It begins, with sugar, originally cultivated in Polynesia and then imported to India. It continues with war, the sixth century Persians leaping on it when they invaded India. Emperor Darius called it "the reed which gives honey without bees," and by the seventh century, the Persians were fashioning sumptuous confections with their new-found discovery, the first cookies reported in history. They also grew sugar cane and kept the crop a great secret, selling the refined product at an enormous profit.
The next wars to spread sugar into usage were religious. As the Arabs (people from the Arabian Peninsula, Syrian Desert, and North and Lower Mesopotamia, as opposed to Muslims) expanded their territories, they absorbed Persia in the mid-seventh century and began cultivating sugar cane in Northern Africa and Spain. It was the soldiers of Pope Urban's First Crusade who imported the "new spice" to Western Europe — conducting pogroms in the Rhineland, massacring most of the citizens of Antioch and Egyptian-held Jerusalem along the way. The Crusaders suffered defeats, too, as well as massive attrition from a nearly 4,000-mile march. Ninety thousand men started out; one in seven crusaders would make it home. By the time the Crusades ceased, 2–3 million Europeans would have died of starvation, battle wounds and disease.
Caucasians against Jews and Arabs, Arabs against Jews and indigenous peoples, Egyptians against Jerusalem…sound familiar?
Out of the carnage came enormous profits. Sugar is first reported in London in 1099 (only 35 years after William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England) as costing two shillings per 11th century pound, or roughly over $100 for 2.2 modern pounds. Did that purveyor of Arab goods (which also included apricots, lemons, rice, dyes, spices, perfume, soap, and glass mirrors) speak the French of conquerors or the guttural Old English of their Saxon forebears?
The Battle of Hastings which put the Normans on the English throne, cost 6,000 lives, most of them poorly armed natives. Just by the way.
I am looking at my recipe for gingerbread, heady with the spices — ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and cloves — that came to Europe in the Middle Ages via trade wars, imperialism, religious persecution, expansionism — all spilling yet more blood.
With the exception of allspice, these spices originated in the far-flung confluence of the South China Sea, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and, most particularly, the small sea of Banda, Java, Timor, Flores, Celebes, and Maluku. The Polynesians, considered primitives by James Cook in his three year exploration beginning in 1768, were extraordinarily talented travelers who brought the Spice Islands riches of nutmeg, mace and cloves to China, where they were cultivated. The Chinese then sold them to India, where Indian and Persian traders began importing them to Egypt and Rome. When the Roman Empire fell, so did the spice trade.
Cardamom was an early arriver in Europe, imported by Vikings, probably from its ninth century raid on the outskirts of Constantinople, squarely between the exotic riches of the East and the hunger for luxury goods in the West. It's one of the world's oldest spices in usage, originating in Southern India where it grew in such profusion that the area become known as the Cardamom Hills. You'll find it in many Scandinavian cookie recipes. It is now mainly grown in Guatemala, a more lucrative crop even than coffee.
Rather than using the commercial ground cardamom from my spice collection, I ground some seeds the other day. I promptly threw out the cardamom powder — the freshly ground seeds have an intoxicating aroma with a hint of eucalyptus, but absolutely unique. It definitely has a shorter shelf life than the other gingerbread spices.
Indian and Persian traders brought ginger to North Africa and Rome, when the spice was promptly forgotten until Marco Polo brought it back to Venice in 1292. Like all spices, the cost was prohibitive: Just over a half pound of ginger was worth the price of a sheep.
To put this in perspective, a half a pound of the best saffron, now the most expensive spice in the world, costs $5,000. Buying a sheep is much less expensive, at most $250, but still a lot of money compared to the $25.00 for a bag of dried ginger root on Amazon.
Two hundred years later, ginger was planted in the Caribbean, giving the Spanish one of its initial sources of revenue before delving into the rich South American continent. It's a safe bet that enslaved natives did the work while the Spaniards worked on their tans.
The next arrival in Europe is the only gingerbread spice that didn't originate in the Far East. Christopher Columbus outfitted himself with an army and 17 ships, intent on wiping out the Taíno natives he'd come up against on Cuba and Santo Domingo the year before. No one offered resistance to his raising of the Spanish flag across the Caribbean and he went on to collect some Native Americans, gold and allspice from the lands he believed were Asia.
The English called this new flavor new spice but it didn't become a widely sought crop until Sephardic Jews living in Jamaica after fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal started trading what they called Jamaican pepper with other Jewish merchants in European ports. Because the Jews of Jamaica were still living in Spanish territory, they still couldn't worship openly and the English, who conquered Jamaica in 1655, were hardly more tolerant. But there is still a thriving Sephardic population in Jamaica and a good deal of archeological investigation is being conducted into their 15th century origins there.
