Bouguettaya turned to this comforting trio when she moved to Detroit in 2004 after graduating from university. Interested in cuisine but not yet an expert, Bouguettaya recalls learning that key to all three was ground ginger. “Ginger is one of the backbones of Algerian cooking,” she says.
Sharp, penetrating and fiery with a sweet aftertaste, ginger—whether fresh or dried—mixes well into almost any food. It is rare, though, that one form can be substituted for the other in a recipe.
But in 2010 at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market, ginger just wasn’t a spice Bouguettaya naturally reached for when she started making and selling her own traditional Algerian pastries, such as date-filled makrouts and crescent-shaped “gazelle horns” that use almond paste scented with orange blossom. While in North America and Europe dried and ground ginger is common in sweets like gingerbread, cakes, biscuits and cookies, to the Algerian palate, ginger was exclusively reserved for savory dishes, with tajine hlou a lone, fruit-based exception.
It was two years later, when her husband’s employer relocated the couple to Shanghai, that for the first time Bouguettaya came face to face with great heaps of fresh ginger, jiāng in Mandarin, in the markets. There she found that China has long consumed ginger in countless ways.
One of the first written Chinese records on ginger is connected with the sixth-century-BCE philosopher Confucius, who noted in his Analects that he “was never without ginger when he ate,” says Mathieu Torck, a postdoctoral research fellow at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven in Belgium. Similarly, he points out that Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals, written around 249 BCE by Chinese statesman Lü Buwei and universally accepted by Chinese historians, contains references to ginger as a prized ingredient used by the 16th-century-BCE Master Chef Yi Yin of the Shang Dynasty.
As a plant, ginger is a perennial shrub, and it looks like short bamboo. But unlike bamboo, it isn’t the shoots that are of greatest interest. It’s ginger’s underground stem—properly called the rhizome and commonly referred to as the root. This gives ginger (Zingiber officinale) its name in most languages. “The earliest source is the Sanskrit word singabera, meaning ‘horny shape,’” says Torck, “which looks a bit like antlers.”
Ginger, he explains, does not propagate by seed. Rather, the root must be split and planted. It has several tropical areas of origin: southern China, Southeast Asia and India. From all of these regions it has been gradually carried and transplanted around the world.
“The Arabs played an important role in spreading ginger throughout the Indian Ocean,” he says, noting that the name zanjabil was used in Arabic. Later, Europeans carried ginger farther, notably to the West African coast and the Caribbean.
While it grows in many tropical places today, India is the world’s largest producer, harvesting some 1.8 million metric tons a year, about a third of the global total, and other large producers include Nigeria, China, Indonesia and Nepal. In the state of Kerala and along India’s west coast, planting takes place in early May with the premonsoon showers, while in Assam and the northeast, it is slightly earlier, in April. Harvesting ginger that will be sold fresh begins about six months after planting, and rhizomes that will be dried and sent for grinding are dug up at about 8 months of age, when they have reached full maturity.
Historically, like many other spices, ginger has been appreciated for its medicinal values. For that, Carlos González Balderas, a researcher at KU Leuven, refers to the first-century-CE Greek physician Dioscorides’ five-volume encyclopedia De Materia Medica. Writing between 50 and 70 CE, Dioscorides characterized the taste and smell of ginger’s root as well as “what parts to use—the stems and root—and advice on administering,” González Balderas adds. “Warming and digestive,” Dioscorides prescribed, ginger roots “soften the intestines gently, and are good for the stomach.” When “mixed with antidotes … in a general way it resembles pepper in its strength.”
For centuries, Dioscorides served as the authoritative source in the West. “The first translation into Spanish was in the 15th century,” says González Balderas. “And then the Spanish pharmacopeia followed it as a standard reference. From it they learned to use ginger,” he says, adding that the Spanish used the spice during their periods of Atlantic and Pacific colonization.
González Balderas discovered references to ginger in 18th-century shipboard boticas (pharmacies) of galleons while collaborating with Torck on research into trans-Pacific trade from the mid-16th to the early 19th century. “It was prescribed for stomach problems and to relieve body pains. It was made into an infusion, and you had to drink the tea three or four times a day for the stomach,” he says. For aches and pains, a ginger ointment was prepared and spread topically.
The idea wasn’t new. For centuries, sailors in Asian waters may have kept ginger on board, Torck says. Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century Moroccan traveler and scholar, observed this about Chinese junks: “The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they cultivate green stuffs, vegetables and ginger in wooden tanks.” Considering the salty air and the preciousness of both space and fresh water, the value of the ginger must have been extremely high. He also recounted that before setting sail on one of his voyages in the region, ginger was among the provisions he was given, which included “two elephant loads of rice, two buffalo cows, ten sheep, four pounds of julep (a syrupy paste with rose water) and four martabans, which are big (glazed, ceramic) vessels filled with ginger, pepper, citrus fruit (lemons) and mangoes, all salted with what is used in preparing for sea voyages.” Here ginger served something of a double purpose, Torck says, serving as both a condiment and a modest source of the vitamin C that prevented scurvy.
For chefs, ginger has offered countless flavoring possibilities—as Bouguettaya learned during what became three years in China. On its Shanghai campus, she enrolled at the noted French cooking school Institut Paul Bocuse, where she ultimately focused on pastry. While the training shaped her career, she credits her experiences in China and her travels around Southeast Asia as deeply formative in developing her taste.
