Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey

By Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family’s history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade.

Traveling along four prominent trade routes—the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate)—Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict—Arabs and Jews—have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520956957

Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary Paul Nabhan is an Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, MacArthur "genius" award winner, and ethnobotanist of Arab-American descent. His food and farming books include Food from the Radical Center, Where Our Food Comes From, and the forthcoming Jesus for Farmers and Fishers.

Book preview

THE S. MARK TAPER FOUNDATION

IMPRINT IN JEWISH STUDIES

BY THIS ENDOWMENT

THE S. MARK TAPER FOUNDATION SUPPORTS

THE APPRECIATION AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE RICHNESS AND DIVERSITY OF JEWISH LIFE AND CULTURE

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Jewish Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the S. Mark Taper Foundation.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE

Darra Goldstein, Editor

Cumin, Camels,

and Caravans

A Spice Odyssey

Gary Paul Nabhan

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley•Los Angeles•London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2014 by Gary Paul Nabhan

Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley

Indexer: Thérèse Shere

Cartographer: Paul Mirocha

Printer and binder: Maple Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nabhan, Gary Paul.

Cumin, camels, and caravans : a spice odyssey / Gary Paul Nabhan.

pagescm. — (California studies in food and culture ; 45)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26720-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95695-7 (e-book)

1. Spice trade.2. Spice trade—History.I. Title.II. Series: California studies in food and culture ; 45.

HD9210.A2N332014

382’.456645—dc23

2013032714

Manufactured in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

To three mentors who showed me how the Old World and New World are deeply connected culturally: Agnese Haury, Juan Estevan Arellano, and Michael Bonine

Contents

List of Recipes

List of Spice Boxes

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Origin of Species

1.Aromas Emanating from the Driest of Places

2.Caravans Leaving Arabia Felix

3.Uncovering Hidden Outposts in the Desert

4.Omanis Rocking the Cradle of Civilization

5.Mecca and the Migrations of Muslim and Jewish Traders

6.Merging the Spice Routes with the Silk Roads

7.The Flourishing of Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Iberia

8.The Crumbling of Convivencia and the Rise of Transnational Guilds

9.Building Bridges between Continents and Cultures

10.Navigating the Maritime Silk Roads from China to Africa

11.Vasco da Gama Mastering the Game of Globalization

12.Crossing the Drawbridge over the Eastern Ocean

Epilogue: Culinary Imperialism and Its Alternatives

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Recipes

The recipes in this book open a window onto the people and communities who made and still make these foods. Even the varied names of the dishes give some sense of the paths they have taken over the centuries. The recipes also record the cultural diffusion of spices as they pass from one place to another: a chicken mole that fuses elements of the Persian, Arabic, and Moorish kitchens; tharīd, a bread-and-broth soup from the Arabian Peninsula that gave rise to açorda soup in Portugal, gazpacho in Spain, and perhaps even sopa de tortilla in Mexico; and mansaf, one of the oldest recipes in the world, a Mesopotamian stew seasoned with a mix of cumin, turmeric, and cassia cinnamon, which is still being made today.

Harira • Carne de Cordero en la Olla: Lamb and Garbanzo Bean Stew

Marak Minj: Green Lentil Curry with Frankincense, Ginger, and Omani Spices

Dates Kneaded with Locusts and Spices

Nabātiyyāt: Nabataean Chicken, Pasta, and Garbanzo Bean Stew

Maqlay Samak: Fried Fish on a Bed of Coconut Rice

Tharīd • Gazpacho al-Andalus: Soup with Unleavened Bread

Oshi Plov: Persian-Tajik Rice Pilaf with Quince

Berenjena con Acelguilla: Sephardic Eggplant with Swiss Chard

Sibāgh: Abbasid and Andalusian Dipping Sauce

Zalābiya • Shaqima • Buñuelos: Deep-Fried Cardamom-Spiced Fritters Soaked in Saffron Syrup

