The Taste of Conquest (39 page)

The change in medical fashion was no doubt accelerated by the technology of printing itself. The arrival of mechanical printing didn’t merely mean a cheaper, quicker alternative to hand-lettered manuscripts. It bore about as much relationship to the earlier technology as Google does to a card catalog. Printing fundamentally changed the way people learned about the world. Without (relatively) cheap Bibles, the Reformation is unthinkable; without copies of cookbooks rolling off the presses by the hundreds of thousands, the coming Europe-wide revolution in fine dining would likely have been no more than a localized uprising.
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Because of its volume, the business of printing books always needs new products, new ideas. By its very nature, it cannot recycle the same information over and over—as was the case in the days of few and precious manuscripts. After all, just how many reprints of Galen can your customers buy?

It’s more than likely that the same mechanism we see in today’s diet-book racket got its start in the Renaissance. Then, as now, publishers were always on the lookout for someone with a bright idea that would resonate with the public. If the book sold, other authors imitated it. As consumers tired of the same old thing, a new (or repackaged) idea came along, and everybody jumped on the new bandwagon. This may explain, at least in part, why, long before anyone could imagine an Atkins diet, nutrition trends came and went for no reason other than a shift in fashion. Naturally, the changes came faster and faster as more publishers increased production and as more people could read and afford to buy books.

By the middle years of the seventeenth century, it seems that readers were fed up with diet books, and the market for these self-help works dried up. It may be that all the competing medical systems of the time just made the public throw up its hands and give up on the experts. Maybe people were sick of being nagged about what they should eat and just stopped listening. Or perhaps it was merely that another cycle of the publishing business had come full circle.

All this religious, scientific, and intellectual ferment was going on as Europe was embroiled in yet another round of her murderous wars. Philip’s crusade against the Dutch was only one among many. In the center of Europe, what had begun as a campaign against Czech Protestants in 1618 spun out of control, drawing in every major power in Europe. The Thirty Years’ War, as it would come to be known, careened across the center of the continent like an insatiable tornado. In its wake, cities lay devastated, fertile plains burned to ashes, whole economies collapsed. When it wiped out the Republic’s customers in central Europe, it was the war, not the Portuguese or Dutch, that delivered the coup de grâce to Venice’s ailing spice trade. But everywhere in Europe, the political system was realigned. Christendom had entered the seventeenth century dominated by one militantly Catholic superpower, Spain. By the time the bloodbath was over, the states that emerged—most notably, France and Austria—were much more interested in keeping their borders intact than in crusading against Protestants or Moors. Europe’s lines of demarcation hardened along nationalist lines. Countries increasingly came to be defined by language and cuisine as much as by creed.

The wars of religion had implications for scientists, cooks, and publishers as they had for politicians and priests. In Catholic Italy, the proudly independent medical faculty in Padua was brought to heel by the pope’s Jesuit watchdogs. As a result, it quickly lost its primacy to more progressive Protestant European schools, such as the Dutch university of Leiden. Notoriously, Galileo was forced from Padua after repeated run-ins with the Inquisition. Many alchemists and astrologers went underground, lest they be accused of practicing necromancy—a serious charge that could get you sent to the stake. Then, in concert with the religious zealotry, witch trials swept the continent during the later years of the Reformation. This wave of persecution peaked in what some historians have called a “witch-hunting craze” of the hundred years between 1550 and 1650. (The Salem witch trials were a distant echo of this Europe-wide phenomenon.) Not surprisingly, physicians who knew what was good for them tried to distance themselves as much as possible from any of the occult arts that had once been part of their medical kit.

