scythians arms of steel
Well-tempered; oil from the rich groves of palm
That spring from the fat lands of Babylon;
Fine gems from Nile, from China crimson silks;
French wines; and sable, vair, and miniver
From the far lands where Russ and Norseman dwell."

Around this time guilds of spicers and pepperers began to crop up across the major towns of Europe. The speciarius became an increasingly common figure on the urban scene; by the thirteenth century he was part of the mercantile establishment. In Oxford in 1264, the shop of one William the Spicer was burned by boisterous students. In London, the Company of the Grocers is still in existence, having grown out of the older guild of the Pepperers; their coat of arms has nine cloves at its center. Guilds such as these were the remote ancestors of the supermarkets of the twenty-first century.

There, however, the similarity ends. For the medieval spicer’s products, though increasingly familiar, were anything but prosaic. The secrets of the spice routes would not be revealed to European savants for centuries, and even today only the outlines are clear. From India spices flowed west along two broad routes, each heavily trafficked since ancient times. The first followed the western shore of the subcontinent north to Gujarat, passing Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and north to Basra, the port from which Sinbad set off on his adventures. Here caravans took the spices north and west, through Persia and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea. Alternatively, they charted a more southerly course, snaking out along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, via the oasis towns of the Syrian desert to marketplaces in the Levant. Many of these spices that came via the Persian Gulf ended up in Constantinople. What was not consumed within the Byzantine empire was then reshipped to other destinations as far away as Scandinavia and the Baltic.

The second main spice route from India followed the path once taken by Rome’s fleets, now largely in Arab hands. From Malabar the spices were ferried across the Indian Ocean, around the Horn of Africa, and north up the Red Sea. Some were unloaded at the Red Sea port of Jiddah, then proceeded by caravan to Levantine outlets via Mecca and Medina. What did not pass overland followed the old Roman route to the western shores of the Red Sea, where the cargoes were carried overland to the Nile and then shipped downriver for taxing, sale, and reshipment in Cairo before finally reaching the Mediterranean at Alexandria.

By the end of the tenth century, it was by this second, Egyptian route that most of Europe’s spices arrived. The reason was political, in the form of the decline of centralized power in Mesopotamia and the emergence, in Egypt’s Fatimid dynasty (969–1171), of a strong and wealthy commercial rival. Like the Romans, the Fatimids encouraged trade by maintaining naval patrols in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. They offered reliable guarantees for the security of merchants, native and foreign alike. Cairo was then embarking on the period of its greatest commercial splendor, drawing commerce, merchants, and travelers like filings to a magnet. Alexandria regained the position it had occupied in classical antiquity as Europe’s chief point of access to the exotic goods of the East.

Like the Romans, Alexandria’s Fatimid masters did not have to look hard for buyers. When the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela called at Alexandria in the 1160s, he found a Babel of all the major western European nations, with Italians rubbing shoulders with Catalans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans. In an age of religious wars theirs was a somewhat anomalous position, yet they succeeded by and large in maintaining the commercial relations on which the flow of spice into Europe depended. The Egyptians needed customs duties, and the Europeans were willing to run the risk of the occasional extortionate or even murderous ruler for the sake of the profits at stake, secure in the knowledge that any unexpected price hikes could be passed on to the captive European market.

But if trade could be profitable, it could also be perilous, for body and soul alike. Not until the twelfth century did the Church accept trade as a respectable occupation, and even then misgivings endured. No trade provoked more distrust than the long-distance trade in luxuries, as much on account of the goods themselves as what getting them entailed. Dealing with the Infidel only made matters worse. The dexterity of the Venetians in particular scandalized more zealous believers, contributing to their reputation as avaricious merchants but tepid Christians. In 1322, the pope excommunicated many leading citizens of Venice for their dealings with the Muslim powers, and for a time a papal ban succeeded in disrupting trade with Egypt. However, even papal sanctions could not halt so much as redirect the traffic — the Venetians simply went elsewhere. The Armenian port of Lajazzo became a new conduit to the West, and for a time Europeans paid a little more for their spice. Shortly thereafter, the Venetians were back in Egypt as if nothing had changed.

The trade and traders alike had an undeniable glamour. For if the risks were great, the profits were colossal. Success in the spice trade conferred vast fortunes and, particularly in the early and central Middle Ages, the rise to ennoblement. The merchants and financiers who established themselves in the traffic were the Rockefellers of their day, such as the Venetian Romano Mairano, who, emerging from relatively humble beginnings and having already made and lost one fortune, financed a cargo of lumber to Alexandria in the 1170s with a loan from the Doge Sebastiano Ziani. The cargo returned a profit sufficient to repay his creditor (in pepper), leaving enough for Mairano to set up a trading network of his own that stretched from Venice to Alexandria, Syria, and Palestine. Such were the risks involved that the valuable cargoes were not entrusted to lumbering, beamy cogs, the workhorses of medieval maritime commerce, but to oared galleys swift enough to outrun any pursuer, leased out by the state to the highest bidder. If the rowers were too slow, there were marines to act as the defense of last resort.

With the growth of the traffic there came a slow but decisive shift in the way spices were viewed in Europe. No longer were spices reserved for a tiny few. Medieval cooks dreamed up hundreds of different applications, leaving practically no type of food free of spice. There were rich and spicy sauces for meat and fish, based on an almost limitless number of combinations of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, pepper, and other spices, ground and mixed in with a host of locally grown herbs and aromatics. To follow there were desserts such as frumenty, a sweet porridge of wheat boiled in milk and spices, and sugary confections of spices and dried fruits, washed down with spiced wine and ale. Though there were significant variations in cooking from one place to another and changes over time, with one or another spice falling into and out of fashion, the spicy tenor of medieval cooking remained a constant.

Thus if the mental world of medieval Europe was provincial, its palate was globalized. The aroma of spice was all-pervasive. In cookbooks of the day spices feature in more than half the recipes, often more than three quarters. Not until modern times, with the advent of air travel and the bulk refrigerated freighter, an age in which Costa Rican bananas are sold in Moscow and Argentine beef in Bangkok, has there been such dependency on foods grown on the other side of the earth. Long before there was world cuisine there were spices.

SALT, MAGGOTS, AND ROT?

"These spices played, alas! A great role in the appalling stews in which our forebears took such delight... They understood nothing of the refinements of the culinary art."

A. FRANKLIN,La Vie privée d’autrefois, 1889

While for the vast majority of medieval Europeans the dreamworlds of Cockayne and Paradise were where the spices stayed, a fortunate few translated their imagined spiciness into reality. Medieval cookbooks and accounts are commonly as suffused with spices as the fantasy. The early-fourteenth-century kitchen of Jeanne d’Evreux, the widow of King Charles IV of France, boasted a small tonnage of cauldrons great and small, solid iron pots, pans, spits, and roasters, offset by an equally heavyweight assembly of spices. Jeanne’s pantry found room for no less than 6 pounds of pepper, 13½ pounds of cinnamon, 5 pounds of grains of paradise, 3½ pounds of cloves, 1¼ pounds of saffron, ½ pound of long pepper, a small quantity of mace, and a colossal 23½ pounds of ginger.

By the standards of the day the widowed queen’s spice stockpile was impressive but by no means exceptional. In England less than a hundred years later the household of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, ate its way through a similarly imposing mountain of seasonings. In twelve months, Humphrey and his family, guests, and retainers devoured no less than 316 pounds of pepper, 194 pounds of ginger, and various other spices, translating into a daily average of around two pounds of spices per day. The account books of the medieval nobility tell of a consumption that looks less like a taste than an addiction. Why this gargantuan appetite for spice, and how on earth did they get through it?

Traditionally, historians have resorted to a straightforward explanation: that old and indestructible myth that medieval Europe had a problem with rancid and rotting meat and that the spices were there to cover other, less appealing tastes. The notion apparently originated with eighteenth-century scholars who looked with horror at the cuisine of their forebears. Like many myths, this does contain a kernel of truth. On the one hand, it is true that, lacking refrigeration, meat and fish were liable to corruption, and food poisoning was a recognized if poorly understood risk. Standards of hygiene could be lackadaisical, as suggested by an ordinance of England’s Henry VIII forbidding the kitchen scullions “to goe naked or in garments of such vilenesse as they now doe.” The cook of The Canterbury Tales has in his shop “many a flye loos;” his repeatedly heated and reheated “Jack of Dover” pies sound like a recipe for botulism. His disease-dealing dishes called down on his head many a poisoned customer’s curse.

The threat was particularly acute with fish, above all in summer. In a famous letter the cleric Peter of Blois (ca. 1130–1203) complains that even at the court of England’s King Henry II the fish was often served four days old: “Yet all this corruption and stench will not reduce the price [of the fish] one penny; for the servants couldn’t care less whether the guests fall sick and die, so that their lord’s tables are served with a multitude of dishes. We who sit at meat must fill our bellies with carrion and become graves, so to speak, for various corpses.”

Against such perils spices were, it is true, a remedy. It is also true that at least some Europeans knew that spices could defuse the risks of old foodstuffs and extend their shelf life. In the medical theory of the day, this preservative effect was explained in terms of the purported physical properties of spices, corruption being understood as an excess of moisture counteracted by the supposedly “heating” and “drying” spices; “fiery” salt was believed to do much the same. The dietetic concerns of the medieval cook are suggested by “The Tale of the Four Offices” by the French poet Eustache Deschamps (ca. 1346– ca. 1406), the four offices in question being the kitchen, cellar, bakery, and saucery, the latter by this time a standard feature of the larger medieval household. Deschamps’s poem is framed as a mock-rhetorical encounter in which each of the offices is endowed with the gift of speech so as to attack the others and proclaim its own superior worth. When it is the saucery’s turn, it claims that not only do spices smell good, they “expel the stench and smell of many meats,” preserving and “rectifying” the meat while aiding digestion. The saucery continues:

"Your flesh will go off,
When it is not cooked in sauce.
Whoever keeps meat two days,
Will find it has a big smell,
Followed by flies and vermin."

