The Taste of Conquest (37 page)

The sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century explosion in the demand for the rarer spices can at least partly be attributed to their use as nutraceuticals. Asian aromatics—and in particular, the “fine spices”—had been used to cure ailments of all kinds at least since the days when Romans used to send their merchants to Cochin. But the printing revolution of the sixteenth century created a whole new market for diet books trumpeting the use of spices as a dietary supplement to balance and “correct” other foods. Any doctor worth his salt had to know the many uses of pepper and, more important, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg in his practice. The directors of the Dutch East India Company had only to walk out the front door of company headquarters and glance up the Kloveniersburgwal Canal to Amsterdam’s spice market on the Nieuwemarkt to see perfumed bales dispatched to apothecaries across Europe. What they didn’t see, or understand, was that the current diet advice was headed the way of the grapefruit diet.

P
RESCRIBING
S
PICE

After all I had read about the Nieuwemarkt, I suppose I had expected the square to be lined with picturesque Dutch façades and have a whiff of nutmeg in the air as I wandered by one foggy Tuesday morning. Instead, the broad plaza is framed by a jumble of plain shops and modern office buildings. The square would be almost homely were it not for the pointy-towered, cinnamon-colored fortress that squats at its center. When this fortified gate was built in 1488 to protect the up-and-coming hamlet of Amsterdam, it was planted with its feet in the canal that encircled the city like a moat. Then, when the city burst its walls in the early sixteen hundreds, the authorities constructed this
nieuwe markt
(“new market”) by paving over a section of the canal. The new market specialized in the aromatic treasure brought from the East, and the tower became a weighing station for the spices that canal boats brought down from the harbor.

The perfume of that time has dissipated over the centuries, but not entirely. At the edge of the Nieuwemarkt, you can still detect a hint of spice in the air in an old house that leans gently toward the Kloveniersburgwal Canal, as if tired out by standing here so long. The sign identifies the building as the Apotheek Jacob Hooy, which claims to be the city’s oldest pharmacy, founded in 1743. The interior sure looks it. Ancient yellowed drawers are inscribed in florid Latin script—
Piper nigrum, Piper alum
—to indicate their contents of black and white pepper. Chocolate brown barrels line the shelves like the brown cheeses at the Kaaskamer, though these, unlike the spiced cheeses, are just for show. All the same, you know you’re in the twenty-first century quickly enough when you see the display of herbal pastilles on the counter promoting stress reduction.

Yet despite the shelves of organic bug repellent and world music CDs, the store is still primarily an apothecary, and the pharmacist’s job is still to consult with his customers on just which herbal cocktail will best combat their flatulence or common cold. Ginger and mace are certainly still for sale here, but the attendant tells me that spices are now used mostly in Ayurvedic medicine, not the traditional European medicine that is Jacob Hooy’s stock-in-trade. The Dutch are much more eclectic than Americans in their approach to healing. So-called “natural” remedies exist side by side with more “conventional” allopathic practices, while homeopathy is also commonplace. Ayurvedic medicine, however, is relegated to a fringe of medical connoisseurs. This is somewhat surprising, since a system much like it dominated European medical practice for more than a thousand years. It was in this, the so-called Galenic system, that spices used to hold pride of place. When the pharmacy first opened its doors, the chamomile and mint sold at Jacob Hooy would have been considered good enough for chambermaids and fishwives, but for the more cultured classes, only the likes of expensive nutmeg and cloves would do.

In 1600, the Galenic system was the conventional medicine of the day and, after more than a millennium of elaboration, consisted of a vast and esoteric body of knowledge. It had all started with the writings of a second-century Greek physician named Galen, who began his career employed in the ER of a gladiator school in Asia Minor and worked his way up to attending to Caesars. By the early Middle Ages, his writings had been preserved mostly in Arabic compilations, which were, in turn, translated into Latin. In the Renaissance, the Galenic school got a new shot in the arm when classics scholars unearthed Galenic writings in the original Greek. Leading the way was the Venetian university town of Padua, with its links to Greece (recall that Greek exiles flooded into Venice after the fall of Constantinople), but other centers of learning, including the University of Leuven, in the southern Netherlands, were part of the trend.

