Flowers that Have Changed the World of Food # 3: Cloves

Posted on October 24, 2012 by lauramk

“And somewhere near India is the island containing the Valley of the Cloves. No merchants or sailors have ever been to the valley or have seen the kind of tree that produces cloves: its fruit, they say, is sold by genies . . . the islanders feed on them, and they never fall ill or grow old.”

Summary of Marvels (Ibrahim ibn Wasif-Shah, ca. 1000 CE)

From Indonesia’s Moluccas (Maluku) Islands to the rest of the world come the tiny but powerful flowerbuds we know as cloves. More accurately, cloves are flowerbuds from the Syzygium aromaticum tree that are picked before opening and dried in the sun until they resemble the little reddish-brown batons used in most of the world’s cuisines. Mentioned in the Indian Ramayana by the 5^th or 4^th century BCE (but possibly as early as the 10^th Century BCE) and in later Sanskrit medical texts (Charaka Samhita) from the 1st Century BCE wherein they were recommended along with nutmeg to freshen the breath, these little blasts of bittersweet peppery flavor that we know today for their ability to energize other spices was first used for its aroma and as a medicinal ingredient.* **

Cloves Dried and in Flower

Maluku natives and other Indonesians smoked cloves and used them to treat stomach ailments, but did not use cloves in cooking. These medicinal and aromatic uses were exported as the clove trade began in antiquity. The Han Chinese used it as a breath freshener to mask the scent of tooth decay and halitosis and used cloves in perfumes and incense. Additional medicinal uses in China and India included chewing cloves as a dental anesthetic or using an external rub of clove oil as a general analgesic or to lessen the pain of rheumatism.

Aromatic and Medicial Uses of Cloves

It is unclear when cloves started to be used as a culinary spice. It is used in modern five-spice powders and garam-masalas, but there is little but unreferenced and contradictory information about the antiquity of its use in these culinary mixtures. In the west, by the time of Pliny the Elder, the clove was still used as an aromatic perfume (NH 12.15), and there is also no mention of the culinary use of cloves in the 4^th century ACE Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome. In the 6^th and 7^th century Byzantine writings of Kosmas Indicopleustes and Paulus Aegineta, cloves are still used for their scent and clove oil used topically as medicine.

There are intermediate uses of cloves as both medicine and culinary spice in 9^th Century Europe at the Carolingian monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, where monks used cloves to season their fasting fish (Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, 1877; viii, 121) along with pepper and cinnamon and several other indigenous plants and herbs. In the 10^th Century, Andalusian traveller Ibrâhîm ibn Ya`qûb notes that the burghers of Mainz (Germany) used cloves to season their food.

Ingredients for Baharat

Also in the 10th Century, it appears in The Book of Dishes by Ibn Nasr ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, listed as an aromatic along with musk, ambergris, and rosewater. In this 10th Century tome, it is used along with purslane in a peach drink and in a relish of crumbs, raisins, vinegar and spices.

By the 13th Century, the acceptance of cloves as a culinary spice is widespread. In the 13th Century Andalusian Cookbook translated by Charles Perry, cloves are used in Ahrash, a type of lamb-burger, Mirkâs a cheese-based sausage; Sweetened Mukhallal a meat stew topped with beaten eggs; Madhûna, a baked chicken dish, a stuffed lamb breast; and an egg-based sausage, as well as several other dishes.

Also in the 13th Century, in the Book of Dishes by al-Baghdadi, cloves are used in the recipe Hummadiyya to flavor meatballs and the broth they cook in along with cinnamon, coriander, ginger, and pepper.

Kyrgyz Bal

Although I cannot yet prove my suspicions, my intuition tells me that that Arabs might have been the first to use cloves as a culinary spice and that this was spread to Europe with the conquest of Andalusia and Catalonia in 711 and throughout the known Islamic World during the Abbasid Caliphate, beginning in 750.

Called kutakaphalah in Sanskrit, qaranful in Arabic or karyphyllon in ancient Greek (as well as cengkeh in North Moluccan Malay), it is now hard to imagine the culinary world without cloves. What would any of the eastern Asian five-spice powders be without cloves, or the subcontinental garam-masalas, not to mention Arab baharat, Moroccan Ras-el-hanout, Tunisian gâlat dagga and Ethiopian berbere? Thailand’s Massuman Curry is also clove laden as are the many spice rubs used on kebabs in central and western Asia, and cloves are a major constituent in my favorite Central Asian spice tea bal.

