Product Description

A brilliant, original history of the spice trade—and the appetites that fueled it.

It was in search of the fabled Spice Islands and their cloves that Magellan charted the first circumnavigation of the globe. Vasco da Gama sailed the dangerous waters around Africa to India on a quest for Christians—and spices. Columbus sought gold and pepper but found the New World. By the time these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers set sail, the aromas of these savory, seductive seeds and powders had tempted the palates and imaginations of Europe for centuries.

Spice: The History of a Temptation is a history of the spice trade told not in the conventional narrative of politics and economics, nor of conquest and colonization, but through the intimate human impulses that inspired and drove it. Here is an exploration of the centuries-old desire for spice in food, in medicine, in magic, in religion, and in sex—and of the allure of forbidden fruit lingering in the scents of cinnamon, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and clove.
We follow spices back through time, through history, myth, archaeology, and literature. We see spices in all their diversity, lauded as love potions and aphrodisiacs, as panaceas and defenses against the plague. We journey from religious rituals in which spices were employed to dispel demons and summon gods to prodigies of gluttony both fantastical and real. We see spices as a luxury for a medieval king’s ostentation, as a mummy’s deodorant, as the last word in haute cuisine.

Through examining the temptations of spice we follow in the trails of the spice seekers leading from the deserts of ancient Syria to thrill-seekers on the Internet. We discover how spice became one of the first and most enduring links between Asia and Europe. We see in the pepper we use so casually the relic of a tradition linking us to the appetites of Rome, Elizabethan England, and the pharaohs. And we capture the pleasure of spice not only at the table but in every part of life.

Spice is a delight to be savored.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12052 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-09
• Released on: 2005-08-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com
There was a time, for a handful of peppercorns, you could have someone killed. Throw in a nutmeg or two, you could probably watch. There was a time when grown men sat around and thought of nothing but black pepper. How to get it. How to get more. How to control the entire trade in pepper from point of origin to purchase. In Spice: The History of a Temptation, classics scholar Jack Turner opens up the whole story of pepper and its kind like a ripe melon. He brings the exotic scents of the East deep into the history of Western culture.

Everyone knows a little bit of the story, how the desire to control the spice trade drove Western nations deep into the heart of the Age of Discovery, the Portuguese sponsoring Da Gama's push to India; the Spanish underwriting the many attempts of Columbus to get to India another way. The Western madness for spice was just about peaking in this time, and spice would all too soon become--gasp--common, much like the afterthought condiment it is for so many today. Who thinks twice about pepper any longer?

And yet, the history is long and glorious, and the window spice throws open on Western culture yields a glorious view. Jack Turner is a skilled tour guide and story teller. He starts his narrative with the 16th century quest for spice, then loops back into three mains sections of text: Palate, Body, and Spirit. Turner has mined classic and Medieval literature for any and every possible mention of spice and demonstrates how fixated the West became from the time of Augustus in Rome through to relatively modern times. He winds his narrative through the way spice was used in the foods of the wealthy (and puts to sleep the nostrum about rotting food), as a medicine, a sex aid, and as an aromatic channel to the gods of the time and place. He ably demonstrates the constant underlying tension surrounding spice--that it was both attractive and repellent, that it represented fabulous wealth and power for some and, for others, an abhorrence of the exotic East that exists to this day.

This is not an easy story to tell. But Turner makes it appear effortless. Pull a chair close to the fire, pour a draught of spiced wine, crack open Jack Turner's Spice and you'll read your way into the wee hours of the night. --Schuyler Ingle

