Reprise of Paul Freedman and spices of Medieval times.

It’s winter here at the bottom of the Earth in Melbourne, Australia and thoughts turn to cooking hearty dishes when the world outside is grey and rainy. I was reminded of this interview from 2008.

As you take that piece of cinnamon cake to enjoy with your morning coffee and suck that morsel of crystallised ginger, have a think about what you might have been doing if you'd been listening to The Book Show in early medieval Europe, assuming the radio and the internet had already been invented. Well you can forget about the cinnamon and ginger, for a start. Paul Freedman is Chester D Tripp Professor of History at Yale University. His previous books include Images of the Medieval Peasant and The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. And the new one is called Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. He joined me from a studio rather north of me in New York:

Welcome to The Book Show, Paul.

Paul Freedman: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Ramona Koval: Paul, if we were sitting down to a meal before the spice trade brought all these wonderful things to medieval Europe, what would the food be like? What would we be eating?

Paul Freedman: If we were rich enough we would have maybe some spices, basic spices like pepper. In the Roman Empire we would have a lot of the food flavoured with some rather unusual herbs, including one called silphium, that came from North Africa. The Romans loved this so much that in fact they ate all of it. It's extinct.

Ramona Koval: What did they say it tasted like?

Paul Freedman: Well, there's some debate about that, and it's hard to reconstruct. It had a kind of sourish taste. It looks like it was replaced by asafoetida, which is still sometimes used in Indian cuisine. Maybe it's a little like fenugreek, but it's was more like a herb...

Ramona Koval: Like a dill, or something...

Paul Freedman: Even a little more sour and a little more...I guess you might think 'off'. They loved fish paste, as well, as a flavouring, but really the advent of the things we associate as edible spices; ginger that you mentioned, nutmeg, really comes in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Ramona Koval: You put paid to this idea, very early on in the book, that the reason why spices were so sought-after was because there was a whole lot of rotting meat around that needed to be preserved, at least, or its horrible taste taken away. Explain why that's a silly thing to think.

Paul Freedman: Well, there are many better ways to preserve meat, and more inexpensive, than coating it with spices. If you salt meat, dry it, pickle it, smoke it—all of these are effective ways of dealing with a surplus of meat before the age of refrigeration. So, you know, if you kill a pig in the fall you can't eat it all at once, you want it to last until the summer, salting would be the most common and those other methods I mentioned. So to use spices, which were incredibly expensive, to preserve meat would be, as I mention in the book, a little bit like slicing white Italian truffles, you know, that go for like a thousand US dollars a pound, in order to jazz up a fast-food hamburger. It's just an inappropriate imbalance of expenses.

Ramona Koval: And besides that there was apparently a lot of fresh meat around, everywhere.

Paul Freedman: There was more than we think. We tend to assume that it was rare, and what meat there was would spoil very quickly. We have lots and lots of complaints about cattle in people's back yards. There are animals everywhere and if you had enough money to afford spices you had enough money to afford fresh meant pretty much whenever wanted. It was an agricultural society.

Ramona Koval: All right. So the question about what made them so valuable and what made them so sought-after is not to be found in that particular idea. Tell me—I was pretty surprised that sugar was considered a spice. And granulated sugar that we use every day for cooking wasn't available. When did that come into being?

Paul Freedman: Well sugar comes through the Muslim world and is one of these things that's not known in the Roman Empire but is very big in the middle ages. It's a spice rather than the staple that it became really after the—about 1700 in Europe—in the sense that it's used with other spices. It's used as a garnish. So for example the early pasta recipes call for parmesan cheese as you would have now, but also cinnamon and sugar to accompany pasta. So it's used with other spices.

Ramona Koval: What about desserts? No desserts? Or desserts only steeped in honey, rather than whipping up your egg whites and adding sugar to them to make wonderful concoctions...