Bal
Bal is a ubiquitous Kyrghyz hot drink served to welcome guests, with meals, and almost any time in between. It is a hot peppery tea made of boiled spices sweetened with honey that is delicious – especially on colder days. Although not enjoyed cold in Kyrghyzstan, it also makes an exotic iced tea drink as well.

4 cups water
2 teaspoon ginger, peeled grated and minced
1 stick cinnamon, lightly crushed
10 whole cloves, lightly crushed
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons honey

Boil water until it has reached a rolling boil. Add spices and return to a boil. Lower heat and cover. Simmer for 10 minutes then remove from flame and let steep another 10-15 minutes. Strain into teapot or serving vessel. Stir in honey until completely dissolved.

In today’s world, we primarily use cloves in the kitchen, but still have medicinal and aromatic uses for them. In Indonesia, they are still used to flavor kretet or clove cigarettes. Interestingly, modern science is also investigating cloves for their antimicrobial properties (Yukawa et al., 1996; Kurokawa, et al., 1995) and finding that cloves have both good antiviral and antifungal activity in vitro. In antiquity, empires were built on them and men were enslaved and died for them. Remember that and more the next time you throw a bag or a bottle of cloves into your basket at the market. (Words and Research by Laura Kelley; Special thanks to Charles Perry for pointing out the use of cloves in the 10th and 13th Century recipes. Photo of Dried Cloves from Wikiemedia; Photo of Clove Flowers by Timothy Motley; Photo of Kyrgyz Bal by Baby Kato).

Flowers that Have Changed the World of Food #1: Orchids
Flowers that Have Changed the World of Food #2: Saffron

* (Some claim that archaeological evidence of the use of cloves has been found at ancient Mesopotamian sites. This evidence (a jar purported to contain cloves) comes from excavations at the ancient city of Terqa, Syria (modern Ashara) on the middle Euphrates that dates to 1760-1600 BCE. However, the scholarly community is divided about whether the contents of the jar is actually cloves. With multiple trading “middlemen”, it is not out of the question that ancient Mesopotamians could have used cloves. Their presence in a scribal area could be for purposes of initial or early description. Until definitive evidence is produced, however, such as mass-spec or other type of constituent analyses, I am hanging back on saying these are cloves.)

** (Older scholarly documents (IH Burkill etc) and the internet are awash in references to a 3rd Century Chinese text that mentions cloves, but my perusal of Shen Nong Bao Cai Jing and several other turn of the millenia medical texts finds no mention of cloves at this time).

The Real Sinbad the Sailor

Posted on May 22, 2011 by lauramk

A post about the real Sibad the Sailor – A Persian named Soleiman Siraf

The Voyages of Sinbad tell of giant, magical creatures: whales the size of islands, snakes so large that they could swallow elephants, and rukh (roc) birds so large that they could carry a caravan of men on their backs. Tales of these creatures repeated across cultures and through the ages have made most readers assume that they were simply pigments of a colorful imagination – works of fiction. But what if these creatures were real? What if the fictionalized accounts were based on the observations of early travelers that were tainted by mysticism and embellished over time by the repetition of stories in an oral tradition? Remember, maps in the medieval world portrayed demons and the edge of the world was thought to be a very real place.

Soleiman Siraf – Production Still from Film

In part at least, the Voyages of Sinbad are based on the voyages of Soleiman Siraf – the first western Asian man to navigate the seas from his home in Siraf, Persia, to Western India, around the Malabar coast and across the Bay of Bengal to Burma, Thailand and eventually to Southern China through the Straits of Mallaca. He sailed around 775 and his voyages were recorded almost 70 years later by Abu Zaid al Hassan in his Siraf & Soleiman the Merchant in 851 ACE.

Siraf sought to open a route to China for western trade so that Persia was not simply the recipient of goods from the east and subject to the inflationary markup of the many merchants the goods had to pass through. Great Chinese ships carrying goods to Indonesia, India and beyond to Arabia and the Persian Gulf were already seen at the larger, deeper ports capable of hosting large ships. These ships carried, silks, pearls and other precious stones, porcelain, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon indicating that Chinese merchants made many stops along their way to the western seas. But until Siraf, no western trader had ever navigated his way back to China to trade directly with the Chinese and the other countries along the way. In sailing and travelling all the way to China and back, Siraf was opening the doors to two-way trade on the Maritime Silk Road.

