Terms and Historiography

The word spice has been in use in English-language print since at least the mid-1200s. Foods can be difficult to define or pin down in terms of definitions, but the Oxford English Dictionary describes the word as a consumable that is “strongly flavoured or aromatic,” and one that is “of vegetable origin, obtained from tropical plants”; it derives the English word as a borrowing from Old French, espice (or épice).¹ In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, spices were understood to come from plants, including their seeds, berries, fibers, bark, and roots. Spices also were understood as pungent: They had a distinguishing scent—one that could burn the nostrils. And, of course, they had a punchy, particular taste that could be hot, sour, numbing, perfumed, or bitter. That early modern British women and men would have understood that spices were distinctively and brightly flavored is suggested from several contemporary uses of the term; for example, botanist, colonizer, and physician Hans Sloane noted in his c. 1707–1725 Voyage to the Islands that a spice he encountered on his travels had “a very fine relish,” a word Sloane used to imply not only that spices were flavorsome but that to eat them conveyed enjoyment and pleasure.²

For most early modern British women and men, spices would not only have been strongly flavored but they would have also been well-traveled, both figuratively and literally. In the early modern British imagination, spices were, by definition, not British: They were from somewhere far away, growing and flourishing in hot, sunny, verdant climates that were dissimilar to Britain’s own. In fact, many early uses of the word spice combined it with words meant to signal other places and people, including the warmer parts of Europe, such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy; the so-called torrid zones of the Americas; much of Asia, but particularly India; and what early modern British people called “Arabia,” a generalization which indicated North Africa as well as the eastern Mediterranean. Spices, according to early modern printed texts in English, had a distinctive taste, and they came from distinctive places.

Spices were also, importantly, not herbs. Although herbs were also eaten with and as food, and although they were also vegetable in origin and could be equally pungent and sapid, they were distinctive from spices in two major ways. The first was physical: herbs were derived from the buds, flowers, stems, and leaves of plants—typically the green parts—rather than from their seeds, roots, or bark, as were spices. As one early 1630s English-language dictionary described them, the word herb was synonymous with “weed; plant, wort; also, grasse.”³ But herbs were also intellectually or ideologically distinctive, as they were local, homey, domestic, and familiar. Early modern British people imagined that herbs might grow in their metropolitan gardens or in the fields and forests of Britain but that spices originated from other people and other places.

This was especially true of the spices that were most popular and most emblematic of the colonial British Americas. In this period, the most popular Anglo-American spices—including pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and cloves—as well as the spices that seemed the newest and most novel to metropolitan British people—allspice, achiote, chili, and vanilla, all of which originated in the Americas—grew and thrived in places that were geographically distinct and separated from the British Isles. And so what an early modern British person might have imagined when they wrote, talked about, or cooked with spices would have been described spices as coming from plants; they would have understood them as strong-smelling and strong-tasting, and they would have believed that they were, in many significant ways, distinctly non-British.

These distinctions and definitions have been at the core of how most scholars have approached the topic of spices in early modern European history. In 1972, Alfred W. Crosby published his pathbreaking book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.⁴ In the text, Crosby traced how Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the Americas set off a chain of biological cataclysms. Prior to this moment, the Americas had been, for the most part, biologically and ecologically separate from the connected continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Few animals and plants, and fewer people, traveled between these two spaces. With a few very notable exceptions, the most significant of which was L’Anse aux Meadows, a c. 1000 ce Norse settlement in modern-day Newfoundland, these continental biomes remained unconnected.⁵ When, in 1492, Columbus and his mariners waded onto the shore of Guanahaní (probably San Salvador Island) in the Caribbean, they introduced new animals, plants, people, and, most dire and consequentially, diseases and pathogens to the Americas. The resulting “Columbian Exchange” caused excitement among Europeans, as they gained access to American plants, animals, and people, all of which they quickly turned into commodities; they frequently caused devastation for Indigenous women and men in the Americas as they had no prior experience with and little resistance to the measles, smallpox, typhus, and whooping cough—among many other diseases—that circulated in the rest of the world.⁶

Crosby’s text was crucial to studies of early modern foodways, as it pinpointed the moment when many iconic, popular foods began to circulate on a global scale. From the Americas, Crosby wrote, came chocolate, chilis, potatoes, and tomatoes; from Europe, Asia, and Africa came most of the domesticated livestock humans eat, including cows, pigs, and most “barnyard” fowl, such as geese, chickens, and ducks. Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no tomatoes in Italian cuisine, no potatoes in Irish cuisine, no chocolate in Swiss cuisine, no capsicum chilis in Indian or Thai cuisine. And there were no cattle, barnyard fowl, or horses in the Americas. The foods Crosby described had been adopted, adapted, melded, and merged, not just into European cuisines but into cuisines and foodways around the world, and their wild-grown origins had become murky. Most importantly, so many of these foods had become so iconic, and even foundational, to the cuisines of their adopted homelands that their original cultivation in the Americas had become forgotten. Crosby’s Columbian Exchange recentered the early modern period as an era which precipitated major changes to diets around the world.

Crosby’s insights were foundational, and in the years since his study, scholars have done important work expanding the scope of his findings and drawing clearer and more pointed attention to the great diversity of people whose lives were changed by the Columbian Exchange. Foremost in this wave of scholarship is Jessica B. Harris, whose published work, beginning in the mid-1980s, sought to celebrate the recipes, foodways, and histories of Black American cooking and included titles like The Welcome Table: African-American Heritage Cooking (1995), The Africa Cookbook: Tales of a Continent (1998), and the epic and influential High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2011).⁷ Harris’ work was at once historical and culinary, providing readers with recipes that they can make in their own kitchens as well as historical descriptions and lessons that are relevant for scholars and chefs alike. And in all her books, Harris worked, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly, to show how the Columbian Exchange was never just limited to trade between Europe and the Americas but always included and incorporated the myriad and magnificent foodways of the African continent.

