Detail of Japanese striped tomatoes from the Album Benary (1879).
The staple crops were closely bound up with the founding of civilizations, but while they may feed and sustain us and satisfy our hunger, alone they do not always fulfil our cravings for flavour, something to make the ordinary special. It is this additive quality of plants and their products that is explored in Taste.
Pre-eminent is the gorgeous spice saffron, redolent of the expensive and the exclusive. This of course has much to do with availability. One man’s ordinary is another’s exotica. From India and the Spice Islands came pepper, nutmeg and cloves; the desire for these condiments drove trade and some of the great voyages of exploration. In contrast the alliums may seem a rather ordinary part of the kitchen garden. Garlic, onion, shallots and leeks each have their own cocktail of pungent sulphur compounds, leeks being the most delicately flavoured. Garlic is one of today’s superfoods, but its smell made it unattractive and there was a distinct class bias. Its consumption was encouraged for Roman slaves and soldiers, who were thought to benefit from its strengthening powers.
The Romans also held asparagus in high esteem. They did much to bring this plant into cultivation and valued its medicinal properties. When diet was more about the qualities of ingredients and less about food groups such as starch and proteins, it was prized in the Renaissance for its subtlety and easy digestibility. Brassicas are often considered humble greens, but what astounding versatility in these highly nutritious species and cultivars. The ancestors of today’s cabbages (and from them the cauliflowers, sprouts, broccolis and kohlrabi) were headless, the heads appearing first in plants raised in northern Europe. At last, a key plant from the cold north. In China a plethora of oriental leaves belong to the same family.
Left Watercolour of a black pepper plant (Piper nigrum) painted or collected in India by Mrs Janet Hutton in the early 19th century.
Right An onion plant, including flower, from La Botanique (1774) by the husband and wife team Nicolas-François Regnault and Geneviève de Nangis-Regnault.
Beer, of various kinds, often seen as an indulgence or a danger today, was an important part of the daily diet of labourers in early civilizations. It provided a source of clean water, calories and pleasurable intoxication, but it didn’t keep. Enter the hop. However, it was only in the 8th or 9th century in Europe that this aphrodisiac herb was added as one of several flavourings, and its preservative qualities subsequently determined.
Two tastes originated in the New World, but became so essential in their adoptive homes that they now help define their cuisines. Chilli peppers were embraced as soon as the Iberians carried these Mesoamerican delicacies home and onwards to their colonies to the east. And tomatoes, with their sweet, sharp fruits, had no equivalent in the Mediterranean cooking that they have come to dominate. Initial suspicion gave way to great affection for the ‘love apple’ from the 17th century.
Crocus sativus
The Spice of Conspicuous Consumption
His floure doth first rise out of the ground nakedly.
John Gerard, 1636
Strands of dried saffron from the pharmacy, though they are identical in all respects to those found in the spice jar. Cilician doctors recommended saffron to the Egyptian queen Cleopatra to ensure her complexion remained unblemished.
Crocus sativus is a small, rather unprepossessing corm that gives rise to delicate purple flowers with distinctive large, dark orange, almost red, dangling stigmas. These stigmas – plant parts otherwise rarely used – produce one of the world’s most expensive food commodities: the spice known as saffron. Since its incorporation into diet, dyestuff, mythology and medicine, golden-yellow saffron has been highly desired. From the saffron-dyed robes of the Buddhists to the saffron-strewn streets of ancient Rome greeting emperor Nero, its association with the sacred and the elite is long-standing. Yet, used whole or ground, its pungent taste, insistent smell and strong colour mean only a little is needed.
In its Persian homeland saffron enhanced traditional rice dishes such as pilaf and shola. The Phoenicians traded it along the seaways of the Mediterranean, taking it as far as Spain in the west, even if the Muslims reintroduced it during the heyday of their empire there. The Mughals expanded its use in India. Crusading knights and pious pilgrims reputedly brought corms back from the Holy Land, though there’s no evidence for this method of introduction. However it arrived, saffron began to be grown in Italy, France and Germany. Walden in eastern England prefixed Saffron to its name as large-scale production took hold in this wool town.
The medieval cooks of Europe regarded saffron as an essential part of the courtly aesthetic, which ostentatiously used food as a display of wealth. Fashions changed in aristocratic households, but saffron remained a key ingredient of Provençal bouillabaisse and Milanese risotto. Swedish lussekatter bread made on the feast of Santa Lucia testified to its rarified integration into the store cupboard there. High cost and scarcity invited adulteration. Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) flower parts could be used to mix in with whole stigmas, while the powdered root of turmeric (Curcuma longa) would substitute for the ground spice. The Germans moved to suppress this sleight of hand in the 15th century – taking it seriously enough to make it a capital offence, punishable by burning or burying alive.