When she returned to Detroit in 2015, she resumed selling pastries at the farmers’s market. But Asia had opened her palate, and she wanted to move beyond traditional Algerian items. She drew on her experiences in China as well as those in the US, France and North Africa to make what she now calls “pastries without borders.” One of her first signature dishes was a rhubarb tart—with ginger.
“The acidity of rhubarb, the tartness of it, with the zingyness of fresh ginger,” she says, “now seemed an obvious and perfect pairing.” Another is her take on the classic French strawberry Fraisier cake, which uses ginger-infused syrup.
Her creations drew such a dedicated following that she opened Warda Pâtisserie in an artist-run space in the heart of Detroit’s historic Eastern Market district. (Fittingly, the building was a former spice-processing warehouse.) Her sweet and savory delicacies, with ginger among her many and often original ingredients, have earned her city-wide accolades. The online food site The Eater named Warda Pâtisserie Detroit’s 2019 bakery of the year. In 2020 the Detroit Free Press, the city’s largest newspaper, hailed her “Chef of the Year.” In June Warda Pâtisserie moved to its own building in Midtown Detroit, where even the pandemic hasn’t thwarted success. One bite of her rhubarb tart or Fraisier cake makes it clear why.
]]>While working on her book The Flavour of Spice, Times of India food columnist Marryam Reshii asked contacts around the world to send her locally sourced samples of cumin. While some 70 percent of this spice is harvested in India, mostly in the western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, cumin grows in a range of countries that span the globe, from Asia to the Mediterranean to Latin America.
The packages of cumin that arrived to her in Delhi all exuded cumin’s warm, earthy flavors and deep, haylike aromas. “But the shapes, sizes and colors varied substantially,” she says. “The Chinese sample was larger than average and had a yellowish tinge. The Iranian one was very dark and slim. … The [one from] Uzbekistan was squat and fat.” When she put the seeds under her microscope, she saw their similarities. “Every last sample had the exact same number of ridges running down its length and three microscopic bristles at one end, where they are joined to the plant,” she says.
Historically, she adds, “almost every spice started off in one corner of the globe, traveled naturally or forcibly to another.” Cumin, however, has taken such deep root in local cuisines that in some places it has become associated more with its adopted home than its home of origin.
Exactly where that origin is, however, has proven hard to pin down. While many other spices have precisely known origins, archeologists have been able to trace cumin only broadly. Most evidence points toward the lands around the Eastern Mediterranean, the Nile Valley or the western region of Asia.
In written records, cumin first appears in the Akkadian language, in cuneiform script, on a trio of Old Babylonian clay tablets, circa 1700 BCE. “The first recorded cooking recipes in human history were written on cuneiform tablets,” explains Iraqi American food writer, historian and translator Nawal Nasrallah. “Cumin was one of the many spices.”
Take for example its recipe for “raised turnips: You throw fat in it … onion, dorsal thorn … coriander, cumin.” It also appears in recipes for broths of fresh and salted venison, entrails and mutton. The cuneiform script renders the spice’s name as kamûnu—not that far from today’s kamun in Arabic and the Latin scientific name Cuminum cyminum, though Nasrullah admits she hasn’t been able to “associate the name with a meaning, just its function.” What is clear is that cumin’s popularity over the millennia is not just about cooking.
The earliest medieval cookbook, Kitab al-Tabikh (Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens), written in 10th-century Baghdad by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq and translated by Nasrallah in 2010, deemed cumin “beneficial in combatting flatulence, facilitating digestion and inducing burping,” she says.
It’s for this reason cumin remained important in the region’s cooking. The early Egyptians had recognized the therapeutic properties of cumin. They used the seeds for a range of ailments, including upset stomach (milk boiled with cumin and goose fat), cough (milk with cumin and honey), and for tongue problems, a prescribed concoction calls for “frankincense 1; cumin 1; yellow ochre 1; goose fat 1; honey 1; water 1; to be chewed and spat out.”
In pharaonic Egypt, Nasrallah explains, cumin seeds coated bread dough before baking. “They would be ‘shaken around the greased mold before the dough was added,’” she says, quoting British Egyptologist Hilary Wilson’s study on the food of early pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian Food and Drink. Archeologists even found a basket full of cumin seeds in the tomb at Thebes of 14th-
century-BCE royal architect Kha. Cumin also appeared amid offerings presented by Ramses III (1217–1155 BCE) to the temple of Ra at Heliopolis. And still today, Nasrallah says, cumin is an essential ingredient in the popular Egyptian spice blend dukkah, which mixes toasted nuts, sesame seeds, coriander and cumin.
From the Mediterranean basin, cumin spread widely. Arabs sailed boatloads of it to the Indian subcontinent, and from there it became popular throughout South Asia. Phoenicians took it across North Africa and to Iberia. From there the Spanish took it to the Americas.
Today in cuisines across North Africa, cumin is a defining flavor. In Morocco, ground cumin often appears on the table, in a small dish alongside the saltshaker—a practice with roots in the Roman Empire. In Libya, cumin is most associated with fish, says Ahmed Gatnash, cofounder of Oea, which sells Libyan spices and blends in Wales, UK. “While other key spices such as turmeric and ginger are used as part of a blend, cumin can stand alone,” says Gatnash. “It is a main flavor.”
In Mexico, Spanish colonists and traders brought cumin, and it took root in both the soil and the spice box. “Across Mexico the use of cumin is quite common for moles, pipianes, adobos and other sauces [with nuts and seeds], such as almendrados, encacahuatados and nogadas,” says popular Mexican chef, TV host and restaurateur Margarita Carrillo. “But always in small quantities that don’t dominate the final flavor of the dish.”