In related scholarly fields such as anthropology, geography, and history, authors deepened the understanding of these crucial Atlantic connections and ties. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) elucidated the links between early modern European luxury food consumption and Caribbean enslavement and inspired generations of research on single-commodity foodstuffs. Judith Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001) punctured the myth that Europeans had introduced rice to West Africa and demonstrated how the trades in rice and in enslaved people grew together in the Americas.⁸ Edda Fields-Black’s Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008) followed rice cultures to West Africa, exploring, via historical linguistics, how premodern Baga and Nalu women and men created the rice-growing methods and technologies which would come to characterize agriculture in the 18th-century Carolinas and Georgia.⁹ Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008) and Rebecca Earle’s The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (2012) both centered Indigenous foodways in their study of the Columbian Exchange, drawing vital attention to the ways that Native women and men imagined and interpreted European and African foods, while simultaneously tracing how foods wild-grown in the Americas came to be perceived around the globe.¹⁰ And Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (2017) synthesized culinary scholarship and kitchen praxis, demonstrating powerfully how Black foodways in the Americas blended, fashioned, and built themselves into new and powerful culinary traditions.

Taken together, these works have helped to provide useful frameworks for study of colonial-era food and spice. The voyages of 1492 set off chains of biological, political, spiritual, and cultural events now known to have changed the ways that people around the planet ate their food. These changes impacted people on every continent on the planet. But they also impacted them differently, creating fabulous opportunities for some and threat and destruction for others. For the next three hundred years, grains, seeds, bark, roots, and leaves traveled across the Earth’s oceans at unprecedented speeds and in powerful quantities. Sometimes these botanicals were specimens, collected by Indigenous and Black women and men, then appropriated, packaged, and labeled by White natural philosophers and scientists who sought to study their taxonomies, traits, uses, and, very often, their potential for profit. At other times, the botanicals were lifelines and remembrances, carried in order to feed, nurture, and protect the souls and bodies of people stolen into bondage. Still other botanicals were accidental travelers, falling into cracks between the planks of decks, hitchhiking in bags and baskets, or attaching themselves to the hulls of ships. Botanicals were traded, borrowed, thieved, and hoarded. They were bought and sold. And then, all around the early modern world, they were propagated, either purposefully or by chance, putting down roots in earth thousands of miles from their places of origin. Many of these plants were edible, and a select number were classified as spices whose purpose was to season and flavor and sometimes to heal.

Spice Cabinet: What Was at Use in the British Atlantic Kitchen

Early modern people loved to spice their food. This was not because—as stubbornly persistent historical myths claim—they used spices to cover the flavors of rotting or spoiled dishes but rather because they enjoyed the sensation of spices on their palates. They equally enjoyed the privilege of using goods gathered from around the world. The spices in Anglo-American kitchens were imagined to have had varying tastes and characteristics. Tracing six of the most commonly used spices offers a sense of the ways that these early modern people typically or habitually flavored their food.¹¹

Pepper (Piper nigrum) was probably the most commonly used spice in the British Atlantic world, and the spice had circulated around Europe for centuries.¹² Twenty-first century scientific and botanical systems classify pepper within the Piperaceae family, a plant family with over three thousand accepted species. Latin classifications were not widely used in the period, and early modern people frequently swapped, altered, or confused different forms of plants. But these classifications are helpful to understand some of the qualities of the most popular early modern spices. Piper is considered the main genera of the Piperaceae family. Each whole grain of pepper, or “peppercorn,” is either a fruit or a seed. The Piper nigrum plant produces flowers and red berries; inside each berry is a pit or stone, and inside of that stone sits a single seed. Figure 1 shows a Piper nigrum plant with its characteristic glossy leaves; the white and light green bud in the center of the image will develop into fruits and seeds.

Open in new tab

Figure 1. Pepper. Black pepper is derived from the plant classified as Piper nigrum.

Source: Photograph © Rowan McOnegal, Piper Nigrum (Pepper), Wellcome Collection.

There are different types of peppercorns, each with different flavor profiles, and these include black, green, red, pink, and white. Red and pink peppercorns are not Piper nigrum at all; they are from an entirely different plant, the Peruvian or Brazilian pepper tree (Schinus molle or Schinus terebinthifolius), and they were well-integrated into premodern Indigenous diets, particularly in communities living in the Andes.¹³ Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people also made use of “long pepper” (Piper longum), classified within the Piperaceae family but producing conical spikes; long pepper is a bit sweeter and less pungent than other forms of Piper.¹⁴ The African continent has its own wild-grown Piper varietals, including Ashanti pepper (classified as Piper clusii) and Guinea pepper (Piper guineense) as well as cubeb or tailed pepper (Piper cubeba), all of which were used widely in early modern Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁵

Peppercorns described as black, green, and white are all formed via different treatments of the fruit and seeds from Piper nigrum plants. To make black peppercorns, workers pick the green Piper nigrum fruits, briefly boil them, and then dry them. The characteristic wrinkled surface of the black peppercorn is the skin and flesh of the Piper fruits, shriveled and dried. Green peppercorns are also made from green, unripe Piper fruits, but instead of boiling and drying, the green color is preserved by treating it in a preservative like sulfur dioxide or via freeze-drying. White peppercorns are the interior seed of Piper fruits; white pepper is sometimes called corticated pepper, reflecting this preparatory process of cleaning or removing the fruit from the exterior white peppercorn.¹⁶ Both black and white pepper were popular in early modern British Atlantic traditions, and recipes called for the use of both whole peppercorns and ground ones.