The cost is due to the methods of harvesting and processing, which are still unmechanized. Each plant has three flowers, opening on successive days; each bloom has three of the precious stigmas, the long, string-like female parts that provide the glorious spice. After the whole flower has been cut, the stigmas – joined at the base – must be separated and dried. It takes 70,000 flowers to yield 1 lb (0.45 kg) of dried saffron, and these 70,000 flowers take up approximately a tenth of an acre (404 m2). Picking of the flowers is best done before sunrise, when the moisture content is at its optimum. In the saffron fields of the world’s largest producer, Iran, harvest occurs in October and November over a 20-day period of intense activity.
Both drug and condiment, saffron was prescribed to cut thick, unhealthy humours such as those thought to congest the lungs in cases of consumption. Similarly, it was included in recipes where its subtle quality would balance the effects of other ingredients and counteract the production of sluggish humours in the healthy body.
Myristica fragrans, Syzygium aromaticum, Piper nigrum
The isles Of Ternate and Tidore whence merchants bring Ther spicie drugs.
John Milton, 1667
Fortunes were made from black pepper. On 16 November 1665 the diarist Samuel Pepys described the spices in the hold of an East Indiaman as the ‘greatest wealth [lying] in confusion that a man can see in the world’. It seems almost possible to smell the ‘Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees; whole rooms full.’
A flowering and fruiting stem of the black pepper plant (Piper nigrum). The detail shows the brightly coloured ripe berry, the dried black peppercorn and, with the coat removed, the white peppercorn.
So important were spices to early modern Europe that the indigenous sources of two of them, nutmeg and cloves, were called the Spice Islands. There were even Spice Wars, as Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Britain vied for control of these valuable commodities once direct sea routes to the east were discovered. Traditional land routes had allowed spices to be laboriously transported to Europe even in antiquity, and early Mediterranean cultures enjoyed cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and pepper. But they were expensive because they were costly to transport, generally first by boat using the monsoon tides of the Indian Ocean to the ports of the Arabian peninsula, and then by land and sea to final destinations. Nutmeg could be had in Rome in the 1st century AD, although no one was quite sure where the precious spice came from.
In fact, the nutmeg tree was indigenous to only a few islands in an archipelago east of present-day Indonesia, the Banda, or Spice Islands. This evergreen tree is unique among spice-bearing plants in that it produces two spices as well as a fruit. Nutmeg is the prized kernel of the fruit and the even more expensive mace is the thin covering around it. The fruit itself was eaten, often candied in honey or sugar syrup. The laden tree with its golden fruit was described in the 16th century as ‘the loveliest sight in the world’. Nutmeg was long traded in the Orient, valued in China and India, and in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) in the Byzantine period. As well as flavouring food it was also used to sweeten ale and to keep clothes fresh smelling. In China it was thought to have medicinal properties, and Europeans also believed it alleviated a number of ailments, including bubonic plague, heightening demand.
After the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama opened a direct ocean route to the Orient in the late 15th century, spices from the area became more readily available. Even though the distance of sailing around the tip of Africa was twice as long as the various land-and-sea spice routes of antiquity, it was cheaper to carry them by water (and pay duty only once). Ships could call at the Banda Islands to take on nutmeg, and then at nearby Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas for cloves, the dried unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum. Having loaded their holds with the dried spices, which kept well, they could return (shipwreck or piracy permitting) with a cargo worth a fortune. Cloves were widely sought after in Europe, to keep the breath fresh as well as for flavouring food and for use in medicines. There is probably no spice that has not been used medicinally.
A flowering sprig, fruit, nut and seed coat or aril of the nutmeg. On its home soil on the Banda Islands in Indonesia the trees bear blossoms and golden fruit all year round. The fruit splits to reveal the vivid scarlet aril surrounding the nut, and this dries to the familiar yellow-brown, brittle mace of the kitchen.
The profits to be made in trade in the two spices were so great that Spain, and then the Netherlands and England, competed with Portugal for the monopoly. Spain was briefly successful before the Dutch East India Company (VOC), formed in 1602, established a strong presence on the Spice Islands. The East India Company of London, which received its royal charter in 1600, was only moderately successful in its attempts to supplant the Dutch, although the small island of Run, one of the nutmeg group, became (briefly) England’s first overseas possession. The English were not able to hold on to it, and eventually the two nations reached an agreement that gave the Dutch their Spice Islands monopoly, but obtained New Amsterdam (and therefore Manhattan and other Dutch possessions in North America) for the British.