Ironically, it was university-trained academics, not practicing physicians such as Galen, who now compiled the medical manuals. No wonder that the attraction of the Galenic system, particularly in its later incarnations, was more metaphysical than practical. (This may, in part, explain the appeal of esoteric spices brought from mystical lands.) Because the scheme was not dependent on empirical data that might cloud its clarity, the medical theoreticians could build a model of transparent symmetry and logic.

The system that underlay Galenic theory could be compared to the workings of a compass, where anything can be mapped according to its four points. North, south, east, and west correspond to four elements (water, fire, air, and earth); which, in turn, match up to four bodily humors (phlegm, bile, blood, and black bile); which are associated with the four seasons; which reflect the four ages of man, the four periods of the day, the four colors, the four flavors, even the four Evangelists…Anyway, you get the idea. By definition, any and all phenomena could be plugged into this paradigm. So, a fish would naturally be cold and wet because of its watery habitat, a spice hot and dry because of its biting flavor and torrid growing conditions. As far as people went, the temperament of any given individual was determined by his or her particular mixture of humors. We occasionally still use these terms when we describe a person as phlegmatic, bilious, or sanguine, though psychiatrists nowadays generally don’t treat depression by prescribing mace to purge their patients of black bile.

In the old days, when a physician was called in, his first job was to diagnose his patient’s temperament so he could calibrate the diet. Most experts believed that everyone’s humors were a little out of whack and needed correction, which, in all but the most extreme cases, could be done by fiddling with the nutritional regimen. So someone with a phlegmatic (that is, cold and moist) “distemperature” could be corrected by prescribing a hot and dry diet that might include an abundance of heating nutrients such as cinnamon or mustard. The spices would increase the person’s “choleric” humors, his temperament would return to balance, and all would be well. Incidentally, the concept of “diet” was seen rather broadly. Depending on the authority, it might include not only food and drink but also air quality, exercise, sexual activity, emotional state, and lots of other factors believed to affect nutrition. For example, our phlegmatic patient could also crank up the choleric humors in the body by standing in a hot and dry wind, exercising vigorously, or even getting really angry. The charm of the system was that you could explain anything to anyone. Once all the inputs were considered, a well-read doctor could tell you just what to eat before going for a walk on a rainy spring day, or the dire consequences of indulging in sex too early on a humid summer morning.

The tricky part of the diagnosis was to first determine a person’s temperament, since everyone was made up of a cocktail of all of the humors, and a clear-cut case of, say, a completely sanguine personality was rare. Sex, age, lifestyle, and climate were all factored into the analysis, as was profession. (Poets and prophets are notoriously melancholy, as we all know.) The physician often resorted to even more nebulous criteria, such as personality, body type, and physiognomy. You could tell a lot from a person’s complexion: sanguine people, having an abundance of blood, were supposed to have ruddy skin, while phlegmatics looked pale and watery.

This was all very well for the purposes of prescribing diet (in the broadest sense), but to make a diagnosis of an actual illness based on a person’s profession and complexion was harder still. In the absence of blood tests and X-rays, medieval doctors depended to some degree on external indicators such as a high fever or an abnormal pulse as a sign of disease. Urine analysis was also a favorite diagnostic technique. By examining, smelling, and even tasting a patient’s urine, much could apparently be learned and the appropriate measures applied. Bleeding was always a big favorite. (It’s why medieval doctors were often called “leeches.”) This was a quick, efficient way to relieve the many illnesses caused by an excess of blood. As you might imagine, the success rate of this sort of medical practice was rather uneven, and consequently, wiser physicians stuck to Hippocrates’s injunction, “First do no harm,” limiting their advice to diet tips or at least reasonably harmless potions.