Cinnamon was also exceptionally popular and widely consumed in ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe.¹⁷ Cinnamon is derived from evergreen plants classified as within the genus Cinnamomum, and several species of Cinnamomum—including Cinnamomum burmanni, Cinnamomum cassia, and Cinnamomum verum, among others—are used to commercially produce the spice. The spice is made from the interior bark of the Cinnamomum tree. Workers encourage the tree to produce stems, then strip the outer bark off these stems before beating the stems to loosen the inner bark, and then peeling the inner bark off in long strips. The strips then curl and dry into “quills,” the scrolls which are so characteristic of cinnamon.¹⁸ Most early modern British Atlantic recipes call for ground cinnamon or “beaten” cinnamon and describe cinnamon in amounts like teaspoons, pinches, or ounces. But it is likely that cinnamon scrolls were also for sale, purchased, and used as some recipes—especially medical ones—call for “bruised” cinnamon to be used in decoctions, where cinnamon was soaked with wine or spirits and often distilled to produce a product called cinnamon water. This image in figure 2 of a Cinnamomum tree displays the tree’s bark at the bottom of the trunk.

Open in new tab

Figure 2. Cinnamon. Cinnamon is derived from plants within the genus Cinnamomum, of which there are more than two hundred species.

Source: Photograph © Rowan McOnegal, Cinnamomum Yeylanicum, Cinnamon, Wellcome Collection.

Ginger also appears in many early modern British Atlantic recipes. In this period, women and men derived ginger from the root or rhizome of the plant, classified as Zingiber officinale. Like other rhizomes, ginger roots grow horizontally under the soil, sending out bright green shoots or leaves, and eventually, yellow flowers. Once it reaches size, ginger roots are dug up, the leaves and flowers are chopped off, and the root can then either be used fresh, or it can be dried or preserved, often by pickling.¹⁹ In the British Atlantic, people consumed ginger in all these forms. Recipes refer to “beaten” or “pounded” ginger as well as “sliced” ginger and measure it by weight (ounces, grams). Premodern merchants were instructed to slice ginger roots open upon their arrival to determine their quality and to watch out for blackened or rotting roots.²⁰ This image in figure 3 of a fresh ginger root shows the light brown, papery skin that covers the juicy inner pith of the rhizome.

Open in new tab

Figure 3. Ginger. Ginger typically comes from the root or rhizome of the plant Zingiber officinale.

Source: Photograph © Rowan McOnegal, Zingiber Officinale (Ginger), Wellcome Collection.

Two related and extremely popular spices, nutmeg and mace, frequently accompanied pepper, cinnamon, and ginger. Nutmeg originates from an evergreen tree in the Myristica genus, and most nutmeg comes from the fragrant or “true” nutmeg, Myristica fragrans. Nutmeg trees produce fruits roughly the size of ping-pong balls; when the flesh and skin of the fruit is removed, it reveals the shiny brown nutmeg seed, covered with a bright red, fibrous aril, or seed covering. The spice called nutmeg is derived from ground Myristica fragrans seeds; the red fibrous aril, when dried and ground, produces the spice mace.²¹ Anglo-Atlantic recipe books contain instructions to grate, beat, and slice nutmeg, suggesting that most consumers would have purchased the whole seeds and then home-prepared them. Mace was also described as beaten and powdered. Both spices were imagined as warming, mace more than nutmeg, and were used for flavoring as well as to warm and strengthen the body. Nutmeg, for example, was prescribed to relieve joint pain and ease sleep, as it was thought that the spice would warm and soothe sore and achy parts of the body. This image in figure 4 dates from a slightly later period but offers an excellent view of both the brown nutmeg seed and its red aril.

Open in new tab

Figure 4. Nutmeg and mace. Nutmeg and mace come from the same plant; mace is derived from the red fiber covering the nutmeg seed.

Source: Colored lithograph by C. Rosenberg, c. 1850, after himself, Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans): stem with fruit and nut and floral segments, Wellcome Collection.

The final most commonly used spice in the Anglo-Atlantic was clove. To a certain extent, cloves break the defining rule of spices—they are not derived from seeds, roots, or bark—as cloves are flower buds from Syzygium aromaticum plants. These plants are evergreen and produce bright red and yellow flowers. When the flowers are still tightly packed in bud, they are plucked and then dried, producing the familiar brown, stemmy clove.²² It is likely that, as was the case with nutmeg, clove was sold whole in the Anglo-Atlantic world, as recipe books include instructions for using whole clove as well as powdered or ground clove spice. Clove has analgesic or numbing qualities, which were appreciated in the early modern period, and it was prescribed for aches and pains—including toothaches—as its numbing effect could ease soreness. Clove was imagined as warming and was used as an aid to digestion. It was also employed as an aphrodisiac.²³ In this close-up image of cloves in figure 5, the rounded end of the clove is the dried flower bud.

Open in new tab

Figure 5. Cloves. Cloves are dried flower buds and have analgesic or numbing properties.

Source: Photograph © Rowan McOnegal, Eugenia caryophyllus (Cloves), Wellcome Collection.

These six spices, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and cloves, appear over and over in early modern British Atlantic recipe books. Frequently combined and mixed, they became a kind of early modern spice blend, a go-to mix of flavors and tastes that were used in many different dishes. Their combined flavor profile would have been familiar, easily recognizable, and enjoyable for many early modern people. And although in 21st-century European recipes these spices are used most commonly in baked goods and desserts, early modern people put them in everything: meats, vegetables, soups, stews, pies, custards, jellies, candies, breads, and pickles. They were used in sweet dishes, and they were used in savory dishes. In fact, it is difficult to find early modern recipes without one or more of these six spices.