It is more prominent in foods from northern Mexico due to both population and climate, she adds. That is where, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 100,000 Lebanese settled, and others from throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Iraq and Egypt followed. Among the most famous culinary influences of this migration are tacos al pastor, whose filling is based on spit-grilled meat, much like Middle Eastern shawarma, seasoned with local and Middle Eastern spices, including cumin. The drier climate of Mexico’s north, with its hot summers, also favors cumin that, because of its volatile antimicrobial and antioxidant properties, came to be used “to help keep vegetables over the winter months, when you can hardly grow any,” she explains.
Nowhere though is cumin embraced as fully as it is in India. In addition to growing most of the world’s cumin, Indians also consume almost two-thirds of the world total. Cumin is known as jeera in Hindi, which comes from the Sanskrit root jri, meaning “digestion.” Often added first to a hot pan, cumin gets a starring—rather than secondary—role in flavoring. For this reason, Reshii includes cumin among “The Big Four” of Indian spices, alongside chili, turmeric and coriander. “In Indian cooking, it is inconceivable to proceed without these four spices,” she says. In much of Indian cuisine, she adds, cumin is “about as important as air is to breathing.”
In her book research, Reshii found that cumin grows best in soil that is nutrient-poor. “Desert soil makes the plant work hard to extract every particle of flavor from the earth,” she says. “Once the seed has formed, the weather needs to be dry for the last month. If it rains, the plant bends to the wet ground and the precious crop becomes dark and flavorless.”
And the best cumin? Among her global samples, Reshii says, the most intensely flavored come from western Rajasthan’s Thar Desert. “My Rajasthani stash had the strongest scent and flavor. Almost as it had entrapped the Thar desert in its tiny body.”
]]>At the end of the 19th century, the East African archipelago of Zanzibar was the capital of cloves. Ninety percent of the world’s cloves grew there. People used cloves for numbing a toothache, seasoning a biryani or pulao rice dish or even for stringing into an ornamental, aromatic necklace. According to sailor lore, when the wind was right, it carried the scent of cloves far out into the waters of the Indian Ocean.
“The strongest tasting of all the pungent spices,” says Ian Hemphill, author of The Spice & Herb Bible. Cloves are “warm, aromatic, camphor-like and faintly peppery,” he continues. And for their flavor? “Words like medicinal, warming, sweet, lingering and numbing come to mind,” lending “palate-cleansing freshness and sweet, spicy flavor.”
Cloves are the dried and unopened flower buds of a species of evergreen tree, genus Syzygium and—no surprise here—family aromaticum. In Swahili-speaking Zanzibar, they are called karafuu, which comes from both the Arabic qaranful and the older Greek karuóphullon, meaning “nut leaf.” Latin, however, looked straight at its shape and dubbed it clavus—nail—from which we have “clove” today in English.
Zanzibar farmers harvest karafuu in September, October and November by gently picking the buds, which grow in clusters of 10 to 15 on trees that can reach as high as 15 meters, requiring nimble climbing. Harvesters then spread the buds on mats to dry in the sun. As they dry, they release their redolence to the sea-bound breezes. They also lose about two-thirds of their weight, and a kilogram may contain up to 10,000 buds. “When dried, the top part where the bud is has small spikes, a bit like the clasps on an engagement ring. When fully dry, you can feel the sharpness of these spikes when held firmly in your hand,” says Hemphill, whose childhood was spent amid the herbs and spices of his parents, who were pioneers in the business.
But Zanzibar is not where cloves originated. It is perhaps just a curious coincidence the sixth-century-CE Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays, quoted at the top of this article, wrote of cloves’ “sweet smell” coming on an “east wind,” for indeed it was then that cloves grew exclusively on islands 10,000 kilometers due east of the Arabian Peninsula.
Some 500 years after the poet, Egyptian author Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah came closer’ to the mark thanks to merchants who hinted at but ultimately hid their source. “Somewhere near India is the island containing the Valley of Cloves,” he wrote in Kitab al-‘Adja’ib al-kabir (The Great Book of Marvels).
No merchants or sailors have ever been to the valley or have ever seen the kind of tree that produces cloves: its fruit, they say, is sold by genies. The sailors arrive at the island, place their items of merchandise on the shore, and return to their ship. Next morning, they find, beside each item, a quantity of cloves.
The actual source lay amid the same volcanic islands in the modern Indonesian province of North Maluku that is also the origin of nutmeg, the third spice in this series. Also known as the Moluccas or the Spice Islands, North Maluku is an archipelago made up of some 1,000 islands.
The first-known written reference to cloves, however, comes from China. During the Han dynasty, from 206 BCE to 220 CE, clove’s minty astringency freshened the breath of courtiers speaking to the emperor. It was around the second century CE that records note Arab traders were making cloves available to the Mediterranean region through the Egyptian port of Alexandria as well as others. Along with trade came uses aromatic, medicinal and culinary.
“Clove was already well known in Arabia in the seventh century,” explains translator and scholar Charles Perry. Referencing the line in the famous ode by al-Qays, he points out that “this quote fails to prove that clove was being used in cookery rather than perfumery, but I have little doubt that it was.” In the 10th century CE, the Iraqi Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq listed cloves in Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Cookery), the earliest-known Arabic cookbook.