Sinbad by Paul Klee

Sailing almost 500 years before Marco Polo and his family departed Italy for China, Siraf’s voyages have gained little attention in the west outside of academic circles – until now. An Iranian film by director Mohammad Bozorgnia that just opened at the Kish film festival celebrates the life and travels of Siraf and his companions. The film is told through the eyes of a fictionalized young man who participates in the voyage and records its details in a Watson to Holmes sort of relationship. Since the film is racking up awards in Iran, I hope that it will released internationally, at least on DVD – I would love to see it.

Building on the extensive knowledge of Arab and Persian geographers of the time – who had already described Southern Europe and Asia, Northwest and eastern Africa to Madagascar, and the Malabar coast – Siraf first navigated across the northern Arabian Sea to around the Gulf of Cambay (Khambhat) and then down to Kollam. Given the importance of trade to the merchants of the Tang Dynasty, the presence of Chinese traders in Kollam was fairly common, but sizeable permanent settlements of Chinese on India’s western coast didn’t begin until the Yuan Dynasty several hundred years later – and indication of how trade grew with the opening of a two-way maritime route.

Sinbad from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Dreamworks

As to the stories themselves, the origins of the Voyages of Sinbad are more or less contemporaneous with the publication of the account of Soleiman Siraf’s travels in the middle of the 9th Century ACE. Early Arabic manuscripts of One Thousand and One Nights do not include the Sinbad stories as part of Scheherazade’s tales. Rather, the Sinbad stories, which are legitimate regional folktales were added in the 18th Century by French traveller and translator Antoine Galland. Still, the stories have captured the imagination of people for centuries.

Whether as early accounts of a fantastic and dangerous world that can provide riches for those who dare depart familiar shores, or in the painting of Sinbad as a romantic a swashbuckling adventurer, or as stories for children to fuel their imaginations, the tales continue to be told. From Galland to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Dreamworks, Voyages of Sinbad have endured for more than 1000 years. And, in part, at least, they were inspired by a very real Persian man – Soleiman Siraf – who changed the face of maritime trade on the early Silk Road. (Words by Laura Kelley. Photos of The Maritime Silk Road Production Still, Sinbad by Paul Klee and Sinbad from Douglas Fairbanks to Dreamworks from Google images.)

Silk Road Soujourners

Posted on March 22, 2011 by lauramk

The University of Pennsylvania Museum displays artifacts Silk Road Soujourners – ancient Caucasian travelers on the Silk Road.

The Beauty of Ziaohe

In a desolate, eastern world of salt and sand, where blinding windstorms were common and potable water was rare, the mummified remains of people from the west have been found. Why they died, where they came from and where they were traveling to is unclear, but for a short time, they were put on display in the United States – another Silk Road exhibit that I just couldn’t miss.

A couple of weekends ago, we bundled the kids into the car and drove to Philadelphia to see the exhibit, Secrets of the Silk Road, a collection of artifacts from Silk Road travelers that spans more than 2,500 years of the region’s history. One of the oldest objects on display was a female mummy with Caucasian features and long auburn hair dated to almost 2,000 years BCE. Dubbed the, ‘Beauty of Xiaohe’ she slumbered silently in her glass case dressed in plain, pale wool and cotton clothing and a felt hat with a few personal artifacts from her gravesite.

Infant mummy from 1000 BCE

Despite false claims that Silk Road trade began with Alexander or with the Romans, episodic trade between east and west – between China and Afghanistan or the Indus Valley – began around this time. Some of the first items to be traded were the semi-precious lapis lazuli from the west for all shades of Chinese jade. The Beauty of Xiaohe and her fellow travelers could well have been on an early trade mission to exchange precious goods such as these, make a buck, and open the doors of cultural exchange that became the Silk Road.

Conjecture, yes, but these travelers could also been engaged in trade for early Chinese silk which was perfected around this time in the Yangtze’s late Longshan culture. Or, they could have been in search of domesticated horses and pigs which the Qinghai’s Qijia culture excelled in. They also could have been part of the Aryan migrations which began in earnest around this time as well.

Whatever goods, economic or living opportunities brought Caucasians into far eastern Central Asia and Western China, they kept on coming – despite the hardships of the Tarim – which took many lives. Also on display, was the mummy of an infant from about 1000 BCE. The baby was buried, swaddled in red woolen shawl with an azure blue bonnet covering its head. Stones covered the dead child’s eyes and next to it lay a tiny drinking horn and sheep udder – presumably so it could feed in the afterlife – another casualty of the Silk Road.