For all their ubiquity, these six spices were not the only flavoring agents or spices employed by early modern Anglo-Atlantic people to change or augment the profiles of their food. Whole and ground seeds such as anise, cumin, and cardamom, as well as whole and ground seeds drawn from plants also used for their leaves, such as basil, coriander, dill, fennel, and nettle, appear with regularity in recipes from this period. Saffron threads plucked from crocuses colored and flavored, and turmeric and galangal rhizomes offered depth of taste. Essential oils distilled from orange, violet, rose, and carnation flowers were added to both sweet and savory foods. Hardened resins from Boswellia trees, called frankincense, and from Pistacia Lentiscus trees, called mastic, were used as perfuming agents in early modern dishes; musk glands from Moschus deer and waxy ambergris residues from whales were used similarly to scent and aromatize.²⁴

Four additional spices—allspice, achiote, chili, and vanilla—also had a place, albeit a carefully mediated one, in the Anglo-Atlantic spice cabinet. All four spices, wild-grown in the Americas, would have been new to Europeans at the onset of colonization. Allspice, Pimenta dioica, often called “Jamaica pepper” in the period, consists of a sun-dried, unripe berry from this tree. Period British recipes refer to “whole Jamaica pepper,” suggesting that the berries were imported and sold whole rather than ground.²⁵ Achiote (Bixa orellana, sometimes called annatto) is a shrub which produces spiky pods, each containing a few dozen achiote fruits and seeds, which are used to flavor foods and also to produce a bright red dye or pigment.²⁶ References to achiote in British recipe books are relatively uncommon, although the spice is included in some ingredient lists for foods like chocolate; Penelope [Jephson] Patrick’s c. 1671–1675 manuscript recipe for chocolate called for “two Drachms of Achiote beaten & searsed [strained or sieved].”²⁷ Chili peppers, or Capsicum plants, feature bright fruits that range in color, including green, yellow, orange, red, and purple.²⁸ The seeds and the fruits of this plant are edible, and both were used to flavor foods and drinks in the early modern period. Capsicum plants prefer warmer climates, and so it is likely that when British people consumed chilis, they did so by importing them from the Americas or from European countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, or Hungary, where they were very popular and quickly became central to the diets of many. But there are a few references to fresh chilis in British recipe books, as in one anonymous 17th–18th century manuscript volume, which called for “1 ounce of fresh Capsicum either green or Red,” in the book’s recipe “To make Indian Lile,” an early form of piccalilli.²⁹

The seeds from vanilla, classified as Vanilla planifolia, a flat-leaved orchid, were also used as a spice.³⁰ These climbing or vine orchids produce light yellow-green flowers, which in the early modern period could only be pollinated by insects—it was not until the 19th century that Edmond Albius, at the time enslaved on French-colonized Réunion, discovered how to pollinate vanilla by hand—and these pollinated flowers, in turn, develop into long seed pods. When mature, the vanilla pods are cut, carefully dried, and cured. Early modern British recipe books do mention vanilla, sometimes spelled “vanillos,” “vynillas,” or “bynillas,” typically with reference to the whole pods. But some manuscripts described methods of preserving or extracting the tiny, flavorful seeds from vanilla pods; the manuscript recipe book compiled by the Grenville [or Granville] family included instructions in Spanish “to enhance and preserve vanillas [Para mejorar y conseruar Vynillas],” which called for the pods to be peeled and soaked in sweet almond oil. Readers were then told to remove the pods, to sear and seal them by running a hot thimble along their length, and to use these pods alongside the now-flavored vanilla oil.³¹

Although American spices like allspice, achiote, chili, and vanilla were readily adopted in many European-Atlantic spaces, and, notably, in many other global spaces as well, they were slower to catch on in Anglo-Atlantic ones, where they were treated with confusion and sometimes hostility. For British consumers, spices offered the opportunity to enrich, brighten, and add nuance to food; but they also, dangerously, carried the imagined potential to injure and harm the human body.

Balanced Bodies: Culinary and Medical Uses of Food and Spice

When women and men in the Anglo-Atlantic world incorporated spices into their food, they did so with careful attention not just to taste but to health and wellness. Early modern people believed that the things they brought into their bodies via food and drink had a direct and powerful connection to the functioning, character, behavior, and well-being of their physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual selves.

Prevailing early modern European medical opinion held that a human’s health was shaped by the “naturals,” substances originating in the body, such as the elements, faculties, humors, and spirits; the “nonnaturals,” substances originating outside of and effecting the body, such as air, emotions, food and drink, motion/rest, repletion/evacuation, and sleep/waking; and the “unnaturals,” illnesses. Food and drink, as nonnaturals which had distinctive qualities, could change a person’s ability to function and thrive.³² These distinctive qualities of food and drink were structured around Galenic ideas about the four humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. All living things were imagined as having different proportions of these humors, and these differentiations helped to determine their character, for blood was characterized as hot and wet, black bile as cold and dry, yellow bile as hot and dry, and phlegm as cold and wet. In figure 6, these designations are mapped out onto a modern diagram of the human body. A healthy and well body was, it was believed, a balanced one, with appropriate levels of naturals like humors, elements, spirits, and faculties, nourished and nurtured by an equipoise of nonnaturals. Of course, not all bodies were alike. People had different levels of humors according to gender—infamously, women were imagined as “wetter,” with more phlegm, and “colder,” with more black bile—and according to age, with younger people imagined as hotter and wetter than were older ones.

Open in new tab

Figure 6. Humors and the body. Early modern people believed that the human body was influenced by overlapping qualities like elements, qualities, humors, seasons, and age.

Source: Airbrush by Lois Hague, 1991, The four elements, four qualities, four humors, four seasons, and four ages of man, Wellcome Collection.

Spices, along with other types of food and drink, were also given humoral designations. Most of the spices used widely in the Anglo-Atlantic were imagined as hot and dry, according to degrees, with the first degree being the mildest. This was true of pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. In his iconic 1636 book The Herball: or, General Historie of Plantes, early modern botanist John Gerard categorized cinnamon as “dry and astringent”³³; while ginger “heateth and drieth in the third degree”³⁴; cloves similarly were “hot and dry in the third degree”³⁵; and nutmeg was “hot and dry in the second degree compleat, and somewhat astringent.”³⁶

When European physicians, dieticians, and botanists encountered spices with origins in the Americas, they slotted them into many of the same categories. Gerard described sassafras (American deciduous trees, family Lauraceae, often used in medicines in the period) as “hot and dry in the second degree; the rinde [bark] is hotter, for that it entreth into the third degree of heate and drynesse.”³⁷ Some plants were, for Gerard, confusing due to his unfamiliarity with them; on American achiote, he wrote that “there is not any thing set downe as touching the temperature and vertues.”³⁸ But Gerard was definitive about capsicum, which he imagined as hottest of all. Chili peppers were, Gerard claimed, “extreame hot and dry even in the fourth degree.”³⁹