The English East India Company subsequently concentrated on India, where the French and Portuguese were already involved, and which was the home of another major internationally traded spice – pepper (Piper nigrum). This vine grows naturally in south India and was cultivated for local consumption and export to other parts of Asia and to Europe. As a vine it needs support: wild plants often hitched up a coconut tree, but posts were employed in plantations. The berries were harvested in early autumn and then dried, which coincided with the monsoon winds that aided the homeward journey of European ships.
The aromatic leaves and flowers of the clove tree. It is the unexpanded flower that is traded as the spice, but the purple berries that form after flowering can be preserved in sugar and eaten as a post-prandial digestive.
Black pepper from the Hortus Malabaricus (‘Garden of Malabar’, 1678–93). Conceived and overseen by the naturalist and colonial administrator Hendrik van Rheede of the Dutch East India Company, these innovative volumes recorded and illustrated over 700 plants of the Malabar region and were in effect the first flora of Asia. The Latin text was augmented with plant names in local languages – Kankani, Arabic and Malayalam.
In Classical times the Greeks and Romans prized pepper, and knew both black and white versions. White pepper is merely the black form picked when riper and with the outer layer removed. Roman authors complained that their balance of payments was in danger, since gold was the only commodity they had to pay for the large quantities of pepper they consumed. The Greeks also used what was called ‘long pepper’ (Piper longum), a hotter version that was always more expensive and which they mistakenly assumed came from the same plant. Long pepper, indigenous to northwest India, was still esteemed in Europe until the 17th century, and even two centuries later, cooks using Mrs Beeton’s classic cookbook (1861) would have needed it to hand. It lost its standing in Western cooking with the greater availability of the American chilli pepper, which provided the same heat and could be cultivated in Europe.
Black pepper was the most widely traded spice, and worldwide demand seemed insatiable. Even in the Middle Ages it was fairly readily available in Europe – if at a price, given the long transport involved. Menus often mention it, and its medicinal properties were as highly prized as its enhancement of food. It was thought to reduce phlegm, warm the body and manage flatulence.
A natural necklace using nutmegs and cloves as ‘beads’, part of the rich holdings of the Kew Economic Botany Collection.
Control of the production of all three spices became as important as their transport and trade. The Dutch were ruthless in the Spice Islands, at one point destroying the entire crop of nutmeg trees on Run to retain their monopoly, unfortunately thereby also reducing genetic variability. Botanical espionage is a long-standing practice around the world, and both nutmeg and cloves were smuggled out of their home islands for transplant elsewhere. Pepper plants had already been exported from India to Indonesia before the beginning of the Christian era, which meant that European ships could add pepper to their consignments of nutmeg and cloves after the sea route to the region had been established.
Although nutmeg, cloves and pepper all require a warm climate, globalization and demand have ensured that they are now grown commercially in many countries. The more widely a spice is grown, and the greater number of powers controlling its production, the more difficult it is to regulate its price on the world markets. Grenada in the West Indies has rivalled Indonesia in nutmeg production, and there are pepper plantations in Malaysia and Brazil as well as India. Cloves were introduced into Zanzibar in the 20th century, but a fungal disease largely wiped out the industry there, leaving Indonesia, the spice’s original home, as the main world producer as well as consumer, where ground cloves are mixed with tobacco in cigarettes.
Foliage, flowers and fruit of the nutmeg (Myristica fragrans). Although indigenous to the Moluccas and Banda Islands in the southern Pacific, this group was painted in Jamaica by Marianne North. Among the islands of the West Indies, Grenada – ‘Isle of Spice’ – dominated production (second only to Indonesia) until Hurricane Ivan (2004) devastated the island’s plantations.
Capsicum spp.
[The Aztecs] have one [plant], like a pepper, as a condiment which they call chilli, and they never eat anything without it.
‘The Anonymous Conqueror’, Narrative of Some Things of New Spain, 16th century
Capsicum baccatum was probably domesticated in Bolivia, although its natural range stretches from Peru to Brazil. It is known as aji in South America, where the subtle bouquet and distinct flavours of the cultivated varieties are much valued.
Few plants pack such a potent punch as the fruit of the medium-sized bushes Capsicum annuum or the even hotter C. frutescens, the chilli (also ‘chili’ or ‘chile’) used in Tabasco sauce. They owe their heat to an alkaloid called capsaicin, which probably evolved, as did many other plant alkaloids, as a protection against predators. It is most concentrated around the seeds; this is why removing the core and seeds of the chilli takes away much of the heat. Since capsaicin is not soluble in water, drinking it does not help relieve the hot sensation.