So what did all this tumult mean for the consumption of spices in Europe? In the short term, not much. Outside of France, late-seventeenth-century recipe collections seem just as enthusiastic about cooking with spices as they had a hundred years before. Just look at the penchant for spice in
De verstandige kock.
Nutmeg and cloves also still show up regularly in physicians’ medical kits. But increasingly, national cuisines started to diverge. And in France, which had now overtaken Italy as Europe’s style-setter, the fashion in spicing was changing. In Versailles, well-spiced cuisine lost its cachet. Elsewhere in Europe, fashionistas took note. None of this happened overnight or everywhere, but the seeds of what we might call modern European cooking (and consequently, American cooking, too), with its emphasis on local seasonings, were planted just as the Dutch East India Company was raking in its greatest profits from the bloodstained nutmeg groves.

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Despite Jan Coen’s mostly terrible reputation today, there is no shortage of streets and other landmarks named after him across the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, he has lent his name to a major tunnel and a harbor nearby. Coenhaven (the harbor) is a short bicycle ride from the Centraal Station. The route takes you past the old wood harbor where the timber for the East Indiamen arrived. These days, the old jetties are lined with crusty barges converted into houseboats, festooned with planters and children’s swing sets that glow magenta against the leaden sky. When you look ahead, giant cranes hover above container ships, like enormous praying mantises readying for combat. Coenhaven is like any other modern harbor, with rows of low, sprawling warehouses painted with gray and more gray. But sniff the air. The usual salt and diesel harbor smell mingles here with the darker, loamier scent of cocoa. Amsterdam long yielded preeminence to the superior modern harbor at Rotterdam, but it nonetheless manages to lead the world in cocoa imports. Still, Coen’s harbor with its scattering of cargo ships is no more than a shadow of the old port packed with hundreds of ships, in the radiant days when Amsterdam’s spice imports made her the envy of the world.

In the beginning, the VOC business model worked sufficiently well to make a lot of seventeenth-century Amsterdamers rich enough to build fancy houses and fill them with exquisite paintings, but it had a fundamental built-in flaw. It did not take into account that spices are not the same kind of trade good as herring and beer, that the demand for luxuries like pepper and nutmeg was not based on price but rather on more ineffable, even metaphysical, attributes; fashion is fickle. Once the Dutch had figured out how to take over the supply side of the equation, they assumed that demand would just keep on growing. The trouble was that spices, once they had been turned into an ordinary commodity and lost their symbolic resonance, had only a marginal place in the modern, postmedieval world.

In the seventeenth century, the chocolate that scents Coenhaven’s briny breeze, as well as tea and coffee, came to be the new darlings of the in-crowd. The new tropical imports were sometimes even hyped in the same words as the old Asian seasoning. In much the way that some spices had earlier been prescribed to increase mental agility, the stimulating effects of tea and coffee in particular were recommended to the movers and shakers of the new rational age. They certainly had none of the fusty and sensuous associations of the Oriental scents or the soporific effects of spiced wine and beer. Heavily spiced beverages, in particular, lost market share to the modern stimulants. Admittedly, chocolate (the drink) had a reputation that was a little more ambiguous than the other brews, perhaps because it had arrived in Europe by way of the decaying Madrid court, but as Amsterdam came to dominate the cacao business, it, too, became a staple in any modish drawing room. The VOC got into the coffee and tea business as well, but it was never able to control the market as it had for the fine spices. As the demand for the East Asian condiments sagged, the shine began to wear off Amsterdam’s golden age.

There were many factors that led to Amsterdam’s slow slide from her perch atop the world. In much the same way that the city’s initial ascent was not wholly dependent on the East India trade (compared to Lisbon, say), her tumble down had many causes. But the drop-off in the spice business was symptomatic of problems all around. Unlike Venice, which managed to reinvent herself as an amusement park, giving the city its long half-life, or Lisbon, which rose again in the eighteenth century on an updraft of Brazilian gold dust, Amsterdam mostly lapsed into obscurity and relative poverty by the mid-1700s. The ambitious expansion plan for the ring of canals that built the Herengracht for the booming seventeenth-century city was left uncompleted and only partially populated until the industrial age.

