The Taste of Conquest (12 page)

Mostly, though, the pepper business is as it’s always been. Just a few steps from the exchange, down a crumbling passageway, is the Kishor Spices Company. Downstairs, as you enter the company complex, a squat pyramid of hundreds of pounds of pepper is protected by a large blue tarp and secured behind thick bars while barefoot bookkeepers sit cross-legged and shuffle papers in a cramped alcove next door. Upstairs, on the other hand, the owner’s air-conditioned office might as well be in an Atlanta corporate park; yet, even so, his business model would have been familiar in Enrico Dandolo’s day. Traders such as the Kuruwa, the company owners, acquire their pepper mostly from small-scale farmers who might have as little as ten pounds to sell. These small lots are collected through a network of country dealers and brought to the company’s warehouses, where they are cleaned and shipped across the world. In the old days, the middlemen had to lug bales of rice and salt up the mountain paths to exchange for the pepper; rupees and SUVs make that part a lot easier now. Heman Kuruwa, the third generation in the family firm, assures me that the locals would never be enterprising enough to run this sort of import-export business. His family are Muslims from the northern Indian state of Gujarat. He reminds me that Gujaratis have dominated this trade for hundreds of years, that they were here long before the Portuguese ever nosed their way into the Indian sea.

The method of growing pepper has seen even fewer changes since that time. It would be hard to improve on the fourteenth-century description of the Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone:

[Pepper grows in a] certain kingdom where I myself arrived, being called Minibar [Malabar], and it is not so plentiful in any other part of the world as it is there. For the wood wherein it grows is 18 days journey around…. In the foresaid wood, pepper is had after this manner: first it grows in leaves like unto potherbs, which they plant near great trees as we do our vines, and they bring forth pepper in clusters, as our vines do yield grapes, but being ripe, they are of a green color, and are gathered as we gather grapes, and then the grains are laid in the sun to be dried, and being dried are put into earthen vessels: and thus is pepper made and kept.

At the behest of the pope, the thirty-year-old friar had embarked from Venice in 1318 on a journey that would take him across Asia. His account was written down upon his return in 1330 and was widely read in Europe, including by the author of Mandeville’s
Travels.
(Parts of Mandeville’s pepper forest description are lifted almost verbatim.) The pepper groves of southwest India were noted by every traveler who passed through this part of the world. Marco Polo describes the kingdom of Coilum (Quilon), where pepper “grows in great abundance.” The Arab travel writer Ibn Batūtah describes the city as one of the finest in Malabar, “with splendid markets and rich merchants.”

Quilon is a slow, three-hour ride south of Cochin on India’s improbable answer to a rail system. What remains of the ancient city today is a modest provincial town of middling size, depending more on rubber than pepper to fill the cash registers. The spice ships had long since moved north to Cochin and Calicut even before da Gama and his lot started meddling in Malabar.

I was met at the Quilon train station by Thomas Thumpassery, a local planter, who had consented to give me a tour of one of Friar Odoric’s pepper woods. He was waiting for me on the platform, cell phone in hand, waving down the Westerner amid the parrot hues of swirling saris, circling food vendors, and Indian businessmen on the march. A moment later, I was bundled into a brand-new SUV, and we sped out of town. The drive from Quilon was a blur of magenta, lime, and tangerine, the road lined with somnolent cows standing before huge billboards of sexy, sari-enveloped models and with rice paddies little bigger than tennis courts hemmed in by ragged banana bushes. About an hour later, the flat coastal landscape gave way to thick and lovely hills.

Thomas, I soon learned, is part poet, part schemer, part dilettante. “I’m lazy,” he says more than once over a glass of
chai
that we drink at a minimall just opposite the ritual pool of a Hindu temple. His latest scheme is a hamburger bar–cum–billiard parlor, and he is full of questions on the minutiae of hamburger and pizza making. He comes across as skinny and younger than his thirty-five years and clearly amused by his own wacky ventures, a penchant he seems to have inherited from his father along with the family plantation. His estate is mostly planted with rubber trees, though there are a few small plots devoted to ginger, nutmeg, bananas, and coconut palms. But he also grows about eight hundred pounds of pepper annually, as a sort of sideline, a kind of insurance. This is typical for India, where pepper plants are cultivated in the shade of other, more dependably profitable crops.