Yingpan Man’s Clothing

A later set of clothing from the 4th or 5th Century CE spoke volumes for the wealth to be had on the early Silk Road. The mummy of Yingpan Man was deemed too fragile to tour, but the Chinese Government generously sent his clothes. He must have been truly magnificent: A tall man from Samarkand – over six-feet – in a gorgeous, red belted caftan with a small army of little golden Greco-Roman putti and bulls or goats woven in gold brocade. His trousers were deep purple with gold brocade in scroll and cloud-like designs. The caftan is believed to have been woven in the Eastern Roman Empire and traded East. The trousers – or at least the fabric they were made from – may have been Levantine as well because of the distinct purple color – a shellfish derived color the Phoenicians were renowned for.

Food from Tarim Basin Sites

So presumably, given his attire, in life, this man was wealthy, perhaps a merchant. If so, his clothing was an advertisement for the services his trade network offered: China, Rome, the Levant, Samarkand and many places in between. The goods and ideas of the known world at your fingertips – for a price.

Of course I wondered what these early Silk Road travelers and traders ate, and this time, I was not disappointed. Grave goods are a fantastic source of information about what people ate, and form the backbone of what we know about the diets of several ancient cultures, including the Ancient Egyptians. But with so little known about the Tarim travelers, the elaborate food items found with them are a revelation! There are cookies and biscuits modeled after plum blossom and crysanthemums, there are wontons and spring rolls and several other types of snacks to be had on the long journey to either Xian or the afterlife.

For me the exhibt wasn’t about naturally-preserved corpses (I’ve seen a lot of corpses in my day – too many really), but it was about the birth and blossoming of the Silk Road. Goods and gold, of course, but more importantly, the Silk Road was about the flow of ideas and cultures that became and engine of change in the ancient world. Every step that the Beauty of Xiaohe or Yingpan Man took has influenced the world we live in today and will continue to echo long after we are gone. I wonder if our own lives will have such impact on the future? (Words by Laura Kelley, Photos from the Secrets of the Silk Road exhibit from Museum sites.)

Ibn Battuta in IMAX

Posted on March 7, 2010 by lauramk

“. . . If I am to die, then what better place to do so than on the road to Mecca,” declares a very young and confident Ibn Battuta to his family and friends who saw him off on his first great journey. Time and the realities of travel in the fourteenth century soon tempered his youthful bluster as Battuta made his way across the Sahara from his native Tangier towards Cairo and Mecca.

Ibn Battuta Sets Out

I’ve written about Battuta’s journeys before on this blog, but his story warrants attention again because of a wonderful new film: Ibn Battuta – Journey to Mecca. Last weekend we took the kids down to the Smithsonian’s Johnson IMAX theatre to see the film and were happy we did. The film chronicles Battuta’s first journey, the Hajj pilgrimage, and the trip across North Africa to the great cities of Cairo, Damascus, and Medina that led to Mecca.

The journey begins with Battuta saying farewell to his family and friends and receiving their simple gifts of a good horse and ihram a white, seamless length of cloth to wear during the pilgrimage. He is soon humbled by the hardships of the desert and an encounter with thieves. But his wanderings also lead him to find charity, friendship and protection from a Bedouin who escorts him to safety in Cairo, where he is received warmly by family friends. Determined to set out alone, he leaves his Bedu friend in Cairo and heads towards the Red Sea where he hopes to find short passage to Jeddah and then make his way overland to Mecca. As his friend warned he finds war along the seacoast has disrupted travel and is rescued from his despair by his Bedu friend who leads him to Damascus where he meets up with a fellow band of pilgrims.

Bedu

The IMAX format is well suited for the sweeping beauty of North Africa’s landscapes and to their credit, the writers keep the story suitably intimate for such a personal story. My favorite part of the film comes about three-quarters through when the fimmakers start to intersperse footage from the present day of real Hajj pilgrimages with those shot depicting the 14th Century. For me, this was a powerful to visually communicate the continuity and power of the Hajj tradition and its ceremonies and a reminder of the numerous connections we all have with the past.

The film is about a great man and a great explorer, but it is also about faith, piety, determination, tolerance and charity. Battuta reaches Mecca a different, more tempered man than he was when he left his home. He fulfills his religious duty with passion and goes on to travel the world all the way to China as he did in a dream on the back of a great bird. His fortunes rise and fall as he travels and only decades later he returns to Morocco before setting out to Spain and other nearby ports.