Absent the “all-surpassing spices,” the act of eating would be a perilous business. “Many would be in grave peril and at risk of death.”

Similar claims can be found with less hyperbole elsewhere. The Trésor de Evonime of 1555 contains a recipe for an essence made of ground nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and ginger, used for keeping “any meat, fish and all food ... from all corruption with their [the spices’] good aroma and taste.” This was not always done with the consumers’ knowledge. John Garland, an English scholar resident at the University of Paris in the early thirteenth century, writes of the cooks who pass off meats “unwholesomely seasoned with sauces and garlic” to “simple servants of scholars” — a scam still flourishing in some of the less salubrious curry houses of the world.

These sources suggest that the traditional view of spices as instruments of concealment has at least some merit. And while medieval rhetoric was seldom without exaggeration, it loses all its force if its claims were simply invented. It is telling that when the kitchen of Deschamps’s poem responds, it chooses not to dispute the substance of the saucery’s claims, but rather their seriousness.

What the kitchen does point out is that the saucery, like many a food historian since, greatly overstates the threat of decomposition. Though the problem of old meat and fish was real, it was the exception, not the rule: not all the meat and fish consumed in the Middle Ages was rotten. Indeed, since most products were grown locally, it is likely that much medieval food was in fact fresher than food today. (In this connection it is worth recalling that spices went out of vogue long before refrigeration was invented.) Moreover, the argument is at odds with the economic reality. The issue of decomposing ingredients was of least concern to those in a position to afford spices, particularly noble or royal households. Spices were expensive, and those with the money would generally have had enough to acquire at least half-decent meat at a fraction of the cost of spices. Why waste good, expensive spices on poor, cheap meat? Rotting ingredients were a more serious concern for the poor, and the poor lacked the money to buy spices in the first place.

Medieval Europeans were no more hardened to the taste of putrid meat and fish than we are. The risk of unsafe ingredients was not taken lightly, and by the later Middle Ages municipal authorities across Europe were taking steps to crack down on sellers of bad meat and fish with harsh penalties. In comparison, the modern health inspector is a toothless creature. The pillory was primarily a punishment for crimes committed in the marketplace. In Oxford in 1356, the chancellor of the university was granted jurisdiction over the market, with authority to remove “all flesh and fish that shall be found to be putrid, unclean, vicious or otherwise unfit.” In 1366, one John Russell of Billingsgate was prosecuted for selling thirty-seven pigeons deemed “putrid, rotten, stinking and abominable,” for which offense he was sentenced to a spell in the pillory while the offending pigeons were burned beneath him. Offended customers — and interested passersby — had the opportunity to rearrange his guilty features with any filth or stones at hand—hardly the sort of response one would expect from a culture that was indifferent to the wholesomeness of its dinner. Anyone willing to believe that medieval Europe lived on a diet of spiced and rancid meat has never tried to cover the taste of advanced decomposition with spices.

There were, however, other flavors that spices helped surmount. The offending taste was not of putrefaction but of salt, as mentioned earlier. In the winter months fresh meat was at a premium for the simple reason that there was nothing to feed the animals. Medieval Europe lacked most of the high-yielding grass and root crops that are today used to feed herds through the winter and enable a year-round supply of fresh meat — the turnip, for instance, was still considered a garden vegetable. (The beauty of the pig, so to speak, and the main reason behind its importance to the medieval diet, was that unlike sheep or cows it could be left to fend for itself, foraging on chestnuts and waste, whether in town or country; but even for pigs there was not enough food to go around through the lean months.) Only the largest and wealthiest households had either the pasture to keep their herds alive or the storage space to put aside sufficient hay to see them through the winter.

For all those who lacked this luxury, as soon as the frosts moved in and the pasture died off, a good proportion of the herd had to be slaughtered. Traditionally, the seasonal killing was set for Martinmas, or November 11— for which reason the Anglo-Saxon name for November was “Blood Month.” What could not be eaten within a few days had to be salted down, with the result that most if not all of the meat eaten from November through spring was dry, chewy, and salty, requiring soaking and prolonged cooking to alleviate the taste. As winter dragged on, the tedium became, by all accounts, unbearable. In Rabelais’s second book, Pantagruel and his companions are utterly fed up with the salty repetitiveness of the winter diet, one of their number, Caralim, professing himself quite “knocked out of shape” by the experience. The one good word Rabelais can find for salted meat is that it worked up a fearsome thirst, the better to throw down the wine.

At least in theory, there were ways around this problem, but in practice the food for one third of the year suffered from an unrelenting lack of variety. Most of the herbs and vegetables available in summer had yet to germinate, and many of the staples of the modern diet —tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, corn — were still undiscovered across the Atlantic. Several long-lived staples — onions, beans, garlic, leeks, and turnips — were available, but an already limited selection was further narrowed by cultural and class bias. Fruits were seen as “moist” and “cool,” for which reason the sources advise that they should never be eaten raw. With extremely rare exceptions, carrots, kale, lettuce, and cabbage are entirely absent from the surviving cookbooks, the reasons being misguided medical belief and snobbery. This is not to say that vegetables were never eaten — they were — but that they were looked down on as food for the poor and animals, unfit for a nobleman. To eat meat was an expression of superior class, whereas to eat vegetables was to join the ranks of gruel-munching churls (or monks). With nobility came land, and with land came meat, whether salted or fresh.

To the constraints of climate and class, religion added another. The dietary restrictions of fast days and Lent further narrowed an already limited selection. Even salted meat was off limits for the forty days of Lent, Fridays, and the other fast days on the religious calendar—in all, nearly half the days of the year. At the start of the thirteenth century, the Twelfth Ecumenical Council decreed no fewer than two hundred fast days in total, which put fish on the menu (and gave a huge boost to the fishing industry) but provided little respite from the salt. Particularly for those living inland, all the fish that could not be supplied by local rivers, lakes, and ponds came heavily salted: herrings pickled in brine; codfish flattened, salted, and dried hard like strips of yellowy leather. Lent was a far more severe form of abstinence than it is today, a fact that accounts for the glee expressed when it ended, most famously in the gluttonous riot depicted by Brueghel in his famous Carnival and Lent. Such was the monotony of the season that Eustache Deschamps could flirt with sacrilege, writing of the “stinking herrings, rotten sea-fish ... A curse on Lent, and blessings on Carnival!” One poor fifteenth-century scholar complained, “You will not believe how weary I am of fish, and how much I wish that flesh were come in again, for I have eaten nothing but salted fish this Lent.”

In the modern West, secularization, greenhouses, and cold storage have brought variety to the tedium of the Lenten fast. In the Middle Ages, for those with the means, one escape was spice. If salt and a deadening lack of variety were the constraints facing the medieval cook, spices were the great opportunity, a means of enlivening a drab and numbingly repetitive diet. What the sixteenth-century Portuguese botanist and physician Garcia d’Orta said of ginger applied to all the major Eastern spices: “On our days of fish it gives us flavor.” This the medieval cook did with a dazzling inventiveness. Far from being an age of culinary primitivism, such was the cooks’ ingenuity that the “lean” dishes of Lent could be scarcely less appetizing or diverse than meat dishes. Spices helped make a feast of the fast.

They were used with practically every type of meat, fish, or vegetable, from the start to the end of the meal. Over and above material necessity, the delight in spices for their own sake — often times with unsalted meat — is unmistakable. Their role was to offset and enhance contrasting flavors, making each taste better — like an espresso before bitter chocolate. The effect was perhaps not wholly dissimilar to the mingling of sweet and sour, pungent and fresh, such as can still be found in dishes of Persian and Moroccan cuisine — many of which are, in fact, medieval survivors. The twelfth-century encyclopedist Honorius of Autun claimed that people ate spices such as pepper to prepare the palate so that wine would taste sweeter afterward.

The most important role of spices was in a huge variety of piquant sauces, perhaps the single most distinctive feature of medieval European cuisine. In his fifteenth-century Boke of Nurture, John Russell, usher and marshal to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, noted that “the function of the sauce is to whet the appetite” — a more refined purpose, in other words, than a simple exercise in damage limitation. Sauces came in many flavors and colors: blue, white, black, pink, red, yellow, and green. They accompanied a huge variety of foodstuffs, both homegrown and exotic — practically anything that moved or swam. Russell mentions spiced sauces for swan, peacock, beef, goose, pheasant, partridge, curlew, thrush, sparrow, woodcock, bustard, heron, lapwing, snipe, beaver, porpoise, seal, conger, pike, mackerel, ling, whiting, herring, perch, roach, cod, whale, and minnow, among others.