One of those soft south Kerala hills is covered by the Thumpassery plantation, the whole thing, from top to bottom, forested with rubber trees, each of which is tapped like a sugar maple to yield a milky sap, which is then dried into raw rubber. But there is also pepper in the woods. As the SUV pulls up to the ranch house that sprawls across the hill’s summit, Thomas almost knocks a worker off a stool to avoid the mat spread in the middle of the driveway covered with drying peppercorns. Driveways are particularly well suited for drying pepper, especially when they are flat and exposed to the sun. For farmers without paved driveways, the Indian Spices Board (a government agency) provides subsidies to pave a section of their property in concrete.

At first, the pepper vines are hard to identify, but when you look carefully, the scruffy vines are everywhere, climbing up spindly
arepa
palms, gangly mango trees, or whatever else happens to be growing in the area. Here, there are none of the prim lines of a European farm or vineyard. Instead, there is jungle, with the unruly pepper vines looking more like rapacious weeds rather than the fountain of wealth for distant empires. The palm-sized leaves surround the supporting trees like ten-foot-high hula skirts, with the dark green pepper clusters, referred to as “spikes,” hiding out among the heart-shaped foliage.

Thomas takes me deep into the pepper wood. Its air is clear and fragrant, filled with clucks and cackles that easily drown out the barely audible cadences of the Hindu prayers coming from a distant temple. He explains how the bisexual pepper flowers, the color of clotted cream, are pollinated by early morning mist, the dewdrops condensing on the flowers and dripping from tiny blossom to blossom. He tells me about the one hundred or more wild varieties that still grow in the high hills and the hundreds more that have been domesticated. He points out the wild long pepper vines that meander in the shadows.

Friar Odoric was quite correct about the harvesting of black pepper, which takes place when the berries are dark green. In Kerala, this typically occurs in January. Once picked, the berries are spread out to dry on bamboo mats for several days until they turn a rich black. Although piperine, the chemical that gives pepper its bite, is contained in the berry itself, most of the flavor components are in the skin. To make white pepper, the green berries are blanched in boiling water, and the outer peel is removed before they are dried. Indians, though, have little use for white pepper, which, while just as hot as black, lacks much complexity. Thomas’s mother laughs when I ask her about white pepper. They sell all of it to Western-style hotels, she tells me, to season the food of foreigners. Green peppercorns, however, leave her puzzled, having never heard of such a thing. Thomas has read about them on the Internet, and he informs her of their use in fancy French recipes. She shakes her head as she returns to the kitchen, where dinner is cooking over a wood fire.

Ironically, Keralans use very little pepper in their cooking. For them, it is the money that grows on trees, and most would prefer to sell rather than eat it, or better yet, store it up for a rainy day. People in the business give all sorts of estimates of how much pepper is being held in reserve in India. Heman Kuruwa, the dealer in Cochin, guesses twenty thousand tons, but this is not something anyone can really know. Thomas alone has some two tons of it, a bulging pile of plastic mesh bags, shoved against the back of a shed that is also used to store smoked sheets of rubber. Some growers will keep pepper up to ten years, waiting for the price to rise or perhaps using it to pay a daughter’s dowry. Thomas has three young daughters. Though, in his case, I wonder whether the pepper will still be there when he needs it or whether it will be the capital for another improbable scheme.

Though pepper originates in the Western Ghats, the mountains that rise from India’s western coast, it was probably transplanted to Sumatra (and possibly other parts of today’s Indonesia) as early as two thousand years ago and was certainly quite common throughout the region by the time Marco Polo passed through on his way home in the late twelve hundreds. Today, pepper is grown in Brazil and China as well, while Vietnam has overtaken India as the world’s largest exporter. In Europe, though, they still like Indian pepper best.