While European medical philosophies played dominant and dominating roles in shaping ideas about spices as well as in justifying European acts of invasion and settlement, they were certainly not the only knowledge systems at work in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Spices and health were imagined differently in American and African diasporic medical and culinary traditions. Among the Mexica, spices mixed into chocolate, including achiote and capsicum, offered a multisensory experience, described as stimulating, delightful, and invigorating to the body.⁴⁰ On the early modern Gold Coast of West Africa, everyday illnesses were treated by drawing upon plants, including spice plants, which were thought to help and cure physical difficulties. Grains of paradise (classified as Aframomum melegueta), a spice wild-grown in West Africa, was used widely by Black women and men for both culinary and medical purposes. Pepper and palm oil cleansed and healed wounds and infections caused by worms which burrowed into the skin. Capsicum chiles, introduced to the African continent by European colonizers, were widely adopted by Black women and men for food as well as medicine.⁴¹

Across different Atlantic traditions, spices were imagined to have the power to change or alter human constitutions. Spices could temper and warm; they could lift up body and soul; they possessed the power to heal. But too many spices, in overly high quantities, or used in the wrong manner, could threaten the wellness, wholeness, and equilibrium of the early modern body.

Global Pictures: Origins, Conditions of Harvesting and Shipping, and Importation

A diverse and flavorful range of spices were well-integrated into European diets, including British ones, well before the start of the early modern period. For hundreds of years, European women and men had accessed and purchased spices externally, via historic, complex trading networks created by and for people in Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa, the western Indian Ocean, and the eastern Mediterranean. Europeans worked on the margins of these Asian, African, and Indian Ocean networks, purchasing spices from traders and merchants who had more direct access, but European demand for spices outstripped this supply. At the start of the early modern period, European women and men were dependent upon these external networks; by its end, they controlled many of them.

Europeans achieved control over the global spice trade through violence and destruction. The world’s largest spice markets included the Malabar Coast on the western side of the India, Sri Lanka to the southeast of India, the Maluku Islands in the eastern part of Indonesia, and Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, all of which were crucial waypoints for spices.⁴² In the Americas, Indigenous people had gathered, grown, and used flavors derived from achiote, allspice, capsicum, and vanilla for millennia, and in cities like Tenochtitlan or among communities like the Pueblo, these goods were traded widely.⁴³ The spices grown in the Americas and those grown in Africa and Asia could not thrive in most European climates.

When Europeans gained the maritime technologies which enabled them to undertake global voyages, they fought viciously to gain permanent footholds in the spice trade, using many different means—including enslavement, military conflict, legal wrangling, strategic partnerships, political intrigue, and targeted murder and assassination—in order to secure these networks for themselves.⁴⁴ Britain’s capacity to undertake Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean voyages was much more limited than many of its European counterparts, and so for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, British merchants and traders continued to access spices by proxy. Purchasing nutmeg from the Dutch, cinnamon and cloves from the Portuguese, and chilis from the Spanish did give Britons ready access to spices throughout the early modern period, but it also meant that these spices were heavily taxed. Like cane sugar, spices were more widely available in early modern Britain than they had been in the past. But high taxes, complex trading restrictions, and labor-intensive production insured that spice prices remained relatively high, and they were affordable mainly to elite and middling-sort women and men.⁴⁵

Europeans acted as a disruptive force to nearly all links in the early modern spice supply chain. On the Malabar Coast, for example, many local systems of farms, markets, and trade—including local piracy—continued to operate regardless of which European colonial presence was in power.⁴⁶ This meant that families engaged in growing pepper, making clove confections, or selling ginger root could continue to practice their trade and to pass down knowledge within traditional community structures. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and eventually British presence in Malabar markets caused financial fluctuations and strains that would have been challenging for local farmers and merchants to navigate, and even the visibility of Europeans at market stalls and in city streets would have had the capacity to be disruptive and distracting.⁴⁷ In places like colonial Mexico, local farming and marketing practices would have faced fundamental challenges by institutions such as Spain’s encomienda system; while American spice plants like achiote, allspice, chili, and vanilla continued to be grown widely, their pathways to market would have been shaped by enslavement and other forms of forced and coerced labor.⁴⁸ Spices were planted, tended, and harvested under conditions of colonialism.

Once spices were harvested, they would have been packed into wooden boxes and barrels for transport by ships. Held belowdecks on sailing vessels for up to three months for trans-Atlantic voyages, and six months for trans-Pacific ones, even the most carefully wrapped and packaged spices would have risked water damage, crushing, and extreme temperatures, as well as absorption of smells and compounds from the rest of the cargo.⁴⁹ Spices bound for European markets would have shared cargo space with foodstuffs like rice, sugar, cacao, and grain; dyestuffs like indigo, achiote, and cochineal; fibers and fabric like cotton, calico, and silk; art, jewels, and housewares like porcelain, wood, and pearls; and medicinal ingredients and compounds like sassafras, cinchona, and snakeroot. And although the scents of some of these products might have been relatively mild, others—such as indigo—were described as notoriously terrible in that period.⁵⁰ It is possible that many spices arrived in British ports looking, smelling, and tasting very differently than they had at their points of origin.

