The Taste of Conquest (41 page)

The
rijsttafel
is a peculiar invention of colonial cuisine in which dishes from Bali, Java, Sumatra, and other Indonesian islands are combined into an enormous buffet. The idea is loosely based on the kind of elaborate banquet you might be served at an Indonesian wedding, though in prosperous colonial households, it became a much more everyday affair. The cooks were often ethnic Chinese, which affected not only the flavors but also the ingredients. In particular, they added lots of pork to what was originally a Muslim feast. Meats of all kinds, whether skewered as
satay
or cooked in a spicy stew like
babi ricah,
became the focus of the meal.

There are dozens of places to eat
rijsttafel
in today’s Amsterdam, from neighborhood take-out joints that give you a choice of some two dozen dishes arrayed in steam tables to white-tablecloth restaurants where the waiters smile and gently guide you through the smorgasbord. I chose, one night, to splurge at a restaurant called Puri Mas. The restaurant is just inside the Singelgracht, the last canal that was incised around the city in the sixteen hundreds, down a honky-tonk street where you have to dodge restaurant hawkers pushing everything from pad Thai to spaghetti Bolognese. It is a couple of bridges away from the Rijksmuseum, so not surprisingly, it is packed with tourists recovering from too much Rembrandt. Yet a kind of genteel atmosphere fills the room, mingling with aromas of fish sauce and spice. You can choose a modest
rijsttafel
for a succession of thirteen small plates, but better to opt for
Rijsttafel Royaal,
with a deluge of sixteen dishes. Plate after plate after plate arrives. The table is set with
kroepoek,
cassava shrimp chips, along with a little bowl of the chili- and ginger-spiced
sambal
sauce that is as common as mayonnaise in every Amsterdamer’s refrigerator. Egg rolls and batter-fried shrimp come with little turnovers exuding a sweet and savory aroma of coriander, black pepper, cumin, and turmeric. There is an assortment of
satays,
chicken, pork, and lamb on skewers, hot with chilies, sweet with sugar, and sour with tamarind. Then come little plates of stew: pork scented with chilies and ginger; chicken with chilies and coriander; lamb in a dense masala of cardamom, cumin, turmeric, fennel, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. There are a few vegetables and then the obligatory coda,
nasi goreng.
This
nasi goreng
has a few flecks of chicken amid the fried rice with just a suspicion of spice.

If you stop for a moment to analyze the avalanche of flavors, you realize that the dominant tastes are of sweet and of sour, along with a judicious sprinkle of exotic spice—the same kind of flavor combination (setting aside the chili) you might have found in medieval Venice or sixteenth-century Amsterdam. No wonder that the seventeenth-century Dutch who arrived in Indonesia took to this style of cooking: it had a lot in common with what they ate at home.

We seem to have come full circle. Today, the spiced cooking of the Renaissance seems no more exotic than the Puri Mas’s
rijsttafel.
Certainly, the old way of cooking is much more comprehensible than it was even fifty years ago, when French historians rolled their eyes in horror at that earlier era’s “orgy of spice.” Now there is no more mysterious East, Prester John, or miraculous spices as precious as gold. The cuisines of every corner of the earth are as familiar as jet travel—or a visit to a shopping mall food court. Americans import more spices per capita than the medieval ruling class ever did, and many Europeans are not far behind. Flavors that were once exotic imports—the very scents of paradise—are now common, everyday, and ubiquitous. The Dutch are perhaps more responsible for this than anyone. Under their watch, spices became an ordinary—if not quite cheap—commodity, as common as herring or lumber or beer.

Epilogue

•

B
ALTIMORE
AND
C
ALICUT

T
HE
S
PICE
C
HAMBER

If there is an heir today to the Estado da Índia and the Dutch East India Company, it would have to be McCormick & Company. So, hoping to catch a glimpse of today’s dominant spice multinational, I called up its headquarters in Baltimore. Easier said than done. When I requested a tour of the plant, the press officer turned me down flat. “We don’t do tours,” she snapped. When I asked for an interview, she grilled me about just what it was I wanted to know and then promised to get back to me. She never did. I felt like a Dutch spy trying to break into the offices of the Portuguese viceroy. What dark secrets could be sequestered in the bowels of the world’s largest spice company?

But I persisted. Six months and several rounds of bureaucratic gymnastics later, I pulled into the McCormick parking lot. The company headquarters is in a large, fortresslike building isolated in a sylvan corporate park just north of Baltimore. McCormick gave up its previous facilities in the inner city in the early 1980s to move closer to the processing plant and away from the then-derelict waterfront. Luckily, it salvaged some of the old headquarters. Behind the receptionist hangs one of the original Depression-era murals rescued from downtown, depicting East and West Indians gathering black pepper and vanilla—still the company’s top sellers. (McCormick is the world’s largest buyer of vanilla.) Much to my surprise, the receptionist asks for neither fingerprints nor a retina scan before I enter. She is downright friendly as she pages James Lynn, my inside source at the corporation. As Jim shakes my hand and guides me inside, the secrets seem to dissipate, though not the peculiarities—this is Baltimore, after all. McCormick not only transplanted some of the old pictures, it lifted an entire mock Elizabethan hamlet from the old offices and shoehorned it here into the new suburban location. As you step through the generic corporate lobby past the bank of elevators, you are suddenly confronted by a street of timbered cottages and leaded glass windows. (The village had been built to promote tea, which was an important McCormick product in the 1930s.) To your left is “Ye Olde McCormick Tea House,” where visitors used to be offered tea by a wench in period costume at the old harborfront main office. Company guests could also visit the next-door “Tea Museum” to examine tea memorabilia and educate themselves in a six-foot-high book entitled “Ye Story of Tea.” The wench, unfortunately, fell victim to corporate downsizing a long time ago, though Jim does sit me at a rustic oaken table and offer me tea. Jim Lynn works in corporate communications, but on the side, he is an amateur authority on the company’s history.