“By the 13th century CE clove was very common in cookery throughout the Arab world,” says Perry, who recently translated the popular Kitab al-Wuslah ila l-Habib, a 13th-century-CE Syrian cookbook, into English as Scents and Flavors. A trio of recipes from the anonymous cookbook rely on cloves for “sweetening breath” as well as for incense, handwashing powders and perfumed soaps. Perry also points to An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century, which he also translated, that calls for cloves in dishes poultry, lamb and sweets.
With the founding of the Sultanate of Malacca in 1403 CE, the port of Melaka, in present-day southwestern Malaysia, began attracting more merchants carrying spices, including those who would row in bearing dried clove buds by the tonne, from the Malukus 3,000 kilometers east. The spice trade attracted Arabs, Javanese and Chinese, among others around the Indian Ocean and beyond. The market prospered on these terms until European ships sailed in, looking to exploit the valuable commidity.
The Portuguese in 1522 became the first Europeans to set up forts on those Malukus that grew cloves, and the story of the colonial takeover of the clove trade bears much in common with the stories of cinnamon, pepper and nutmeg. The struggle over cloves, however, took place mainly on the island of Ambon in the Banda Sea. The Ambonese, after being forced to cede land to the Portuguese and contend with their aggressions for nearly a century, in the early 17th century found themselves facing the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). Like the nutmeg growers on the Banda Islands, the Ambonese lost all control of their trade when the VOC decreed that cloves could only be grown on Ambon and enforced a policy of extirpatie (extirpation): All trees not controlled by the VOC were destroyed. “Burning of young trees was the VOC way of regulating supply and keeping prices high,” says the Indonesian spice trader Karen Faroland.
On Ambon this violated more than economics. By custom Ambonese parents planted trees when children were born and believed their lives were thus linked to the lives of the trees. This, Faroland says, was part of what inspired the unsuccessful 1817 revolt led by Ambonese soldier Thomas Matulessy, also known as Kapitan Pattimura (or simply Pattimura), who is today a national hero.
It was the French who broke the Dutch monopoly in 1770 when an administrator on Isle de France (now Mauritius) and Ile Bourbon (now Réunion) smuggled out some seedlings. They thrived, and their descendants were transplanted to the Seychelles, Réunion and Madagascar.
How cloves came to Zanzibar is popularly attributed to a Zanzibari Arab named Harmali bin Saleh, who in 1812 introduced them from Réunion and set up clove plantations. He did not, however, get to enjoy the fruits of his labors for long: His plantations were confiscated by the sultan, Said bin Sultan of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, whose realm included Zanzibar. Bin Saleh’s loss proved Zanzibar’s gain in the 1830s when Bin Sultan moved the sultanate’s capital from Muscat, Oman, to Zanzibar. The clove industry flourished even more when the sultan promoted its expansion to supplant the slave trade, Hemphill points out. “To stop Zanzibar’s dependence on the slave trade, Sultan Said decreed that three clove trees would have to be planted for every coconut palm on Zanzibar and Pemba, making Zanzibar one of the world’s largest producers by the mid-19th century,” says Hemphill.
Zanzibar dominated the world market until 1964 when revolution led to its merger with what is now Tanzania. Clove production plummeted as the new government nationalized and redistributed plantations. Although yields crept up, they never came close to their former outputs. By the 1980s the islands were focusing on tourism. Today’s clove production of some 5,550 tonnes a year still, however, makes cloves Zanzibar’s top cash crop.
Spotting opportunity, Madagascar and Indonesia both expanded clove production from the 1960s, and today, Indonesia is the world’s leading producer at around 112,000 tonnes, or 80 percent of the global output. Yet 90 percent of it sells on the local market to the Indonesian tobacco industry to produce kretek cigarettes, which blend tobacco with ground cloves.
Via a Zoom call from her office in Bali where she sources and exports high-quality organic Indonesian spices, Faroland points out that the clove producers in North Sulawesi have earned their place as not only the largest but also the ones that grow the best-quality cloves. These are, she says, larger and better-looking, and they contain higher percentages of clove’s active ingredient, eugenol, an essential oil that can be used to flavor food or as herbal medicine or aromatic.
In the Indonesian kitchen, cloves are key to the popular pineapple-filled cookies punctured with a whole clove called kue nastar, explains Faroland. “We serve nastar during Lebaran,” she says, using the popular Indonesian name for ‘Id al-Fitr, the celebration following Ramadan. Cloves are also found in savory cooking, “mostly used in dishes made of goat, mutton, seafood and offal,” Faroland continues. Pounded with other spices, they go into the aromatic, curry-like gulai and soto betawi, a famous Jakarta soup made with beef, tripe, coconut milk, galangal, lime leaves, lemongrass and spices that often include cloves.
Just like the ancient sailors who could once smell cloves from out at sea, she says, “you can smell soto betawi from the parking lot.” And that is a modern ode to the rich power of cloves anywhere.
]]>Ringed by reefs rough enough to shatter a ship, the volcanic atoll is the smallest and most isolated of the 11 Banda Islands, which cluster loosely amid the more numerous islands of the Indonesian province of Maluku (Moluccas). Collectively the Maluku Islands became known in the West as the Spice Islands, a maritime trading zone blessed with—and exploited for—its endemic, uniquely aromatic plants. In the Bandas, this mainly meant mace and nutmeg. And in Palau Rhun in particular, this led to a curious kinship with a very distant American island whose fortunes turned out very differently.