Not unlike the major Indian spice mixes still in use today, medieval European sauces tended to be built around a few basic templates that admitted infinite personal variation. Most tended to have one spicy “note” standing out foremost, with dozens of variations on the theme. Every cook was expected to have the basic repertoire at his disposal to make his employer “glad and mery,” as Russell phrased it. Of the various sauces, one of the oldest and most popular was black pepper sauce, in which the sharpness of pepper was offset by bread crumbs and vinegar. There was a hotter variant called poivre chaut, hot pepper, and another called poivre aigret, sour pepper, with verjuice and wild apples. Taillevant, cook and equerry to the French kings Philip VI, Charles V, and Charles VI, gives a recipe for a green sauce for fish comprising ginger, parsley, bread crumbs, and vinegar. Another perennial favorite, often served with roasted poultry, known as galantyne, was made from bread crumbs, ginger, galangal, sugar, claret, and vinegar. Some took their names from the meat they accompanied, such as the “boar’s tail” mentioned by a fourteenth-century householder of Paris, based on cloves, ginger, verjuice, wine, vinegar, and various other spices. One of the most popular sauces across the breadth of medieval Europe was camelyne, so called for its tawny camel color, the keynotes of which were cinnamon, vinegar, garlic, and ginger, mixed with bread crumbs and occasionally raisins. (The name was doubly apt, for much of the cinnamon so consumed would have done time on a camel’s back while in transit through Arabia.)

The usefulness of spices did not end with the main course. It was customary to round off the meal with an after-dinner “dainty” of fruit, nuts, and various spiced confections. When dinner is finished, the valets of Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Perceval bring in “very costly” dates, figs, and nutmegs. In the early-thirteenth-century romance Cristal et Claire the meal is followed by dates, figs, nutmeg, “cloves and pomegranates... and ginger of Alexandria.” When Sir Gawain is entertained at a fabulous castle en route to meet the Green Knight, he is served the same after-dinner treats.

Typically, these after-dinner spices were candied with sugar and fruit, like the Provençal orengat, fine slices of orange left to soak in sugar syrup for a week or so before being boiled in water, sweetened with honey, and finally cooked with ginger. The convention endured well beyond the medieval period, the candied and jellied fruits served today its direct descendants. Another survivor is gingerbread, which takes its name from the Middle English “gingembras,” originally a composition of ginger and other spices. The modern “bread” bears little resemblance to the original, which was more of a stodgy paste.

Spices were, if anything, still more in demand in medieval wine and ale. The custom, like so many others, was shared with the Romans. In one of his sermons Saint Peter Chrysologos, archbishop of Ravenna (ca. 400–450), refers to the custom of smearing leather wine flasks with fragrant spices “in order to keep the taste of the wine preserved.” What apparently began as a necessity in due course became an acquired taste. The mid-fourth-century writer Palladius refers with relish to the use of cassia, ginger, and pepper in wine, according to a recipe preserved among the Cretans and given them, so tradition had it, by the oracle of Delphi. The Roman statesman and monk Cassiodorus (ca. 490– ca. 583) drank his wine mixed with honey and pepper. In Gregory of Tours’s late-sixth-century History of the Franks, one Frankish thug offers another a glass of spiced wine after dinner, shortly before swords are drawn and blood is spilled.

The methods of preparing spiced wine remained much the same throughout the Middle Ages. The basic technique was to mix and grind a variety of spices, which were then added to the wine, red or white, which was then sweetened with sugar or honey and finally filtered through a bag, bladder, or cloth. The latter was known as “Hippocrates’s sleeve,” hence the wine’s name, “hippocras.” A late-fourteenth-century book of household management gives the following instructions:

"To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger (gingembre de mesche), fine and white, and an ounce of grain [of paradise], a sixth of nutmegs and galangal together, and grind them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure."

This basic template admitted almost infinite variation. Hippocras could also be made with cloves and nutmeg; another variant called for mace and cardamom. Clarry was much the same as hippocras, the chief difference (though not necessarily) being the use of honey in place of sugar.

As with sauces and sweets, then, spices vastly expanded the drinker’s possibilities. But if spices were the means of invention, necessity was the mother. To a far greater extent than with solid foods, their use was dictated by a need to preserve against corruption, or at least cover its taste. It is suggestive that when medieval writers turn to the topic of wine, the emphasis tends to be as much on results as on taste. Taken neat, medieval wine could be a harrowing experience, and the problem of foul wine was sufficiently common to inspire all kinds of complaints, as with the man-strangling “hard, green and faithless” wines of the poet Guiot de Vaucresson. In the poem “Dispute Between Wine and Water,” composed sometime in the fourteenth century, the best the anonymous author can say of Gascon wine is that it does better than it tastes, “satisfying without doing harm.” Geoffroi de Waterford said of the variety known as vernache that it “tickles without hurting”—faint praise indeed. Several centuries earlier in England, Peter of Blois began a still-flourishing tradition of French complaints about the quality of the wine drunk in England. If Peter is to be believed, the wine consumed at the court of King Henry II tasted like paint stripper: it was “sour or musty; muddy, greasy, rancid, reeking of pitch and quite flat. I have witnessed occasions when such dregs were served to noblemen, they had to sift it through clenched teeth and with their eyes shut, with trembling and grimacing, rather than just drink it.” But even in France there were similar problems. The Burgundian poet Jean Molinet (1435–1507) borrowed some of the starkest lines from scripture to evoke the full nastiness of those vinegared wines that he could only imagine came from Gomorrah, that left him crying in repentance and calling on God for mercy: “Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.”

While there is a good deal of exaggeration in these descriptions, by the same token they point to an underlying truth. Expectations were low, a problem stemming, ultimately, from the barrels in which wine was shipped and stored. Even if the wine survived shipping and storage in a reasonable condition in the barrel — a big “if,” as barrels were often poorly sealed — the contents began to oxidize as soon as the barrel was tapped, rapidly acquiring a powerfully unpleasant taste, variously described as bitter, musty, smoky, ropy, or cloudy. To get the wine at its best, the contents of the barrel had to be drunk within the space of a few days—fine for feasts and binges but less than ideal for all but the largest or most alcoholic of households.

Failing that, old wine quickly turned so acid as to scour even the hardened medieval palate. Records from England’s royal account books tell of the royal cellarers disposing of their spoiled stocks either by pouring them down the drain or — a gesture of dubious largesse — by giving them away to the poor. But such drastic measures represented a serious loss of capital. A better alternative was to drink the wine young. Though young wines were considered very much better than old, they were themselves none too gentle on the palate, being naturally harsh and sour. Eustache Deschamps complained that one year’s green vintage was sharper than spears, slashing razors, and stabbing needles: “I piss a hundred times night and day, yet I’m constipated nearly to death.” So the trick was in the timing: finding the happy medium between too young and too old, too sour and too musty. In effect, the medieval wine drinker was caught between two evils and faced an unenviable trade-off. In his poem “Battle of the Wines,” Henri d’Andeli relates the difficulty of finding wines for even the king’s table that are not either “too yellow” or “greener than a cow’s horn;” yet all others are “not worth an egg.” (Though even these were preferable to beer, which he left to the ignorant Flemings and English.) Compounding the problem was the fact that the stronger and harsher the wine, the longer it was likely to last. Hence one common medieval formula for “good drinking now,” which made perfect sense then but sounds self-contradictory today, was “strong and harsh and drinking well.” It may have burned on the way down, but it was at least likely to last and was at least less caustic than a more “mature” vintage.

By taking the sting out of a young, astringent wine, defusing a barrel “on the turn,” or else suppressing the full malevolence of a vintage that was destined never to be anything other than horrible, spices made the wine drinker’s life a little less painful. As far as the medical authorities were concerned, this virtuous trinity of benefits was capped off by a fourth, in the form of potent healing properties. Writing of the popular clove-flavored wine known as gariofilatum, John of Trevisa summarized the attractions of the spices: “The virtue of the spices and herbs changes and amends the wine, imparting thereto a singular virtue, rendering it both healthy and pleasant at the same time … for the virtue of the spices preserves and keeps wines that would otherwise soon go off.”

With the advent of the technology of the bottle and cork in the sixteenth century, the need for spices in wine was abruptly less pressing. Winemaking techniques and the quality of the end result improved. Yet of all of spices’ uses in the medieval world, spiced wines were perhaps the most enduring, long outlasting the Middle Ages. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) enjoyed an occasional glass of hippocras; it even gets a mention in Der Rosenkavalier. Neither clarry nor hippocras has ever quite disappeared, ultimately evolving into the vermouth, glögg, and mulled wine of today — still one of the best ways of dealing with a red on the turn, short of pouring it down the sink.

Spiced ale, on the other hand, has gone the way of the crossbow and the codpiece. In the Middle Ages, ale really was good for you... comparatively speaking. It was certainly better than the available water, an observation traditionally credited to Saint Arnulphus, bishop of Soissons and abbot of the Benedictine foundation of Oudenbourg, who died in 1087. Arnulphus is the patron saint of brewers, an acknowledgment of his realization that heavy ale drinkers were less afflicted by epidemics than were the rest of the population. Particularly in Europe’s densely crowded towns, with their poor drainage and rudimentary public hygiene, untreated water was a daily reality and an extremely effective vector of infection. Though the effect of contaminated water was only dimly appreciated, the medical theory of the day added intellectual respectability to the wariness of water, classing it as wet and cooling and therefore potentially inimical to the body’s natural balance of moderate warmth and moisture. (It was most likely the probable physical consequences of drinking untreated water that explain the severity of a diet of bread and water, often handed out to errant monks as punishment or adopted willingly as a form of penitence: given the intestinal upsets likely to result, this was truly, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, the bread of adversity and the water of affliction.) Given that the ale drinker was exposed to fewer microbiological nasties, Arnulphus’s bias against water made perfect sense.

The upshot was that ale was consumed in prodigious quantities. In twelve months during 1452 and 1453, the household of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, whom we met above galloping through the spices, consumed more than 40,000 gallons of ale, a daily average of about one gallon per staff member. A few years earlier the more modestly run household of Dame Alice de Bryene in Suffolk had maintained the same girth-stretching rate of consumption. Since its manufacture called for only the most rudimentary technology and ingredients, ale was within the reach of all but the very poor. In England at the start of the fourteenth century, ale cost approximately one sixth as much as wine and was often provided to day laborers as part of their rations. It was, moreover, a crucial source of carbohydrates. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Johann Brettschneider said that “some subsist more on this drink than they do on food.”