C. annuum was found in the wild in Mesoamerica and was prized by the Aztecs. The stews of the milpa fields (maize, beans, squash) would have been tastier with it, and it was added to chocolate. Chillis (the word is from the Aztec language Nahuatl) were picked from the wild as early as about 7000 BC and were cultivated by about 4000 BC. By the time of the Spanish conquest they came in various sizes, shapes, colours and degrees of hotness, and had also spread to North America and the Caribbean islands. Columbus encountered them on his first visit to the New World; their use by the Taíno people of Santo Domingo confirmed his mistaken belief that chillis were the pepper (Piper nigrum) of the East Indies and that he had found the western route to those islands. Although the two are unrelated, the word ‘pepper’ has stuck as one common name of Capsicum, especially for the larger, sweeter varieties.
Columbus’ physician Diego Álvarez Chanca took chillis back with him to Spain, where they were immediately popular with a few. They proved easy to cultivate there, much to the alarm of merchants of the lucrative trade in black pepper. European sailors soon spread the new taste sensation to Asia, Africa and Brazil. Chillis quickly became so important in Indian cooking that it is hard to realize that they are a relatively recent addition. The Renaissance naturalist Leonhart Fuchs even assumed they were native to India.
As with most new additions to the diet, chillis were also evaluated as a medicine. They were regarded, like black pepper, as hot and dry, and so useful against cold, wet diseases. The chilli never really established itself as a mainstay of medical therapeutics, however, and it is as a condiment that the plant is cultivated today, with Mexico and India the major producers. More than a dozen major varieties are available, with dramatic differences in flavour and hotness. Most modern ones are derived from C. annuum, but the seeds of C. frutescens are used to make cayenne pepper. Paprika (the word is also derived from Piper) is a mainstay of Hungarian cooking, and also comes in a variety of degrees of heat and shades of sweetness.
Something of the rich variety of shapes, sizes and colours of cultivated capsicums can be seen here. Their heat is measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHU) on a scale devised by the American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. Bell peppers score 0 SHU as they have no capsaicin, while long red cayenne scores 30,000–50,000 SHU. The range reflects the interaction of varietal genetics and the circumstances under which the plant is grown.
In addition to C. annuum and C. frutescens, other species of capsicum have local importance, including C. chinense, which is popular in the West Indies. Despite its name, chinense did not come from China, nor is the dominant species, annuum, an annual. When Carl Linnaeus named it in the 18th century, he was responding to its European behaviour; in tropical countries, capsicums are perennials.
Allium spp.
And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 4, Scene 2
Cut and consume the familiar kitchen alliums and the result is distinctive. Onions (Allium cepa var. cepa), shallots (A. cepa var. aggregatum; A. oschaninii) and leeks (A. porrum) may induce tears, and all, as well as garlic (A. sativum), can leave a lingering smell on the breath, in sweat and in urine. These well-known effects are due to the high concentration of organic sulphur compounds found in many of the 800-plus species of the genus Allium. Sulphur is the ancient stuff of hellfire and brimstone, a fitting evocation of the alliums’ potent qualities.
Intact plant tissues bind the sulphur into stable compounds (cysteine sulphoxides), but these become volatile (primarily as thiosulphinates) when the cells are compromised, for instance by cutting or chewing, and the sulphur comes into contact with an enzyme called alliinase. With onions, which make us cry the most, the volatile sulphur dissolves into sulphuric acid in our eyes’ natural moisture. These processes have evolved to protect the plants from predation. We might not like the tears, but the sharp, biting tang of the raw and the wonderfully sweet mellow flavour of cooked alliums have been appreciated for millennia as upfront vegetables and rounded-out background seasonings.
Alliums are northern hemisphere plants (only two species are native to the southern hemisphere). The diversity of these edible plants, with species stretching from the dry subtropics to just below the Arctic Circle, afforded plenty of opportunities for foragers. The greatest number is concentrated from the Mediterranean basin through Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same region that was probably home to the main domesticated garden plants. East Asia also provided some cultivars including bunching onions (A. fistulosum) and Chinese chives (A. ramosum).
Onions are thought to have been cultivated first in Central Asia, though the wild form is not now known. Leeks look likely to have come from the area of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Kurrat leeks (A. kurrat) were cropped for their leaves by the 3rd millennium BC and the stemmed forms (A. porrum) followed. The garden origins of garlic in Central Asia date back to around 3000 BC. Nomadic tribes probably then took garlic into Mesopotamia and India. As with onions, the dry bulbs were easy to carry and even simpler to plant – individual cloves can be gently inserted straight into the ground.