People in the Bandas today descend from traders, laborers and slaves who came to the islands both willingly and not, mostly from Mainland and Maritime Southeast Asia. Bandanese today refer to their islands as tanah banda (land of Banda) and tanah berket (blessed land). Legend has it that Banda islanders were the first in the Indonesian archipelago to become Muslims. In a report written in 1512, Portuguese pharmacologist Tomé Pires noted, “It is thirty years since they began to be Moors.”
Islam had come with sailors who had come looking to buy what Rizal (“Abba”) Bahalwan, owner of the hotel and restaurant Cilu Bintang Estate on Banda Neira, the largest of the Banda Islands, describes as the fragrant seeds of the yellow-orange fruit of the tall, willowy nutmeg trees, with their laurel-like leaves and bell-shaped flowers.
Bandanese, he says, refer to nutmeg as pala, a word derived from the Malayalam pāl and generally applied to many plants with a milky sap. Harvests of nutmeg come twice a year. Harvest workers use a gai pala (nutmeg picker), a wicker basket on the end of a long bamboo pole, to pull down the fruit that is, botanically speaking, a drupe. They then slice away the outer protective shell to reveal a glossy, dark-brown nugget wrapped in a bumapala, a saffron-red aril, or net-like caul: mace. It gets peeled away, dried, ground and sold as a separate spice.
The seed is the nutmeg.
“Nutmeg takes about a week and a half to dry, and the inner nut rattles,” says Bahalwan, a descendant of Arab spice traders who settled in Banda in the 17th century.
That was some 600 years after Arab traders first began taking pala to markets in China and Europe. They dominated the nutmeg trade during the Middle Ages, and though they guarded the location of their source, even by 1000 CE the polymath Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), who came from Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, identified nutmeg as jansi ban—“Banda nut.”
It was leaders called orang kaya who consolidated the nutmeg market and established commercial solidarity in the Bandas, which allowed the Bandanese to trade freely, Fadli says.
“The unique flavor of the Banda nutmeg comes from volcanic soil, sea breezes and plenty of rain,” says Bahalwan, who began working as a tourist guide at 15 years old in 1989. After attending the University of Pattimura on nearby Ambon Island, he returned to the Bandas, and in 2005 he opened his first guesthouse.
As nutmeg’s botanical name Myristica fragrans indicates, the spice is deeply, even profoundly aromatic. Arabic speakers refer to it as al-jouz al-tib (the fragrant nut). Nawal Nasrallah, food historian and author of the 2011 Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine, describes nutmeg as having “a warm scent, pleasantly rich and woodsy in a very subtle way, and homey. It is inviting and does not overwhelm the senses.” Mace, she says, is “more playful, lighter, more feminine in nature, kind of addictive.”
As they did with many other spices, nutmeg’s earliest consumers often sought it out less for cooking than for medicine. Arab physicians initially promoted nutmeg as a curative-preventive aid against digestive issues and liver problems, freckles and skin blotches. In his highly regarded Al-Qanun fi al-Tib (The Canon of Medicine, 1025 CE), Ibn Sina recommended “three-eighths of a dram of nutmeg with a small quantity of quince-juice” for “weakness of the stomach,” and he included nutmeg in a potent anesthetic concoction.
Nutmeg found its way into kitchens, Nasrallah maintains, during Baghdad’s “Golden Era” of the five-century Abbasid caliphate, from 750 CE to 1258 CE. As metropolitan Baghdad became the world’s marketplace, so too did Arab cuisine flourish. “They had the means to experiment with all kinds of imported spices, including nutmeg,” she says.
Yet cooks continued to keep an eye on nutmeg’s health benefits. “From the extant medieval cookbooks we have, we can see that it was used more often in foods and preparations that were more medicinally oriented,” says Nasrallah by email. For example, in Kitab al-Tabikh, written in the 10th century CE in Baghdad by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq and translated in 2010 by Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, “its usage with savory dishes is very limited, once in a sandwich preparation and a chicken dish. The rest are all foods and drinks made for their medicinal benefits, such as digestives, drinks, jams, etc., and hand-cleansing preparations.”
The Bandanese, long established as boatbuilders and mariners, controlled their mercantile interests through their orang kaya, who also sent crews to set up shop in spice markets as far as Melaka, some 2,000 kilometers away. From the early 15th century, the sultanate in Melaka developed the most extensive trade network the region had known. It was through active exporting by the Bandanese at the port in Melaka that nutmeg became a global commodity. According to maritime historian Chin-keong Ng, “islanders from Banda would row their boats laden with spices to cover the long distance.”
Despite global demand, nutmeg trees on the island remained largely inaccessible to all but those whom the Bandanese allowed to drop anchor. Others they drove off, including the first Portuguese, who showed up in 1511, the same year the Portuguese took control of Melaka. For several decades the Portuguese had to settle on sporadic visits to the Bandas and purchases from Bandanese coming to Melaka.
Nearly a century later, in 1599, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company) muscled its way into the region. The Bandanese initially received the Dutch as potential allies against Portuguese encroachments, but they soon discovered that the Dutch were a far more powerful adversary. The Bandanese endured a Dutch campaign of deportations, executions and enslavement that came to a head in 1621 when the Dutch slew more than an estimated 90 percent of the population.
“It is hard to pin down the real number, because there are almost no records,” says Fadli, “but from approximately 15,000, only 1,000 or so survived.” This year, after a four-year collaboration with the Indonesian journalist Fatris MF, Fadli published a documentary project called The Banda Journal on the 400th anniversary of the massacre.
