Here is a fun thing to know. At some point in school we were all taught that the reason Medieval Europeans so lusted after spices from The East was to preserve their meats.
Absolute nonsense, says Michael Krondl. Europeans, like everyone else, preserved by salting, drying and pickling, none of which depend on exotic spice.
Medieval Europeans did not need exotic spices anymore than we do. The spice trade served not necessity, but taste – and fashion. Apparently they liked sprinkling cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger over just about everything they ate. And spices were fashionable, in part because they were expensive enough to confer distinction, but not beyond reach of a substantial market of upper middles class consumers, rather like that bottle of extra virgin olive oil sitting on your granite counter-top.
Here’s another one. Common as it is today to lament the “globalization of food,” Krondl points out that it is really the “re-globalization of food.” According to the author of “Taste of Conquest” we are reverting to the internationalism of the Middle Ages during which the upper-middle classes of essentially the entire civilized world shared the same palette of flavors.
I learned all this in the first few pages.
The rest of the book I found nearly unreadable.
Oh, the style is fine, though perhaps a bit too fine.
The real problem is that rather than giving us the meaty history it promises (of Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam the “three great cities of spice”) the book gives us lots of Krondl wandering around those cities, chattering away, keeping what he clearly regards as his delightful personality on center stage, and never really letting the narrative get rolling.
It’s like one of those TV documentaries with the telegenic historian as our personal guide, giving us the once over lightly while clearly terrified we’ll tune him out if he doesn’t hoke things up a bit.
In Krondl’s case the effect is simply tedious.
The Taste of Conquest
The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice
by Michael Krondl
Ballantine