Ale’s shortcoming, like wine’s, was its very short shelf life. Its optimum age was around five days, after which time it rapidly deteriorated, turning “ropy” or “smoky,” whereafter it turned undrinkable and occasionally even injurious. (Beer, on the other hand, is made with hops, which contain a natural preservative. Hopped beer is mentioned in a document from the abbey of Saint-Denis dated to 768; however, its consumption did not take off in continental Europe until roughly the thirteenth century. Its acceptance in Britain dates from the fifteenth century.) Old ale could be truly foul: Saint Louis found the drink so noisome that he took it during Lent as a form of penance. Peter of Blois called it a “scurvy drink, sulfurous liquor”—had not Christ elected to turn water into wine, not beer? The sixteenth-century medical writer Andrew Borde was merely stating the obvious when he insisted that ale should be drunk “fresshe and cleare... Sowre ale, and dead ale, and ale the whiche doth stande a tylte, is good for no man.”

This was where spices came, yet again, to the rescue. The medieval popularity of the nutmeg owed much to ale’s perishability: as the clove and cinnamon were to wine, so the nutmeg was to ale — the context of Chaucer’s reference to “notemuge to putte in ale.” Here too, the medieval palate seems to have developed a virtue out of necessity, acquiring a taste for spiced ale to the point that the addition of spice became expected, even preferred; the spice was used “wheither it [the ale] be moyste [fresh] or stale,” as Chaucer puts it. Further down the social scale, ale laced with spice could even be regarded as a poor man’s delicacy. When Chaucer’s “joly lovere” Absalom pays court to the miller’s wife, he sends her spiced wine, mead, and ale—little good though it did him. Some of these spiced ales survived until relatively recently, such as “Stingo,” a variety of pepper-flavored beer popular in London in the eighteenth century. Russian writers of the nineteenth century mention sbiten’, a spiced mead flavored with cardamom and nutmeg.

Much as occurred in the wine trade, advances in hygiene and technology eventually rendered spices redundant, as better preservation and sterilization took the harmful bacteria, and so the spice, out of ale drinking. The invisible and unavoidable action of bacteria was not, however, the only threat to ale that spices had to counter. Other problems with the ale were man-made, the culprits being the taverns and alewives who produced perhaps the bulk of the ale consumed outside the great households. The alewife’s profession was not, to put it mildly, renowned for its integrity. (Along with prostitution, this was, incidentally, one of the very few economic opportunities open to women in the Middle Ages.) The thirteenth-century German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach included the tale of the honest alewife among his collection of miracles. So outstandingly repugnant were some of the alewives’ home brews that they inspired a whole subgenre of poetry, the “good gossips” tradition. Nor was the law any gentler with the unscrupulous alewife than with the monk or satirist. Towns of any size appointed officials responsible for performing spot checks on ale and enforcing harsh penalties on offenders. In London in 1364, one Alice Causton was obliged to “play Bo Peep through a pillory” for tampering with her ale; others did worse (and received worse) for selling bad ale—befouling the national drink, after all, was not to be taken lightly. Even the Church had something to say on the issue. In Ludlow church in Shropshire parishioners were either warned or gratified by a carving of an alewife in Hell, condemned to eternal torment among claw-footed devils.

But while such laws and warnings may have sent the occasional shiver down an unscrupulous alewife’s spine, their sheer proliferation suggests that laws on ale quality were regularly flouted. In this world if not in the next, spices were a more dependable ally of the ale drinker than the authorities, the pillory, or even, it would seem, the threat of perdition. Just how desperately they were needed can be gauged from John Skelton’s The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge, a poem composed early in the sixteenth century and perhaps based on a real alewife of the same name, recorded to have lived at Leatherhead in 1525. Skelton’s heroine had come up with an ingenious way of accelerating the production of her home brew—by letting her chickens run in the “mash-fat,” the vat where the malt and the water were mixed. Worse, they roosted

"Straight over the ale-joust,
And dung, when it comes,
Drops right in the ale..."

There were worse tastes for spices to counter than salt and sourness.

THE REGICIDAL LAMPREY AND THE DEADLY BEAVER

"The first thing is to know and recognize the complexion and nature of all things that are suitable to eat, and of him who eats them."

ALDOBRANDINO OF SIENA (thirteenth century), Le Régime du corps

If the dish is hot, mix it with another cold one; if it is wet, join it with its opposite."

AVICENNA(ca. 980–1037), Canon of Medicine

Alas for poor King Henry. Though he arrived in Lyons-la-Forêt (Normandy) in the autumn of 1135 sound in body and mind, he left there a corpse, all on account of an ill-advised meal. In the words of Henry of Huntingdon, author of "Historia Anglorum, or History of the English:“When he came to Saint-Denis in the forest of Lyons, he ate the flesh of lampreys, which always made him ill, though he always loved them. When a doctor forbade him to eat the dish, the king did not take this salutary advice…. So this meal brought on a most destructive humor and violently stimulated similar symptoms, producing a deadly chill in his aged body, and a sudden and extreme convulsion.” Within a few days he was dead, and his kingdom was at war.

Seldom can a poor menu selection have mattered more, at least in the chronicler’s version of events. The ensuing wrangle took the better part of two decades to sort out: “When King Henry died … the peace and harmony of the kingdom were buried with him,” as a contemporary put it. With his son and heir dead in the disaster of the White Ship, drowned in the English Channel, Henry had proclaimed his daughter Matilda next in line to the throne, but his nephew Stephen and the Norman nobility were not so sure. Overlooking his sworn oath of loyalty, Stephen made a rival claim for the crown, resulting in a civil war that ended only with his death and the accession of the young King Henry II in 1154. If only the first Henry had listened to his physician — or read his cookbooks.

At the time, they amounted to much the same thing. In the modern bookstore the contents of the food section can typically be divided into three categories: the practical, the dietetic, and the whimsical. During the Middle Ages the whimsical—by which I refer to travel, history, and essays on gastronomy—did not exist, and between the first two there was no clear distinction. Cooking was dietetics. The concern of the medieval food writer was as much in maintaining or restoring health as with creating an aesthetic effect. Cooking was considered more a medical science than an art. (There is a distant echo of this past in the modern term “recipe,” which originates with the medical precepts of the Salernitan school, the most widely read medical textbooks of the Middle Ages. These were written as a series of formulae beginning with the Latin injunction “Recipe,” that is, “Take...”) In the opinion of Andrew Borde, author of The Dyetary and Breviary of Helthe, both published in 1547,“A good cook is half a physician, for the chief physic (the counsel of a physician except) doth come from the kitchen.” Once this fact is appreciated, much of the mystery of medieval cooking is abruptly explained. Were it possible to beam one of today’s celebrity chefs back to the court of Henry I, the king would find his or her bestsellers bland, bizarre, and more than a little dangerous, bound to finish him off even faster than a surfeit of prohibited lamprey.

The medieval overlap of cuisine and health is particularly significant to understanding the taste for spices. (The European taste for coffee and tea likewise began on doctors’ orders, as it were.) Medical theory held that all foods diverging from the temperate ideal risked causing a humoral imbalance; that is, illness. Many a death caused by natural causes or some unknown agency was attributed to food provoking a supposed disruption of the humors—as was the case, in all likelihood, with Henry’s death-dealing lamprey. Writing early in the sixth century, Anthimus claimed to have witnessed two peasants brought near death by eating turtledoves, birds believed to be replete with melancholy humors, resulting in an alarming outbreak of diarrhea and “vomiting that constricted part of the face.” Aldobrandino of Siena claimed that foods he classed as cold and moist, such as fruit, brains, and oily fish, were “viscous... producing abomination.”

With such dire warnings ringing in the diner’s ears, the spiced dishes that were such a feature of medieval cuisine made a good deal of medical sense. It was all a question of striking the right balance. There was nothing new in this notion; indeed, its sheer antiquity guaranteed its authority. From Hippocrates onward all the major medical writers of antiquity cite various spicy recipes, many of which reappear, sometimes changed little if at all, in the cooking of the Middle Ages. Even the cookbook of Apicius, the foremost document of the Roman delight in the belly, pragmatically counsels a dose of spiced salts “for the digestion” and to ward off “all diseases and the plague and all types of cold.” Sanctioned by the wisdom of the ancients—if wisdom it was—spices were believed to heal, mitigate, and rectify as much as they delighted.

Underlying this faith—for medieval medicine had a great deal more to do with belief than empiricism—was an acute suspicion of many foods now regarded as eminently nutritional. Food frequently took the blame for all the far more deadly but as yet inexplicable and invisible killers such as salmonella, cholera, pneumonia, typhus, and tuberculosis. According to medieval medical theory, many foods required modification before they could be eaten safely, the supposedly heating and drying properties of spices being seen as a form of compensation, their primary duty being to rectify the otherwise harmful properties of the food. If the premise was not scientific, the methods were. Writing in the 1330s, the Milanese physician Maino de Maineri claimed that spiced sauces could counterbalance the effects of “intemperate” foodstuffs. His Opusculum de Saporibus — “A Medieval Sauce-Book” was Lynn Thorndike’s apt translation—begins with a summary of meats, fish, and fowl, setting out a classification system by which to judge their place on the spectra of hot through cold and dry through wet, with the appropriate sauce tailored accordingly. Depending on their classification, some otherwise problematic foods could be rectified with spices, the potentially dangerous effect of one canceling out that of the other. Pork was generally seen as cool and moist by nature, apt to generate phlegmatic humors, and therefore amenable to spices. Beef, in contrast, was dry and cold, suitable for spicing but requiring some wetting as well.