Nutmeg, imported by Arabs to Constantinople from the Banda Islands that lay squarely between Borneo and Australia, survived the fall of Rome to become one the bloodiest ingredients in our gingerbread men. In 1190, Henry IV invaded Italy while trying to undermine other claimants to the title of Holy Roman Emperor. He negotiated a deal with Pope Celestine III and arranged for his coronation in 1191. The pageantry included strewing the streets of Rome with nutmegs, an expensive way to mask the odors of the crowded city, although probably not more expensive than his ongoing three-year march to seize the crown of Sicily. It cost thousands of lives in battle and a plague, as well as the imprisonment of his wife. But when your empire encompasses parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy, you can waste lives and money on nutmegs and invasions.
The Spanish winkled out where nutmeg came from, the Banda Islands, in 1512. A little over a century later, the Dutch went to war with the Spanish for the territory and then to massacre and enslave the population in service of growing and harvesting the spice. Later, the Dutch traded Manhattan Island to the British for one of England's nutmeg-producing islands. Despite a brief interlude of British seizure of the Spice Islands 1810, the Dutch controlled the plantations until the Japanese occupation in World War II.
Nutmeg was fashionable among Europe's wealthiest not only for its supposed medical powers and its definite taste, but because it's a hallucinogenic. (I admit it: I've wanted to get high on nutmeg ever since I learned this but I've never investigated how much it would take.) In 1760 London, a little over a pound cost 85–90 shillings, or $955.12 in today's money. You'd have to be high to pay that much money for a little reality break.
Cinnamon, first grown in Ceylon, appears in Chinese and Egyptian records about 3,000 years ago; Pliny the Elder mentions that that 12 ounces was worth 11 pounds of silver. It was one of the lost spices after the German conquest of Rome, rediscovered when the Crusaders sacked Jerusalem and it became one of the prizes wrested from the Egyptian rulers of the city. Arabs traded the highly sought preservative until 1518, when the Dutch took control of Ceylon, monopolizing cinnamon as their own by seizing enormous quotas from the poorest caste in Ceylonese society.
The last of the spices my recipe uses is cloves, which come from the Maluku Islands, which lay in the Banda Sea where nutmeg originated. It, too, was lost to the West with the fall of Rome. Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe with the Armada de Molucca, which consisted of five ships and 270 men in search of a western, Spanish incursion into the Spice Islands. Magellan was killed in the Philippines when natives resisted the Spanish attempts to convert them so it was the remaining two ships and crews who reached the Moluccas in 1521. They loaded their ships with spices but only one was seaworthy. Ten months later, 18 or 19 survivors made it back but the Spanish had a route to the cloves of the Malukus — until the Dutch arrived in 1605.
The Dutch went to work destroying every clove tree they could get their hands on in order to keep the spice in their possession, blithely indifferent to the islanders' practice of planting a tree for each child born. Burning trees was tantamount to cursing the spirits attached to them. Were they surprised when the people revolted? Did they understand why they were so hated for the next century?
The first gingerbread was, in fact, bread, made by the Crusaders who ground up their regular bread and mixed the crumbs with the spices and sugar they found in Jerusalem. European cooks made gingerbread with ground almonds, rosewater, sugar and ginger. It sounds good but it wasn't the gingerbread we know until the English took on the challenge and used flour and eggs in addition to sugar and ginger.
The English also invented the first gingerbread man. Elizabeth I commanded that gingerbread likenesses be made of her favorites and, possibly, her un-favorites (so often the same men in her mercurial affections). Why isn't there a gingerbread cookie cutter of Walter Raleigh with his platter of a collar and proffered cape? Or one of Mary, Queen of Scots, kneeling headless with her lap dog jumping out of her arms?
Jacob and Ludwig's "Hansel and Gretel" are responsible for the invention of gingerbread houses. The story illustrates how beloved gingerbread was to children by the 19th century. The house is also an extravagance on a large scale. Europeans gave cookies at Christmastime because the ingredients, hard-sought and hard-fought, were too expensive to share in a larger form.
There it is: the ubiquitous Christmas cookie, particularized by each country — speculaas, pryaniki, snaps. Maybe it's no coincidence that the Gingerbread Man, shouting, "Run, run as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man," spread mayhem as his baker and her husband, a pig, cow, and horse chase him with their mouths watering. It takes a river and a lying fox to bring the Gingerbread Man to his natural end, eaten alive for the deep warming flavor the entire neighborhood lusted after.