Paul Freedman: Well you put your finger on a kind of interesting difference between the middle ages and now. We make a big difference between savoury and sweet, and we tend not to like to have sugar, say, with fish or with meat, except in some exceptional—like sweet-and-sour—circumstances. In the middle ages the dessert could be things like fried pork meatballs. It could also be crystallised sugar with spices in it. Or maybe both. So for one thing they have sugar in every course of the meal. In the soup, in the fish, in the meat. It's used along with cinnamon or cloves—which we would consider also more sweet and more appropriate for desserts. So their desserts would be disappointing. On the other hand they're very big on what would be the ancestor of candies, these things like sugar shaped in little chess pieces and with different spices enclosed in them, and eaten crunched up like peanut brittle or something like that.

Ramona Koval: So before they got the sugar, presumably they couldn't make a sponge cake.

Paul Freedman: No. No, the certainly had a diet—and honey is not nearly as sweet as sugar—they had a diet that by our standards we would be starved for sweetness. And it's not surprising then that once sugar comes in, it's wildly popular, and once it starts being cultivated in great, huge plantations, after the discovery of the New World, then European consumption goes up astronomically. The average person in Britain now consumes literally 100 times what a well-off person in the middle ages would have consumed annually.

Ramona Koval: Well talking of consumption, they were very, very fond of meat and they didn't like vegetables. And they liked their spices completely mixed up together. The more the merrier.

Paul Freedman: That's right. In the mixing up of spices then, it's not for example that you put cinnamon on French toast, or maybe have cloves with ham. It's more like the Middle East or Indonesia or other parts of East Asia where you have combinations of spices. Recipes call for various mixtures of eight spices or ten spices. Something like curry powder. And that's very characteristic of medieval cuisine.

Ramona Koval: You've got a 14th century recipe requiring lampreys to be eviscerated while still alive. Their blood's then drained into red wine for two hours to produce a sauce. And then you add pepper, ginger, cloves, something called 'grains of paradise', mace...and lots of sugar.

Paul Freedman: That's right. Doesn't sound very appetising, perhaps, by modern standards, but they loved big fish, or big, fish-like creatures. Lampreys are big eels, and they are an Atlantic and have a fresh-water cycle. And they have to be killed in a certain way in order for them to taste good. They also were considered to be dangerous in the middle ages. All eels were, but lampreys particularly were thought to be excessively moist and cold. And so they had to be countered by something with the opposite properties of hot and dry. So you're supposed to have lamprey with a lot of pepper and a lot of other spices as well, and sugar, as you point out, and it had to be drowned in red wines. There's a whole ritual associated with it. Fabulously expensive, very highly prized. Again, an example of something where I'm not sure modern tastes are in sync. But the one place in Europe where they still eat a lot of lamprey is Bordeaux. Lamprey à la Bordelaise is still a very prized dish and you still have to basically cook the lamprey in red wine.

Ramona Koval: So Paul, what about this extraordinary description of the musicians in the pie from a medieval feast. Tell me about that because it (of course) occurs to me that there's a little song about that: 'Four and Twenty Blackbirds'.

Paul Freedman: Well the thing about medieval dining, at least aristocratic and royal dining, is that it's really kind of vulgar. In the United States I guess the closest parallels would be certain kinds of big weddings, or Las Vegas. Spectacle's very important, and trying to do things that are almost impossible, like having a pie with musicians inside. These things include not only edible courses, where you for example have a castle with various animals on its battlements and the animals are breathing fire, and the animals may be made out of edible bean paste, or just be things like huge lobsters with camphor wicks attached to them so that they seem to be breathing fire as if they were dragons.

But then you also have things called entremés, which are things like a kind of little ballet intermezzo between courses where you have fountains in allegorical forms spouting different kinds of wines, or a tableau of the crusaders attacking Jerusalem, or boats sailing in a kind of artificial lake. Or the pies with the musicians.

Ramona Koval: Now I want to know, how do you cook a pie with musicians in it? Presumably they get in afterwards. there's a little trapdoor in the back, and they come in and...

Paul Freedman: Trapdoor in the bottom, I think, yes. And you probably have like a grid, kind of like those geodesic domes where you've got a kind of wooden latticework and you just put your dough on it and probably bake the dough in sections and then attach it.

Ramona Koval: And then you get your musicians...

Paul Freedman: Or you get your birds in and you close the trapdoor and you wheel the pie out as the birds struggle against the crust.

