Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

Book Overview

In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era--from ancient times through the Renaissance--when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood. Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375707050
• ISBN13: 9780375707056
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Its fascinating and hard to put down.

The first pages of the book had me regretting my life choices. Once I got past those few pages things perked up and I began to enjoy the book. I'm about half way through now and I hate putting this book down. I find every opportunity to read another few pages. It's not your typical boring dry history book, it's really very interesting. I would highly recommend this to anyone who doesn't mind reading nonfiction.

Well-researched

This book is very well researched! I really enjoyed the wealth of knowledge on different subjects like the usage of spice during the Crusades, Roman eating habits, etc... I learned a great deal and felt very mentally simulated. I was not the biggest fan of the organization within the book but it was still amazing.

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.

This Book Tastes Good

I found this book while writing a term paper on the impact of spices. Spice: THoaT stands out among both popular and academic style books on spices with its colourful diction, its intense focus and most of all with its exhaustive research. Turner's bibliography was just as helpful as his other content. For the majority of readers, those who aren't doing research, I still recommend it heartily. Spices are absolutely fascinating, and Turner chows down on their history without using phrases like I have in the title of this review. Another strong work in the same vein is Nathaniel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton. Unlike THoaT, NN has a central story and a narrow focus, but it covers similar ground and is also a good read. I got an A on my paper, and Spice: The History of a Temptation gets an A+. Turner is thorough in his research, and deft in his presentation.

Important Explanation of the Rise and Fall of Spice Envy

`Spice - The History of a Temptation' by historian Jack Turner is a work of cultural and culinary history which is `culinary' in much the same sense as the writings of M.F.K. Fisher are not about cooking, but about hunger or desire for food. History of food is not as useful to the average amateur cook as food science, but ignorance of food history can lead to misstatements about food as easily as ignorance of food science can lead to misstatements about how cooking works. One of my most fascinating observations in my reading of several books on Medieval and Renaissance cooking was the pervasive appearance of spices in recipes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. And, this prevalence was not only in the Mediterranean, but also as far north as England and Scandinavia. Conventional wisdom regarding modern cuisine says that the cookie spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger) are common in savory dishes of the southernmost reaches of Europe such as Sicily, Crete, and Greece plus the great Renaissance trading ports such as Venice. Yet, here we have French kings and nobles in Paris using as much of these spices as the merchant kings of Venice and Genoa. Our author and scholar answers this question and a lot more in this delightfully written and thoroughly researched book. Mr. Turner's writing may not be up to the level of M.F.K. Fisher, but it is every bit as good as the quality of writing in the typical journalism in depth pieces which appear regularly in The New Yorker. We can thank the wisdom of the editors at Knopf for giving us an excellent work of popular history on a subject which turns up now and then on food shows such as `Molto Mario' and Alton Brown's `Good Eats'. One piece of conventional wisdom that the author dispels is the claim that spices were used to mask the bad taste and odor of spoiling food. In fact, it is much more logical to believe that food preservation by drying and salting was far advanced by 1200 CE The problem was not with spoiled food as with dull, salty, dry food in the winter. And, this problem was primarily a problem of the rich. Before 1600, the diet of the wealthy landowner was based almost exclusively on meat, preferably game. Fruits were avoided except as themselves a type of spice, since they were thought to be the source of undesirable humors. Vegetables were avoided as being the food for the common folk. This happens to be an eminent confirmation of the description of modern European cuisine, especially Italian cuisine, which is heavily vegetarian, as the cuisine of poverty. So, the oriental spices were commonly used widely throughout Europe to liven food. And, my reading of aforementioned Medieval and Renaissance cookbooks with recipes from England and France confirms that these spices were used in virtually every dish. While much of the use was done to enliven salty, dry meats, an equal attraction of these spices, including pepper and citrus fruits was simply because they were rare and expensive

A Little Bit Of Everything.

This is a nice, well written history of spices and their effects on humanity. Much of the book deals with the spice races of the 1400s and 1500s and the impact on the world and on Europe's rising power. Other sections deal with spices and their roles in history, cooking, romance, politics, religion, and war. The book is not arranged chronologically but instead in broad categories devoted to spices' various uses. Turner is scholarly but also witty and informal in his writing. You will learn a lot and also have a lot of fun while reading his book.

The History of Spice, and Spice in History

Three thousand years after one of the greatest of Egypt's pharaohs, Ramses II, was embalmed and put into his tomb, he was discovered to have a couple of peppercorns up his nose. This was in some ways unsurprising. The Egyptians used all sorts of spices to preserve the body so that the soul might wander back into it. But regarded historically, this is an astonishing use of pepper; the peppercorns were not any African species, not anything Ramses's lands had grown. The only source at the time was the tropical south of India; there must have been a previously unsuspected direct or circuitous trade route between the regions. No details about the route can now be known, except that it was part of the lucrative spice trade that for centuries powered economies and exploration. In _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (Knopf), Jack Turner includes the story of the first known consumer of pepper along with hundreds of other facts as a way of looking at a part of human history that was vital and has been influential into our own times, but is now merely curious. Spices are high on the list of goods that have made the modern world. Spices were costly and mysterious, and people thought that they came from Paradise itself, the place in the East from which Adam and Eve had been banished. It was to gain spices that Columbus sailed, and spices he did bring back, but they were disappointments; that did not stop the continued search for them, and the resultant expansion of the world. Turner shows that spices were not really used to help make old meat palatable; fresh meat was cheaper than spices. But they were used to improve wine, a use that became unnecessary after bottle and cork technology came in the sixteenth century. Though spices were not really responsible for warding off decomposition, they were thought vital for warding off disease. In medieval medical logic, sweet fragrances might drive off the bad vapors, and spices (most thought of as hot and dry) might drive off a cold (thought of as a disease of cold and wet). Millions of spam e-mails every day are sent to tell how to enlarge male sexual equipment; those who believe in such cures would do well to invest in the simpler, cheaper, and just as effective formulas given here from the chapter of the ancient treatise, _The Perfumed Garden_, "Prescriptions for Increasing the Dimension of Small Members and Making Them Splendid" The priapic value of spices is just one reason the church has had wildly ambivalent notions about them. There is scriptural documentation that the God of the Bible likes to be sent good smells, as have many gods before him, but Turner's quotations from theologians indignant over the eagerness of their parishioners (and, gasp, their clerics) to partake in spicy foods are among the most amusing parts of the book. Ministers just don't care anymore about the theological implications of spicy food. The reduction of their interest in such things parallels the reduction in i