Spice: The History of a Temptation

For a wealthy Roman the dinner table (technically, the couch, the dining table being a medieval innovation) was one of the most effective stages on which he could display his sophistication and generosity. Public or semi-public events such as the banquet offered the perfect opportunity for flaunting them, where the cost and flamboyance of a dish were a proclamation of opulence and liberality. At his banquets the emperor Elagabalus mixed together jewels, apples and flowers, tossing as much food out of the window as was served to his guests. He ‘loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, claiming it was an appetiser for the banquet’. He fed foie gras to his dogs, served truffles in place of pepper, ground pearls on the fish and dished up gold-encrusted peas.

Elagabalus was an extreme and indeed a pathological case, yet his appetites exemplified an ingrained tendency of Roman society. Romans of a certain class generally took an uncomplicated attitude to the relationship between wealth and happiness, an ethos well summarised by Apuleius: ‘Truly blessed – doubly blessed! – are those that trample gems and jewellery underfoot.’ A single adjective, beatus, sufficed for both wealth and happiness. To those inclined to agree, display at the table was nothing less than a social imperative. Only the poor or miserly patron stinted in his hospitality, at the expense of influence and regard, whether in his own eyes or the client’s. Juvenal’s fifth satire is addressed to the contemptible client who accepts second-rate hospitality and a miserly meal of fish bloated on Tiber sewage, ‘like some public buffoon’. Even the host’s satirically sentient lobster disdains such ignoble guests.

For those keen to avoid such a fate, whether a host out to impress or a client on the receiving end, spices were a godsend. They were expensive and exotic, not far behind the gems Elagabalus tossed from his window. Elagabalus himself perfumed his swimming pool with spices. They were the ideal accoutrements of the flashy gourmands who, in Juvenal’s words,

scour air, sea and land for tasty morsels,

and cost is never an object; pry more closely, and you find

the more they spend, the greater their pleasure.

It was doubly impressive that spices were, in nutritional terms, superfluous: prime examples of what Lucan (AD 39–65) saw as ‘what luxury, frenzied by an inane love of display has sought out throughout the entire globe, unbidden by hunger’. The Romans certainly did not invent gastronomic snobbery, but they raised it to a high art. Athenaeus (c.AD 200–?) dedicated a book to the subject, The Deipnosophists or Banquet of the Learned, a fifteen-volume marathon of recherché commentary on matters gastronomic through the course of a night-long banquet.

In social terms, then, the cost of spices was less a liability than an asset. They were moreover ideally suited for the equally ancient inclination to pretentiousness. One of the Satires of Horace (65–8 BC) mocks an absurdly affected banquet hosted by a certain Nasidienus Rufus, who waxes lyrical over the dinner he serves. For the appetiser there is wild boar ‘captured while a gentle south wind was blowing’. Pepper – the white variety is de rigueur – features in one of the main courses, a dish of lamprey served in a sauce of live shrimp, described by the host in language worthy of a modern gourmet magazine. His lamprey,

he said, was caught while still pregnant; had it been taken later, the flesh would have been inferior. These are the ingredients of the sauce: extra-virgin olive oil from Venafrum; fish sauce from Spain; a five-year-old wine, but Italian-grown, and added during the cooking – if you add it after the cooking a Chian vintage suits best – white pepper, not without a little vinegar, made from fermented wines from Lesbos. I who was the one who first pointed out that you should boil arugula and bitter elecampane* in the sauce; whereas Curtillus prefers sea-urchins, unwashed …

For Nasidienus it was apparently the sheer difficulty of obtaining ingredients that counted. Elagabalus refused to eat fish while at the coast, yet demanded it when he found himself far inland. The emperor’s insistence on novelty could take a sadistic turn:

By way of entertainment he used to propose to his guests that they should invent new sauces for seasoning the food, and he would offer a great prize to he whose sauce he liked, even giving him a silk robe which was at that time regarded as a rarity and an honour. If however he disliked the sauce, he would order that its creator would have to keep eating it until he came up with a better one.

