The marketplaces of medieval Europe were redolent of the spices that purportedly 1st arrived with returning Crusaders. A taste for the flavors of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger, pepper & the like created an increasing demand for spices that could not be grown in Europe’s climate but had to be imported from the East along secret trade routes, over land & sea. Distance was only one of several factors that affected the supply of spices, which were expensive & enjoyed only by those who could afford them...the new taste for exotic flavors helped encourage world exploration & turn spices into global commodities.
The uses of spices were both culinary & medical, and medieval cookbooks & herbals reveal that spices were part of preferred regimens. Spices were taken together in varying combinations, sometimes seasonal. In the cold & wet winter months, it was advisable to eat spices in strongly flavored food & drink to warm the body. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat notes in her History of Food that the physician Arnau de Villanova (c. 1240-1311) recommended balancing the 7 humors of the body by consuming spices “proper for winter” as zesty sauces of ginger, clove, cinnamon, & pepper... These spices would aid digestion after a heavy winter meal by heightening the effects of “hot” & “humid” properties in roasted meats. To this day, the warming spices advocated by Arnau de Villanova tend to be associated with fall & winter.
Cameline sauce, perhaps the original steak sauce, was the perfect accompaniment to roast meats. Prepared in summer & winter months alike, the sauce was so popular in some locations, such as 14C Paris, that the blend was usually readily available from the local sauce maker. There were regional varieties of Cameline sauce, too, & the “Tournais style” involved grinding together ginger, cinnamon, saffron & half a nutmeg. The spice powder was soaked in wine & stirred together with bread crumbs. The strained mixture was then boiled, with sugar added to make the winter variety of the sauce...
Ginger came to be highly prized during the Middle Ages, though the use of ginger can be traced back thousands of years in India & China. The potent ginger plant & rhizomes were valued for their stomach-warming & digestive properties as much as for the flavors they imparted. The first-century Greek physician Dioscorides advocated consuming a spicy Arabian plant called ζιγγίβερις (zingiberis), which was probably ginger, to “soften the intestines gently.” In Arabia, Dioscorides noted, they used only the freshest ginger plants...
Clove was known as one of the “lesser spices.” Though not as strong as ginger but useful for its antiseptic & anti-inflammatory properties, clove was especially useful in dental care.
Named in English & other languages—“clou de girofle” in French—for the resemblance of the bud to nails, clove originated in the Moluccan Islands of Indonesia, the historical core of the Spice Islands. As with ginger, clove had its earliest uses in India & China in the 4 BCE, finding its way to Roman & Greek markets by way of port cities on the Mediterranean. By the 8C, clove was known throughout Europe & features in several historic dishes. It was also a typical spice in pomanders, the medieval precursor to potpourri, in which fragrant ingredients were placed in a perforated box to ward off illness. The decorative use of clove-studded oranges, a seasonal pomander, is still associated with the winter months.
Hippocras, or hypocras, was a medieval spiced wine & popular cordial enjoyed especially during the winter holidays for several centuries. Hippocras was a concoction of powdered cinnamon, cassia buds, ginger, grains of paradise & nutmeg boiled with sugar & wine. Cinnamon, the essential flavor of hippocras, was a favorite spice of the medieval palate. Its mysterious origins generated many fanciful tales & even several expeditions. Perhaps most famously, the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus thought he had located the spice in America—the Indies to him— & in 1493 he reportedly brought back bits of bark from a perfumed wild cinnamon tree that was not very tasty.
Long before Columbus, the ancient Egyptians had prized cinnamon as the “… goodly fragrant woods of The Divine Land…” In the 1C, the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder rightly located the origin of cinnamon on the shores of the Indian Ocean. With information from some seasoned merchant, perhaps, Pliny knew that the cinnamon trade was dangerous & that a return trip to the source of the spice took almost 5 years. Pliny’s claims about the origin of cinnamon were eventually verified in the 1340s, when the Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta (1304–c. 1368) arrived at the island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) & discovered untouched miles of the cinnamon tree. Before its widespread appreciation as a culinary ingredient, cinnamon was prized in several ancient cultures as incense holding ritualistic importance, sometimes burned for its fragrance on a funeral pyre.
The final “proper” winter spice is pepper. With a name widely applied to many spices, including the black & white varieties, pepper was perhaps the most familiar spice of the Middle Ages. Both black pepper & white pepper are obtained from the small berries of the Piper nigrum vine.
Unripe berries are green, & ripe berries are red. Dried ripe berries yield white pepper, & despite the fantastic medieval legend propagated by Isidore of Seville (560–636) that the scorching of pepper crops blackened the berries & drove out the poisonous guard snakes, unripe pepper berries are simply plucked, gathered, cooked, & then dried to give us the most familiar variety, black pepper. The principal traders of pepper came from India, where the vines thrived in tropical regions. Pepper was used in medicine to aid digestion & to treat ailments like gout & arthritis, as well as infectious diseases like the bubonic plague.
The term “peppercorn rent” derives from the practice established in early common law in England that payment of rent or tax might be made by a peppercorn, to avoid the bother of exchanging real currency. Usually no peppercorns were actually collected during these transactions, but the spice represented a hard asset, and the term is still in use today in legal parlance to describe a token amount of rent money paid in order to keep a title alive. In all seasons, spices & their increasingly globalized trade during the Middle Ages affected medieval economies, & brought social, culinary, & health benefits to Europe...
