Spice
The History of a Temptation (Text Only)
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An essential history of a taste that shaped the world.
Spices: for centuries the staple of cuisine, remedies and ritual, they have commanded the highest of prices. To this day, saffron is, per ounce, one of our most expensive commodities. For their sake, fortunes have been made and lost and new worlds discovered. Astoundingly, in the 17th-century more people died for the sake of cloves than in all the European dynastic wars of the period.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depict a merchant fleet sailing to the Horn of Africa and returning with a priceless cargo of cinnamon. Only the story of mankind’s infatuation with precious metals can rival the story of spice; and only the history of silver and gold rivals spice for its improbable and extraordinary combination of discovery and conquest, greed and violence.
Reviews
‘Epic and evocative…as readable as it is exotic.’ Independent
‘Splendid. Erudite, urbane and original. An appetising debut.’ SundayTelegraph
‘Sumptuous. Turner is equally at ease in antiquity and the Middle Ages.’ Guardian
About the author
Formerly a MacArthur Foundation Research Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a Rhodes Scholar, Jack Turner has been cook, farmhand, and photographer, and has lived and travelled in Britain, Spain, Indochina, South America, Syria, Southern Africa and Australia. He has a first-class degree from Melbourne University and a D.Phil from Oxford. He can speak and/or read seven languages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spices helped draw Europeans into their age of expansion, but the Western world was far from ignorant of them before that time. Turner's lively and wide-ranging account begins with the voyages of discovery, but demonstrates that, even in ancient times, spices from distant India and Indonesia made their way west and fueled the European imagination. Romans and medieval Europeans alike used Asian pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace to liven their palates, treat their maladies, enhance their sex lives and mediate between the human and the divine. While many of these applications were not particularly efficacious, spices retained their allure, with an overlay of exotic associations that remain today. Turner argues that the use of rare and costly spices by medieval and Renaissance elites amounted to conspicuous consumption. He has perhaps a little too much fun listing the ridiculous uses of spices in medieval medicine since, as he notes in a few sparse asides, some spices do indeed have medicinal effects and fails to get into the real experience of the people. His account of religious uses, on the other hand, paints a richer picture and gets closer to imagining the mystery that people found in these startlingly intense flavors and fragrances. It is this mystery and the idea that sensations themselves have a history that make the entire book fascinating.
