'Perhaps the Most Impressive of All'

Spices meant salt and pepper. For my family like others in the American working class, there was no cardamom or turmeric. When I was a kid those would have sounded vaguely like medical conditions. We never heard of such things until decades later. For some baked goods, breakfast cereals and eggnog at Christmas we might have added cinnamon and nutmeg. Cloves meant chewing gum. Otherwise, the American palate was unaccustomed to such exotics. Sophisticates might make fun of our provincial tastes but we didn’t know any better. American cuisine was narrowly defined, immune to snobbery and seldom went further than chop suey. Pizza was only semi-domesticated. Iris Origo writes in The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 (1957): 

“The spices include pepper, cinnamon, clove, ginger (both green and ‘ripe’), nutmeg, galinga (a bitter Chinese root), cassia, incense, aloes, zedoary, camphor, cardomon [or cardamom], spikenard, myrrh, and resins such as Arabian gum, mastic, galbanus, and ‘dragon’s blood.’”

 

Origo’s book is a biography of the fourteenth-century merchant from Prato in Tuscany. A self-made businessman, he got his start in Avignon in the arms trade, eventually supplying luxury goods, including spices and works of art. Surviving him are 500 account books and 150,000 papers relating to Datini's business, all discovered in 1870 in a stairwell in his mansion in Prato. No other figure from his era is so well documented.

 

Most of the spices Origo lists were imported from East Asia to Europe beginning in the Middle Ages. Not only are many of the spices she mentions no longer much used in the West, though some have been "repurposed" as medicinal. The words too are sparsely used. Here are some explanatory notes, though there's a lot of information available online: galinga, or galangal, is a rhizome resembling ginger, with a peppery taste; cassia, a form of cinnamon derived from the bark of an East Asian evergreen;  zedoary, “aromatic, tuberous rhizomes” (OED); spikenard, a root native from India cited in the Song of Solomon; mastic, a resin from the mastic tree used in various desserts.

 

Origo tells us Datini imported three kinds of sugar and that pepper was then costly, “one of the most expensive, but nevertheless was imported in large quantities. A single ship for instance, from Alexandria, brought to Genoa over 300 pounds of pepper from Cyprus, as well as ‘much ginger and cotton,’ and the news that ‘another caravan from Mecca was soon expected.’”

 

Spices in the Middle Ages are often associated with wealth, while we can find shelves of them in our neighborhood grocery. Datini imported wool, alum, soap and gall-nuts, Flemish madder (a plant-based reddish-purple dye), and Lombard woad (a flowering plant, the source of blue indigo dye), linen and leather. Later in the biography Origo writes:

 

“Perhaps the most impressive of all, to his fellow citizens, were the rare foods and wines: cheese from Pisa, Sardinia, and Sicily, barrels of tunny-fish, oranges and dates from Catalonia; besides sugar, pepper, and all sorts of spices—cassia, clove, ginger, and saffron. And sometimes, too, a carte of exotic creatures for the new garden would be unpacked before their startled eyes – ‘a monkey, a porcupine in a cage, two peacocks (male and female) and a sea-gull.’”