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I have just finished "Spice: the history of a temptation" by Jack Turner.
Since the title does not make this immediately obvious, I should add that this is primarily a history of the spice trade from ancient to [late early modern? 1700s-1800s ish] times. The focus is Mediterranean and European, specifically Western European.
It was enjoyable but I've read so much history of the 1400s-1700s lately that I could hear lots of bits he'd left out, or what he was talking around. (I wouldn't call them omissions so much as that his narrative was about the spices and the emotions surrounding them - he touched on the whole beating indigenous people's up and torturing them and all in the name of commerce, but he didn't really *comment* on it because that would have distracted from the thread of the book he intended to write.) I've observed other researchers discussing this feeling with books, and now I've reached the point where I hit it - it was strange because I'd read a very good book on the Black Plague in the 1300s that used one of the same quotes about a Genoese ship (The Great Mortality) and I'd read the same account of Vasco de Gama's trip around Africa on his way to India (but with a lot more detail) from my reading of "Africa: a biography of the continent". The best part for me of the book was finding all the references in the chapter endnotes to overview books of Dutch colonialism and the East India companies, since that's next on my list of things to get through from this time period.
The bits on Greek and Roman antiquity were very enjoyable. The bits on spices in French monastic life were likewise enjoyable. The bits where he discussed the Italian economics of the spice trade, and later the Dutch economics, were also enjoyable. The bits on spice and its use in ancient medicine and ritual weren't bad at all, but the bits on spice and its use in late medieval and early modern medicine didn't work for me at all - to talk about remedies used by many people for hundreds of years and to just flat out say "they didn't work and it was totally stupid to say they could work, maybe they sometimes didn't hurt" without taking any time to discuss, at a minimum, the placebo effect, seems foolish to me.
Not to mention it's stated a number of times in the text how antibacterial and antimicrobial properties are inherent in many of the spices under discussion, but it's never suggested that perhaps these properties could have had a useful effect in a time totally lacking in processed antibiotics, in regions of the world infested with bacterial cultures in food and water? The role of spices in keeping ale and wine from going rankly bad due to their antibacterial whatsit is discussed, but this thread is dropped totally in the medicine discussion. There's a postscript to the section on spice and sex, which says that recent medical research has suggested cinnamon really may improve virility (in mice, anyway) - I felt that this section of the work could have been punched up by with a bit more of a look at what medicines have been synthesized from what spices or something along those lines.
The other thing that irked me is the contrast between "spicy" elite cuisine and "bland" poor people cuisine, when we're usually reminded in the text that the native Europeans had herbs and flavorings that grew locally (think basil, oregano, thyme, lavender, fennel, saffron, garlic, onion, ...).
Lots of nitpicking differences of priority aside, the book did a really good job at looking at the questions that it put forward in the introduction (which involved looking closer at the appeal of Eastern spices to Western Europeans during the Age of Discovery, and tracing that thread back into Greco-Roman antiquity). It was strong in its discussion of spices in re Western Catholicism, Greco-Roman antiquity, the purely commercial aspects of the spice trade during the Age of Exploration. Outside of those bounds it felt less well-grounded, but those were some entertaining bounds. I got some very tasty Dutch anecdotes out of the book, and better knowledge of Dutch and Italian trading stuff is my big takeaway.
Since the title does not make this immediately obvious, I should add that this is primarily a history of the spice trade from ancient to [late early modern? 1700s-1800s ish] times. The focus is Mediterranean and European, specifically Western European.
It was enjoyable but I've read so much history of the 1400s-1700s lately that I could hear lots of bits he'd left out, or what he was talking around. (I wouldn't call them omissions so much as that his narrative was about the spices and the emotions surrounding them - he touched on the whole beating indigenous people's up and torturing them and all in the name of commerce, but he didn't really *comment* on it because that would have distracted from the thread of the book he intended to write.) I've observed other researchers discussing this feeling with books, and now I've reached the point where I hit it - it was strange because I'd read a very good book on the Black Plague in the 1300s that used one of the same quotes about a Genoese ship (The Great Mortality) and I'd read the same account of Vasco de Gama's trip around Africa on his way to India (but with a lot more detail) from my reading of "Africa: a biography of the continent". The best part for me of the book was finding all the references in the chapter endnotes to overview books of Dutch colonialism and the East India companies, since that's next on my list of things to get through from this time period.
The bits on Greek and Roman antiquity were very enjoyable. The bits on spices in French monastic life were likewise enjoyable. The bits where he discussed the Italian economics of the spice trade, and later the Dutch economics, were also enjoyable. The bits on spice and its use in ancient medicine and ritual weren't bad at all, but the bits on spice and its use in late medieval and early modern medicine didn't work for me at all - to talk about remedies used by many people for hundreds of years and to just flat out say "they didn't work and it was totally stupid to say they could work, maybe they sometimes didn't hurt" without taking any time to discuss, at a minimum, the placebo effect, seems foolish to me.
Not to mention it's stated a number of times in the text how antibacterial and antimicrobial properties are inherent in many of the spices under discussion, but it's never suggested that perhaps these properties could have had a useful effect in a time totally lacking in processed antibiotics, in regions of the world infested with bacterial cultures in food and water? The role of spices in keeping ale and wine from going rankly bad due to their antibacterial whatsit is discussed, but this thread is dropped totally in the medicine discussion. There's a postscript to the section on spice and sex, which says that recent medical research has suggested cinnamon really may improve virility (in mice, anyway) - I felt that this section of the work could have been punched up by with a bit more of a look at what medicines have been synthesized from what spices or something along those lines.
The other thing that irked me is the contrast between "spicy" elite cuisine and "bland" poor people cuisine, when we're usually reminded in the text that the native Europeans had herbs and flavorings that grew locally (think basil, oregano, thyme, lavender, fennel, saffron, garlic, onion, ...).
Lots of nitpicking differences of priority aside, the book did a really good job at looking at the questions that it put forward in the introduction (which involved looking closer at the appeal of Eastern spices to Western Europeans during the Age of Discovery, and tracing that thread back into Greco-Roman antiquity). It was strong in its discussion of spices in re Western Catholicism, Greco-Roman antiquity, the purely commercial aspects of the spice trade during the Age of Exploration. Outside of those bounds it felt less well-grounded, but those were some entertaining bounds. I got some very tasty Dutch anecdotes out of the book, and better knowledge of Dutch and Italian trading stuff is my big takeaway.