Ibn Battuta and Pilgrims to Mecca

The Muslim World is in great part synonymous with the Silk Road, and Muslim traders were important in moving, goods, ideas and ideals around the old world for millenia. In many ways the world of the Silk Road was more multicultural than our own – with Muslims from abroad serving as ministers in Chinese courts and Persian Muslim rulers showing cultural and religious forbearance to non-Muslim states in their empires.

If Ibn Battuta: Journey to Mecca is showing in your area, I urge you to see it, it is a strange combination of sweeping and intimate and teaches history, respect and understanding in each frame. (Words by Laura Kelley; All photos from the film borrowed from the “Journey to Mecca” website)

The Silk Road Roots of the Age of Exploration

Posted on February 24, 2010 by lauramk

I’ve written a lot about the participation of Asian nations in Silk Road trade, but what I haven’t considered enough is the effect of the Silk Road on Europe. The Silk Road and its spice trade played important parts in shaping early modern Europe, and it was no less than the price of pepper, cinnamon and cloves in the mid-fifteenth century that forced the Portuguese and the Spanish to the seas to find a route to Asia – kicking off the European Age of Exploration. A route to Asia that didn’t involve the Mediterranean or the Black Sea, that is.

Beginning with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Muslim traders controlled both of the major sea ports that brought Silk Road goods into Europe – Cairo and Constantinople and were soon to wrench Kaffa away from the Genoese twenty-two years later. With the control of all three ports, the traders and their financiers started charging higher and higher overhead fees for the passage of goods, which drove up the cost of goods to European consumers. There may have been a bit more than profiteering going on as well, because the higher import fees were being levied on the Christians who had unsuccessfully defended the remains of Byzantium against the Ottomans – a sort of Silk Road tribute to the victors if you will.

So in the mid-to-late fifteenth century the Portuguese and the Spanish begin funding massively expensive ocean expeditions to try to avoid the Muslim taxes on spices and Silk Road goods. In 1492 Columbus winds up in the West Indies and in 1498 the Portuguese – sailing in the correct direction – landed in Kerala, India. Within a decade, Vasco de Gama, Almeida, Albuquerque and other Portuguese pioneers had negotiated treaties with local rulers and set up trading posts to buy and sell black pepper, cinnamon and other spices at four sites in Southern India. With ports at Malindi, Mombasa and Mozambique in Africa they ran a vast spice empire that moved Asian spices from India, Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific directly around Africa to Lisbon for further distribution into Europe.

Three Types of Peppercorns

The seafaring Dutch were at first the principal partners of the Portuguese in transporting spices and other trade goods from Lisbon to the rest of Europe. Although Charles V was born in Ghent, as Holy Roman Emperor, he increased pressure on the growing Protestant population in the Netherlands – in part a Spanish possession. This caused unrest in the region and helped lead to the Dutch Revolt. Eventually, the Dutch were excluded from their part in this trade, and took to the seas on their own – forming the Dutch East India Company. Within a few decades, this company came to dominate the seafaring spice route, and until its demise in the late 1700s moved two and a half million tons of Asian trade goods into Europe and sent almost one million Europeans to work in Asia.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Europeans loved their spices and paid dearly for them. A pound of cinnamon cost 24 pence and a pound of ginger half that; black pepper was about 18 pence per pound. With the average wage of a master carpenter being about 8 pence per day, one would have had to work 3 days for a pound of cinnamon and a little more than 2 for pepper. With 96 teaspoons in a pound, these purchases would probably last for 2-3 months in an average sized family, but still one can see how expensive spices were at this time. Anyone who could afford them, even if it was a stretch for their household income, considered spices a necessity. This was not only because food tastes better with added flavoring, but also to show to others in the community that they were well-off enough to afford spices (conspicuous consumption) and to harness the medicinal benefits offered by spices that I’ve written about in other posts.

The culinary creations enjoyed by the people of late Medieval and early modern Europe with Silk Road spices were well worth it. I am lucky to be married to a man who loves to dabble in historical cookery and am treated to these dishes on a regular basis. Recently he cooked a lamb stew from 17th Century Europe that had culinary relatives in Persia, Uzbekistan and even Mongolia. More accurately stated perhaps, the Persian dish gave rise to the European, Uzbek and Mongolian dishes. He started with a wonderful stock from Hugh Platt’s Delightes for Ladies from 1602 that combined currants, dates and almonds with onions, white wine, mace, black pepper, parsley, mint, bay and rosemary on a chicken and lamb base. The Levantine fruits, parsley, mint and mace make this a sweet treat to build a stew on. The completed stew goes on to add more onions, chestnuts, nutmeg and cloves for a rich, deep, filling stew.

