Spices cost more than tank of gas

It is always amazing to me how many items in the culinary field we take for granted — such as the great variety of spices. Although we may not use them every day, food would be awfully dull without spices.

What, for example, would food be without pepper?

Today we need only to go to our local supermarket to buy a vast array of spices that, 400 years ago, would have cost a king’s ransom. It is likely they probably would have cost several lives on dangerous journeys to procure them.

Once valued as highly as gold, spices have changed the course of history. Countries vied to win control over their sources and navigators attempted to discover new sea routes to the Far East for them. If it had not been for the quest for spices, Columbus would not have had the desire to discover America.

Eastern flavors

The early civilizations around the Mediterranean obtained spices from India, Africa and other lands to the east. Records exist of Egyptian spice expeditions to the east coast of Africa 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. Particularly treasured were two aromatic barks, cinnamon and cassia (both come from the bark of the same evergreen tree and are interchangeable). The Egyptians used them not only to flavor foods but in cosmetics and an assortment of ceremonial functions, including burial rites.

Spices are mentioned in the Bible. One of the most well-known references to spices is the instruction to Moses in the book of Exodus telling him to take myrrh, sweet cinnamon, sweet calamus and cassia with him on the journey out of Egypt. Myrrh was brought to Jesus by the wise men, but it has not been grown in the Middle East since ancient times. Cinnamon also was grown there in ancient times.

World according to Pliny

Although there were various legends about the growing of spices in the Middle East, it was Pliny the Younger who documented the real story. Pliny was a Roman treasury official who became alarmed over the empire’s balance of payments. The luxury-loving Romans, in order to secure supplies of eastern spices, were sending vast amounts of gold out of the empire to India and areas beyond.

In his writings, Pliny, who also was a historian, described a series of fantastic voyages across thousands of miles of ocean, ranging from the east coast of Africa to India. The cinnamon traders, who were from India, used only tiny open rafts. They used the stars for navigation and often took as long as five years to complete the round trip. Cinnamon traders took home Roman glass, bracelets and other baubles.

Geoffrey Chaucer, a well-known English writer and author of the “Canterbury Tales,” wrote about “ginger

green and liquorice pale, and cloves their sweetness offer, with nutmegs too, to put in ale, no matter whether fresh or stale.”

His ginger probably came from India and the licorice from southern Europe, but the cloves and nutmeg came from farther away. In Chaucer’s time (1340-1400), all the cloves in the world came from a tiny group of islands on the equator between Borneo and New Guinea, the Moluccas or Spice Islands. All the world’s nutmegs grew on an even smaller set of nearby islands known as Banda.

In the early 1400s the magnificent and powerful city-state of Venice ruled the Mediterranean trade. Much of her wealth came from agreements made with Arab traders to control the spice trade. All of the fabulous spices of the Orient flowing into Europe passed through Venice. Similarly, vast sums of gold and silver flowed outwardly to pay for the spices. The Venetians grew rich, but the rest of Europe began to suffer the same balance of payment difficulties that had worried the Romans.

Far to the west, in the tiny but newly independent kingdom of Portugal, one man decided to challenge the supremacy of Venice. Ultimately, his decision changed the whole course of human events.

Prince Henry of Portugal’s plan was a simple one — to find the end of Africa, sail around it all the way to India and buy the spices directly from the producers. In so doing, he would be able to cut out the Venetian and Arab middlemen. It was a difficult task, similar to reaching the moon in our lifetime. Prince Henry was driven not only by his desire for spices, but his hatred of the Arabs and the hope of finding a fabled Christian empire in the East.

He gathered together the world’s greatest scholars and navigators and set out on his grand plan. Unfortunately, Henry died before it was accomplished, but the Portuguese did develop new ships that could sail against the wind and new methods of navigation that let them venture out into the open ocean.

By the 1480s the Portuguese had rounded Africa and were ready to push on to India. This so worried Portugal’s neighbor and rival, Spain, that the Spanish decided to finance an Italian navigator who claimed that he could reach India ahead of the Portuguese by sailing, not around Africa, but westward into the Atlantic. Christopher Columbus’ astounding voyage was to alter commerce of spices forever.