The Dutch took control of all the Bandas except isolated Pulau Rhun, which the English had taken. The VOC resettled the Bandas with settlers, slaves, convicts and indentured laborers from other parts of Indonesia and even India, thus seeding a new society in what became an agricultural colony of nutmeg plantations. Dutch attempts to transplant it outside the islands met with failure.
It was under these circumstances that Pulau Rhun became a powerful pawn in the Dutch-English rivalry over colonial resources, which erupted into war four times. The second of these conflicts settled in 1667 by the Treaty of Breda, named for a city in the Netherlands. Under Breda’s terms, England ceded Pulau Rhun, which gave the VOC a monopoly in the Bandas. In exchange, the Netherlands ceded a slightly larger, wooded island in North America that went by the Lenape name of Manhattan. The English gave a new name to Manhattan’s Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam: New York.
Back then, says Fadli, “no one would have imagined New Amsterdam would become this economic powerhouse. And if you see Rhun Island,” it is “really a backwater.” For Palau Rhun’s 2,000 people, electricity only runs a few hours in the evening, fresh water can be scarce, and many services basic to life on the other Bandas remain out of reach.
In 1667, however, the Dutch appeared to have come out with the better deal, and within a few years they were selling nutmeg at a 60,000-percent markup. Speaking by video call from his home in Jakarta, Fadli emphasizes that for the Bandanese, “it was misery.”
The Dutch monopoly was broken in 1772 by a Frenchman who smuggled nutmeg seedlings to Mauritius and produced the first successful transplant. English incursions to the Bandas during the Napoleonic Wars also allowed them the chance to grab seedlings and transplant them to colonial centers in Penang, now part of Malaysia, and Sumatra, Indonesia, as well as in Sri Lanka, off the coast of India.
Today Indonesia is the largest nutmeg producer in the world, but it is grown largely on the islands of Java, North Sumatra and Sulawesi. Of the 44,000 or so metric tons that Indonesia produces annually, according to Bahalwan only 372 metric tons—less than 1 percent—is grown in the Bandas. And although Palau Rhun’s contribution to that is only 50 metric tons, he says, the terms of trade are better than at any time in 500 years.
After gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1949, the Indonesian government nationalized nutmeg plantations in the Bandas. In 1982 residents of Pulau Rhun took over the state-owned enterprise and divided the groves among the island’s families. Each now sells to a collective, which in turn sells to a range of global wholesalers.
“Everything is back in locals’ hands,” says Fadli.
Rhun may not have an internet connection, and its electricity may be spotty, but the nutmeg growers can once again trade as they themselves choose.
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Among the many ports in Malabar he visited in the 14th century, thee “flourishing and much-frequented” Kozhikode, known then as Qaliqut (and later Calicut), today in the state of Kerala. stood out. In its harbor, he wrote, “gather merchants from all quarters,” such as China, Java and Sri Lanka to the east and the Maldives, Yemen and Persia to the west.
Many of them traded in spices—especially cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon from further east and cardamom, ginger and cassia from Malabar itself. But one spice was king, anchor of the city’s success: Piper nigrum—black pepper.
Black pepper was then the most widely used spice in the world, and it still is, says spice writer and Times of India food critic Marryam H. Reshii. “You’d be hard pressed to find a single family around the globe whose kitchen or dining room dresser does not have black pepper,” she says. So commonplace is pepper that it frequently regarded as unassuming and humble. That’s deceiving. “Modest appearance notwithstanding,” she says, the spice that “has led world history for much of the last millennium is a giant.”
Piper nigrum is native to India’s Western Ghats mountain range. In the shady, steamy heat of its forests, and on Malabar’s coastal plain and neighboring hills, pepper thrives. Ibn Battuta described the pepper trees as looking a lot like grape vines. “They are planted alongside coco-palms and climb up them in the same way that vines climb,” bearing dozens of peppercorns on each single, slender spike.
As soon as one or two of the berries turn red, the whole spike is harvested, generally in autumn. Workers separate the berries between their hands or even their feet, and they spread them out in low piles on coconut mats or large patios. There they dry in the sun, and workers rake them from time to time until, as Ibn Battuta wrote, “they are thoroughly dried and become black.”
The process is essentially similar today, says Australian spice trader Ian Hemphill. “When fresh, green peppercorns are dried in the sun, a naturally occurring enzyme in the skin turns the berries black and creates a highly aromatic oil that gives black pepper its distinctive aroma and flavor,” he says. “The taste is warm, and the flavor full-bodied, round.” And hot, in a clean, sharp way, thanks to piperine, the active ingredient in the white heart of the peppercorn.
“Black pepper drying in the sun is one of the distinctive sights of Kerala’s countryside,” Reshii described in The Flavours of Spice. She recalled how as a child in Kochi, south of Kozhikode along the coast, she could see men “raking tons of pepper set out to dry on coconut-leaf mats.”
She adds that at any table in Kerala, there is no avoiding pepper: “It is the one state where the sting of black pepper will catch you at the breakfast table in your idli steamed rice cake, in the incendiary chutney served with your fragrant lamb biryani at lunch and during the tea-time snack of banana chips sprinkled with black pepper,” she says. And if you manage to avoid it during dinner, it’s a deep mystery. “Its fragrance and tingling heat will grab your attention even if there are just one or two peppercorns sprinkled over your food.”
Pepper is endowed with more talents than simple taste. “The oils in black pepper create an appetite stimulant,” says Hemphill, who is also author of the authoritative Spice & Herb Bible (Robert Rose, 2014). Pepper’s aromas make us salivate in anticipation, and as its pungency warms the tongue, it also chemically activates our gastric juices.