So changes in traditional Silk Road maritime routes in the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the fifteenth century sent the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and eventually the rest of Europe to sea. The Dutch Revolt was the first in a series of struggles for succession that shaped early modern Europe, and the dissolution of the remnants of Byzantium sent the Greeks into Europe and opened intellectual doors that had long been shut – paving the way for many of the innovation and rediscoveries of the Renaissance. A victory for the Ottomans was the first in a long line of changes in the global spice trade that eventually led to the end of the Silk Road. (Words by Laura Kelley)

Africa on the Silk Road

Posted on June 21, 2009 by lauramk

Spices in an African Market

The Dark Continent, the Birthplace of Humanity . . . Africa. All of the lands south and west of the Kingdom of Egypt have for far too long been lumped into one cultural unit by westerners, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Africa is not one mysterious, impenetrable land as the legacy of the nineteenth Century European explorers suggests, it is rather an immensely varied patchwork of peoples that can be change not only by region and country but by nature’s way of separating people – b y rivers and lakes and by mountain ranges and deserts. A river or other natural barrier may separate two groups of people who interact, but who rarely intermarry, because they perceive the people on the other side to be “different” from them.

Africa played an important part in Silk Road trade from antiquity through modern times when much of the Silk Road trade was supplanted by European corporate conglomerates like the Dutch and British East India Companies who created trade monopolies to move goods around the Old World instead. But in the heyday of the Silk Road, merchants travelled to Africa to trade for rare timbers, gold, ivory, exotic animals and spices. From ports along the Mediterranean and Red Seas to those as far south as Mogadishu and Kenya in the Indian Ocean, goods from all across the continent were gathered for the purposes of trade.

One of Africa’s contributions to world cuisine that is still widely used today is sesame seeds. Imagine East Asian food cooked in something other than its rich sesame oil, how about the quintessential American-loved Chinese dish, General Tso’s Chicken? How ‘bout the rich, thick tahini paste enjoyed from the Levant and Middle East through South and Central Asia and the Himalayas as a flavoring for foods (hummus, halva) and stir-fries, and all of the breads topped with sesame or poppy seeds? Then think about the use of black sesame seeds from South Asian through East Asian foods and desserts. None of these cuisines would have used sesame in these ways, if it hadn’t been for the trade of sesame seeds from Africa in antiquity.

Given the propensity of sesame plants to easily reseed themselves, the early African and Arab traders probably acquired seeds from native peoples who gathered wild seeds. The seeds reached Egypt, the Middle East and China by 4,000 – 5,000 years ago as evidenced from archaeological investigations, tomb paintings and scrolls. Given the eager adoption of the seeds by other cultures and the small supply, the cost per pound was probably quite high and merchants likely made fortunes off the trade.

Tamarind Pods

The earliest cultivation of sesame comes from India in the Harappan period of the Indus Valley by about 3500 years ago and from then on, India began to supplant Africa as a source of the seeds in global trade. By the time of the Romans, who used the seeds along with cumin to flavor bread, the Indian and Persian Empires were the main sources of the seeds.

Another ingredient still used widely today that originates in Africa is tamarind. Growing as seed pods on huge lace-leaf trees, the seeds are soaked and turned into tamarind pulp or water and used to flavor curries and chutneys in Southern and South Eastern Asia, as well as the more familiar Worcestershire and barbeque sauces in the West. Eastern Africans use Tamarind in their curries and sauces and also make a soup out of the fruits that is popular in Zimbabwe. Tamarind has been widely adopted in the New World as well as is usually blended with sugar for a sweet and sour treat wrapped in corn husk as a pulpy treat or also used as syrup to flavor sodas, sparkling waters and even ice cream.

Some spices of African origin that were traded along the Silk Road have become extinct. One such example can be found in wild silphion which was gathered in Northern Africa and traded along the Silk Road to create one of the foundations of the wealth of Carthage and Kyrene. Cooks valued the plant because of the resin they gathered from its roots and stalk that when dried became a powder that blended the flavors of onion and garlic. It was impossible for these ancient people to cultivate, however, and a combination of overharvesting, wars and habitat loss cause the plant to become extinct by the end of the first or second centuries of the Common Era. As supplies of the resin grew harder and harder to get, it was supplanted by asafetida from Central Asia.

