Jack Turner's Spice for Christmas

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Spice: The History of Temptation (Knopf 2004, Vintage 2005) is a wonderfully informative and entertaining book, whose enjoyment, like taste in general, depends very much on the education of your palate. The author, Jack Turner, was born in Sydney, Australia, studied Classics at Melbourne and then International Relations as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and now resides in Geneva, Switzerland. This short biography alone should warn you to expect erudition and world savvy. Turner's appeal, though it stretches broadly to anyone interested in human society, targets today's youth, a text-messaging bunch who are all-to-often largely ignorant of great text. His aim with this book seems to be to lead them to read History and Literature by putting them in context in, well, spicey fashion. With Aussies as a whole at least as anti-intellectual as Yanks, Turner is careful to introduce Spice with a picture of himself as just a young bloke, stuck in grade school and wondering about the nonsenese spewed at him concerning the Age of Exploration: Parrots flew overhead while jaunty, armor-clad gents negotiated on the beaches of the newfound lands, asking the natives if they would convert to Christianity and whether by chance they had any spice. (p. xi). With this and other sarcasm, he sets the tone for the book, carefully subsituting more and more wonder for the wisecracks. He acknowledges how hard it might be to understand why the commonplace spices of today might have made men risk their lives and livelihoods to search for them around the world. He then alludes to the power spices once held, vestiges of which survive in modern culture as "exotic" and "forbidden." As he embarks with us on a journey back in history, he promises us: don't worry, kids -- "spices have always been sexy." The book seems determined to keep reader interest throughout, if only judging by chapter and section titles with thier double- and triple-entendres based on the expressions of today, like: The Spice Race The Spice of Life The Spice of Love Hot Stuff Spice Girls Holy Smoke Odors of Sanctity The text is riddled with allurements, including spice-coded erotic literature that dates from Ancient Greece -- such as Aristophanes' play The Clouds, in which a newly wed wife, approaching her nuptial bed, "positively oozed perfume and saffron, not to mention sex, money, sex, overeating, and, well, sex" (p. 206). Two of the greatest services Turner provides to all readers are to clear up misconceptions and to show how little human taste has changed. Both are evident in his review of medieval cookery. Although spice could be and was used to hide the taste of spoiling food and drink, "medieval food was far fresher than the food of today" (p. 108). Besides, he asks with common sense, "why was good, expensive spices on poor, cheap meat? (p. 109). Instead, he argues, exotic spices were used to relieve something else: the constant taste of salt in preserved foods. Yet, he notes: The impression of unmitigated spiciness of medieval cuisine can largely be attributed to the highly spiced seasonings developed to offset (and relieve the tedium of) the cold, fishy season of Lent. Medically, of course, the greater part of this was nonsense. (Though who are we to laugh? Modern dietary fads can be just as bizarre -- and we have fewer excuses for our gullibility.) (p. 125) Such a short compendium is bound to fall short, and Spice seems to do so in at least two areas, one smaller, one larger. As a small critique, Turner seems rather unfamiliar with the rise of Haute Cuisine: further research might have helped him more fully explain the rise and fall of spices in food recipes, starting perhaps with Anne Willan's Great Cooks and Their Recipes: From Taillevent to Escoffier. Still, he does manage to conntect past with present with rather vicious relish: The noveau gourmet who savors the cross-cultural mix-and-match of fusion cuisine is not so far removed from the self-consciously exoticized aesthetic of the medieval nobleman" (p. 309). The greater shortcoming in Spice is that it tastes weaker to the more experienced palate. For the scholarly, this well researched book contains few footnotes to detail the societies of Rome and Medieval Europe or to document sources for some of the specific fallacies it claims to clear up. Worse, great literary and historical figures pop in and out so often, reading Spice at moments feels like so much TV channel surfing (though perhaps even this familiar experience will attract today's youth). Like a chef's tasting menu, you never really taste enough of one thing to truly enjoy it. Nevertheless, the more experienced palate may still rely upon the reminisces conjured up by Turner's delightful tasting menu: perhaps Turner was counting on "bigger kids" to hoist themselves up and over to the bookshelf to look up what they are missing -- knowing that the kids of today might not be so inclined (if they even knew where to go). Overall, as a result of his efforts, Turner's Spice has become a well selling, popular book -- the Food in History of our generation. In fact, Turner seems to have combined Reay Tanahill's Book-of-the-Month Club favorite with the companion Sex in History and then distilled them together down to Spice. This is a book stuffed with fun human details to last a thousand dinner parties, perhaps even better as a gift for college kids. Previous articles: [complete Cookbook Reviews] Book details: Publisher Amazon.com Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, cookbooks, history, spice, exploration --> back to superchefblog