A range of varieties of European onion (Allium cepa), characterized by skin colour, form and season of readiness.
Left and right Leek and garlic (Allium porrum and A. sativum), both from Joseph Jacob Plenck’s Icones Plantarum Medicinalium. This Austrian doctor and dermatologist compiled seven fabulous illustrated volumes of medicinal plants (1788–92); an eighth was added after his death. The inclusion of these familiar kitchen vegetables reminds us of their long medicinal history, as well as the overlap between these categories.
The Egyptians likened the layers of the onion bulb to the concentric spheres of their cosmos. This may have been why they placed onions within the body cavities of mummies, offered them on altars and swore their oaths on them. Egyptian attitudes towards alliums presaged much of their later culinary history. Garlic, onions and leeks were part of the daily fare of Egyptian workers, and according to the Bible the Israelites while being led by Moses through the wilderness from bondage in Egypt lamented the alliums of their captivity. Consumption was not restricted to the lower classes, but it is said that garlic breath would lead to exclusion from the Egyptian temple by its priests. Alliums – especially garlic – were both delicious and polluting.
The Greeks and Romans also appreciated garlic for its strengthening qualities. It was the daily food for their labourers, athletes, sailors and soldiers, who needed vitality and stamina. For the same reason it was fed to fighting cocks before they entered the pit. Garlic was widely employed both externally and internally as a medicament against a range of illnesses. In part this was due to its demonstrable anti-microbial properties, although it would not have been understood in this way at the time. Garlic’s easy availability, cheapness and broad application led the physician Galen (129–c. 210) to refer to it as ‘theriaca rusticorum’, the poor man’s cure-all, an appellation that lasted as long as Galenic humoral medicine.
Like the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans worried about tainted breath, a concern shared even by the immortals – Cybele, an ancient mother goddess, refused those with garlic-breath entrance to her temple. Brahmins, the Hindu priestly caste, also eschewed garlic. Overly stimulating, the smell distracted from prayerful contemplation and smacked of the inferiors who consumed it.
The Romans took their culinary alliums with them into other parts of Europe to join the chives (A. schoenoprasum) that grew wild there. The cultivars held their place in the subsequent monastery and physic gardens. Their popularity in elite cultures – whose recipes appear much earlier in cookery books – was tempered once again by concern over the smell, and fears about the sometimes violent heating action on the digestion. Garlic, as ever, was the main culprit. Ladies, or those who courted them, should permit only the merest hint of garlic said the 17th-century diarist John Evelyn, by gently rubbing round the dish with a single clove, or rely upon the safer, gentler onion. Peasants couldn’t afford to be fussy, but perhaps they had the last laugh.
Those peasant dishes of the Mediterranean diet, heavily based on garlic and onions, have turned out to be healthy as well as delicious. Alliums contain carbohydrates, or sugars, which provide the savoury sweetness of French onion soup or red onion marmalade. In addition to simple sugars, onions, garlic, shallots and leeks contain relatively large amounts of more complex carbohydrates (fructooligosaccharides). Indigestible in the small intestine (humans lack the necessary enzyme), these pass on to the colon where they are fermented by the healthy gut bacteria, which they encourage to the detriment of harmful ones, and thus function as a probiotic food. Added to their potential in defending against blood clots, help in managing diabetes and possibly preventing cancers, alliums have a great deal to offer within those pungent, encircling layers.
Brassica spp.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
Of cabbages and kings…’
Lewis Carroll, 1872
Fields of rapeseed oil plants colour the agricultural landscape a bright yellow. Varieties bred for consumption have low levels of erucic acid and bitter-tasting glucosinolate. Before these advances, the oil was a leading lubricant for steam engines. Suitably modified, it may make a comeback as an environmentally friendly lubricant in motor engines.
Ornamental but absolutely edible varieties of kale or borecole (loose- and open-headed) from Album Benary (1879). The central one is a palm-tree kale, also known as cavolo nero, which has become fashionable again as an heirloom variety.
The humble brassica is a large family. We exploit the leafy greens of cabbages and kales, as well as other parts in the case of broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi (all varieties of B. oleracea), and the roots of turnips and swedes (B. rapa subsp. rapa and B. napus subsp. rapifera) – but all lack glamour. Perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. These vegetables are often associated with bitterness in taste, sulphurous odours in cooking and flatulence. Yet the Germans savour their sauerkrauts (pickled cabbage); for the Russians shchi (cabbage soup) is a national dish; and the Dutch salad coleslaw now accompanies American fast-food wherever it appears. In East Asia brassicas are also prized – the pickle kimch’i is an essential component of a Korean meal and in recent years numerous Chinese leaves and bok choi have moved with the wok into Western kitchens. Mustard, from brassica seeds (B. nigra), is an ancient condiment of the Mediterranean lands. Today, improved rapeseed (B. napus subsp. oleifera) is one of the world’s most important oilseed crops and its residues a much-used animal feed. As well as their distinctive taste, brassicas can be defined by their bountiful diversity. Uniquely, all parts of the plant have been developed for use over time, from the age of prehistoric foraging to industrial agriculture.