Of course, the Renaissance doctor’s authority, much as it does today, depended on keeping the system as arcane and jargon-filled as possible. For this, physicians required fat Latin volumes filled with humoral system analyses of Talmudic complexity. Publishers were happy to oblige. However, more popular interpretations of Galenic theory were a big hit as well. Platina’s bestselling
De honesta voluptate,
for example, was intended to be as much a dietary guide as a cookbook and provided all sorts of advice on judicious humor balancing. Even Linschoten’s
Itinerario
was packed full of advice on the dietary uses of the Eastern commodities. Along with data on the cost of cinnamon and the mating habits of Portuguese
fidalgos,
Linschoten’s collaborator (a graduate of the prestigious medical school in Padua, no less) adds, “Cinnamon warms, opens, and tones up the intestines.” He writes, “It is good for catarrh, making it move down from the head to the lower parts. It cures dropsy as well as defects and obstructions in the kidneys. Oil of cinnamon strengthens all organs: heart, stomach, liver, etc.” Nutmeg is just as much a wonder drug, according to the good doctor: “[Nutmegs] fortify the brain and sharpen the memory; they warm the stomach and expel winds. They give a clean breath, force the urine, stop diarrhea, and cure upset stomachs.”

Writings on diet circulated widely in manuscript before printing came around, but those laboriously copied volumes of bound parchment had only been available to a tiny elite. As with Bibles and cookbooks, the revolutionary impact of Gutenberg’s invention brought this highly specialized subject to the attention of a much wider public. Much as it does today, the market for dietary self-help books seemed insatiable. From the 1470s to 1650, a flood of dietary literature rolled off the presses across Europe. As with so many other subjects, Venetian publishers led the way. By the mid-1520s, even editions of Galen in the original Greek were printed by the Aldine Press in Venice. With Venice’s decline, the presses in Amsterdam and other northern cities took up the cause.

In Amsterdam, Margaretha Cromhout, the wealthy timber merchant’s wife, could now instruct her cook on the fine points of balancing the phlegmatic and the bilious humors much the way diet-obsessed Americans calculate their grams of fat and carbohydrates. Others of a less exalted status followed suit. In Protestant Europe, the reading public was not limited to the wealthiest classes, even though they probably had more time to worry about their diets than seamstresses and shoemakers. One of the unintended but profound aftereffects of the Reformation was an enormous increase in literacy, since everyone was now supposed to read the Scriptures. The middling classes could purchase cheap pamphlets and almanacs much like the flimsy little diet books you find today in supermarkets. The fact that the perennially popular “book of secrets” by the sixteenth-century Dutch surgeon (and cookbook writer) Carolus Battus was expressly intended for the “common folk” underlines just how broad-based the reading public was in the Netherlands.

As in the case of Platina, the line between cookbooks and health manuals was as blurred as it is today, and the advice seemed similarly confusing and contradictory. Who couldn’t use the advice of experts in negotiating all the complexities of this arcane dietary system? And didn’t everyone need a little fine-tuning of their humoral makeup? Yet how could a layman even begin to gauge the delicate balance among nutriments? Chicken might be too sanguine for spring because of its airy temperament, pepper too fiery for someone with a sanguine makeup, turnips too dry and cold for an old man with a young wife. The diet guides had all the solutions, even if the specifics varied from author to author. They explained in great detail, for example, how you could correct fish’s watery (phlegmatic) nature by roasting it or serving it with an appropriate sauce. The term often used is to
temper
a dish or a sauce with an appropriate seasoning to make it digestible. (The Portuguese still use the verb
temperar
for “season.”) For this, spices were seen as particularly effective. The following advice is typical:

Sauces should be made according to the nature of the season, for in summer sauces are composed of relatively cool ingredients, whereas in cold weather they are made of warm ingredients. Consequently in summer the proper ingredients are verjuice, vinegar, citrus and pomegranate juices, with sugar and rose water…. In cold weather the proper ingredients are mustard, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, sage, mint, parsley, wine, meat broths and vinegar that is so weak it approaches the nature of wine. Between times, when neither too warm or too cold, you make sauces of tempered warmth and cold.