Ramona Koval: and when the pie's open the birds begin to sing... And wasn't that a dainty dish, etc, etc.

Paul Freedman: Yes. Or you have cooked blackbirds in the pie and then you've got one live one, so that you have.

Ramona Koval: A decoy...

Paul Freedman: Right. But it wasn't that long ago that there were sort of... Oh, you know, certain kind of businessmen's fetes would involve girls jumping out of pies or various kinds of dubious performances. This would be medieval as well. I think we erroneously think that this was an age of purely religious interests. It most certainly had a lot of different interests apart from religion.

Ramona Koval: Well I am getting very much stuck on these meals, but they are fun to talk about and I will get back to the spices in a minute. What about a medieval menu—you couldn't go past having peacocks—and dolphins, as well!

Paul Freedman: That's right. As I said earlier, Ramona, they were very big on large fish like sturgeons or things they thought were fish, like dolphins or porpoises or whale or these gigantic eels...

Ramona Koval: Whales...

Paul Freedman: Yes. A whale is found on menus particularly in north-western Europe.

Ramona Koval: And so the whole idea that medieval notables are standing around with their spit-roasted carcases, pulling them apart, tearing them limb-from-limb from the dead animal—that's not it. They liked making their dishes look like other things.

Paul Freedman: Yes. They are very sophisticated but they're kind of show-offs, so they love having a trompe l'oeil, something where it looks like a peacock, or it's partridge dressed in peacock, or it's fish used to make something look like it's wild boar. Or where you have a fish that's still whole but it's been cooked three different ways and coloured three different colours. So anything that is spectacular, brightly coloured...

Ramona Koval: What colours? We're talking about really big colours, aren't we?

Paul Freedman: Well, they love gold, and so in some banquet orders we have surprising quantities of gold leaf to be pounded very thin, and there's a kind of edible gold where you can cover a—for example wild boar's head where one half of the boar's head is covered with gold and the other half is covered with a parsley sauce. So you have a green and gold boar's head. This is one recipe.

Ramona Koval: I'm surprised they even used parsley, because it was sort of vegetable-like, wasn't it, and they didn't go for it.

Paul Freedman: Well it's a herb. It's okay. Better maybe, more prestigious, would be cameline sauce, which is so-called because it's camel coloured. It's basically cinnamon and five or six of those other spices like the grains of paradise that you mentioned before. This is a kind of peppery spice that actually comes from Africa, as it turns out. They thought it came from India or maybe from paradise itself, the Garden of Eden.

Ramona Koval: So they had this idea that raw fruit was bad for you.

Paul Freedman: They were very afraid of rotting. They had this obsession with food not being digested and therefore rotting in the stomach. And so raw fruit, again, like lamprey, is too cold and too moist. Dried fruit is great and fine and they get this from the Muslim Arab Persian world as well—via Spain particularly. But ordinary people, peasants, maybe middle-class people, enjoyed the fruit of the season, but the upper classes tended to mistrust—or their doctors told them to mistrust it. Sometimes of course, as happens now, people listened to their doctor's advice, fussed about their doctor's advice and then proceeded to do what they wanted—often in defiance of that advice.

So in the Renaissance particularly melon became incredibly popular, even though physicians warned that of all fruits it was the worst in terms of this rotting in your stomach fear. The doctors finally prevailed on people to accompany it with something salty, so that it would by countered by a hot and dry ingredient. Caviar and melon, or eventually prosciutto and melon. You get the combination of prosciutto and melon really from medical advice—salty ham will offset the evil effects of the fruit. We think of these as naturally going together, but if you actually consider it, there's not an obvious kinship between ham and melon.

Ramona Koval: I just thought to myself, didn't they think about people in the state of nature, going around picking fruit off trees and thinking, well, obviously it didn't kill them because that's all they had at the time. Why would it be so feared?

Paul Freedman: Well they don't have quite so evolutionary or anthropological a view. Part of it is that maybe in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve simply lived off various trees and various fruits.

Ramona Koval: And look what happened to Eve...