The corollary of the same was that there was an equal though opposite danger from foods occupying the hot and dry end of the spectrum. Like all creatures, wildfowl were held to take after their element, being regarded as warm and a little on the dry side — all that flying around in the dry, hot air — from which it followed that they had to be seasoned accordingly. One common remedy was the addition of a compensatory “cool and moist” pea puree. For the same reason birds were apparently seldom eaten with spices, at least not without some countervailing “cooling.”

Some foodstuffs were more dangerous than others. Lamb was widely regarded as dangerously warm and moist, for which reason it was never popular. One of the most problematic meats was beaver tail, widely classified as fish and therefore much sought after by certain monastic communities for fish days. Like fish, it was judged to be “a very delicate dish,” for which reason the medieval diner apparently never ate his beaver au naturel. It was not gastronomy so much as dietetics in Edward Topsell’s mind when he advised how to get one’s beaver done right: “The manner of their dressing is, first roasting, and afterward seething in an open pot, that so the evill vapours may go away, and some in pottage made with Saffron; other with Ginger, and many with Brine; it is certain that the tail and forefeet taste very sweet, from whence came the proverbe, that sweet is that fish, which is not fish at all.”

But it was not the fishy beaver so much as real fishes that caused the greatest concern. Taking after their cool and moist native element, they were held to be likely to nourish bitter humors, considerations that made them particularly amenable to spicing. According to Maino de Maineri, the porpoise was a “bestial” fish, cold and wet, calling for a particularly sharp, hot pepper sauce. It was likewise with King Henry’s regicidal lamprey, classed as cold and moist and as such highly dangerous. Though throughout the Middle Ages it was an esteemed and luxurious dish, lamprey was apparently never eaten without amending, or not without the fear of dire consequences. (One of the ironies of Henry’s fate is that he was, his exit aside, a monarch with a keen interest in medicine.) For this reason it was customary to kill lampreys by drowning them in wine, classed as warm and drying, after which they were invariably cooked by the heating and drying method of roasting, then spiced. According to Laurence Andrew, author of The Noble Lyfe and Natures of Man of 1521, lamprey “must be soaked in good wine with herbs and spices, or else it is very dangerous to eat, for it has many venomous humours, and is evil to digest.” Similar concerns dictated the preparation of oysters, mussels, cockles, scallops, eels, and congers, classed as wetter and colder still.

King Henry’s death was, then, a particularly dramatic illustration of a broader orthodoxy: you were what you ate. Complicating the issue still further was the consideration that it was not just the qualities inherent in the food but the adjudged qualities of the diner as well that had to be taken into account. Like diseases, individual variations were accounted for in terms of one’s natural humoral balance or “complexion,” as determined on the basis of a number of outward signs such as eyes, temper, voice, laughter, urine, or coloring (whence, very obviously, the modern use of the term complexion). Diet had to be tailored accordingly, as with Jack Sprat’s celebrated diagnosis: he could eat no fat and his wife no lean, his natural disposition being on the wet side, hers on the dry. An early-fifteenth-century handbook of health summarized the physician’s belief that “a man should choose meat and drink according to his complexion: if he is of a hot complexion he should use hot meats in moderation, and if the bodily heat augments and is inflamed by a surfeit of overly strong meat and drink, or by any other happenstance, then contrary meat and drink are more helpful to his health.” Melancholics were to avoid cold and dry beef, for it would only aggravate their condition. So, too, it was possible to alleviate one’s natural predisposition by means of the appropriate diet. Falstaff said of Prince Henry that through drinking sufficient Spanish sack he had so heated the “cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father” that he did become “very hot and valiant.” Hence the old soldier’s claim: “If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”

What sack did for Harry, spices did more powerfully. For those whose complexions inclined to cool or melancholy, the risk of illness could be mitigated or neutralized. A patient with a cold, dry complexion should be given spices (hot) and meat (wet), whereas a “hot” individual should avoid them, for they would merely aggravate a predisposition to choleric humors. Erasmus (ca. 1469–1536) attributed the endemic plague and “deadly sweating fever” in England partly to the national addiction to seasonings, “in which the people take an uncommon delight.” These considerations varied with age as well as nation. An old, cold, and dry man could benefit from a little meat “lightly flavored with sweet spices, such as cinnamon, ginger and others that are suitable.” On the other hand: “The use of pepper is of no good to sanguine or choleric men, since pepper dissolves and dries the blood... ultimately breeding measles and other full evil sickness and evils.” The trick of finding the right balance varied according to age, the aging process being seen as a progressive cooling down and drying up of the organism—the reason why spices are continually recommended for “old folkes” but cautioned against for the young. As the widely read, pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum puts it, “For young men, an abundant, moist diet, to old men, moderate diet and hot.”

Reaching such judgments was, needless to say, a subjective business. A certain degree of objectivity was at least possible with the final variable, it being an article of faith that certain foods should be eaten at certain times of the year and avoided at others. Hot weather called for cool food and vice versa. It followed that spices should be used only moderately or not at all in the hot summer months; the cold and wet winter, on the other hand, was the season for hot, dry foods, such as birds and roasted and spiced meats. The Venerable Bede advised cloves and pepper for the winter months but none in the summer. He had it on the authority of Hippocrates that pepper and warm sauces could counteract the phlegm of the season. On cold days a cup of spiced wine was not only warming but healthy, the perfect excuse to indulge — “With Wines and Spice the Winter may be bolder,” in the words of the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harrington. (Another source of heat recommended for the winter was sex; summer was the season of chastity.) The risk of catching a wintry affliction was redoubled by the Lenten diet of fish, in a season ever prone to engendering wet and cool diseases. The impression of the unmitigated spiciness of medieval cuisine can largely be attributed to the highly spiced seasonings developed to offset (and relieve the tedium of) the cold, fishy season of Lent.

Medically, of course, the greater part of this was nonsense. (Though who are we to laugh? Modern dietary fads can be just as bizarre — and we have fewer excuses for our gullibility.) But if the foundations of medieval dietetics rested less on verifiable proofs than on inherited belief, from the practitioner’s point of view the supreme merit of humoral theory — and one reason for its durability — lay in its flexibility to fit any situation: retrospectively, any disease could be “explained.”

In wealthier households, the task of juggling these considerations fell to the speciarius, or spicer. Occupying a role midway between pharmacist and in-house health consultant, the spicer was considered an indispensable employee. In 1317, the household of the French king found room (or cash) for only four officers of his chamber: a barber, a tailor, a taster, and a spicer. Charged with both acquiring and then supervising supply, his main duties were the acquisition, composition, and prescription of the appropriate drugs and seasonings. In conjunction with the physician and cook — arrangements varied from one time and place to another — he was there to ensure the suitability of dinner, taking into account both the diner’s constitution and the different courses on offer at any given meal as well as their proportions, qualities, and quantities. Among the most important of his tasks was the preparation of the after-dinner spices that were such a conspicuous feature of medieval cuisine. Occupying a place somewhere between dessert and medicine, these were regarded as healthy pleasures, the idea being that the warming and heating spices helped digest or “cook” a meal in the stomach, suppressing the stomach’s tendency to generate wet and cold humors. The household of King Edward IV had an “Office of Greate Spycerye” charged with delivering sugar and spice to the “Office of Confectionarye” for the preparation of highly sweetened after-dinner spices. It was doubtless a diagnosis of a cold, wet stomach that explains an entry in the account books of the Avignon papacy in 1340, recording the pontiff’s consumption of a whopping thirty-two pounds of ginger, a remedy for the pain in his belly.

Few medieval Europeans, as we shall see, could afford to eat (or indulge their hypochondria) on such a grand scale. For those who could, the reputed physiological effects of spices were an important determinant of how and when food was prepared—and a reminder that medieval food was not as overwhelmingly or as uniformly spicy as later ages have tended to imagine. Fear of the consequences of overdoing it were very real. In wealthy households the physician would often stand behind the head of the household and ensure that things did not get out of hand. During his brief stint as governor of the island of Barataria, Sancho Panza is tormented by a comically finicky physician who stands behind him as he eats, rejecting every dish but for the wafer cakes and a few thin slices of quince. He considers the fruits too cold and wet, and even the hot spices are inappropriate:

"My chief duty is to attend on his [Sancho’s] meals and feasts, and to let him eat in my opinion what is suitable for him, and to keep from him what I think will be harmful, and injurious to his stomach; and therefore I ordered the plate of fruit to be removed on account of its excessive moistness, and that other dish likewise, as being too hot and containing many spices that aggravate thirst; and he who drinks a lot kills and consumes the radical moisture wherein the life force resides."

This was parody, but even Sancho was no more credulous than the well informed. But if getting the balance right was deadly serious, what of the quality of the end result? How spicy was it? Some old preconceptions can easily be dispensed with. The medical context argues strongly against the familiar images of medieval cuisine as an over-spiced, pungent welter of competing flavors. One reason why people have been so willing to accept the received wisdom on medieval cuisine—besides the fact that it makes for a good story—is that medieval cookbooks seldom stipulate quantities, leaving them up to the cook’s discretion. But any immoderation modern readers detect therein is of the reader’s making.

