Spices always played a big role in the History. Reserved for the most fortunate until XVIIIth century, they were always the object of commercial rivalries.
Of current usage today, they lost of their rarity but are left by products of choice. They raise the dishes, perfume houses and offer numerous medicinal properties.
The Antiquity
In the Antiquity, the Egyptians already used it to raise the food, the frabriquer of the flavors and ointments to embalm their deaths.
The Bible also mentions them has numerous occasions. In the Genesis, Joseph, son of Jacob, is sold by his brothers to traders who transported on their camels of spices, incense and myrrhe.
We also say that the wealth of king Salomon rested on the business of horses and that some spices.
In the time, spices came generally from China, from Indonesia, from India, or from Ceylon. They were collected by Chinese traders then forwarded by bâteau to India or in Ceylon where the exchanges were made with sailors native of the Arabian peninsula before being redistributed.
The Empire Roman
The Roman conquests in 1st century BC open the ground road of spices through current Iran and current Aghanistan. Alexandria becomes as for her the main commercial harbour between the East and the West. The Roman empire facilitates the custom of spices in the Northern Europe.
The fall of the Roman Empire of West in the sièclefait 5th to decline the custom and the business of spices for the benefit of Byzantium and of the Arabic world. The crusades and the formation of Christian realms in Holy Land will mark the return of spices in Western Europe.
Venice and Genoa, thanks to the crusades, become in this period the intermediaries obliged between the West and the Arabic world. The rarity of spices makes them so precious as the gold or the money, and this business is very lucrative for Italian.
With their medicinal, turned out or supposed properties, spices were an eesentiel element of the antique and medieval pharamacopées.
Treaties on the virtues of plants and spices of Aristote and Hyppocrate were in force until XVth century. The kitchens of the noble persons and the middle-class persons abounded then in spices, because they allowed to show the wealth, the most humble contenting itself with meats or with dried fishes, boiled and flavored with little expensive spices.
The fall of Constantinople and the Turkish progress in Méditérranée close the access in marine Christian. The price increase of spices incites then the European nations to find the other ways to bring back these invaluable ingredients.
The most famous of the explorers barrel Marco Polo, whose narrative of its long journey - 24 years - through Asia makes him list and describe spices which he discovers and whose business he describes minutely. He inspired numerous sailors and western explorers in their collection of a direct road towards " islands in spices ".
The big discoveries
The big discoveries made by the Portuguese and the Spaniards in the XVth century entrainent a radical alteration of the business of spices.
In 1492, for Spain, Christopher Columbus, making road westward on the Atlantic Ocean, approaches in the Bahamas, discovers Cuba and Haiti, persuaded to have reached a still unknown region of India. He ignored that he had just discovered the New World and was the first European to enjoy the hot pepper.
Three other expeditions begun between 1493 and 1502 will allow him to investigate the Antilles and to get twice the American continent. It is him who will discover the hot pepper of Jamaica and will import in Europe the potato, the chocolate, the corn, the groundnut and the turkey.
In 1498, Portuguese Vasco de Gama by-passes Africa by the Cape of Good Hope and reaches directly India by Indian Ocean. After a trade agreement crossed in the name of king, he returns with a ship loaded with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger and pepper and is welcomed as a real hero !
Some years later, Portuguese become established on the islands of the Probe and in Moluques, famous " islands in spices ", and take care of the collection and the transport of spices. At the beginning of the XVIth century, Lisbon becomes the capital of spices.
The Spanish and Portuguese monopoly
The monopoly held by the Spaniards and the Portuguese is not however accpeté by the other European countries, in particular France, England and Holland. Avid to stock up directly with spices, these countries establish in turn counters, then colonies in India and in the rest of Asia, often at the price of bloody fights. In the XVIIth century, Hollande profite of its dominant position in sea transports to replace the Portuguese on the islands of the Probe and in Moluques and to eliminate the English people of the region.
Based in 1602, the powerful Dutch Company of East Indies checks the business of spices in this region very desired by the other European states. To remain, she tries hard to restrict the culture of the nutmeg and some cinnamon to the islands of Amboine and of Bandaged, in the archipelago of Moluques.
But the discovery, on a nearby island, of sowing of seeds transported by birds allows the missionary Pierre Poivre to introduce the nutmeg and the cloves into Mauritius.From there, the exploitation of the clove gains the island of Zanzibar (this island is at present one of the big centres of productions of cloves), then the nutmeg reaches finally up to the island of Grenada, in the Caribs.
At the same time, the English people try to acclimatize these two spices on the island of Penang in Malaysia, then develop the culture of spices in Singapore, supervised by Sir Stamford Raffles, for the English Company of East Indies, based by queen Elizabeth Ire in 1600.
By seizing India and Ceylon, the English people are imperative, at the end of the XVIIIth century, on the spice route, at the same moment when these begin to become less rare and thus much less expensive.
It is also the time(period) when the United States dash into the running(race). Practising the business or the barter, the clippers of the New England bring in to Salem holds filled(performed) with bags of pepper of Sumatra. The city of Salem ( Massachussets) so becomes a big center of business of pepper.
The evolutions
In the course of time, the tastes evolved: the French cooking is crossed by an excess of spices in the sweetening, the lowering and the hierarchical organization of these. This simlplification of the art of cooking was summarized well by " Prince of gastronomes ", Curnonsky: " the cooking, it is when things have the taste of what they are ". It is necessary to wait for the XXth century, for the big World or colonial Fairs, then for the development of the mass tourism and its global migrations, so that the general public in West rediscovers spices and learns about the exotic kitchens.
Today, we consider spices as commonplace products. They offer an infinite palette of flavours allowing to give free rein to our imagination, to reinterpret the traditional flats, to innovate, while respecting the taste of food. We have difficulty in imagining that a handle of cardamom represented, one century ago, the equivalent of the annual income of a laborer, that slaves were sold for a bag of peppercorns or that a pound of ginger was worth the price of a ewe.
In the port of London, the dockers turned their pockets in front of their employers when they had stopped unloading a ship of spices : it was not question that they take with them a single peppercorn!
The democratization of the custom of spices and the globalization of the exchanges created an international market the main centres of which are London, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Singapore, and New York. Stored in warehouses, spices undergo health controls before being conditioned.
At the world level, the business of spices represents at the moment approximately 10 billion francs a year (I let you make the conversion, my pocket calculator had enough 0): the black pepper, the hot pepper, and cardamom are the most consummate. The main producers are India, Indonesia, Brazil, Madagascar and Malaysia. The culture and the export of spices establish(constitute) an important part of the economy and the balance of trade of these countries.
Source : "Epices et Condiments" – édition Larousse, "Epices", de Bruno Jarry, éditions Hachette Pratique
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