Paul Freedman: Exactly. Look what happened. And after that, in our fallen state, now, we have to go out and kill animals. We can't live that way. We can't live in a kind of paradise of light meals that we gather in the forest. We've got to go out and actually spill blood and kill animals, get fish through various devious and laborious means. And food is difficult. Some of it is taste, however, as you pointed out earlier. The upper class really has a high protein diet. The upper class likes meat and fish and sugar and spice, and is not enthusiastic about dairy products and rather despises vegetables.

In terms of balance and balanced diet, the lower classes, provided they actually had enough to eat, had a much more nutritious regime than the upper classes, who's caloric intake and protein intake would now strike us as just extraordinary.

Ramona Koval: Apparently you said a banquet to celebrate the enthronement of George Nevill as archbishop of York in 1465 allowed for ten kilos of well-spiced meat per person.

Paul Freedman: Yes, it went on for a few days, to be sure. But what's striking about these kinds of banquet menus of the highest aristocracy is that each course seems to be meat—or if it's a fast-day fish—but the variety of species is quite amazing. So they make up in variety of different kinds of animals, birds and fish particularly, things that we just either don't get because the environmentally degraded environment that we have prohibits the use of them—or we just don't like them any more. Particularly all sorts of little birds—bitterns, curlews, ortolans, larks—huge quantities of quails, partridges, various varieties of partridges, and then also very big birds that I think we don't consider to be completely edible now: heron, swan, things like that. They were very big on those.

Ramona Koval: You mentioned the doctors. Doctors and chefs had a big conversation going, didn't they, because doctors, as you said, said you should avoid raw fruit and that kind of thing. But spices were used as drugs, indeed also as aphrodisiacs. Tell us about the use of spices for the healing arts.

Paul Freedman: Well, spices had the great advantage of being not only delicious and prestigious, but they were thought to be of medicinal value. So that you have a kind of situation the closest parallel of which might be something like aromatherapy. The idea that fragrance is kind of a virtuous thing and a healing thing in itself.

So spices were important for balancing food in terms of the theory of the humours, that is these hot, cold, moist, dry qualities we were talking about before. Spices were also in themselves drugs, or medicine. Every edible spice that we know of today: cloves, nutmeg, were found in lists of drugs, pharmaceutical manuals. And there are some things that are fragrant that you wouldn't associate with food that were considered incredibly powerful drugs and regarded as spices because of their fragrance. Things like ambergris, which is a fragrance that comes from sperm whales.

Ramona Koval: From sperm whale vomit, actually, isn't it?

Paul Freedman: Well...it's actually an effluvia but it's not from the digestive system. . It's a kind of—it's something produced by certain kinds of whales in response to an irritation. So it's not quite that bad. But it is from the guts of the whale, yes, indeed.

Or camphor, which comes from one particular tree that was native to Indonesia, particularly to Kalimantan. Or musk from a certain kind of deer. Or mastic, which comes from a particular plant that grows only on one Greek island in the Aegean. So all of these fragrances, resins or animal substances were thought to—either singly or in combination, have extremely powerful healing and preventive powers, preventive in the sense that if you burned them or smelled them, held them close to your nose in times of plague for example, they would ward off the miasmas or the bad air that was thought to cause disease.

Ramona Koval: So in fact spice merchants were apothecaries of the time.

Paul Freedman: It's very hard to tell the difference between someone who is selling edible spices and an apothecary who is in effect selling medicinal spices. The frontier between medicine and food was pretty soft.

Ramona Koval: So now let's talk about the spice routes, then, because we've established beyond a doubt the importance of spices in this time, and the thirst for them and the fascination with them. Where did they come from and how did they get there?

Paul Freedman: Well they actually came from more places than the Europeans realised. The Europeans at the time thought they all came from India. They weren't exactly sure where India was other than that it was in the east. They thought it was probably next to the Garden of Eden. They often placed it at the extreme east. Then it was realised that some spices came from even further east of India, and one of Marco Polo's contributions around 1300 was to report that there were islands east of India, particularly Indonesian islands, where nutmeg and cloves came from, and that these were shipped to India to reach Europe. Marco Polo also identified China as the source of some exotic products, so there was a certain diversity of where things actually came from.