Europeans have been importing pepper from this part of India at least since Roman times. Large numbers of Roman amphorae have been excavated at Pondicherry, in South India, dating to the first and second centuries
C.E
. The route remained more or less the same for the next fifteen hundred years, and at least some pepper continued to be shipped over the old caravan routes long after the Portuguese opened the route around Africa.

Nevertheless, the routes did shift over all those years, depending on the vagaries of geopolitics. The Silk Road of Marco Polo’s day, which carried spices, jewels, and silks between China and the Middle East, endured only as long as Genghis Khan and his successors kept an iron grip over central Asia. But once their empire fell in the early years of the fourteenth century, the flow of Eastern luxuries had to be sluiced through a new set of channels. Now the bulk of Malabar’s riches was loaded onto Arab dhows (but also some Chinese junks), which skimmed up the Red and Arabian seas, then at Aden, and later Jeddah, the spices were loaded onto enormous camel caravans. In his early days, Muhammad had the job of supervising one of these dromedary delivery services between Mecca and Syria. For later Arab merchants, one of the attractions of the port of Jeddah was its proximity to the Prophet’s hometown; Muslims were just as adept at mixing business and religion as any Venetian Crusader. The processions of camels, each beast laden down with a quarter ton of spice, passed through Mecca in caravans that grew to be so huge they took two days and nights to pass through the gates on the last leg of the journey to Damascus or Alexandria.

Once in the Mediterranean, the spices passed into Christian hands. At first, the western Mediterranean market was split up among the Genoans, Provençals, and Catalans, who kept the spice flow coursing not only to western Europe but also to Arab towns in western North Africa, while Venetians sent most of their pepper across the Alps. But by the early fourteen hundreds, Venice began to monopolize the spice route straight through to the Atlantic, even sending her perfumed galleys all the way to England and the Low Countries. All over Christendom, the appetite for spice, whetted by the Crusades, would grow and grow for at least five hundred years. Generations of (well-off) Europeans would grow up with the taste of Malabar on their tongues.

A T
ASTE FOR
S
PICE

Just what the food in the Middle Ages and Renaissance tasted like is impossible to say. The old cookbooks are too imprecise, the technology is hard to replicate, and the ingredients are utterly different. Animals, fruits, and vegetables were all smaller. Even the spices were different. The spices we have today have undergone centuries of selective breeding to concentrate and standardize their flavor, whereas most of the aromatics of 1400 were still gathered in the wild from bushes and trees. Then there is the issue of freshness and storage. When you consider that cloves, nutmeg, and mace might have been in transit for an absolute minimum of a year, and all the spices were often stored for years at a time under often dubious conditions, you have to wonder just how potent they were.
^*10
Under ideal storage conditions, pepper holds up extremely well, but the others have nothing like pepper’s shelf life. No doubt, many of the spices that reached such European backwaters as England and Scandinavia were about as fresh as the jar of allspice that has sat in my spice cupboard for the last six years.

But just because it’s impossible to replicate the cuisine of the past hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. I am particularly intrigued by the efforts of Sergio Fragiacomo in Venice to try to turn gastronomic time travel into a business model. Sergio owns a restaurant, some five minutes’ walk away from Piazza San Marco, called, somewhat incongruously in French, Bistrot de Venise. Sergio comes across more like a genial professor than a restaurateur, and like so many Venetians, he is an amateur (in the old sense of the word) on the subject of Venice. He has the old lover’s devotion to the city, enamored as much of her foibles as her charms. “I want to have a conversation with her past,” he tells me. His obsession is to bring the old tastes alive, to introduce the tourists not merely to mortar and marble but to the very flavors of the ancient republic. But he also has to make a living, so he offers two menus, one of traditional Venetian food—grilled fish, polenta, risotto, and such—and another inspired by old Venetian sources. “The other restaurateurs think I’m crazy,” he tells me as we sip a distinctly twenty-first-century cocktail of Prosecco and pomegranate juice. “There is no sense of the history of our culinary culture in today’s Venice,” he says. “It’s so stupid!”