Dajaj Gdra bil-Lawz: Spiced Chicken in Almond Sauce

Pollo en Mole Verde de Pepita: Spiced Chicken in Green Pumpkin Seed Sauce

Prehistoric Mansaf: Kid and Lamb Stew with Yogurt, Root Crops, and Herbs

Spice Boxes

The spices profiled in this book embrace an eclectic assortment of herbs, incenses, gums, fruits, musks, and teas. Some are esoteric, such as frankincense and mastic, while others are familiar and beloved, like cumin and chocolate. Some might come as a surprise, since they are not widely thought of as spices, like pomegranate, caper, and Damascus rose. But what all of these have in common is that they were in high demand throughout history as flavorings, fragrances, and pharmaceuticals. Because many aromatics were specific to certain geographic areas, they had to be traded for rather than produced locally. These valuable commodities gave their names to the roads by which they were traded, which became collectively known as the Spice Routes. The spice profiles give an overview of the vernacular names, folk uses, medicinal applications, and local lore surrounding each of these global travelers.

Mastic

Frankincense

Turmeric

Cardamom

Saffron

Cassia cinnamon

Capers

Sesame

Cloves

Damascus rose • Rose of Castile

Melegueta pepper • Grains of Paradise

Musk

Ginger

Pomegranate

Sumac

Anise

Coriander • Cilantro

Star anise

Sichuan pepper

Tuocha pu-erh • Camel’s breath tea

Cumin

Chile peppers

Annatto • Achiote

Allspice • Jamaica pepper

Vanilla

Chocolate

Illustrations

PLATES

1.A selection of spices

2.Frankincense gum oozing from a tree trunk in the nejd of Southern Oman

3.A Yemeni spice trader

4.Depiction of a camel caravan from the Middle Ages

5.Muslim women in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, selling vegetables, fruits, and spices

6.The facades of tombs cut from the rock cliff in Petra, Jordan

7.Ships arriving for trade in the harbors of the South China Sea

8.A stand selling mole preparations at the Flower Festival of San Angel, Mexico City

9.An Arab transformed into a taco vendor at a mobile food stand in Baja California Sur

FIGURES

1.An Omani forester approaches a frankincense tree

2.The al-Balid ruins near Salalah, Oman

3.A dhow near Lamu, Kenya

4.Bahla Fort in Oman

5.An oxen-driven water wheel being used for irrigation

6.Harira stews at Siwa Oasis in Egypt

7.A well in the Negev

8.Ruins of an ancient Omani trading center below the Jabal al-Akhdar plateau

9.Cloves spread out to dry in Zanzibar

10.Salman the Persian meeting merchants from the Quraysh tribe

11.Merchants in Timbuktu

12.Symbols carved above doorways in the Jewish section of Essaouira, Morocco

13.Herbal Viagra in a market in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

14.A camel train in Mongolia

15.Francisco Pradilla Ortiz, The Capitulation of Granada, 1882

16.The eastern part of the Anping Bridge, China

17.Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, China

18.A three-masted junk

19.Vasco da Gama delivering the letter of King Manuel of Portugal to the samuthiri of Calicut

20.The processing of cacao pods in the West Indies

MAPS

1.Spice trails of the Arabian Peninsula and Arabian Sea

2.Spice trails of the Sahara

3.Spice trails of the Desert Silk Roads and Maritime Silk Roads

4.Spice trails of the New World

PLATE 1. Clockwise, from top left: annatto, cardamom, melegueta pepper (also known as grains of paradise), dried frankincense gum, star anise, long pepper, sumac, turmeric, fennel, and coriander. (Photos by Lia Tjandra.)

PLATE 2. Frankincense gum oozing from a tree trunk in the nejd of southern Oman. This fragrant resin, popular as a spice and incense, was one of the most coveted objects in the early global aromatics trade. (Photo by the author.)

PLATE 3. Yemeni spice trader. (iStockphoto.)

PLATE 4. Depiction of a camel caravan from the Middle Ages. (Color lithograph by J. Coin from L’Art arab d’après les monuments du Kaire, 1877. Art and Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

PLATE 5. Muslim women in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, selling local and imported vegetables, fruits, and spices. (Photo by the author.)

