A quick history of spices

The spices in your kitchen cupboard that you bought in the supermarket came there all the way from the Middle and far East of ancient times. Read on for a quick and fascinating history of common spices.

Humans have been using spices to enhance food for generations. The lucrative trade in pepper and other spices began as early as 1450 BC, when Egypt imported cinnamon.

From Malaysia and Indonesia, traders carried the spice across 7,240 kilometres of open sea in canoes to Madagascar, then up the coast of East Africa to the Red Sea.

The first and most important of the oriental spices to reach Europe was "Indian pepper," known in Greece by 431 BC.
In ancient and medieval times 450 grams of peppercorns could literally be worth its weight in gold.
The Romans introduced pepper to wealthy Britons, along with ginger, named from the Sanskrit sringavera, or "horn-root."
Saffron, the yellow stamens of Crocus sativa, grew wild in Italy. The Romans left the work of harvesting it to the Greeks, who had been cultivating the flower since ancient times.
Such refined tastes lapsed after the fall of Rome until the Arabs planted zafaran in Spain in the eighth century AD.

Nutmeg and mace were the last major spices to reach Europe, probably in the 12th century.

Strategically positioned between the East and West, Venice grew rich from its monopoly of the spice trade. In the late 1400s other European nations set out to find new trade routes. In 1493, the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus landed on Hispaniola, today Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

One local hot seasoning earned praise from Columbus, who described it as a "better spice than our pepper."
The Spanish called it pimiento, the masculine form of pimienta, their name for "black pepper."
In Mexico, where it had been valued since around 6,000 BC, the Aztec word was tchili or chili.
The Portuguese took chili peppers to India in 1525. Until then the Indian kari, or "sauce," was flavoured with cardamom, coriander seeds, turmeric and cumin, and made hot with black pepper.

Dried chillies later became the basis of another hot sauce. Tabasco is a Native American word meaning "land where the soil is humid," a good description of south Louisiana, where the seasoning was invented by the American Edmund McIlhenny in 1868.

The spices that enhance your cooking and baking each have a colourful history to add to their flavour! Think of this next time you add nutmeg to your cake mix or pepper to your chilli!

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