Spices, Herbs & Seasonings

Pliny the Elder complained that India drained the Roman empire of fifty million sesterces a year, and he priced the drain: long pepper at fifteen denarii a pound, white at seven, black at four. The berry came down the rivers of Kerala and out through Muziris, a Chera port trading with Rome from about 100 BCE. When the Goths besieged Rome in December 408, the ransom that lifted the siege included three thousand pounds of pepper.

The eastern end of that trade cost more than money. Nutmeg and mace are one fruit, and it grew on the Banda Islands and almost nowhere else. In 1621 the Dutch East India Company's governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen took the islands; of perhaps thirteen to fifteen thousand Bandanese, about a thousand were left there as forced labourers. Nutmegs were dipped in lime before export so they could not sprout anywhere else.

Heat travelled the other way. Chile peppers were domesticated in central-east Mexico, and Diego Álvarez Chanca, the physician on Columbus's second voyage, carried the first of them to Spain and wrote about them in 1494. The word chili is Classical Nahuatl, chīlli. Half this wall, though, never went anywhere at all: basil's name is the Greek basilikon, royal, and Pliny records that gardeners sowed it with curses, on the theory that it came up better for the abuse.

So the shelf runs both ways at once. Butcher's Cracked Black Peppercorns are the Malabar berry. Cloves, Whole come from the islands that same company kept by uprooting every tree it did not own. Ancho Chili Powder is a dried poblano out of Puebla, and Basil is somebody's back door. Garam Masala is what one kitchen does with the whole argument. Whole spice keeps longest, which is why so much of this wall is sold uncrushed.