PLATE 6. View of the facades of tombs cut from the rock cliff in Petra, Jordan, a Nabataean trade hub that once received tons of spices annually. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002698303 .)

PLATE 7. Ships arriving for trade in the harbors of the South China Sea. (Photo by the author of an exhibit at the Quanzhou Maritime Museum.)

PLATE 8. Stand selling mole preparations from San Pedro Atocpan at the Flower Festival of San Angel, Mexico City, 2009. (Photo by Thelmadatter.)

PLATE 9. The crafty Arab is transformed into a taco vendor at a mobile food stand in the desert oasis of San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Mexico. (Photo by the author.)

Introduction

The Origin of Species: Trading Spices to the Ends of the Earth

Perhaps my lifelong love of aromatics—from allspice to za’atar—served as the genesis of this reflective inquiry. But somewhere along the line, I realized that one could not truly love spices without conceding that their use is never politically, economically, or even culturally neutral. It is impossible to reflect on the significance of aromatics and their history without acknowledging that imperialism, cultural competition and collaboration, religious belief, and social status are embedded in every milligram of cardamom, cinnamon, or cumin.

And so, this book is less the story of any single spice or spice trader and more about the cultural, economic, and political factors that propelled spices across the face of the earth, depleting some species while causing others to proliferate. It is a multilayered narrative that is as much about alchemy as it is about chemistry, cultural history as it is about natural history, and culinary imperialism as it is about transcontinental and multicultural collaboration. In short, the history of the spice trade is an object lesson in how, step by step, globalization has developed and sealed off other formerly prevalent options for business and cross-cultural negotiation among the world’s diverse peoples.

If this story line occasionally strays away from the trajectory that particular incenses, gums, and culinary and medicinal herbs took as they traveled around the world, so be it, for I am ultimately trying to answer a series of much larger questions. When, where, how, and through whose hands did the process of globalization begin? What have we gained and what have we lost by entering into this Faustian bargain? And finally, how has globalization irrevocably changed the human condition? How has that thirteen-letter word come to be perhaps the most pervasive expression of the current cultural tendency to trade a place-based existence for one that is essentially placeless?

I was encouraged to ponder this issue after reading The Dawn of the Homogenocene, a fascinating essay by the deeply thoughtful environmental historian Charles C. Mann.¹ Mann, like another fine contemporary writer, David Quammen, likes to use ecologist Gordon Orians’s term homogenocene, which refers to the present era in geological history, one in which the world’s biota has become blandly uniform in place after place due to recent biological and cultural invasions on every continent. In his essay, Mann suggests that the roots of globalization and homogenization can be traced back to 1493 and the Casa Almirante (Admiral’s House) of Cristóbal Colón (our Christopher Columbus) on the island of Hispaniola.

Indeed, the initiation of the Columbian exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old World and the New World was a bench-mark in the onset of ecological imperialism that not only reshaped life in the Americas but on all other continents as well.² It is a rupturous moment in history that I have elsewhere referred to as the Great Colónoscopy.³

Nevertheless, I believe that while Mann understands and writes eloquently of the socioeconomic and ecological processes associated with globalization, he has grossly erred in dating its onset. So has Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his lovely 1492: The Year Our World Began.⁴ It certainly did not emerge from humanity’s economic endeavors as late as 1493 CE, nor even as late as 1493 BCE. Depending on what we might use to date the earliest evidence of spice (or copper) trade occurring between regions or continents,⁵ Fernández-Armesto, Mann, and I would likely agree that the initial phases of the inexorable process that led toward ever more pervasive globalization occurred at least as early as thirty-five hundred years ago.