But what interested me a lot was the Europeans' idea of the east, not so much their accurate ideas but their inaccurate ones, their ideas of the exotic, or of the east as being somehow richer, more beautiful, the source of things like spices that were not only prized consumer products but that had a kind of spiritual value as well. So there's a sense of the east as exotic but also a sense of the east as better, more powerful, closer to the source of goodness in the world. And even the idea that somehow the people of India were actually Christian—ruled over by Christian kings—becomes a powerful idea in Europe related to this lust for spices.

Ramona Koval: So the spice routes across the Indian subcontinent and through central Asia, these are moderated by Arabs?

Paul Freedman: They are moderated by Muslims of different sorts. In central Asia more by Turkic peoples. The seaborne trade that sometimes dominated over the central Asian land route, that would bring spices up the Red Sea to Egypt, or up the Persian Gulf into what's now Iraq and Iran. These were certainly dominated more by Arabs. But often there were different kind of middlemen, from Gujaratis in India to various Malay and other peoples further east. But from the European point of view, until the voyages of da Gama and Columbus, the people that the Europeans bought the spices from were almost 90 per cent of cases Muslim. And this irritated some of the strategists of European commerce.

Ramona Koval: Do we know what the Muslims thought of this sudden interest in the spices from the Europeans?

Paul Freedman: Well, the Europeans were only one part of a kind of global trade in spices. When Marco Polo says that in China they import 100,000 times more pepper than Venice does, this is probably not quite accurate, but it is an indication of the balance. So it's not so much that Europeans were unique in wanting spices, but that the Muslim traders made it their business to try and prevent the Europeans from dealing directly with the source of spices.

Ramona Koval: And how did they make it their business?

Paul Freedman: They could, in effect, prevent the Europeans from getting out of the Mediterranean into the Red Sea. Europeans for example at one point tried to build a base in what's now Elot, in Israel, in order to be able to bypass Egypt, and Saladin pretty quickly put an end to that.

So when you have the opening up of the land route because of the Mongols, the Europeans are able to deal directly with Asia but still not so much with the real centres of the spices. They were a few European merchants who managed to make it across the Himalayas into India, for example, but they don't figure out the sea route to India, of course, until the end of the Middle Ages. And once they figure that out then the Portuguese begin the European colonial adventure in Asia and the balance of power is pretty dramatically changed.

Ramona Koval: Well of course these great expeditions at the end of the 15th century were launched by the desire for spices...and including Columbus.

Paul Freedman: That's right. And what interested me was not the trade in spices, but where that desire came from. Why was that desire so strong as to fuel such insanely risky ventures as those of da Gama and Columbus, ventures that you had no more than a 50-50 chance of surviving. You'd have to be really sure that if you made it, your profits would be huge to undertake a risk like that, and that's what kind of interested me and motivated me in writing this book.

Ramona Koval: So, how do we explain this? Is it like the sense of the gold rush or the tulip mania that we've read about, or the dotcom craze of more recent times?

Paul Freedman: Partly, yes. It's partly a kind of image, rather than a need. And one of the things that's important to realise is that the world of commerce is fuelled not only on things that are necessities, or perceived necessities like petroleum, but on non-necessities, on affordable luxuries, on consumer products that may even seem frivolous or somewhat pointless. Certain kinds of beverages like Coca-Cola achieve an international kind of celebrity at a certain point, even though no-one could call them necessities. And then the other thing is that the desire for these things generates a possibility of profits. And when you think that you can get the profits into your own hands and that the commodity itself is really common. Then it's worth the risk.

In other words, if the Europeans had thought spices were really rare in India and that they cost almost the same in India, like—to get back to white truffles in Italy because there are only a few of them. Then it's not worth the risk of disease, death and horrible long voyages. But if you think that the spices are really common, then it's worth the trip.

Ramona Koval: So how did these voyages affect the known geography of the world?