Given the fact that Amsterdam had made its fortune during the years of conflict with Spain, the trouble began with a short-lived fashion for signing peace treaties. The first bit of bad news came in 1648, when word circulated on the Dam that an end had been declared to the Spanish war. To make things worse, the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe had finally ground to its weary conclusion that same year. Three years later, the English stopped slaughtering one another in their Civil War. Now, all of a sudden, Europe’s great powers could pause to turn their greedy heads upon the riches of the minute republic.

Spain was out of the picture for good, but now England was feeling her oats. In a series of wars between 1652 and 1678, the new naval superpower gnawed off chunks of the Dutch empire from Malaysia to Manhattan. In mainland Europe, the French invaded the Netherlands itself. Wars against Louis XIV’s armies were bad enough, but what really hurt the economy of the Hollanders was when one Dutch business after another was expelled from the Sun King’s realm in the name of French protectionism.

All over Europe, absolutist monarchs and their ministers were entranced with the economics of mercantilism, subsidizing exports and cutting off imports. The French founded their own East India Company so that they wouldn’t have to buy spices imported by foreigners. They set up a little colony at Pondicherry, on India’s southeast coast, to supply their pepper ships and even tried to seduce the ruler of Ceylon away from the embrace of the Dutch. But as one Frenchman pointed out, “No lover is as jealous of his mistress as the Dutch are of their trade in Spices,” and the maneuver ended in failure. Virtually all of Europe’s pepper continued coming through Amsterdam and London, and the Netherlands alone controlled all the cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves that reached Europe’s shores. And yet, while it does not appear that Dutch spices were particularly singled out for sanctions by the Versailles government, it does seem awfully coincidental that heavily spiced cooking loses favor among the elite in France, and only in France, during just this period. You have to ask, how seemly would it have been to serve food highly seasoned with the foreigners’ spices to the king and his mercantilist ministers? Still, mercantilism can at best offer only a fragment of the explanation for the French revolution in cooking of the sixteen hundreds.

It’s hardly surprising that Europeans would give up medieval cookery just as they were abandoning feudalism, counterpoint, egg tempera, and a Ptolemaic universe. But why was France the hotbed of this innovation? The court of Louis XIV was hardly known for its revolutionary spirit. Renaissance France had no Galileo or Monteverdi, no Spinoza or Rembrandt. But it had La Varenne.

A glance at François Pierre La Varenne’s seminal 1651 cookbook,
Le cuisiner françois,
reveals how much things had changed in France.
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Gone are the generous helpings of sugar and exotic spice of the Italian Renaissance masters, replaced by local herbs and mushrooms. Though this nouvelle cuisine was definitely more delicate (or blander, depending on your point of view), the French chef still includes nutmeg or cloves in plenty of his recipes, though he does so in stingy quantities. A typical recipe will call for “two or three” cloves and a grating of nutmeg. Pepper and ginger are mostly absent, and cinnamon has been quarantined in the dessert chapters.

There are a number of reasons why the seventeenth-century culinary revolution sprouted in French soil (even while it was pollinated by Europe-wide trends). To a greater degree than elsewhere, the old and once-powerful French aristocracy was increasingly dependent on the whim of the king. As early as 1586, a Spanish commentator (admittedly, not the most impartial source) mentions that in France, the courtiers and grandees are such slaves to royal fashion that they will ape the king even if he has a taste for foods that are “vile and common, which even the poorest wretches would not consent to eat.” (Was he referring to truffles and mushrooms?) To some degree, feasting in the new absolutist monarchies now had a fresh purpose. Whereas, in the olden days, lavish feasts were put on to impress a noble’s underlings, they now headlined an aristocrat’s talents as a sycophant. Ostentation took on a slightly revised form. One thing is sure, though: French aristocrats certainly did not stop using spices because they were now cheap. The fine spices were at least twice as expensive at the end of La Varenne’s seventeenth-century revolution as they had been at its beginning. But it is true that with the establishment of a worldwide colonial system that produced bulk commodities instead of aromatic missives from paradise, spices lost much of their cachet.