I would argue that the same mentalities, skills, and economic drives that led to the colonization of the Americas were already well articulated by the time the inhabitants of the Middle East colonized regions of Africa, Asia, and southwestern Europe. After 1492, they simply extended their base of operations to two other continents, using many of the same entrepreneurial and political strategies employed first to capture transcontinental trade in spices from the New World and then to expand their hegemony over other arenas of economic activity. And although none of us would necessarily grant its invention to an Italian-born immigrant such as Christopher Columbus, I believe that we could agree that Semitic peoples such as Phoenicians, Nabataeans, Arabs, and Jews left legacies of navigation, geographical exploration, culinary imperialism, and globalization that clearly informed Columbus.

For almost anyone who has lived on earth over the last four millennia, it is difficult to imagine a world without extra-local herbs, spices, incenses, infusions, and medicines next to our hearths or in our homes. It is as if their fragrances have always been wafting into the culturally constructed spaces where our saints and sinners, prophets and prodigal sons come together to be healed or to celebrate a communal meal. The aromas of leafy herbs, dried fruits, crushed seeds, ground roots, and droplets of tree gums lodge deeply in our memories. Although we have difficulty verbally describing what distinguishes one fragrance from another, the most memorable of them nevertheless insinuate themselves into the holiest of oral histories and the most sacred of ancient scriptures we have shared as a species.

The words species and spices come from the same roots in Latin, spec (singular) and species (plural), which referred to kinds, forms, or appearances of items within a larger assortment. But according to etymologist Walter W. Skeat, by the time Middle English was in use, spis, spyses, or species more particularly denoted different kinds of aromatic plants or drugs in trade.⁶ Following Skeat, our current usage of the Modern English term species seems to have evolved out of the need to speak collectively of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and saffron, and then to be able to distinguish among them as distinctive aromatics; only later was this sense of species extended to other non-aromatic plants and to animals. Thus, the origin of species as a construct within English may very well be rooted in the economic or aesthetic need to discern various kinds of spices from one another. Spices and our own species have certainly traveled together and shaped one another as far back as our surviving mythic narratives reach.

In the Hebrew scriptures, a Jew named Joseph is sold off to a caravan carrying spices out of Palestine into the ancient Egyptian cities along the Nile. In the Christian scriptures, in the part known as the godspel among Christian speakers of Old English, we hear the good news that three traders of incense came from the East to encounter another Joseph, his young wife, Mary, and their newborn baby, Yeshu, one winter night when the stars were bright. In the Qur’an, we learn that before receiving his call to be the Prophet, Muhammad assisted his uncle Abu Talib and his own first wife, Khadijah, with their spice caravans, riding dromedaries from Mecca to Damascus and Aleppo. They became used to guarding from pirates and competitors their camel-hair bags burgeoning with herbs, dates, frankincense, and other exotic aromatics long enough to sell them for higher prices when they envisioned that such opportunities would soon emerge, leading to our current practice of speculation. A spice speculator was considered a visionary, someone who could anticipate when a new story (or market) was emerging and help to shape it.

Whenever I hear such stories, I come away from them sensing that these visionaries on their spice odysseys were also quite worldly, for they navigated through tangible perils as they crossed barren deserts, war-torn borders, and tumultuous seas. Their stories inevitably retain meaning for us today, for they reveal some of the earliest recorded efforts to race into undiscovered or contested space, to globalize trade, and to forge new fusion cultures and cuisines.

Despite the relevance these tales hold for us, we have been left with little understanding of what it was like to make one’s living trading spices on a daily basis. We have only a few fragments, like those from the eleventh century found among the sacred trash of Arabized Jews in the Cairo Geniza,⁷ which give us a fleeting glimpse into the lives of the tajir, or big-time merchants, who reshaped life in the Mediterranean basin.

I myself have briefly made a meager portion of my living hauling wild chiles and Mexican oregano across the United States–Mexico border, but until recently, I had seldom thought much of my own activity as a trader in relation to the lifelong (and sometimes multigenerational) commitment made by most spice traders. Is cross-cultural trade in aromatics a rarified and inherently risky activity fitting for only a few overly adventurous polyglots? Did most spice traders have the money-thirsty mindset of Marco Polo’s father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo, who left their families for years on end in order to profit from exotic treasures from distant lands? Or were some of these pilgrims spiritually motivated, like those mysterious Magi who allegedly followed stars from one place to the next in search of a new voice on earth?