Paul Freedman: Well, particularly it led to competing theories about where India was in relation to Europe, and a little bit of what many of us had to slog through in secondary school is true. There's a theory that the world is actually small and that if you sail west of Europe you will hit the eastern islands of Asia, either Indonesia or Japan or coastal China, pretty quickly. The competing the theory was that you could go around Africa. Even though some of the Greek geographers said there wasn't water around all of Africa, the Portuguese finally figured out that actually there was, and that by then sailing east rather than west, you could reach India via the Indian Ocean.

So some of this is commerce and knowledge—geography following commercial expansion. Some of it is, of course, inaccurate geographical knowledge, and that's spurred as much advance in its own way—unpredictable to be sure—as accurate knowledge. It's not just a question of people learning and then assimilating their new knowledge. Like the dotcom boom, like the tulip mania, the exaggerated ideas of wealth, the false but alluring belief in riches just around the corner. The El Dorado myths are equally important in leading to progress, global connections, as are accurate forms of information.

Ramona Koval: They developed a moral critique of the use of spices. People thought that they were bad for you, eventually, didn't they?

Paul Freedman: Well morally bad, certainly. There was something disturbing right from the start about spending inordinate amounts of money on something that's an ephemeral pleasure. Gold is something that is associated with vice as well, but at least it's a durable thing. There is, as always happens with gourmandise, the idea that all this labour went in to making this lamprey, or making this fish cooked three ways, and then the thing is consumed in a matter of minutes and excreted out of the body. So how can this be worthwhile—how can people give all this energy to something so frivolous, spend all this money on something so ephemeral?

Ramona Koval: Well it's fetishisation, isn't it?

Paul Freedman: Very much so. And of course we're familiar with some of these same kind of critiques of luxury. In the first place ephemeral luxury and of luxury that flaunts, ostentatiously, wealth in the face of the poor. And this was certainly strong in a society that had lots of poor people and in which spices were one gesture of showing wealth as opposed to the prevailing kind of scrimping and frugality.

Ramona Koval: And of course they became less rare, less exotic, and they really did fall out of fashion, didn't they?

Paul Freedman: Slowly. But already in the 15th century pepper is thought to be really for peasants, although it continued to be eaten in large quantities by the upper classes, it sort of does fall out of the cookbooks because, you know, now anybody can afford it. It's no longer—it becomes a little bit too readily available.

Ramona Koval: Now salt and pepper's just the boring bit that you add and you have to think of something really delicious. What about the way you cook, Paul. How do you cook—are you a great spice man?

Paul Freedman: I think I am, in the sense of—like a lot of Americans I like piquant things. I like to make Mexican food, I love Chinese food, I have a small repertoire that I know how to make. But the spices that I like tend to be peppery spices, things like chilli peppers, and chilli peppers are not a medieval spice—more a New World spice.

Ramona Koval: What about—remember we talked about that Roman spice that the Romans ate up, completely, the one that came from the north of Africa. What are the ones that you would like to taste that you haven't done. You haven't tried the lamprey yet, presumably.

Paul Freedman: I haven't tried the lamprey. I'm really quite keen on that and plan to make it my business to do that...

Ramona Koval: Are you going to eviscerate it live?

Paul Freedman: I think I'll have someone else do that, but I do want to try this lamprey à la Bordelaise. And I suppose I tend to be I suppose gastronomically squeamish, but quite ready to eat something as long as somebody else has dealt with the nasty part.

Ramona Koval: And in the pursuit of your research, of course.

Paul Freedman: Naturally. Naturally. This is all part of my academic mission.

Ramona Koval: And how will you have your dolphin...on toast?

Paul Freedman: I'm not sure. Maybe sushi form. Toast is a good idea. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe with a little white truffles. They loved truffles in the Middle Ages too.

Ramona Koval: Delicious. Look, you've made our mouths water—except for the whale vomit.

Paul Freedman: Well it's almost time for lunch where you are, isn't it?

Ramona Koval: Yes. It's nearly morning tea time. Paul, thank you so much for talking to us on The Book Show.

Paul Freedman: Thank you, Ramona. It's been a great pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ramona Koval: And the book is called Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. It's published by Yale University Press, and I've been speaking with Paul Freedman who is Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University.