Salt, Spice and Exchange.
Before 1492 there were no tomatoes in Italy, no chillies in Sichuan or India, no potatoes in Ireland and no chocolate in Switzerland.
Salt was the first great food commodity: essential, unevenly found, and easy to tax. China's Han dynasty made salt and iron state monopolies in 119 BCE (盐铁专卖); Roman soldiers' allowances are linked, by tradition, to the word salary. Spices — light, valuable and durable — built the longest trade routes: black pepper from the Malabar coast reached Rome by sea in quantities large enough for the Muziris papyrus to record a single shipment worth a fortune (XXIX.1); cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg came from the Indies through Arab and Venetian middlemen; the search for a sea route to them sent Portuguese and Spanish ships around Africa and across the Atlantic.
Columbus's voyage of 1492 began what Alfred Crosby named the Columbian exchange. From the Americas came maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, chillies, beans, squash, peanuts, cacao and vanilla; to the Americas went wheat, rice, sugar cane, coffee, cattle, pigs and chickens — and diseases that killed most of the Indigenous population. Within two centuries New World crops had transformed Old World cooking: chillies reached China by 1591 and became central to Sichuan and Hunan food (XXVII.4, XXVII.8), sweet potatoes arrived in Fujian in 1593 and fed millions in famines, tomatoes entered Italian sauces by the 1690s (XXX.2), potatoes became staples of northern Europe (XXX.4), cassava of Africa (XXX.9). The workshop traces a crop.
Below: where the crop you choose came from and when it reached China and Europe (dates of first record, from standard food histories), with a timeline of trade landmarks.
- Explain why salt and spices built trade routes.
- Describe the Columbian exchange.
- Date the arrival of New World crops.
- See how "traditional" dishes are often recent.
Every cuisine is a trading cuisine
Look at the dishes of this course with the dates in mind. 麻婆豆腐 and 剁椒鱼头 need a chilli first recorded in China in 1591; Italian tomato sauce is younger than Shakespeare; Indian curries took their heat from Portuguese chillies after 1498; the potato became Ireland's staple in the eighteenth century; West African jollof and Sichuan hotpot alike rest on New World plants. Traditions are real, but they are made — usually from borrowed ingredients, adapted with local skill.
Trade still shapes the kitchen: spices from India, Indonesia and Madagascar, soy sauce and fish sauce from Asia, olive oil from the Mediterranean, coffee and cacao from the tropics. Knowing where things come from is part of using them well — and of choosing them responsibly, from vanilla to fish (XIX.8).
Cook a dish you think of as traditional and list where each ingredient first came from. How many crossed an ocean after 1492?
Terms
- Columbian exchange
- The transfer of crops, animals and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world after 1492.
- Spice trade
- Long-distance trade in pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.
- Monopoly
- Exclusive state control of a commodity, such as salt.
- New World crops
- Maize, potato, tomato, chilli, cacao and others from the Americas.
Sources
- A. W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 1972; the Han salt and iron monopolies (盐铁专卖), 119 BCE; Roman pepper trade with the Malabar coast (the Muziris papyrus, 2nd century CE); 高濂《遵生八笺》 (1591), the first Chinese record of chilli; sweet potato brought from Luzon to Fujian by 陈振龙, 1593.