In most cases, the lens through which we view the historic spice trade has long been obscured by romance and fogged by clichés. Each of us may recall when we first saw those nineteenth-century lithographs or Persian rug designs with scenes depicting merchants arriving at caravansaries within the fortified gates of port towns. There, they would ceremoniously dismount from their dromedaries, which had carried vast quantities of aromatic cargo into souks nearby. Those marketplaces would be crowded with buyers and sellers of spices from the Molucca Islands, Malabar Coast, or Zanzibar and incense that had come across the Horn of Africa or the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula.

Unequivocally, the strongest and most lingering images we have of the spice trade come from the Mediterranean shores of the Middle East, where the Oriental and Occidental worlds met, competed, and intermingled. Turks, Persians, Portuguese, Berbers, Sogdians, Gujaratis, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans have clearly had their hands in spice bags, baskets, and barrels. And yet, it seems that those of the Semitic language family—Arabs and Jews, Phoenicians and Nabataeans—have played peculiarly pivotal roles in the development and control of the global spice trade.

To validate the impression that spice merchants, especially those of Arab and Jewish descent, were among those who played a disproportionately important role in efforts to globalize trade across continents, we must look for evidence beyond the souks clustered at the crossroads of the Middle East. To be sure, Arabs and Jews did not act alone but interacted with Persians, Sogdians, Berbers, Uighurs, Gujaratis, Han Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Dutch at these crossroads. We must go to the ends of the line—to the farthest corners of the earth—where the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real of Chile and Chocolate become no more than rustic footpaths climbing up into the hinterlands.

It is at the ends of these lines that we might truly fathom how the spice trade contributed to today’s globalization and how pervasive the culinary influences of Arabs and Jews have become.

For our immediate purposes, imagine the ends of one line for trading spices to be Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Quanzhou and Xi’an, China, on the east and the montane hinterlands of Taos, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the west. Let us begin in Ulaanbaatar’s precursor, historically known as Yihe Huree (literally Great Camp), which stood not far from where the most far-flung of all Arab contributions to global cuisines was once recorded. From 1328 to 1332 CE, the country from Xi’an northward into Mongolia was ruled by the emperor Tutemur, who suffered chronic health problems during his brief reign. These maladies were severe enough to prompt him to seek dietary advice from a medical doctor who had vast knowledge of medicinal and culinary herbs in use in Persia and Arabia.

The man chosen to be the imperial physician, Hu Szu-hui, was most surely of Hui Muslim ancestry and had widely traveled in Central Asia, Asia Minor, and the Arabian Peninsula before settling in north-central China. Hu Szu-hui encouraged the emperor’s kitchen staff to favor healthful Persian, Arabic, and Turkish recipes heavily laden with certain dried spices that were already becoming popular in China and Mongolia. In essence, he worked with the emperor’s chefs to craft China’s first dietary manual. It was a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep Tutemur, a descendant of Kublai Khan, alive, in good health, and in power for several years longer.

Although the emperor soon died, the Hui doctor’s recipes lived on in a medieval manuscript, Yin-shan cheng-yao, recently translated by food historian Paul Buell and ethnobotanist Eugene Anderson. One of Hu Szu-hui’s recipes curiously resurfaced in a place halfway around the world from where the Hui and Mongolians had traded spices.⁸

At a meeting of ethnobiologists in May 2013, Gene Anderson recounted to me the story of how, while rummaging through used books in a shop in Silver City, New Mexico, he noticed a recipe for lamb stew in a 1939 booklet called Potajes Sabrosos. He showed the recipe to Paul, and they quickly realized that it was nearly identical to a recipe that Hu Szu-hui had left behind in China some seven hundred years earlier—one that Gene and Paul had translated for Yin-shan cheng-yao. Both recipes were for a lamb and garbanzo bean stew. The Spanish version by Cleofas Jaramillo that appeared in Potajes Sabrosos—later translated as The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes⁹—lacked only one ingredient that appeared in the Arabic-Persian stew recorded by Hu Szu-hui. That single missing ingredient was mastic, a gum from a wild pistachio tree relative that was used as a thickening agent in the Mediterranean. Hispanic New Mexicans apparently found their own local surrogates for such gummy thickeners.