Moreover, moderation with spices made economic sense as well as medical. As we have seen, spices were expensive and so were not to be thrown around without good reason. In middling households they were kept under lock and key in a special hutch. The accounts of some noble households and monasteries detail a very modest expenditure. In England in the fifteenth century, the pepper consumed in the household of Dame Alice de Bryene averaged out at about one teaspoon per person per week; cinnamon at a paltry 2½ ounces per year. A fourteenth-century Parisian book of household management advises the following quantities of spice for a dinner for forty people: 1 pound of ginger, ½ pound of cinnamon, ¼ pound of clove, ? pound of long pepper, ? pound of galangal, and ? pound of mace. These are impressive though not swamping quantities—less than half an ounce of ginger per person is less than one would use in a mild Indian curry, and even this was spread over several courses. Furthermore, all of these spices were staler than we know them, having spent at least a year in transit from harvest in Asia; nor were they sealed in airtight containers, as they are today.

At least some medieval cooks were well aware of the need for balance in cooking, as much for aesthetic as for medical reasons. Cookbooks constantly stressed the need to offset one ingredient with another, stipulating which spices went with which foods. One English recipe specifically cautions against overspicing the dish: “Add ground mace, cinnamon and cubebs, take care it is not too hot.” John Russell, whom we met above advising would-be cooks to know their repertoire, warns darkly that in the endless search for new combinations, cooks’ “nice excess … of life will make an ending.” The fifteenth-century Italian culinary manuscript known as the Neapolitan collection advises discretion with spices, one recipe stipulating a moderate five or six cloves for a standard serving. This is not the voice of an age of anesthetized palates and cast-iron guts.

But if the medieval diner was not quite the bone-tossing oaf of Hollywood legend, it does not follow that medieval cookery was all that delicate or refined—we should not go looking for modern gastronomes dressed in medieval clothes. “Gastronomy” was not yet the word (at least in Europe), nor did it make much sense before the end of the seventeenth century. For while the medieval cook may not exactly have smothered all other flavors with spice, there can be little doubt that at times he laid it on thick. The Franklin of The Canterbury Tales, a middling landowner, was something of a gourmand—“Epicurus’ own son”—with a taste for spicy sauces. He liked his food hot and had a temper to match:

"Woe to his cook, if his sauce was not
Pungent and sharp, and all his utensils at the ready"

And when the fifteenth-century Book of Vices and Virtues weighed the merits of a meal, the terms of the question were whether the sauces had been sharp enough.

No aspect of the past vanishes so completely as its tastes. Perhaps the best that can be said is that though some liked food hot, some did not. And notwithstanding the doctors’ abundant caution, there can be little doubt that on occasion spices were used with a heavy hand, for reasons that apparently had very little to do with taste. The Middle Ages were, after all, an age that developed elaborate public rituals in which machismo could be publicly paraded and tested. If manliness could be paraded and strutted on mock fields of battle, why not at the table? For characters such as the Franklin, a hale and hearty stomach was a declaration of sanguinity; toughness of guts was more of a manly virtue (and certainly more of an asset) than now. As the English writer Robert Burton (1576–1640) put matters, “As much valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and carpet knights will make this good, and prove it.” After all, similar instincts are alive and well in our own day. At the start of the third millennium, the market offers a variety of scorching chili sauces, suggestively if not always appetizingly trademarked: Liquid Lucifer, Dave’s Insanity Sauce, Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce, Psycho Bitch on Fire, and Rectal Revenge (“particularly effective on in-laws”). Since a drop or two benumbs the palate, it seems a reasonable assumption that the appeal of these products is not culinary, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. It is more about seeing than tasting.

But at this point we are heading into different realms of appetite, which is where we must go if we are to fully account for the attraction of spices. We need to look beyond the table, beyond even the dictates of medicine and cuisine, to the equally powerful and perennial demands of society.

KEEPING UP WITH THE PERCYS  

"Nobility is judged by the costliness of the table, And taste gratified by the greater expense."

JOHN OF HAUTEVILLE, Archithrenius, ca. 1190

"Let not your table be rustic if you are to be counted rich."

ANONYMOUS, Modus cenandi, ca. 1400

For a young crusader setting off to win his spurs, it was imperative that the catering should rise to the occasion. The scene was the house of Prince Henrique of Portugal, the occasion Christmas Eve 1414. Better known in the English-speaking world as “Henry the Navigator” (because he sent others to navigate), Henrique was about to set off to attack the Moroccan town of Ceuta. Before this first step in his and Portugal’s imperialist career, he was determined to show himself as generous a host as he was valiant a knight. Noblemen, bishops, family — anyone who was anyone was invited, and supplies were ordered in from all corners of the kingdom. There were opulent silk cloths, wax for hundreds of candles, torches “in such a number that it would be impossible to count,” barrels of the finest wines, sugared confections, all sorts of meats, fresh and preserved fruits. Rounding off this extravagant display was a lavish selection of spices. Why go Moor killing on an empty stomach?

At the time Henrique’s catering arrangements seemed very much more impressive than they do now. The details are taken from Account of the Capture of Ceuta, written around 1450 by King Afonso V’s Chronicler Royal, Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Unencumbered by the modern historian’s qualms about objectivity, Zurara’s job was to present Henrique in as regal a manner as possible: the flower of chivalry, an exemplary knight and nobleman. Hence the lengthy description of the Christmas Eve feast, notwithstanding the menu’s complete and utter irrelevance to the ostensible topic of the work, the capture of Ceuta. Hence, too, the exacting catalogue of Henrique’s largesse: the prince had to be seen to be rich — and generous. On account of their high cost and exclusivity, spices, along with the other costly luxuries listed by Zurara, were the ideal means to that end.

It is no coincidence that the rise of the spice trade toward the end of the first millennium coincided with the reemergence of the European nobility, a nascent class with surpluses to spend and social needs to meet. Just as in Roman times, much of the appeal of spices was not so much that they tasted good as the fact that they looked good. Along with the other luxuries with which they are almost invariably grouped—pearls, gems, furs, tapestries, and mirrors — spices fulfilled a need for display, for conspicuous consumption. Spices’ attraction was not so much that they were necessary, but that they were un necessary: money on a plate.

At the table — as indeed anywhere else — the medieval nobleman was unconstrained by a sense of modesty. This is to put it very mildly. To live the life of a medieval monarch, nobleman, or higher clergy required being seen to live that life. Wealth was something to be paraded, with its purposes as well as pleasures. As Max Weber (1864–1920) said of a later age, luxury was “a means of social self-assertion.” And what was true of the various other trappings of wealth flaunted by the medieval nobility—the number of retainers, the architecture, the jewelry, the dress, the halls bedecked with rich tapestries — held equally true at the table. At the semipublic event of the feast, the flavor or any imagined salutary effects of the food were no more esteemed than its sheer cost or superfluity.

The food, in not so many words, proclaimed the man. (Whereas noblewomen were less frequently in a position to dispense largesse. Their birth and station had to be advertised by means of other, less material refinements.) Accordingly, an elaborate ceremonial developed around the rituals of the table. In the noble or royal household, the after-dinner spices were typically served on gold or silver spice plates, often highly prized works of exquisite craftsmanship. In England in 1459, one well-born merchant owned one such plate “well gilt like a double rose, with my master’s helmet in the middle, surrounded by red roses of my master’s arms.” So heavy was the baggage of class that the desserts they carried— “dainties” — took their name from the Latin dignitas, conveying a sense of honor, station, and bearing. From the head of the table the host would dispense his dainties as he saw fit, yet another means of signaling honor and precedence. If the situation and rank of the guests and hosts demanded, the quantities could be immense. When he hosted the emperor Charles IV at Valence in May 1365, the Avignon pope Urban treated his guests to a stupendous 150 pounds’ worth of spices.

Likewise during the main part of the meal, when many a spiced dish was intended more to be seen than savored. At the marriage of Charles the Bold of Burgundy (1433–1477), six models of ships were mounted on the main table, one for each of the duke’s territories. These in turn were orbited by sixteen smaller vessels, each trailing still smaller craft brimming with spices and candied fruits. On a more modest scale, around the year 1400 the Parisian merchant Jacques Duché had a walkin gingerbread house constructed, its walls inlaid with precious stones and spices.

Cost, convenience, and aura all suited spices to the medieval penchant for courtly playfulness, as exemplified by the exotic food fight staged by Albizzo da Fiore, podesta of Padua, in 1214. For his guests’ enjoyment he constructed a “Court of Solace and Mirth,” at the center of which stood an allegorical castle of love, defended by a dozen of the noblest and fairest ladies and besieged with mock ferocity by selected noblemen. The battlements were of sable and furs, precious cloths, ermine, and brocades of Baghdad, which the besiegers assaulted with an extravagant arsenal of apples, dates, nutmeg, tarts, pears, quince, roses, lilies, violets, rose water, pomegranates, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, “and all manner of flowers or spices that are fragrant to smell or fair to see.” All went swimmingly until the Venetian guests took their contention for the ladies’ honor a little too seriously, wrecking the party when they started a brawl with the Paduans — all in all, a very medieval mix: stage-managed gallantry and whimsy, offended honor, spice, and blood.

The limits to such occasions of spiced largesse were set only by the budget of the host or his imagination. A poem by Juan Manuel of Castile (1282–1348) tells of the weakness of the Moorish king of Seville for indulging the many whims of his wife, Rramayquia. When she protested at the heat of the Andalusian climate, he had the hills around Córdoba planted with almond trees, so the blossoms would remind her of snow. Still unsatisfied, she envied the bucolic life of a brick-making peasant woman (mawkish nostalgia for the honest virtues of the peasant life was another common pastime), whereupon her husband had a lake filled with rose water, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, musk, and “all conceivable good spices and sweet odors,” so she could make bricks of fragrant mud amid the aromas to which she was accustomed — all this without leaving the comfort of her palace.