Brassicas’ variability, exploited many times during the history of domestication, is due to the complex history of their genome. Over the twenty million years since the early progenitor of today’s brassicas appeared, a series of hybridization or gene duplication events has had the effect of multiplying the number of chromosomes, so that by five million years ago brassicas had four copies in their genome. Some four million years ago assorted species of brassica (including the edible B. oleracea, B. rapa and B. nigra) diverged from their common ancestor. A final natural hybridization between members of the species occurred just 2,000 years ago, when B. napus, the oilseed plant with its huge genome, joined the mix.
Early domestication of a brassica (B. rapa) may have been for the plant’s oily seeds, although the leaves and swollen roots were also available. Purposeful cultivation from around 2000 BC occurred over a wide area, from the Mediterranean to India, when plants appeared as weeds in the land prepared for cereals. After the oil came the leaves of B. oleracea. Wild brassicas were native to Europe’s Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. The early cultivated plants, similar to modern kales or collard greens and lacking pronounced heads, were widely enjoyed by the Celts, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians.
Cabbage was held in high regard as a medicinal plant; even the urine of cabbage eaters, applied externally, had a place in the materia medica according to Cato the Elder, writing in the 2nd century BC. The Romans took their stalky garden varieties with them to lands they conquered, but densely headed cabbages, with leaves tightly wrapped around the stalk to form a heart, were developed in northern Europe. Pliny wrote about, but probably didn’t eat them in the 1st century AD; they don’t grow well in hot climates and were not widespread in Europe before the Middle Ages.
Inevitably the garden plants continued to interbreed with wild and feral populations as people began to fiddle around with different parts of the plants and utilize their inherent variability. Broccolis gave rise to cauliflowers perhaps in southern Italy via a Sicilian calabrese-type plant, although Cyprus is mentioned as a possible origin too. Both varieties exploit the growth of flowering tissues in the plant, holding it at the bud stage when the nutrients (which would be used for the flowers) are abundant. The fattened stem of kohlrabi was first reported in 16th-century Germany. There are hints in the historical record about sprouts from their eponymous city of Brussels in the 13th century. Perhaps the most divisive of the brassicas in the taste stakes, sprouts reputedly appeared on the menu of a 15th-century wedding feast at the Burgundian court, making the transition to Christmas dinner essential in some European countries in the 19th century, where fresh (and preserved) cabbage dishes were already popular. The role in winter celebrations served as a reminder that these greens could stand through the coldest part of the year.
Despite their prominence today, brassicas were not the most important leafy vegetables in the early husbandry of northern China. This role was filled by the perennial mallow, Malva sylvestris, its slippery, mucilaginous properties compensating for its lack of vegetable oils. Oil extraction techniques advanced, the mallow became forgotten, while the range of brassica cultivars that could provide food all the year round increased, and these were then spread around East Asia and crossed with local varieties.
An ‘earliest solid blood red Erfurt’ cabbage. Erfurt, in the Thuringian basin of central Germany, is renowned for its long history of growing vegetables.
A bitter taste often indicates the presence of a toxic substance in a plant. Our taste buds pick this up, although not nearly as well as our hominin ancestors must have done before the use of fire for cooking. It is still the bitterness of brassicas that their haters object to. Brassicas are rich in sulphur-containing glucosinolates. When the plant tissues are damaged by cutting, cooking or interaction with human gut flora, an enzyme breaks them down, and volatile sulphur is released – hence the smells – and mustard oils or isothiocynates are produced. These serve the plant by deterring predators and give the pungency. They may also be responsible for the cancer-preventing properties currently being investigated. Mothers may well have been right all along – you should eat your greens.
Left A herbarium specimen of black mustard seed (Brassica nigra). Used as a condiment in Europe and Asia, its seeds were also part of an early weights system in the Indus valley.
Right Brassica chinensis or Aburana (the Japanese name for rapeseed) from The Useful Plants of Japan (1895). Produced by the Agricultural Society of Japan, this volume informed its readers that as well as using the oil for cooking and lamps, the flower buds and leaves could be boiled or preserved in salt.