The similarities between these two recipes are so uncanny that some sort of cultural diffusion makes more sense to food historians than independent invention does. Had the same core knowledge of what spices to pair with lamb and beans independently diffused to different corners of the earth? How in the name of heaven had the same recipe landed at one end of the line as well as at another halfway around the world, when both of these places were equally remote from the Middle East, the heartland of Arabic and Jewish spice trade?

When Cleofas Jaramillo was a budding folklorist for the Federal Writers’ Project during the Depression, she became intent on collecting recipes and other lore from the villagers of the Rio Arriba watershed of northern New Mexico. Those Spanish speakers pointedly referred to their ancestry as Hispanic, not Mexican, and certainly not as Jewish or Arabic. A few may have known that some of their Spanish-speaking ancestors who had accompanied Hernán Cortés from Spain to Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519 did not want to linger very long in central Mexico, where echoes of the Spanish Inquisition had already begun to reach. They linked their cultural identity to new beginnings in the Rio Arriba in the 1590s, when Gaspar Castaño de Sosa and Juan de Oñate recruited emigrants from Spain to join them in the colonization of the northern highlands now known as New Mexico. It seems that many of the people who joined Oñate and the others for the journey were at first thought to be conversos—newly confirmed Catholics from historically Jewish (or perhaps some former Muslim) families—who had recently fled from Andalusia, the Canary Islands, or Portugal. And yet it may well be that they were conversos in name only, and that they continued to practice their former faiths and associated culinary traditions clandestinely. Although historian Stanley Hordes and sociologist Tomás Atencio have referred to these people as crypto-Jews, their colleague Juan Estevan Arellano has suggested that there may have been crypto-Muslims among the earliest Spanish colonists of New Mexico, as well.

The descendants of these original Spanish-speaking inhabitants still reside in the remote uplands of northern New Mexico, where they remain quick to distinguish themselves from recent Mexican immigrants in language, appearance, and custom. Curiously, among the culinary customs that many of these Hispanos juxtapose with those of more recent immigrants from Mexico is their abhorrence of pork and their predilection for lamb, as well as their breaking of fasts with capirotada (bread pudding) and pan de semita (a bread made with bran, sesame, or nuts, originally unleavened but today also leavened). They do not see such observances practiced among the Spanish-speaking newcomers to the arid, windswept reaches of the Rio Arriba, and for good reason.

We now know that many of the descendants of those original Spanish and Portuguese inhabitants of New Mexico, when genetically fingerprinted, test positive for Semitic roots, Sephardic Jewish, Arabic, or both. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Hordes, Atencio, and Arellano, we are able to confirm that both bloodlines and cultural practices of Semitic communities from the Middle East reached one of their most remote outposts in northern New Mexico during their worldwide diaspora. The crypto-Jews, crypto-Muslims, and true conversos had arrived at the ends of the earth in 1591, less than a hundred years after the Great Colónoscopy of the New World had begun.¹⁰

But let us return to consider that recipe-catching folklorist Cleofas Jaramillo. The surname Jaramillo, like many others in northern New Mexico, such as Robledo, Martinez, Gómez, Oñate, Salas, and Medina, now appears to be one that was commonly attached to Jewish or Muslim families escaping to less populated areas of the Americas to avoid the Mexican Inquisition. Genealogical and historical evidence suggest that among the first sheepherders, garbanzo bean growers, and spice traders in New Mexico were crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims who outwardly behaved as conversos in their Catholic-dominated communities but maintained many of the religious and culinary traditions of Sephardic Jews, Arabs, and Moors within the confines of their homes.