Visitors to McCormick headquarters are greeted with a vintage painting of pepper picked and dried much the same as in Roman times.

Like Heinz, Kellogg’s, Hershey’s, and so many other grand American brands, McCormick was founded in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Jim describes a tough and feisty Willoughby M. McCormick, who got his start selling flavored syrups out of a basement in Baltimore. He survived the great Baltimore fire, the Great War, the Great Depression—all the while enlarging his portfolio, adding spices, tea, mayonnaise, and even insecticides. And he gave tours of the factory. (Today’s reluctance to host visitors is simply corporate caution, Jim assures me.) When it came to spices, McCormick satisfied its needs by buying on the New York Commodities Exchange, then processing and packaging the imported spices. Up until the Second World War, the spice export business was still mostly in Dutch and English hands.

Under W. M. McCormick’s successors, the American company went public and gradually assembled an international potpourri of spice companies from Shanghai to San Salvador. Investors can read all about it in the company’s annual report, where they’ll also find out that McCormick’s profits are soaring, mainly because world spice consumption keeps going up and up.

If McCormick headquarters holds a secret, it is on the fourth floor. This is where the carpeted hallways of the lower floors give way to barren institutional corridors lined with anonymous doors. Jim leads me to one of these doors, slides a key into the lock, and flips the light switch. As the fluorescent lights flicker to life, the little room bursts into a riot of words and colors. Hundreds, thousands of neatly arrayed packages from little one-shot servings of Moroccan chicken seasoning in hot pink tetrahedrons to giant food-service packs of Key West Style Seasonings labeled in tropical turquoise are arranged in row after row after row. A shelf of chili-flavored mayonnaise from the Central American division is squeezed next to a display case for Stange, the Japanese division. (“Taste the magician” is the only part of that package that I can read.) Here, in McCormick’s secret spice chamber, is a snapshot of the world spice market today and where spicing around the globe is going. Today’s company has divisions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Central America, China, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey as well as the United States, and many of those national brands are exported elsewhere. The company that started selling vanilla syrup to Baltimore soda fountains is now the epitome of globalization, sourcing its vanilla in Uganda and Vietnam to flavor chocolate bars in Switzerland and Argentina. But then the spice business has always been a worldwide affair even before the Castilians and the Portuguese set in motion the first great push for a global trade network.

Yet the way the world eats is changing, and these changes may be even greater than they were after the “Cabralian” exchange that redistributed New World peppers and peanuts along with Old World black pepper and sugarcane across the continents. One of the things made graphically clear in McCormick’s spice chamber is that people don’t cook anymore. They assemble. “Yes, we have all our gourmet jars of spice,” Jim assures me, “but much of what we put our attention to are blends—seasoning blends and grilling sauces—because people can come home and
chuhk, chuhk, chuhk
[he makes the noise of shaking sauce out of a bottle].” For every package of nutmeg and paprika on the shelf, there are dozens of ready-made mixes of multiple spices: to make teriyaki beef (the United States), chili con carne (the Netherlands), Moroccan
tajines
(France), or Balti chicken (the United Kingdom). Even in India, where the fashion for spices never faded, women today are as likely to rip open a polyethylene envelope of commercially processed masala as to pull out the mortar and pestle. For good or ill, the decisions about what your food will taste like are made at corporate headquarters.

And even that is only part of the picture. Jim Lynn explains how McCormick has increasingly moved into the food-service branch of the industry, so that now half its business involves products that never even reach the consumer’s cupboard, or at least not directly. That secret seasoning boasted of by a certain southern chicken chain—“They don’t like us to mention the name,” Jim says with a grin—is a McCormick spice mix; that special sauce at the hamburger chain with the arches is concocted in Baltimore. McCormick flavors everything from chips to beer. Processed food is where the future lies. The tastes in that food are often cooked up in McCormick’s “Technical Innovation Center.” Even food processors don’t want to come up with their own seasoning. “A food manufacturer doesn’t want a truckload of ginger; they want a containerload of a ready-made flavoring mixture,” the corporate communicator informs me. Which is why he keeps emphasizing that McCormick now wants to be seen as a “flavor company” rather than a spice company. You can be sure its flavor decisions do no harm to its spice business.

As Frank Lavooij, the Dutch spice trader, happily informed me, people are eating more spice, and they aren’t even aware of it. There is an apocryphal story about a research project in which dogs are given increasing quantities of chilies in their food. Eventually, they find chili-free food so bland that they refuse to eat it. The dog study apparently never took place, but we are undergoing a similar experiment. More and more of us are eating processed food that is increasingly spicier.

If the Dutch had figured out how to influence demand as well as control supply, Europeans and their New World colonies might never have given up the spice habit to begin with. But the kind of vertical integration that McCormick has accomplished was inconceivable in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The
Heren XVII
could only wring their hands as the fashion for the exotic aromatics waned and per capita spice use sagged in the seventeen hundreds. The appetite for pepper, which the VOC had calculated at about seven million pounds in 1688, remained more or less stuck at that figure until the eve of the French Revolution, even as Europe’s population finally surged. Eventually, in the late nineteenth century, the overall demand for spices grew as living standards rose. Just about everyone could now afford to use cloves and cinnamon. But it was a pinch here and a pinch there. Victorians recoiled in horrified fascination at the earlier orgy of spice.