One of the biggest research challenges that I face is tracing the history of spice usage and spice trade in northern Europe. There are many reasons why this work is so difficult:
1. Throughout most of history, the people who knew the most about spices were often illiterate. They were either cooks or traditional healers, and their employers did not always think that their work was important enough to record.
2. Spices were incredibly expensive throughout most of history, only used by the wealthy. Many merchants often kept their account ledgers and inventories in code, so that no one except that merchant family would know for sure what type of spices they handled, or how much money they had earned from those spices.
3. Biologically accurate plant illustrations did not appear in books until the invention of the Gutenberg Press in the mid-15th century. The average northern European would not be able to identify most plants from a book published in the Dark Ages or Middle Ages. Here are some examples of spice drawings from that time:
This is an Arabic translation of a classic Greek herbiary. Not only do all of the plants look like dandelions, but there are no standard words to describe leaves, stems, roots, or other parts of the plant. It was very easy to mix up plants, especially foreign exotic ones. This was a big problem for doctors, as plants, herbs, and spices were used as medicine. People had to rely solely on the text for whatever factual information they could find.
Here is another one, from a German health encyclopedia. As late as 1491, reference books still contained unidentifiable plant drawings. Some of the plants are even imaginary. (The drawing to the left is the "Tree of Life", if you ever run into it...complete with serpent.)
4. The Church has hidden away some of the best material on spices. Contrary to popular belief, many priests and monks of early Christian Europe were not far removed from their pagan roots, and they still indulged in the intake of spices as aphrodisiacs. Meanwhile, wars were fought over the consumption of gingerbread and highly spiced fermented beverages such as
glogg and
wassail.
Even the modern history of spice is highly secretive. In
Cardamom: The Genus Elettaria by Indian botanists P.N. Ravindran and K.J. Madhusoodanan, I am left hanging by this fact:
"Cardamom was introduced in Guatemala only in early 1920s from Sri Lanka or India with the help of a New York broker and was planted in the vicinity of Coban in the Department of Alta Verapaz" (Ravindran, 2002).
Who was this spice broker? Must I travel to Coban to find his name? I cannot trace the name of this broker anywhere else in the literature, but I do not doubt the information, as India is the home of cardamom, and southern India is home to many cardamom research institutes.
5. There is no "paper trail" of previous research done on particular spices. Internet research on spices is the worst, as very few "facts" are cited, and some end up not being true at all if you do the grunt work of hitting the books.