When Cleofas Jaramillo visited with her brother’s neighbors in the Rio Arriba village of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, in 1938, she was ostensibly collecting nineteenth-century Hispanic culinary traditions. But both the direct and indirect roots of their cultural and culinary practices can be traced far deeper than that. The Arabic, Sephardic Jewish, and even Phoenician influences on Spanish cuisines were centuries if not millennia old, perhaps dating back to the twelfth century BCE in Spain. Given the status of historical research during her career, it would not have been possible for Cleofas Jaramillo or anyone else of her upbringing during that era to extricate those Arabic and Sephardic subtleties from other influences on the culinary traditions of New Mexico, Mexico, or even Spain itself.

Perhaps that inextricability is due in part to certain advances in the Spanish culinary arts initiated by the Phoenicians, who arrived in Cádiz, Spain, around 1100 BCE. These arts became even more deeply indebted to Persian and Arabic influences in 822 CE, when an enigmatic figure named Ziryab arrived in Córdoba, Spain. As we will discover later, Ziryab not only revolutionized Spanish farming and cookery but also sent Spanish table manners, seasonal dress, and chamber music on altogether fresh trajectories. Of course, one of his principal contributions to Spanish cuisine was the delicate mixing of rather pungent, aromatic spices in a manner already popular in the courts and kitchens of Damascus and Baghdad.

In the late 1970s in Santa Fe, I had the good fortune to walk down a side street into a marketplace then known as Roybal’s General Store. There, among hundreds of bags and bins of culinary and medicinal spices, I found the same herbs that Cleofas Jaramillo had earlier recorded in her recipes for lamb and garbanzo stew. Roybal’s store reminded me in many ways of the stores that my Lebanese uncles first tended when they arrived in America, for they were much like spice stands in the souks of Lebanon and Syria. Some of the spices there, such as cumin and coriander seeds, had clearly been transplanted from the Mediterranean landscapes of the Middle East and North Africa. But was the Roybal family that ran the store aware that its own roots may have extended back to Ignacio Roybal of Galicia, Spain, who married a crypto-Jew by the name of Francisca Gómez Robledo in Santa Fe in 1694?

A half century after Cleofas Jaramillo recorded a recipe that was a dead ringer for an Arabic or Sephardic Jewish one—and a quarter century after I first bought Middle Eastern spices in Roybal’s General Store—many New Mexican Hispanics began to acknowledge a secret long held within their families: that they had maintained Jewish or Muslim customs, including food taboos and formulas for mixing spices, sometimes without being able to put a name on them, in an unbroken chain that reached across centuries.

It was at the end of that line—one that had reached across the Atlantic Ocean into the New World—that the pervasiveness of the Arab and Jewish spice-trading legacy had been revealed to me. This discovery does not diminish the culinary contributions made by many other cultures along the line, and it may in fact enhance their significance.

It is a long way from Muscat, Mecca, Mar’ib, Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, or Alexandria to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and Xi’an and Quanzhou in China at one end and Arroyo Hondo, Santa Fe, and Taos, New Mexico, on the other. And yet, around the time of the 9/11 disasters in 2001, I decided that I needed to trace the story of how Arabs and Jews had both collaborated and competed for centuries in the spice trade from one end of the earth to the other. I sensed that such a journey would tell me much about who we have been, where we have gone wrong (or stayed steady), and what we have become through the process of globalization. If that were correct, my journey would also shed light on the cryptic and unheralded influences now found in virtually every cuisine on the planet. Some of those influences clearly delighted those who shared recipes and ingredients with one another, but such exchanges rarely occurred on a level playing field; most were ushered in through the processes of culinary imperialism.

Although aromatic herbs, gummy exudates from thorny trees, and roots extracted from dry desert soils are among this story’s many characters, the story line is more about imperialist politics and the hegemonic economics of cross-cultural exchange than it is about plants. It is perhaps a parable about the origins and consequences of globalization and a morality play that may help us to discern the difference between what Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini calls virtuous globalization and its more capitalistic, conniving, and crass counterparts.

