Day 20

Of course ‘spice’ suggests much more than veiled erotic allusion. Besides romance, if that is the word, there are the Romantics, for whom spices are inextricably linked with images of a fabulous Orient in all its mystery and splendour. The word comes poetically charged, In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Titania tells Oberon of her conversation with a changeling’s mother in the ‘spiced Indian air’; in the dour surrounds of a New England farmhouse, Herman Melville imagined the ‘spiced groves of ceaseless verdure’ growing on the enchanted islands of the East. For countless others spices and the spice trade have evoked a host of vague, alluring images: dhows wafting across tropical seas, the shadowy recesses of Eastern bazaars, Arabian caravans snaking across the desert, the sensual aromas of the harem, the perfumed banquets of the Moghul’s court. Walt Whitman looked west from California to ‘flowery peninsulas and the spice islands’ of the East; Marlowe wrote of ‘Mine argosie from Alexandria, Loaden with spice and silks, now under sail … smoothly gliding down by Candy shore’. In a similar vein Tennyson waxed lyrical on the ‘boundless east’ where ‘those long swells of breaker sweep/The nutmeg rocks and isles of clove’. Spices and the trade that brought them have long been one of the stocks-in-trade of what Edward Said labelled the Orientalist imagination, their reputation for the picturesque, glamour, romance and swashbuckle enduring from the tales of Sinbad to several recent (often equally fabulous) non-fiction potboilers.
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By the time these quintessentially Eastern products reached the West, spices had acquired a history laden with meaning, in which respect they are comparable to a mere handful of other foods, the weight and richness of their baggage rivalled only by bread (‘give us this day our daily bread’), salt (‘the salt of the earth’) and wine (‘in wine is truth’ – but also the liquor of death, life, deceit, excess, the mocker or mirror of man). Yet the symbolism spices have carried is more diverse, more spiked with ambivalence than these parallels would suggest. When spices arrived by ship or caravan from the East, they brought their own invisible cargo, a bulging bag of associations, myth and fantasy, a cargo that to some was as repulsive as others found it attractive. For thousands of years spices have carried a whole swathe of potent messages, for which they have been both loved and loathed.

 ~~ Spice- The History of a Temptation -by- Jack Turner