For more day-to-day purposes, the spiced sauces of the medieval kitchen were an opportunity for more affordable opulence. Medieval cooks were forever in search of new combinations, driven in large measure by what one critic described as their employers’ “vainglory in rehearsing how they are fed, how many varieties of dishes they eat, and how inventively they are dressed.” As John Gower (ca. 1330–1408) punned in an untranslatable line, rich and expensive sauces were a social law for the rich and powerful. Just as game and wildfowl were the nobleman’s meat, the yield of his fields and forests, kept off limits to others by draconian laws against poaching and trespass, the rare and expensive spices were his trademark seasonings, a signpost of his class.In the words of the Dutch author Jacob van Maerlant (ca. 1225– ca. 1291), they were the particular food of distinguished, worldly people.

The message, though essentially a very blunt one, was amenable to a thousand different permutations and reiterations. One of the many rituals of medieval life to which spices were ideally suited was the gift giving that accompanied formal correspondence and diplomacy. Between 1294 and 1303, Pope Boniface VIII was regularly presented with spices by ambassadors and sovereigns. Early in the twelfth century, the Venetians offered a gift of fifty pounds of pepper per annum to Emperor Henry V. An early-thirteenth-century church ceremonial records that the Jews of Rome marked the accession of a new pope with a gift of pepper and cinnamon — though this is likely to have been less a spontaneous offering than a form of tribute. Like the best diplomatic gifts, they were bound to impress. In May 1290, envoys from England’s King Edward I sailed on board a “great ship” from Yarmouth to Norway, their mission to arrange the marriage of Edward’s son to Margaret, “the Maid of Norway” and rightful heir to the crown of Scotland. Along with the standard provisions for crew and envoys—including beer, wine, whale meat, beans, stockfish, nuts, flour, and so forth—the dynastic dealings were lubricated with ample supplies of sugar, pepper, ginger, zedoary, rice, figs, raisins, and gingerbread.‡

While there was no mistaking the bottom line of such abundance, it would be misleading to reduce spices’ cachet to a simple economic measure. Much of their charm derived from a sense of mystery and glamour, an intensely evocative effect of Utopian opulence. They were a totem of what the great Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga called the “more beautiful life” for which the medieval nobility continually hankered, in its rituals, its tapestries, or the dreamy make-believe of its literature.

Which is where, at the distance of half a millennium, in a culture less disposed to public culinary exuberance, we can best sense their effect. For literary purposes, spices meant nobility. In the anonymous Middle English poem known as “The Debate of the Body and the Soul,” the ghost of a “haughty knight” reflects on the trappings of his proud and vainglorious life, not the least of which are the “fragrant spices sweet to smell,” prominent among the castles and towers, pages and palfreys, hounds, falcons, and noble steeds, chambers and stately halls. Spices serve a similar purpose in Jehan Maillart’s early-fourteenth-century Roman du comte d’Anjou, in which a young countess tells the sorry tale of her banishment from home and family on account of her father’s incestuous passion. The heroine is pursued by one trial after another, forced to conceal her noble ancestry and live incognito off the kindness of strangers, all the while pining for the life of comfort and ease she knew in her father’s castle. At one point in her wanderings she is offered a piece of bread by an old peasant woman, but finding it black, hard, and moldy, she breaks down and, abandoning her disguise, recites the delights she knew at her father’s table, for which she has an encyclopedic memory. The peasant is subjected to a catalogue of all manner of delectable fish and fowl, including capons, peacocks, swan, partridge, pheasants, hare, venison, rabbits, boar, congers, cod, mullets, bream, lampreys, eels, and sole, all served with the appropriate spicy sauce: black pepper sauce, green sauce with ginger, tawny brown with cinnamon and cloves. These are followed by confections such as spiced apples and pastries, washed down with spiced and precious wines from all over France, over which the gruel-chomping churl —and well- born readers — presumably shed a salty tear.

In the real world, however, spices were generally put to more prosaic purposes. And while this instinct to display was common to the European nobility and senior clergy, they found their most exuberant expression at the apex of that society: namely, at court. Royal superiority may have been divinely sanctioned, but still the message had to be hammered home. Along with an increasingly elaborate courtly etiquette, architecture, and art, a royal meal was propaganda on a plate (or, more accurately, a trencher). When Henry II descended on Lincoln to celebrate Christmas in 1157, he demanded sixty pounds of pepper from the local grocers for his feast. This they were unable to cope with and sent to London for extra supplies.

Given the scale of their appetites, the royal family and the court were a large part of the market for spice for all of the medieval period; in London, possibly the lion’s share until late in the era. When Edward I returned to London from the wars in Wales at the end of the thirteenth century, his officers spent more than £1,775 on spices out of a total expenditure on luxuries of just under £10,000— a staggering sum, even taking into account that many of his “spices” included items such as oranges and sugar. To put the figure into perspective, his spice expenditure was about the same as the total annual income of an earl, of whom there were about a dozen in the kingdom. Such regal appetites ensured that the office of supplying the king’s “wardrobe” with spices was highly sought after by medieval merchants. The risks, however, could be great: in 1301, Edward I owed the Genoese merchant Antonio Pessagno the staggering sum of £1,030 for spices alone.

Pessagno’s compatriots could afford to be more sanguine. The riches that flowed from the trade in Eastern luxuries routed through Genoa’s ports and factories on the Black Sea and Constantinople helped transform the physical fabric of Genoa from the twelfth century; much of the wealth that built the cathedral of San Lorenzo came from this traffic. It was therefore wholly natural that the poet known as the Anonymous of Genoa, a contemporary of Dante, could celebrate spices as symbols of civic pride and affluence. In a poem addressed to a citizen of Brescia arriving from Venice, he points to the rich spices, the shops and stalls crammed with Eastern luxuries, symbols of Genoa’s commercial and imperial greatness: “More pepper, ginger, nutmeg and merchandise … than in any other great city.”

In the medieval as in the modern world, however, the ultimate in ostentation was not to boast, display, or dispense but to discard. Early in the fifteenth century, the lord mayor of London curried the favor of his king (and debtor) Henry V by publicly burning the king’s IOUs in a fire of cinnamon and cloves: a fragrant twist on the medieval pyre of the vanities. The king was impressed: “Never king had such a subject,” murmured a grateful Henry. This spiced incineration of debtors’ notes seems to have been something of a convention. When Charles V visited his creditor Jakob Fugger in Augsburg in 1530, the banker threw a promissory note into the stove with a bunch of cinnamon. Given the emperor’s chronic money troubles, the cinnamon was worth more than the note.

But of course the situation of a mayor, a king, a Fugger, or an emperor was scarcely representative of the population as a whole. With spices as with any other luxury, the instinct for ostentation could be gratified by only a very few. The celebrated spiciness of medieval cuisine holds true only for those with the money. For the poor the attractions of spices were, for the most part, strictly academic.

Researching the diet of the medieval poor is a frustrating business. By their very nature, most of the relevant sources are heavily biased in favor of the wealthy, the nobility, the Church, and royalty, and even these speak less of day-to-day consumption than of special occasions such as weddings, feasts, and coronations. Yet these sources represent only a relatively small segment of the population. By a crude estimate, for the greater part of the Middle Ages the clergy or nobility made up about 1 percent of the population, and about 5 percent of the population lived in towns. The remainder was the rural and generally poor peasantry. At the start of the thirteenth century, a majority of the population of western Europe was to some extent unfree, tied in some sense to land and lord.

For these, cost alone ensured that spices remained out of reach. This was particularly true of the fine Eastern spices: the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace that are so liberally sprinkled through the cookbooks. Like any other books, cookbooks were for the rich, though occasionally they make a nod to the diet of the masses. The fourteenth-century English Modus cenandi suggests a pepper sauce for wild goose; birds of lesser quality are seasoned with salt alone and served to diners of lower station. One English culinary manuscript gives details for the preparation of three variants of hippocras, specifying different quantities of spice according to rank and budget: pro rege, pro domino, and, with the least spice of all, pro populo. A rare exception to the generally upper-class tenor of medieval cookery books is the mid-fifteenth-century Liber cure cocorum, written for those who could afford to practice only economical “petecure,” literally “small cooking.” The preface outlines the principles of cooking on a budget: “This craft is set forth for poor men, that may not have spicery as they would like.” The history of cooking is the history of class cooking.

Though spices became a more familiar presence over time, the essentials of the situation remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages. The data are sporadic, but the picture is clear. In England in 1284, a pound of mace cost 4s. 7 d., a sum that could also buy three sheep—a whopping outlay for even the better-off peasantry. At much the same time, a pound of nutmeg would buy half a cow. In London at the start of the third millennium, the best places to shop for spice tend to be in the poorer, immigrant areas of the city, whereas seven hundred years ago it was the exact reverse, with the business addresses of London’s grocers and spicers concentrated in the (then) well-off areas of the City. Spice could be bought from a number of retailers in the wealthy parishes of Saint Pancras, Saint Benet’s Sherehog, Milk Street, and Saint Mary-le-Bow; but no spicer saw fit to set up shop in the poorer area of Farringdon. Spices went where the money was.

And where the money was not, spices occupied much the same position as they had in the age of Bede: out of reach but not out of mind. When the poor did eat spices, they did so sparingly or at someone else’s expense—at public feasts, for example, or, for those attached to a noble household, as leftovers from the high table. For the medieval poor, spices were seen primarily as rent payments and medicines, and as seasonings only rarely, if at all.