These conditions were exacerbated by the timing and process of importation. Because British people lacked direct access to spices for much of the period, they would have received them on secondary transports from rival European countries, which meant even more time on ships. Some spices were seized as prizes of war; when British ships attacked Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch vessels during acts of piracy and privateering, they frequently seized their cargoes during maritime battles. The image in figure 7 illustrates just how dangerous storms could be for early modern ships and their cargoes. These boxes and barrels would have arrived in Britain cracked, broken, waterlogged, and reeking of gunpowder. Their damaged spices would still, however, have been considered valuable and would have been auctioned off to the highest bidder, a testament to poor British supply as well as high British demand.⁵¹ Cargoes of spices would have faced inevitable delays even if they did arrive in British ports relatively unscathed. Imported goods had to be checked and taxed, and contemporary letters written by merchants and importers are full of complaints about long wait times at customs offices and poor warehousing conditions for cargoes. Customers living in British colonial markets faced tertiary marketing systems; all trade goods like spices, regardless of their place of origin, were supposed to go through the metropole.⁵² A quill of cinnamon destined for a British American family living in Boston, for example, might have been grown and harvested in Sri Lanka, but it would then have faced six months on a ship to Portugal; reshipment across the English Channel; holding, taxation, and wholesale in London; reshipment across the Atlantic for two to three months; wholesale, unpacking, and marketing in the British Americas; and then final arrival at a kitchen in Massachusetts.

Open in new tab

Figure 7. Ship at sea. Spices were transported long distances by ship, and these vessels were often subjected to storms, damage, piracy, and shipwreck.

Source: Etching by Claude Lorrain, c. 1635–1640, A storm at sea, with a sailing ship being wrecked on rocks, Wellcome Collection.

Of course not all spices went through legal channels. Because European trade systems were so complicated and so heavily taxed, some consumers purchased pirated or black market spices. Smuggling networks between continental Europe and Britain were well-established by the early modern period, and they continued to be used for all sorts of consumable goods, especially luxury goods.⁵³ In the wider Atlantic world, piracy grew rapidly over the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and pirates as well as privateers moved goods between and among the colonies claimed by different European powers. Smugglers and pirates would purchase or steal alcohol, spices, silk, and porcelain—anything that had high import duties—and sneak these goods by boat for direct sale or barter to contacts ashore, enabling both parties to avoid paying duties.⁵⁴ When high taxes were not a problem, boycotts and disrupted supply lines were. The British crown and government spent much of the early modern period at war with the Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and during times of war, piracy and smuggling thrived.

Spices and other foods were also smuggled into British colonies in complex acts of survival, resilience, cultural preservation, and self-care. As scholars like Judith Carney have argued, Black women and men who were kidnapped into British systems of slavery hid and concealed edible seeds and grains in their hair and clothing when they were forced to travel.⁵⁵ These seeds and grains enabled Black communities to grow food shortly after arrival, and thus helped them to ensure a more ready and self-controlled source of sustenance. It also enabled them to preserve, protect, and nurture the flavors and foodways of their family and homeland, whether those origins were in Madagascar, Senegambia, Benin, or Sierra Leone. Foods wild-grown on the African continent, like yams, millet, and rice, traveled with Black women and men around the Black Atlantic diaspora; it is entirely possible that cottonseed, coffee, cubeb, Ashanti and Guinea pepper, peppermint, and sesame made similar journeys.

Old and New Flavors: Established Traditions and Novel Dishes

For women and men living in the Anglo-American world, spices were at once familiar and new. Foods featuring the most popular spices had long been incorporated into some of the most iconic and traditional dishes in the metropole. One of the spiciest examples of this was gingerbread, a confection made with spices, a sweetener, and different kinds of starches, grains, or flours, including oats, wheat flour, and breadcrumbs, often depending on regional preference. In the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, gingerbread was sweetened with honey; by the 17th and 18th centuries, with the growth of colonial Caribbean sugar manufactories and the simultaneous growth of the slave trade, gingerbread recipes began to substitute sugar cane-based sweeteners such as sugar, molasses, and treacle. Gingerbread, ginger cake, ginger biscuits, ginger snaps, and ginger nuts were all popular treats in the period and were often served at fairs or on holidays. Above all else, early modern gingerbread was spicy, scented, and flavored with ginger, saffron, cinnamon, and pepper.⁵⁶ It was imagined by early modern British people as a celebratory treat but also a beloved and familiar one.

Perhaps in part because of the wider availability, if not the significantly lower prices, of spices in the early modern period, these flavorings were used not just in traditional recipes but simultaneously in novel, unusual, and experimental ones. When 17th- and 18th-century British cooks and chefs adapted, adopted, and appropriated recipes, they very often added more spices and more spice blends. The example of “pickled mango” offers just one such adaptation.⁵⁷ Pickled mango is a dish that appears with frequency in British and British American early modern recipe books, both print and manuscript. But when these recipes are read closely, it becomes immediately clear that very few of them actually call for mango fruits (Mangifera indica), instead substituting a variety of produce commonly grown in early modern Britain, including melons, cucumbers, quinces, and even walnuts. For Anglo-Americans, pickled mango was an entirely mango-free dish, heavily spiced with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sometimes chiles.

These substitutions seem strange and even amusing, but they were not a result of metropolitan people being unknowledgeable about “real” mangoes. Accounts of Mangifera indica, originally wild-grown in South and Southeast Asia, began circulating in Britain as early as the 16th century. In figure 8, a period drawing of a mango shows the interior of the fruit as well as a close view of its leaves. Mangoes were grown in British colonies in the Caribbean, and fresh mango fruits were occasionally sold in places like London, although their condition after months aboard ship might have been quite poor. Mangifera indica was difficult to cultivate in Britain, and it was not widely grown there in the period, but early modern British people probably understood what a mango was, and they could have recognized one, at least in theory if not due to extensive personal experience.

Open in new tab

Figure 8. Mangoes. Anglo-Americans would have been familiar with the shape, size, and look of mango fruits and mango trees; images of mangoes circulated widely in Europe the 17th and 18th centuries.

Source: Colored line engraving, Mango (Mangifera indica L.): fruiting tree, leaves, fruit, flower, seed and cross-section of seed, Wellcome Collection.