Other spices traded along the Silk Road are used almost exclusively in African cuisines today – although their use was common until the middle of the first millennium in Europe and Asia. African pepper, Moor pepper or negro pepper is one such spice. Called kieng in the cuisines of Western Africa where it is still widely used, it has a sharp flavor that is bitter and flavorful at the same time – sort of like a combination of black pepper and nutmeg. It also adds a bit of heat to dishes for a pungent taste. Its use extends across central Africa and it is also found in Ethiopian cuisines. When smoked, as it often is in West Africa before use, this flavor deepens and becomes smoky and develops a black cardamom-like flavor. By the middle of the 16th Century, the use and trade of negro pepper in Europe, Western and Southern Asia had waned in favor of black pepper imports from India and chili peppers from the New World.

Traditional Chinese Ship

Grains of paradise, Melegueta pepper, or alligator pepper is another Silk Road Spice that has vanished from modern Asian and European food but is still used in Western and Northern Africa and is an important cash crop in some areas of Ethiopia. Native to Africa’s West Coast its use seems to have originated in or around modern Ghana and was shipped to Silk Road trade in Eastern Africa or to Mediterranean ports. Fashionable in the cuisines of early Renaissance Europe its use slowly waned until the 18th Century when it all but vanished from European markets and was supplanted by cardamom and other spices flowing out of Asia to the rest of the world.

The trade of spices from Africa to the rest of the world was generally accomplished by a complex network of merchants working the ports and cities of the Silk Road. Each man had a defined, relatively bounded territory that he traded in to allow for lots of traders to make a good living moving goods and ideas around the world along local or regional. But occasionally, great explorers accomplished the movement of goods across several continents and cultures.

Although not African, the Chinese Muslim explorer Zheng He deserves special mention as one of these great cultural diplomats and entrepreneurs. In the early 15^th Century he led seven major sea-faring expeditions from China across Indonesia and several Indian Ocean ports to Africa. Surely, Chinese ships made regular visits to Silk Road ports from about the 12^th Century on, but when Zheng came, he came leading huge armadas of ships that the world had never seen before and wouldn’t see again for several centuries. Zheng came in force, intending to display China’s greatness to the world and bring the best goods from the rest of the world back to China. Zheng came eventually to Africa where he left laden with spices for cooking and medicine, wood and ivory and hordes of animals. It may be hard for us who are now accustomed to the world coming on command to their desktops to imagine what a miracle it must have been for the citizens of Nanjing to see the parade of animals from Zheng’s cultural Ark. But try we must to imagine the wonder brought by the parade of giraffes, zebra and ostriches marching down Chinese streets so long ago – because then we can begin to imagine the importance of the Silk Road in shaping the world. (Words by Laura Kelley).

A Silent Passage: the Wandering Life

Posted on December 28, 2008 by lauramk

Christmas Tree

The overcast sky moved quickly over the frozen earth as the end of another year slipped silently away. Films were run, one-by-one; the kids played with their new games and toys; and we all read lots of books. The past few days have been a delight of relaxing by the multi-colored fire of the decorated tree as our ambitious plans for entertaining and visiting local museums evaporated into a happily ensconced domesticity. I smiled foolishly at my gift of an autographed photo of David Tennant – the best Dr. Who ever; gazed at some nature prints I received – one a beautiful, old Persian hunting scene; cooked a wonderful Moroccan meal featuring lemon and cumin meatballs over caraway-flavored couscous with baba-ganoush, home-baked bread and a tomato and cucumber salad with an olive and lemon dressing. I also reread the travelogues of the great medieval travelers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta yesterday, simply because I love them. Those are two of the books that I return to every five or ten years or so. And each time I revisit them, I learn something new.

This time, I was struck by the fact that Battuta managed to avoid the Black Death, not once, not twice, but at least three times during his travels. Furthermore, fear of the plague quite directly determined the route of his journey several times. The first time he encountered the plague, he was kicking around in Southeastern India in 1341 after a disastrous failed coup attempt in the Maldives and trying to find passage to China. The epidemic was sweeping though Tamil villages and killing people within a matter of one to five days. Although Battuta falls ill at this time, he describes malaria-like symptoms and not those caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

The second time he encountered the plague was on his journey home from China through Syria in 1348. From travelers from the south he hears of the disease raging in Gaza and Egypt. Going south to Damascus he walks head on into the advancing epidemic. He eloquently records the chaos that the massive numbers of deaths were bringing. People fleeing the pestilence in the cities often dropped dead on the road if they were infected. Mosques were closed because the clerics and caretakers had died. Cairo’s pre-plague population was about half a million. After the plague, the city was reduced to slightly more than 200,000. Likewise, Damascus was reduced from almost 100,000 to about 50,000.