Medieval poverty was seasoned with more run-of-the-mill flavors. For the majority the only seasonings on the menu were garlic, garden herbs, and salt, and for some even salt was out of reach. Chaucer describes the situation of a “poor widow” who shared a cottage with her two daughters, Chanticleer the cock and his hens, three pigs, three cows, and Malle the sheep. No “piquant sauces” for her, and “no dainty morsel ever passed through her throat.” Her calories came from “many a slender meal” based on the staples of milk, brown bread, bacon, and occasionally an egg or two. However, even Chaucer’s skinny widow was better off than the wretched peasantry described by his contemporary William Langland (ca. 1330– ca. 1400). His Piers Plowman has “no penny” to buy “pullets, nor geese nor pigs;” the most he can afford is two green cheeses, curds, cream, an oatcake, two loaves made of beans, and bran. Yet even Piers was one rung up the ladder from the truly destitute who did not have enough to quiet the sobbing of their children “in their craving for food”: “A farthing’s worth of mussels were a feast for such folk.” Starvation was a frequent visitor to medieval Europe, as much the result of dreadful communications and transport as poor harvests and pests, and most peasants would have experienced at least one serious famine in their lifetime. Here and there in the sources there are references to cannibalism and even disinterring of the dead so they might be eaten. One modern scholar has argued that the frenzied millennialism of the sixteenth century can in part be attributed to hallucinations and trepidation arising from a life spent in a cycle of famine and subsistence, constantly overshadowed by the very real risk of starvation. Although standards varied widely, it is fair to say that the diet of the majority of the population ranged from meager to adequate for the entirety of the Middle Ages. The greater part of the peasantry lived at or not far above subsistence level, acutely vulnerable to fluctuations in cost and climate, getting by (or not) on a diet built around staples such as cabbage, beans, turnips, onions, ale, and above all bread. The latter was commonly black, impure, and made from oats or rye; in hard times, it was made from bean flour or even straw. Wine was an occasional luxury. Meat and especially fowl were exorbitantly expensive. The henpecked husband of the anonymous English medieval poem of the same title dares not so much as ask his bossy wife for meat:

"If I ask of our dame flesh,
She breaks my head with a dish."

The only alternative supplies were illegally obtained from the king’s forest, poached at the risk of one’s limbs or life.

In households such as these, on the rare occasions when there was money to spare, it was spent on foods that were more likely to stick to the ribs than spices. That fact would not change in its essentials until the Middle Ages were a distant memory.

The exception, at least by the late medieval period, was pepper. Thanks to the success of the Venetians and their competitors in ferrying an ever increasing volume of the spice from Alexandria and the Levant to Europe, in real terms the cost fell steadily but surely through the Middle Ages. In England in the middle of the twelfth century, the cost of a pound of pepper ranged from 7 d. to 8 d., the equivalent of a week’s wages for a laborer in the king’s vineyards in Herefordshire (and therefore marginally more expensive in real terms than it had been in Roman times). Fifty years later, the price was down, at least in real terms, though one pound was still worth around four days’ work. Over the next three centuries, the price continued to fall, though not without occasional spikes caused by crises in the money supply or by political turmoil along what was an extremely long and sensitive supply line. The price soared in the middle of the fourteenth century, then steadily fell back again. In England in 1400, one day’s work by a skilled craftsman would buy half a pound of pepper — roughly half the cost of two centuries earlier. The spice was expensive but well within the means of the better-off peasantry.

Uniquely, pepper had made the transition from luxury to costly necessity. Such was the importance of the spice that in London in 1411 the authorities intervened to keep the price down, Parliament calling on the king to step in and protect the consumer from the perceived rapacity of the London grocers and resident Italian merchants. Moved by the appeal, the king set a price ceiling of 20 d. a pound. By the time the Mary Rose sank in 1545, pepper was accessible to a common seaman earning a wage of 7 d. a week: when their corpses were raised some four hundred years later, most were found to have owned a small bag of pepper.

In the growing availability of the spice to an ever-larger swathe of the population is the first glimpse of a profound shift in perceptions. For intriguingly, pepper’s accessibility to the common sort seems to have caused a loss of interest on the part of the nobility. Much as vegetables carried the stigma of commonness in the eyes of a meat-eating nobility, so too pepper gradually lost its air of exclusivity. As the spice became progressively more affordable and less exotic, the nobility turned its nose up at pepper and began to hunt around for more exclusive flavors. The trend is clearly reflected in the cookbooks. In the twelfth century, pepper had been deemed fit for a king: in the Urbanus or Civilized Man of Daniel of Beccles, a courtier of England’s King Henry II, the spice features in numerous recipes, for poultry, meats, fish, beer, and wine; it is in fact the only Eastern spice mentioned by name. Pepper is likewise the sole Eastern spice mentioned in the earliest surviving accounts of an English noble household resident in London and Windsor in the late twelfth century. On trips to the capital they bought pepper, cumin, saffron, sugar, fish, meat, eggs, wine, flour, and apples.

Two centuries later, their well-born descendants looked down on pepper as irremediably déclassé. In The Forme of Cury written for King Richard II around 1390, pepper features in a mere 9 percent of the recipes. It was much the same on the Continent, the spice barely featuring in the early-fourteenth-century Italian Liber de coquina, another upper-class production. More revealing still is the gradual disappearance of pepper from successive editions of the French cookbook known as The Viandier, published in many editions in the fourteenth century and thereafter, traditionally attributed to Taillevant, cook and equerry to Kings Philip VI, Charles V, and Charles VI. Over time the amount of pepper decreases, as it is gradually superseded by other spices that carried a greater social cachet, such as grains of paradise and cardamom.

What is most striking about pepper’s slow fall from grace is that it ran precisely counter to economic developments. The period when pepper went out of vogue, beginning around the middle of the fourteenth century, was exactly the moment when pepper imports to Europe reached unprecedented levels. From 1394 to 1405, pepper cargoes formed about 75 percent of all Venetian imports of spices. However, it was not the kings and nobles but the next few rungs down the social ladder that were paying for new palaces along the Grand Canal. The main consumers were the wealthy peasantry and the emergent bourgeoisie. In the mid-fourteenth-century Livre des mestiers pepper is the only spice that features in the shopping list of a bourgeois householder in Bruges. The accounts of the Bonis brothers, spicers at Montauban in the same period, tell a similar story of diet mirroring class. Pepper, mustard, and garlic are the seasonings sold by the mustard maker, a poor man’s spicer. Likewise, the lower nobility, merchants, and prosperous bourgeois bought pepper, often with smaller purchases of ginger, saffron, and cinnamon. Artisans and peasants, on the other hand, bought pepper and nothing else.

An economic change, in not so many words, had social implications: tastes mirrored class. Occasionally pepper’s fall from grace is made explicit. As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, pepper appears in an anonymous poem as an ingredient of a “common sauce” of sage, salt, wine, pepper, garlic, and parsley. A little later it is dismissed as a poor man’s spice in the Thesaurus pauperum or Treasure House of the Poor of Pedro Hispano, later Pope John XXI (ca. 1215–1277), whose reign was famously and abruptly curtailed by the collapse of a Vatican ceiling. And as the trade grew, so too grew the stigma. A medical treatise of the Salernitan school dating from the fifteenth century dismissed pepper as the “seasoning of rustics,” fit only for the lowly beans and peas of peasants.

But pepper’s fate was the exception, not the rule. If the other, finer spices did not form part of the peasantry’s diet, this did not make them any less attractive. For just as the nobility esteemed spices as a highly visible expression of superior birth and wealth, so too the message of spices as a glittering correlate of the better life lost none of its potency for those on the receiving end. Viewed from the other side, spices were doubly desirable for being the privilege of the “great and the good;” which is to say that those barriers themselves contributed in no small part to spices’ allure. Like beggars clustered outside a restaurant window, the medieval poor could only look on and drool as the well-off spiced their meat. What Montaigne (1533–1592) said of sumptuary laws applied equally to the still more unyielding laws of the market: “To declare that only princes may eat turbot and wear velvet and gold braid, forbidding them to the people, what is that but enhancing such things and making everyone want to have them?”

Those who could not afford spices, on the other hand, were inclined to view the issue less analytically. For those outside the charmed circle the line between admiration and resentment was a fine one. During Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt of 1381, the rebel priest John Ball, self-styled “Bishop of the People,” harangued the crowd of rebels in Canterbury before marching on London. In Jean Froissart’s (ca. 1333– ca. 1405) version of events, Ball asks of his feudal overlords:

"Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show or what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs ornamented in ermine and other furs while we are forced to wear poor clothing. They have wines and spices and fine bread while we have only rye and refuse of the straw and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome manors ... while we must brave the wind and rain in our labors in the field."

Burning the Savoy and sending their overlords scurrying for safety would not change the situation one iota. Someone more resigned to the situation than Ball, but like him one of the many who found himself on the wrong side of those insuperable barriers, was the Kentish hero of the medieval English poem “London Lickpenny.” Visiting London from the country, he was overwhelmed by the street scene that greeted him in the capital:

"Into London I set off;
Of all the land it bears the prize.
“Hot peascods!” someone cried — “Cherries on the branch!”
One called me over to buy some spice: pepper and saffron they offered me, cloves, grains of Paradise ... but for the lack of the money I could not avail me."

The culture’s objects of desire may have changed, but not the impulse. The unattainable glitter and glamour along Bond Street or Madison Avenue continue to inspire much the same sentiment in the cash-strapped visitor — or, for that matter, the impoverished writer.

By Jack Turner in " Spice - The History of a Temptation", Intage Books (Random House), New York, 2004, excerpts chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.