Spice: The history of a temptation by Jack Turner, HarperCollins, £25, ISBN 000257067X Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THIS is a hugely enjoyable book, written with erudition, style and wit. Jack Turner is the latest to visit the spice trail, and here we have it with all its adventures and explorations, brutality and comedy.
It’s a tale punctuated with famous seafaring names: Magellan, who died on a search for the spice islands; Vasco da Gama, who sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to find a way of transporting spices that avoided the bottleneck of importing them through the Middle East; and Columbus, the radical thinker who sailed west to reach the East – and spices.
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In the Middle Ages, the East was seen as a mysterious, gorgeous region, and spices were thought to be the ancient products of paradise. The rage for spices was not simply to add piquancy to food or to preserve it. Spices were important in medicine, religion, magic and sex, and even in social distinction.
In Spice, all these aspects are tackled with an elegance that marvellously carries the reader on. Starting from the dictionary definition of the word, the story takes off on an exciting progress, from the discovery of cloves in the remains of a house burned down nearly 4000 years ago to the secret formula for Coca-Cola, alleged to include cinnamon. The flavours of the book are as seductive as those of the spices themselves. It’s a feast.