Long before Ibn Battuta, pepper was one of the earliest and most-important commodities sold to southern Asia and the lands around the Mediterranean. While the Romans were not first to use pepper in cooking, they were first to do so with regularity, according to Jack Turner, author of Spice: The History of a Temptation (Knopf, 2004). Among the 468 Roman recipes compiled in the first-century-CE collection Apicius, 349 call for pepper.
During the Middle Ages, pepper continued to travel west across the Arabian Sea and north through the Levant, often ending up in Constantinople. Some also went to Jiddah and overland to Makkah, Madinah and beyond, and more continued onward still to Cairo, Alexandria and the greater Mediterranean.
When the physician ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi visited Egypt in the 13th century, he observed how Egyptians used black pepper, cinnamon and coriander in sweet chicken dishes. The 14th-century Egyptian cookbook Kanz al-fawa'id fi tanwi al-mawa'id, (Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table) backs up his observation, asserting that filfil (pepper) “is added to all the main dishes and it is indeed the spice to use.”
But there were yet larger markets than these for pepper both domestically, within India itself, and around Asia, especially in China. In 1320, just 22 years before Ibn Battuta’s visit to Malabar, Marco Polo wrote: “I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton,” which is now called Quanzhou.
Even Ibn Battuta, arriving in Qaliqut, made passing note of 13 Chinese vessels at anchor. While Polo may have exaggerated, says Michael Krondl, author of The Taste of Conquest (Ballantine Books, 2007), in 1500 China consumed three-fourths of the global pepper supply. Thus, it is an irony of history, Krondl maintains, that the relatively smaller volumes of spices that went west ultimately had an outsize impact on world affairs. “That minority trade in Europe motivated a trade system that did in fact lead to globalization and colonization,” he says.
This began when Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa at the end of the 15th century. His exploratory visit was followed by a Portuguese fleet of 13 ships outfitted with cannons and crewed by more than 1,000 sailors who arrived in Qaliqut demanding exclusive access to the region’s resources—pepper chief among them. When they were rebuffed, says Manu Pillai, a Kerala-born historian and author, “the Portuguese took their business to Cochin [Kochi] instead—helping that port grow as the Arabs had helped Calicut—and began centuries of war” that broke both Indian and Arab control of trade for more than four centuries.
While pepper remains king of the world’s spice racks, India is today far from its largest grower. Pepper had spread long before Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Vasco da Gama saw it, and in their times Malabar produced about two-thirds of the world’s total. Siam (Thailand), Sumatra and Java (both now in Indonesia) grew substantial, competing amounts.
Today, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia produce more than 60 percent of the world’s pepper. And as pepper plants have proliferated, so too the aromas and various pungencies of the peppercorns have shifted depending on soil and climate conditions. For example, says Hemphill, “Vietnamese has a somewhat lemon-like profile, and to me, Indonesian is a little earthy and not as fragrant as Malabar.”
Experts generally agree that the south of India still produces the world’s most flavorful pepper. “I am often of the belief that the best spice is the one that comes from its country of origin,” Hemphill says. “As pepper is native to the south of India, and was traded from the Malabar Coast, I find Malabar Garbled number 1 [the highest grade of pepper] the most original.”
According to Reshii, this is perhaps to be expected: The hills of Malabar are drenched by the monsoon at exactly the moment the flower develops into the spice, she says, lending the region’s peppercorns their unique potency. Such conditions and traits cannot be duplicated, not even elsewhere in Kerala, she maintains. “I ask for Malabar Garbled Extra Bold,” she adds. “All I need to do is inhale the fragrance, and I can tell if it is what I am looking for.”
]]>Vijaya called the kingdom he founded Thambapanni, “Copper-hands.” According to Sri Lankan historian Dilhani Dissanayake of La Trobe University in Australia, panni can refer also to leaves—specifically young leaves of the Cinnamomum verum (“true cinnamon”) tree native to that part of Sri Lanka.
An unassuming evergreen that, when cultivated, is a bush as much as it is a tree, says Marryam H. Reshii, author of The Flavour of Spice (Hachette India, 2017), cinnamon’s value lies not in its leaves, but in its inner layer of bark. The English word “cinnamon” comes from the Phoenician and Hebrew qinnamon, via the Greek qinnamomon, which may have come from a Malay word related to the Indonesian kayu manis, “sweet wood.” It’s the Greek that lends itself to the current botanical genus, Cinnamomum, of which verum is one of some 300 species. Cinnamon’s first scientific name, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, refers to Sri Lanka’s former name Ceylon.
Together with its close but coarser relative cassia (Cinnamomum cassia and several other species), which originated in southern China, cinnamon was carried to Egypt as early as 2000 BCE by merchants who, while trading throughout the Middle East and Arabia, kept their Sri Lankan source a secret. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that Greek historian Herodotus wrote around 430 BCE in The Histories that cinnamon grew in the land where Dionysus, the Greek god of harvest, was brought up—that is, somewhere to the east—and that it was gathered in Arabia. Arab traders, he wrote,
say that great birds carry these dry sticks, which we have learned from the Phoenicians to call cinnamon, and that the birds carry the sticks to their nests, which are plastered with mud and are placed on sheer crags where no man can climb up.
The merchants, he continued, set large chunks of raw meat near the nests of this cinnamologus, or cinnamon bird. “The birds swoop down and carry off the limbs of the beasts to their nests, and the nests, being unable to bear the weight, break and fall down, and the Arabians approach and collect what they want.”