Asparagus officinalis
Of all the garden plants asparagus is the one that requires the most delicate attention.
Pliny, 1st century AD
‘Garden sperage’ from an illustrated edition of Gerard’s Herball (1633). The immature stems of other foraged plants, such as wild or cultivated hops (Humulus lupulus), were also eaten, but asparagus had long set the ideal in spring shoots.
Cultivated asparagus has been a delicacy since it was first taken into the garden. During its season this perennial vegetable requires harvesting daily by hand. Each plant has an eight-week cutting window after which it must be allowed to grow undisturbed. Establishing a bed takes three or four years, when little can be cut; it can remain productive for up to twenty years, generating green or purple spears depending on variety (white ones are blanched by earthing up). But asparagus is land hungry, likes choice soils, benefits from regular manuring and must be weeded carefully to avoid damaging the underground crowns.
The Roman author Cato gives remarkably similar advice on cultivating asparagus in his On agriculture (160 BC), but its labour-intensive character wouldn’t have bothered him. His instructions were for estates farmed by slaves – cultivating asparagus and its consumption were luxuries. Including it in an appendix to his work, Cato was perhaps adding a relatively new introduction to the Roman garden. The beginnings of the cultivated Asparagus officinalis are uncertain. Probably in the eastern Mediterranean or Asia Minor, collectors of wild asparagus noticed then (as now) that returning each year to cut the spears in the spring increased the yield of individual plants. ‘Asparagus’ is derived from the Persian ‘asparag’, a general term for young shoot. Pliny rejoiced that wild plants – A. acutifolius – were easily found. Some considered the thinner wild spears to be superior to the fatter garden crop; the taste was certainly held to be stronger.
Garden asparagus appears to have faded after Roman decline, though where the Muslims held sway it continued to be grown. It maintained a presence in the medicinal plot too, often in monasteries. The water in which it was boiled was drunk as an aphrodisiac, but it was the seed and especially the root that were most used. Decoctions of the root were used as diuretics and this raises a vexed problem. The 16th-century Italian, Alessandro Petronio, was uneasy about the wholesomeness of asparagus. He reasoned that if asparagus made the urine smell foul, as it seemed to, it was putrefying dangerously in the body. Others would echo his reports of stinking urine, but asparagus’s popularity grew. France’s Louis XIV championed it at Versailles and the diarist Samuel Pepys reported eating and cutting what he referred to as ‘sparrow grass’. The smell may be caused by the breakdown of the sulphur compound asparagusic acid, but it seems that only some people process this acid to produce the odour and only some can detect it.
‘Grass’, flowers, berries and seed of asparagus. One of 500 plates of medicinal plants drawn, engraved, coloured and published by Elizabeth Blackwell in her A curious herbal (1737–38/39). Blackwell undertook this gargantuan task to raise money to secure the release of her publisher husband from debtor’s prison. She drew the plants from life at Chelsea Physic Garden, London.
Before the days of chilled airfreight, fresh asparagus travelled only short distances – the condition of the spears and their taste deteriorate quickly. Its flavour, which has tantalized over the centuries, owes part of its appeal and complexity to the fifth basic taste – umami. Long known in East Asia, it has recently been accepted more widely, along with the familiar sweet, sour, salty and bitter. In 1912 the Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae asked his sceptical audience to conjure what was common in the flavour of ‘asparagus, tomatoes, cheese or meat’. It was umami, difficult to translate but meaning tasty or savoury. Ikeda identified umami as the amino acid glutamate; asparagus contains relatively high amounts.
Humulus lupulus
The hop doth live and flourish by embracing and taking hold of poles, pearches, and other things upon which it climeth … the floures hang downe by clusters … strong of smell.
John Gerard, 1636
The homeland of the common hop stretches across Europe into Central Asia as far as the Altai Mountains. A herbaceous perennial, it puts up its new shoots from extensive underground rhizomes each spring. The tender tips and young leaves were reportedly eaten at the time Pliny was writing his Natural History in the 1st century AD, and hop shoots are still a delicacy in parts of Europe.
Hops have a long history of medical use, relating to the bitterness found especially in the inflorescences or ‘cones’ of the female plants (Humulus are dioecious, having separate male and female plants). The cones are made up of bracts; at the base of each is a gland that produces the bitter acids humulone and lupulone. Hop medicaments were thought to cut through unhealthy, thick humours, cleansing the body and restoring flow, though hops were also thought to induce melancholy.