Whether it was made of cucumbers or walnuts, each batch of British pickled mango would have tasted fairly similar: like spices. British pickled mango was not a direct copy of South and Southeast Asian pickled mango, although recipe books did sometimes use phrases like “after the fashion” or “in imitation” or “like mango,” to describe their adapted versions of the dish. In South and Southeast Asia, where mangoes had been pickled for centuries, this dish was made by preserving mangoes with salt and vinegar and flavoring them with garlic; more elaborate South and Southeast Asian pickled mangoes also called for cilantro, ginger, lime, mint, mustard, and turmeric. But when British people made pickled mango, they flavored the dish with a much wider range of spices, including long pepper, black pepper, cloves, mace, nutmegs, horseradish, and sometimes capsicum chili. South and Southeast Asian pickled mango would have tasted like sharp ginger and garlic, fresh lime and mint, earthy mustard and turmeric. British pickled mango would have tasted more like gingerbread, with a horseradish and chili kick.

British recipe books, dietaries, and botanical treatises do not explain why British people decided to make pickled mango in this way. Clues to these adaptations and additions may lie in the ways that early modern British people, and early modern Europeans in general, approached the creation of another adapted dish, chocolate. As Marcy Norton has argued so persuasively in her article “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” when the chocolate drink was brought into European diets, it was changed and altered.⁵⁸ Without ready access to the plant and flower blends used in making chocolate in Mesoamerica (including xochinacaztli, likened to black pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg; mecaxóchitl, likened to anise; and tlixochitl, known in the European tradition as vanilla), Europeans made chocolate with spices to which they had ready access and long familiarity, like cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace. They also added achiote, allspice, vanilla, and capsicum chiles, all wild-grown in the Americas and part of Mesoamerican chocolate traditions. This, Norton shows, offers concrete evidence of the ways that European colonizers worked to maintain food traditions they had learned about and adopted in the Americas—at least, as best as they were able.

But the full range of spiced additives that British consumers included in chocolate is worth a bit of additional consideration. In her article “The Introduction of Chocolate into England” (2013), Kate Loveman has identified a 17th-century British chocolate recipe, associated with the Earl of Sandwich and Charles II, which, like Spanish recipes, called for allspice, aniseed, capsicum, cardamom, cinnamon, and vanilla to flavor the chocolate; however, this recipe also included animal-derived flavorings such as ambergris, civet, and musk.⁵⁹ The historic image of musk deer in figure 9 illustrates the animals from which musk was derived. Nor was the Earl of Sandwich and/or Charles II’s recipe for chocolate the only early modern British chocolate recipe to call for animal-derived flavors. Penelope [Jephson] Patrick’s c. 1671–1675 manuscript recipe “To make Chocolate,” similarly called for allspice, achiote, aniseed, cinnamon, long pepper, nutmeg, and vanilla, and then added musk and ambergris, “as you like the taste.”⁶⁰ And the c. 1640–c. 1750 Granville family manuscript recipe book contained a recipe for “Mr Leonard Wilkes Receat for Good Chocolate,” obtained in “Cadiz 4^th October 1665” and called for cinnamon and vanilla but then encouraged English-speaking readers to add musk, “if you please.”⁶¹ In addition to a full range of spices, it can be seen that early modern British chocolate very often contained animal-derived flavorings as an addition.

Open in new tab

Figure 9. Musk-deer. Musk was derived from the glands of the musk-deer and was highly prized in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it was added to foods and to perfumes alike.

Source: Colored lithograph, Two musk-deer hiding under bushes, Wellcome Collection.

While the wider ranges of spices used by Europeans in chocolate, including allspice, aniseed, cardamom, cinnamon, long pepper, and nutmeg, may have been deployed in strategic attempts to replicate or mimic spicy Mesoamerican chocolate, the frequent inclusions of animal-derived flavorings to British chocolate recipes are more challenging to understand. These substances had a distinctive profile, one that was appealing to most early modern people. The flavors of ambergris, civet, and musk are notoriously tricky to describe, with modern approximations including earth, perfume, potpourri, deodorant, menthol, medicine, and soap, all of which, notably, are not routinely consumed as food. People who have tried ambergris or musk sometimes say it has a simultaneous smell and taste, with multisensory effects on the palate and the sinuses.⁶² It is not known precisely how early modern ambergris and musk might have smell-tasted, but it is known that early modern people imagined it as a strong, potent sense—attention-grabbing and notable. The British inclusion of ambergris and musk alongside the many other spices in early modern chocolate might, then, have meant a subtle change to its flavor profile, perhaps an adaptation or addition rather than an approximation. Like pickled mango, early modern British chocolate was markedly different and spicier—in the sense that it contained more layers of spice flavors—than the food from which it originally derived.

The two examples of pickled mango and chocolate offer ranges of possibilities in terms of understanding attitudes to spices in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world. It is known that women and men in this world used a lot of spices and that they enjoyed the layered, complex effect of combining many kinds of spices together. Including spice blends in food may have been prompted by conspicuous consumption as a way of displaying the reach, power, advantage, and commercial availability of a globalizing empire. Spice blends might have been created out of necessity when key ingredients were not obtainable. British women and men might also have spiced their foods because they were trying to mimic or approximate the aesthetics of the people and places they encountered in acts of invasion and colonization. Early modern spice blends may have been a product of household experimentation and investigation, and they may have been prompted by desires for pleasure and experience. Spice use surely was driven by all these factors at different times and in different situations; no matter their motivations, early modern women and men used spice blends to navigate foodways both old and new, to create spaces where they might preserve certain traditions while also deploying novel ones.

Nutritive and Poisonous: Popular and Unpopular Food and Spice

At once familiar and foreign, spices were challenging foods for early modern people. They were expensive. They came from distant places. They seemed to affect the body in unpredictable or even dangerous ways. They were distinctive and strong-tasting. And they were seen as both delicious and disgusting, inciting appetite and desire as frequently as they did revulsion and displeasure.