Of course, most spices embody the essence of mobility—high value in its most featherweight forms—and so this tale is inherently a cross-cultural odyssey, one that will take us to the far reaches of the earth.

And yet, there is another kind of moral to this story, one that forces us to recognize that for centuries, if not millennia, many communities of Arabs and Jews worked collaboratively to move spices all the way across their known worlds. This is not to pretend that they did not compete economically or suffer atrocities at the hands of each other in certain places at certain times, but it also does not ignore long periods of the coexistence that Américo Castro first labeled convivencia in the late 1940s. Although this term has been used in a rather romantic and naïve manner in the last decade by some social scientists, what has become clear is that the comingling of Jewish and Muslim cultural traditions did occur peaceably at times, while at other times it was an uneasy if not ugly truce at best.¹¹ In a historical moment when both Arab Muslims and Sephardic Jews are among the most maligned peoples in the world, and the subject of a rising frequency of hate crimes, it would do well for the rest of humanity to acknowledge our collective debt to these peoples, however complex and conflicted that legacy may be. (Whether or not you like globalization is an altogether different issue; perhaps for us, it is the equivalent of asking a fish whether it likes water.) More important, perhaps, it is time that we remember the elements of convivencia, such as cross-cultural civility, that showed what humans are capable of, rather than assuming that we must be locked into the kinds of violence that later tore at the once-shared fabric of their lives. Not only in Andalusia but also in historic Fez, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Bukhara, Turpan, Chang’an (Xi’an), and Zayton (Quanzhou), such convivencia was for centuries the custom rather than the exception. Was cooperation among most spice traders along a five-thousand-mile caravan route once the norm, or was subtle or not-so-subtle coercion and domination always there? Why do the descendants of those same traders today live in a world where hatred and violence keep the holiest of cities, Jerusalem, a divided, desperate shadow of what it once was?

Although I will not give you direct answers to those questions at the moment, I will give you a hint: if you come far enough with me along the spice trail that opens up in the next few pages, the answer will come wafting toward you like the purifying aroma of burning frankincense.

But where will I be going? I will be traveling sections of the spice roads that played pivotal historical roles in shaping the processes of globalization that now affect each one of us every day of our lives. In particular, I will be visiting the historically significant souks, mercados, bazaars, and harbors where these processes were first field-tested before being applied and extended to countless other landscapes. I will stay in caravansaries, pensiones, hostels, hotels, and haciendas where landmark negotiations have been made and debts have been paid, so that I might listen to the ways in which spicers trade across currencies and cultures, with or without a shared language. I will relate the essence of these conversations back to you, as I have captured them in field journals or on the edges of paper napkins. Over the course of twelve years, these inquiries have taken me to markets in Afghanistan, Bali, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Portugal, Spain, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

To be sure, many of the modes of spice commerce have changed over the centuries. Recently, much of the great market of Aleppo, Syria, has been destroyed by civil war, while others, such as the Souk al-Attarin in the Old City of Jerusalem, have been made into touristic facades of their former selves. To understand what once went on in these places, it has been necessary to dip into private archives, public libraries, and nearby museums. In some cases, traces of the former activities of these historic markets still linger around the corner, and there ancient fragrances and flavors, the modes of cooperation and elements of conflict or colonization, may still prevail.

And so, this narrative will weave at least two strands together again and again: the ancient practices that can be discerned from history, archaeology, ethnobotany, and linguistics of how spices were gathered, traded, and diffused into various cuisines and my own descriptions that bear witness to the remnants of those practices that remain in place. In fact, many of those customs retrace my own Arab ancestors’ participation in the spice trade or in cross-cultural cooperation and conflict. Yes, both personal and scholarly motives have driven me to undertake these journeys; I have wanted to decipher my own family’s historical role in developing the processes of

Reviews for Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

[quondame · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There is a lot of interesting anecdotes about spices, their history, and uses, but this is not at all a rigorous study, but a very idiosyncratic view which excludes about the same number of facts as it includes and includes complete speculation as fact.