From 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Turner arranges his history of spices thematically, in a series of lively essays on their role in different aspects of human endeavor, such as exploration (Columbus was looking for cinnamon when he discovered America) and love (a fifteenth-century tract prescribes an ointment of honey and ginger for "Increasing the Dimension of Small Members and Making Them Splendid"). Turner's sedulous research is manifest on every page, as he follows spices across cultures and eras, with allusions that range from St. Augustine to the Spice Girls. The book's unlikely hero is the peppercorn, which has linked East and West since the time of the Romans and which typifies the way that spices, although no longer the luxury items they once were, have become quietly ubiquitous. Cinnamon and nutmeg are rumored to be the key to "capitalism's most closely guarded secret," the formula for Coca-Cola.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Very informative, but bogs down in repetition
This is an extremely well-researched book and is brimming with all sorts of interesting anecdotes and historical analysis. It's obvious an enormous amount of work went into this. But... it would have been better if it was about 80-100 pages shorter. Not because I prefer short books (the longer the better if it's great), but because 1) the author seems to keep making the same points over and over, and 2) it seems there's not a source he found that he's not going to quote from. These two things feed off each other until the book bogs down in repetition and runs out of steam about 2/3 the way through--I kept thinking, "Wait a minute, didn't the author already make this point in a previous chapter?" I had to push myself through the last third of the book until the last chapter (Epilogue), which finished nicely.

READABLE POPULAR HISTORY - A DELIGHT!
Spice, The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner is a very well written history of the spice trade, written in the popular history mode. A tremendous amount of research must have gone into this work as it is absolutely filled with little gems of detail and wonderful small side stories. There are a number of other books out there that deal with this subject. A recent one, Dangerous Tastes by Andrew Dalby comes to mind, but the work being reviewed here, unlike so many of the others, including the aforementioned, is not an imposing tome which reads more like a doctorial dissertation, than a readable story. If I want sleep, I can always increase my exercise or simply take some sort of pill. I read books such as this for information and to be entertained. They go hand in hand. With Spice I got just what I wanted.

With this work the author has given us a very readable history of spices and the spice trade, starting from the beginning dating back to ancient Egypt and beyond. Of course the majority of the book is rather Eurocentric, but hey, that is where the author was educated, did his research and wrote the book. I suppose if you want a history such as this that is not Eurocentric, then you should probably find a non European author! Anyway, the author has discussed at length the impact spice has had upon world civilization. It was the prime motivator during the Age of Discovery and of course an undeniable pillar of Western Civilization along with quite a number of other civilizations throughout history. Today we have oil; in days gone by we had spice!

The author's organization of the book is different, but once you get use to it, it does make sense. At times he will bounce around just a bit, from country to country; from civilization to civilization. This is good though as it allows the reader to grasp the magnitude of both time and distance in the saga of the spice trade and just what it means to us.

This book does a very nice job of covering the various uses of spice throughout the ages, some of which include being used as currency, embalming, food, in religious ceremonies, sexual aids and as excuses to start some very nasty little wars. He does address the culinary uses of spices by various peoples from around the world and at different times at length and in particular dwells in the Middle Ages which is an era of special interest to me. I found his comments and observation of the diets of various people quite fascinating and he has done well to dispel some of the myths that have grown up around this area. This is something that is long over due.

All in all, a delightful read. If I have one complaint, and it is a very minor complaint, I did not that in some of the chapters the author was a bit repetitious. This is not a major problem, as of course I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so perhaps the repetition was good for me. I very much recommend this one for a good and very informative read.

Good, but could be better
This is a good intro book, but it could certainly be better. The main problems with this book is that it is completely and totally Euro-centric. We have absolutely no idea what people outside of Europe did with spices or with the goods we traded them for the spices. Spices were, however, a major engine of world trade and economic growth in the 'Age of Exploration', something the author uses as a justification to study spices in general. But then the study narrows into the uses of spices in Europe, and leaves the 'big picture' of world history, except to mention the trade being responsible for the Black Death.

Towards the end, the book also becomes a little repetitive. For example, first we learn that the Romans used spices to embalm the dead, then we learn that medieval Europeans also used spices to embalm the dead. This covers two chapters, which could easily be covered in one. There are other examples of this. So, in general, it's a good book, but it could be shorter and better.