Skulls and Bones

He avoided plague in Damascus and left sometime after July 1348 and moved southward though one depopulated village after another into Palestine and Jerusalem and eventually to Alexandria where the plague was finally subsiding. He moved though Cairo which was still in the grips of the epidemic, then up the Nile to Upper Egypt and across the Red Sea to Jeddah and on to Mecca where he performed the ceremony of the tawaf around the Holy Ka’ba in late 1348 and praised God that he has been spared.

The third time he avoids the plague, was after he had returned home first to Fez and then to Tangier and took a short trip into Muslim Spain. Plague was still raging in Gibraltar area. Although he fell ill during his sojourn to Spain, it was with another bout of the malaria that had been making him periodically ill for many years.

Battuta never mentions what – other than God’s grace – protected him from contracting plague, but it could be that he followed the advice of Muslim physicians. Now, to be sure, Muslim doctors were at this time in history, some of the best doctors in the western world. They had inherited the Galenic tradition of medicine from the Greeks and advised their charges to clean their homes with vinegar and rosewater and eat plenty of pickled onions, black pepper and dishes flavored with verjuice – a highly acidic liquid derived from the pressing of unripened grapes, and often mixed with lemons or citrons and sorrel or other herbs. Other potions to ward off the disease included one made of marigold petals and crushed eggshells.

Marigold

The following commentary may seem a bit odd to those who know me well because it comes from someone who firmly believes in modern methods to prevent and treat disease, but some of the recommendations of these ancient physicians are not without merit. Cleaning with vinegar would act as a mild disinfectant as cleaning with diluted bleach might today and would discourage (but not prevent) infestations of fleas the vector of bubonic plague, and keeping a highly acidic diet might also make the insects less likely to bite because of the smell and chemical composition of the sweat and skin of the acid-eaters. The anti-inflammatory nature of marigolds petals is well known and different forms of Calendula are currently under scientific investigation for their tumor-killing potential. All this good advice aside, how Battuta avoided repeated exposures to the pneumonic forms of the disease in both India and Cairo remain a matter of luck, a miracle or the structure of certain receptors – depending upon how faithful or rational one’s personal outlook.

Interestingly, verjuice is still used fairly commonly in many Levantine and Maghreb cuisines and in Persian cooking as well – where it is used to give a sour zing to meat and vegetable stews. It is also an ingredient in real Dijon mustard, probably entering France via Muslim Spain. Marigold is also commonly used in Western Asian cooking, and some say the flavor approximates fresh turmeric – the anti inflammatory drug (. . . I mean spice) from the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, the whole study of medicine began as a subset of the art of the kitchen with the earliest books on leechcraft and herbs being barely distinguishable from cookbooks. After I completed my graduate degree, I spent many a happy hour in the New York Academy of Medicine’s rare books collection – pouring over some of these works.

It’s odd, at the time I wasn’t nearly as interested in cuisine as I am today. I was already a good cook who experimented widely with international foods – but cooking wasn’t as important to me as it is today. I was researching at the Academy to try to come up with a topic of inquiry for my research fellowship at a nearby hospital. Funny how life’s experiences introduce you and prepare you for events and actions well in advance of their happening. With the vantage of age, I’ve come to think that life is less linear than a cyclical or even a stochastic jumping from point to point – without a guiding purpose. I used to envy people who had a life plan and achieved their goals on more or less of a set schedule. Now I feel sorry for them and wonder if they ever think about the adventures they are missing because of the artificial structure they are imposing on their passage through the world.

Ibn Battuta returned to his native Morocco after he had turned 45 years old and had spent more than half of his life traveling to the farthest reaches of the known world. At some times he was honored as a senior scholar and jurist and lived as a wealthy man and at others, he lost everything to pirates, bandits or bad political choices and had to rebuild his life on the road literally from scratch. For him, the journey was the thing as he crisscrossed the globe, chronicling life in the medieval Muslim world and beyond its borders in cosmopolitan China and the Pacific Islands.(Words and Photo of Christmas Tree by Laura Kelley; Photo Skull and Bones and Marigold borrowed from Google Images).