ABSTRACT
Spices pervaded the aristocratic cuisines of late medieval Europe, and cookbooks of the era specified quantities of pepper, clove, and nutmeg that appear outlandish to modern readers. While some might imagine that meat must have been thoroughly rotten to need such excessive condiments, spices were actually used for their social prestige, as an expensive import, and for dietary reasons, to balance “hot” and “cold” foods according to humoral medicine. Yet regardless of its origins, the spice trade launched mariners in search of a route to the Indies, thus beginning a process of imperial expansion that culminated with European hegemony over most of the world. The taste for spices proved ironically short-lived, declining by the seventeenth century, but overseas empires also supplied new foods with even greater demand. Sugar, in particular, became both a centerpiece of modern diets and the cause of suffering for millions of African slaves, transported to the Americas to work and die in tropical plantations.