But it is a character from fiction who is most closely identified with the Roman penchant for culinary exuberance. The Cena Trimalchionis, or Trimalchio’s banquet, is a mid-first-century work by Petronius (?–c.AD 66), bon vivant, courtier and style-consultant to the emperor Nero – a position that presumably left him well-informed on the subject of lavish dinners. The action of the Cena revolves around a dinner laid on by Trimalchio, a fabulously wealthy parvenu who has made a pile from speculative voyages – exactly, as it happens, the milieu of the India trader. (Similarly engorged characters reappear many centuries later, in the time of the Dutch and English East India companies.) Trimalchio’s guests are treated, if this is the mot juste, to a banquet of toe-curling vulgarity. The meal is part theatrical stunt show, part gastronomic marathon. There is a daunting variety of courses, the only common element a stress on the exotic, the unexpected and the bizarre. One guest tries the bear meat and ‘practically spews her guts out’. Another, impressed, whispers to his neighbour that everything – even the pepper! – is home-grown (without a greenhouse, a botanical impossibility). If you want hen’s milk, Trimalchio can get it. He orders mushroom spawn from India and serves boar stuffed with live birds that fly out when the beast is cut open. There are dormice seasoned with honey and smoking sausages resting on a silver grill above ‘coals’ of plums and pomegranates. A slave brings in a basket containing a wooden hen atop a pile of eggs, at which point Trimalchio wonders out loud if the eggs are half-cooked. The narrator tries to crack one and finds it made of pastry. He is about to toss it aside, thinking there is nothing worthwhile inside, when he fishes about within and pulls out a figpecker swimming in peppered egg yolk.

The spice, evidently, was in keeping with the flashy and expensive display. Another dish, borne in by four slaves, consists of heaped plump fowls topped with sows’ bellies. Perched at the apex is a hare to which wings are attached in imitation of Pegasus, the winged steed of myth – the effect not unlike a broiler hen trussed up as Superman. Live fishes flop about this pile of flesh in a slew of peppered wine sauce. The spicy sauce is little better than the bear meat, but then a display of taste was never the host’s intention.

Thanks in no small measure to the brilliance of Petronius’ creation, the lurid hues of Trimalchio’s debauch continue to shape modern images of the Roman meal. But as Trimalchio’s unfortunate guest is at pains to point out, to many Romans this was all a bit much. A powerful purist aesthetic ran through Roman culture, indeed was basic to a cherished if increasingly tarnished self-image until the final days of the empire. Viewed in this light not merely spices but for that matter all seasonings were superfluous, luxurious and even harmful fripperies. The correct purpose of food was nutrition; all else was vanity. Cicero (106–43 BC) was of the opinion that the best spice for his dinner was – or should be – hunger. He even claimed that he preferred the smell of earth to that of saffron. In his Tusculan Disputations he relates the salutary tale of the visit to Sparta of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, a town famous in antiquity for the quality and sophistication of its cooks. Spartan food was equally stereotypical, but to the other extreme. This was, in short, an encounter made to order for edification: the archetypal rich sybarite meets the dour ascetics, famed for their renunciation of all pleasure. On being served a stodgy black broth Dionysius complains that the meal is not to his taste, whereupon the Spartan cook puts the visitor in his place: ‘Small wonder,’ he replies, ‘for the condimenta are lacking.’ ‘And what condimenta are they?’ asks the visitor, obligingly walking into the trap. ‘Honest toil in hunting, sweat, a run to the Eurotas [the local stream], hunger and thirst,’ is the tart response, ‘for with these things the Spartans season their feasts.’

Self-evidently, the message of such exemplary incidents ran deeper than a straightforward declaration of personal preferences. To Romans such as Cicero, how and what you ate was an issue of the utmost ethical importance. Diet was a yardstick of, and in some sense shaped, moral worth. It was Trimalchio’s point inverted: you were what you ate. And what a shocking contrast present indulgence formed to the rugged heroes of the past! Historians and satirists never tired of comparing contemporary debauch with ancient virtue. Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of Pyrrhus, is reported to have cooked his own vegetables. The emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, liked his dinner plain and unaffected; the Stoic Cato declared that he only ate meat so as to be strong enough to fight for the state. The past was tough, frugal and pristine; the present, luxurious and bloated.

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