In Anglo-American traditions, dietitians, philosophers, herbalists, and physicians were full of warnings about the consequences of eating too many spices, especially about eating chili. They believed that consumption of fourth-degree or third-degree hot foods in high quantities or with frequency could cause injury or sickness. Some were concerned with the physical reactions associated with consumption of capsaicin—the chemical compound that makes chili peppers seem spicy—and they described worriedly that the sneezing, watering eyes, and coughing people experienced after eating a lot of chilis might be a sign of serious bodily distress.⁶³ Others were concerned that the peppers might be poisonous, noting that small or immature capsicum fruits resembled nightshade berries. John Gerard even claimed that capsicum had “a malicious qualitie,” and that he had heard that “it killeth dogs.”⁶⁴ Others were more concerned about the long-term effects that capsicum consumption might have on young, growing bodies. Food commentator and idiosyncratic temperance advocate Thomas Tryon criticized people in the British metropole for feeding children foods that were “so enriched with West and East-India Ingredients, that is, with Sugar and Spices,” and warned that overconsumption of spices could lead to “Obstructions and Stoppages” as well as “Languishing Diseases” and even “Botches, Boils, and various sorts of Leprous Diseases.”⁶⁵

While Tryon’s views on capsicum were in the extreme, he was not alone in his worries about the meanings and influence of spices on white Anglo-American bodies. Chilis, as well as vanilla, achiote, and allspice, were readily integrated into diets in Spain and Portugal. On the Iberian Peninsula as well as in parts of Italy and in eastern Europe, capsicum chilis were imagined not only as nutritive and healthful but as aesthetically pleasing and as offering a cheaper, more practical, and more economical way for lower-status people to flavor their food. In the image in figure 10 of capsicum, the fruit’s red hue indicates that this particular type of pepper is now ripe. People in metropolitan Britain were slower to try American-grown spices; in 1697 English mariner and enslaver William Dampier did write positively about vanilla, which he called “vinello,” and even about capsicum chiles, which he called “Guinea-pepper” or “Cod-pepper,” in his A New Voyage Round the World.⁶⁶ But printed and manuscript recipe books written by and for British audiences show only a slow acceptance and integration of achiote, allspice, vanilla, and especially chili, and they typically appear in recipes already associated with colonial foodways, such as piccalilli, chocolate, and ketchup. When spices like chili were consumed at all, British commentators frequently described them as belonging to the foodways of Black and Indigenous women and men.⁶⁷

Open in new tab

Figure 10. Capsicum. Capsicum chiles were wild-grown in the Americas but were transplanted and shared around the world during acts of invasion, colonization, and settlement.

Source: Photograph © Sue Snell, Capsicum Annuum (Chilli [sic] pepper), Wellcome Collection.

There is good evidence that capsicum in particular was part of the shape and contour of Black Atlantic foodways. By reading, as Marisa Fuentes has urged, “along the bias grain” of books written by 17th- and 18th-century white commentators like John Evelyn, William Dampier, Hans Sloane, and enslaver James Knight, evidence can be seen that Black and Indigenous women and men living in the Caribbean and in North and South America pickled capsicum chiles with salt, pepper, and either vinegar or lime juice, and that they used these hot pickled peppers—either whole, chopped, or in a sauce form—to season and enrich their food.⁶⁸ William Dampier observed Black communities in the Caribbean putting lime-pickled capsicum chiles on fire-roasted plantains, and he admired this dish, saying “they eat very pleasant so.”⁶⁹ And Jessica B. Harris has traced the histories of capsicum and other spices to pepperpot, a spicy and spice-filled soup or stew with West African origins, which was made and sold by Black food workers in many North American cities, including most famously in Philadelphia.⁷⁰

That some spices were associated, either imaginatively or practically, with the work of empire has been valuably explored by scholars, particularly those studying colonization and critical race studies. In her deeply-researched Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008) Marcy Norton showed how Spanish colonizers adopted and adapted to the American spices frequently included in foods like chocolate, working to reconcile their racialized American origins with their popularity and desirability in metropolitan Europe.⁷¹ Rebecca Earle’s The Body of the Conquistador (2012) built on these findings to demonstrate how Spanish colonizers associated constructions of race with these foods, showing that when white European women and men consumed American foodstuffs, they believed they also risked changing their physical, emotional, and even racial compositions.⁷² In Anglo-American contexts, this work on has been advanced immeasurably by literary critics, including Jennifer Park, in her article “Discandying Cleopatra” (2016), exploring ideas about race, food preservation, and exoticism⁷³; and Gitanjali Shahani, whose book Tasting Difference (2020) delineates English ideas and ideologies about certain foods—and, notably, about spices—arguing that these constituted a “conflicted discourse of fear and desire,” in which English readers and thinkers were both obsessed and repulsed by global spices.⁷⁴

There is no single way to understand why certain spices were either popular or unpopular with early modern Anglo-American people. For Black and Indigenous women and men, spices were used widely and enthusiastically, with fiery spices in particular offering nuance, interest, and liveliness to dishes. For white British commentators, especially those who had little firsthand or personal experience with American foodways, spices could be difficult to swallow and savor, either literally or figuratively. Spices were widely eaten in other European countries, but British physicians and herbalists warned that too many spices could injure or harm the body and that some might even be poisonous. For many Anglo-Americans, eating and experiencing spices was an experiment in reconciling suspicion with reverence and apprehension with delight.

Conclusions

British Atlantic foodways were anything but bland. On both sides of the ocean, women and men packed dishes full of flavoring agents that altered the taste and relish of their food. Mainly derived from the bark, seeds, roots, and fibers of tropical plants but also from plant resins, fruits, and oils and even procured from animal glands and by-products, spices graced nearly every dish that was placed on the British-American table. And while most Anglo-Americans relied upon their favorite flavor profile—the early modern “spice blend” of pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and mace—they also experimented with new combinations, varieties, and quantities of spices, adding them to dishes both sweet and savory through processes of trial and error. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ubiquity and popularity of these goods, spices were not always easy to obtain. Prices remained high, importation and exportation processes were complex, and the spice trade was marked by invasion, characterized by violence and displacement, and facilitated by enslavement. For some people in the British Atlantic world, spices were a source of income, power, and prestige. For others, they offered a method of resistance, a symbol of possibility, and a taste of home.