A “fabulous story,” scoffed Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder nearly 500 years later, told by traders to keep prices high and sources shrouded. And while Pliny was right—the world did value cinnamon for both rarity and mystery—scarcely anyone in the Mediterranean or Europe could answer where it came for nearly another 1,000 years.
While today cinnamon is on nearly every spice rack, and it is used mostly to flavor food and drinks, its history shows it has had a range of other, mostly health-related roles, as Jack Turner noted in his 2005 Spice: The History of a Temptation. In addition to Egyptians who used it as a perfume in embalming, the Bible’s Old Testament mentions it as an ingredient in anointing oil. From India to Rome people burned it in cremation. The voluminous 10th-century Kitab al-Hawi fi al-Tibb (Comprehensive book on medicine) by polymath al-Razi recommends cinnamon to help “prevent sweat from armpit and feet, so there will be no stink.”
Medieval Islamic physicians used cinnamon to treat wounds, tumors and ulcers. They influenced European physicians such as Italian Matthaeus Platearius, whose 12th-century The Book of Simple Medicines recommended cinnamon to help form scars on wounds and relieve ailments of the stomach, liver, heart and more. Dissanayake points out that in Sri Lanka the fourth-century CE medical books of King Buddhadasa introduced the cinnamon tree as a medicinal tree or herb and that, still today, Ayurvedic medicine prescribes cinnamon to aid digestion and oral hygiene.
It was not until the 10th century that glimmers of the connections between Sri Lanka and cinnamon began to appear. In Aja’ib al-Hind (Marvels of India), traveler al-Ramhormuzi wrote, “Among remarkable islands, in all the sea there is none like the Island of Serendib, also called Sehilan [Ceylon]. … Its trees yield excellent cinnamon bark, the famous Singalese cinnamon.”
By the 13th century, naturalist and geographer Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini had written in Athar al-bilad (Monuments of the lands) that “the wonders of China and the rarities of India are brought to Silan. Many aromatics not to be found elsewhere are met with here, such as cinnamon, brazilwood, sandalwood, nard, and cloves.”
Ibn Battuta, the most well-known global traveler of his time, came to the island in 1344 CE and wrote—or perhaps exaggerated—that “the entire coast of the country is covered with cinnamon sticks washed down by torrents and deposited on the coast looking like hills.”
Hieronimo di Santo Stefano of Genoa, traveling in the late 15th-century, noted that “after a navigation of twenty-six days we arrived at a large island called Ceylon which grow the Cinnamon trees.”
Still, the origins of cinnamon did not become widely known until after 1505, the year a storm blew a Portuguese fleet to the shore of Sri Lanka. The Portuguese departed with nearly six metric tons of the spice that whetted their appetite for more. Over the next hundred years, variously through force and local alliances, they gradually took control of the centuries-long Arab and Muslim trade monopoly. A century later Ceylon’s king allied with the Dutch to evict the Portuguese, only to have the British wrest control near the end of the 18th century. However, by 1800, Cinnamomum verum transplants were thriving commercially in India, Java (now in Indonesia) and the Seychelle islands off East Africa. No longer as scarce, cinnamon’s value declined, on its way to becoming a worldwide grocery-store spice staple.
Now twice a year, after Sri Lanka’s big and then small monsoon seasons, when high humidity makes production easier, wrist-sized cinnamon trees are cut, and skilled cinnamon peelers trim the branches and scrape off the outer bark. With blade-sharp knives they loosen and then remove the delicate inner bark, often only about a half-millimeter thick. They pack the paper-thin curls inside one another to form dense, cigar-like quills that are dried, graded and cut into lengths.
Traditionally, a peeler passed down the skill to an apprentice. According to Dissanayake, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the subject, it took five to seven years to master the art. “The peeling process is really intensive,” Dissanayake says. It “relies on local knowledge, expert skills, dexterity and patience.”
Both in quills (cinnamon sticks) or ground to powder, true cinnamon has a highly fragrant aroma with a warm, woodsy flavor that is simultaneously delicate and intense, and its aftertaste is sweet. While in European and American cultures cinnamon features frequently in cakes, cookies, candies and hot drinks, in Sri Lanka, where cinnamon is pervasive in the national cuisine, cooks often add a quill to fish curries, for instance, and elsewhere cinnamon frequently compliments savory flavors such as Moroccan lamb tagines (slow-cooked stews), Turkish pilafs and Middle Eastern meat dishes, as well as curry powders, masala spice mixes and the essential Chinese five-spice mix.
Often what is on the shelf today is not Cinnamomum verum, true cinnamon, but its cousin cassia, which now grows both in southern China and in other parts of South Asia, like Laos and Vietnam.
Easier and cheaper to produce, cassia’s inner bark is darker, coarser and thicker—often too hard and thick to pulverize or grind by hand using a mortar and pestle. Cassia can be more pungent because it contains tannins, those protective polyphenols that make our mouths rough and dry. “The cinnamon of Sri Lanka is stronger, more sweet and pleasing to the palate, and not woody at all,” says Reshii. That sweetness, she adds, is why true cinnamon is so popular in desserts, breads and puddings, while cassia is popular among cooks for main dishes, from curries to kibbeh, especially across Asia.
Cinnamon has long been a key part of Sri Lanka’s cultural identity, and today it is one of the world’s most popular spices, a key to every cook’s pantry.
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