Quite when and how hops were first used in brewing is not known. If hops are added to the infusion of malted grain or wort, and the resulting mixture is boiled prior to fermentation, it is sterilized. The heat releases the acids from the hops, which react with proteins from the grains, clearing the brew, and their continued antimicrobial effect keeps it from taint. It was for this reason that small quantities of hops were eventually added to all commercial beers, even when a heavily hopped taste was not necessarily desired.
The keeping qualities of hopped beer meant that brewing could be turned from a local business into a viable trade. By the 13th century Bremen in Germany had a lively export business with Flanders and the Netherlands. Imports of hopped beer in 14th-century England were mostly for people of German and Dutch descent, until some started brewing themselves. King Henry VIII didn’t like hopped beer, but later Tudor monarchs encouraged hop production. Their aim was the victualling of the army and navy: hopped beer provided a clean source of portable refreshment that would keep. And late in 1620 as conditions worsened on the Mayflower after its Atlantic crossing, shortage of beer was reportedly one reason the Pilgrims decided to make their settlement at New Plymouth rather than sail on.
North America had its own variety of hop (Humulus lupulus var. lupuloides), but the European plant made its way over in about 1630. This export was followed by the familiar attempt to grow key crops as part of imperial and settler projects. The original India Pale Ale, exported from Britain from the 18th century onwards, gained its special taste from the long sea voyage and further maturation in tropical temperatures. In the late 19th century entrepreneurs at the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi, and would-be hop growers in Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, all contacted Kew Gardens for help with their plants.
The habitat of the common hop plant was the wetlands populated by alders and oaks. After the climatic and human changes of around 6000 BP, the hop flourished at the edges of the reducing woodlands, in boggy bottoms and opportunistically clothed hedges, making it easy to forage from the wild.
The right amount of beer has a soporific effect, but if you prefer not to take your hops in this form, a hop pillow is reputed to do the same.
Solanum lycopersicum
How did the Italians eat spaghetti before the advent of the tomato? Was there such a thing as tomato-less Neapolitan pizza?
Elizabeth David, 1984
Solanum peruvianum from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1828). The ‘Large-flowered Tomato’ is a native of Peru and Chile. Although it will not naturally hybridize with S. lycopersicum, genetic techniques allow researchers to exploit the disease- and parasite-resistance of this wild tomato relative.
The tomato, one of several fruits treated as if it were a vegetable, originated in western South America. Perhaps regarded by the peoples of the Andes as an uninteresting weed, once its seeds were spread, at least partially by birds, it was domesticated in Mesoamerica. The original plant had small cherry-type fruit, but by the time of the Spanish conquest of the early 16th century tomatoes in a range of sizes, colours and textures were available in Aztec markets. The Aztecs ate them raw and combined them with chillies to make spicy sauces. ‘Tomato’ is derived from an Aztec word, although early descriptions sometimes confused the tomato with a variety of physalis, a native plant with small green fruits that the Aztecs also ate.
The Spanish tried them, liked what they tasted and returned to Europe with seeds. Tomatoes were not immediately popular, however; for one thing, the leaves, which are inedible, resemble those of the poisonous deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), another member of the same family (Solanaceae), as is the potato. One early naturalist grouped the tomato with the mandrake, perhaps because of a resemblance of their roots. It thus acquired a brief reputation as an aphrodisiac.
The tomato was more favourably received in Italy, where it gradually became a mainstay in cooking. It slowly spread throughout the Mediterranean countries and further north, where plants were sometimes grown as ornamentals. The Turks took tomatoes to the Levant and the Balkan countries. By the 19th century commercial production was underway in Italy, and the tomato was introduced to the United States. Tomatoes became the main ingredient in ‘ketchup’, a Chinese-derived word that initially referred to a spicy fish sauce. ‘Tomato ketchup’ became so dominant that it is the default version for such condiments.
Despite being a slow starter, the tomato has now become a worldwide favourite. In China, where it was introduced via the Philippines in the 16th century, it was not grown much until the 20th century. Today China is the world’s largest producer. The British introduced the tomato to India, now the second largest producer, in the late 18th century. Its initial modest cultivation there was primarily for European palates, but tomato-based dishes have become integral to Indian cuisine. In fact, the tomato is second only to the potato in worldwide production.
A selection of ‘Tomatoes or Love-Apples’ from Album Benary (1879). Many of these are now considered heritage or heirloom varieties and are not commercially grown. All live up to the name ‘tomatl’ bestowed on them in the Mexican Nahua peoples, which means ‘plants bearing globous and juicy fruit’.
The tomato’s commercial importance has led to genetic research to improve yields and pest resistance, produce fruits with a rich colour and increase the thickness of the skin for ease of transport and longer keeping. Unfortunately, the flavour generally suffers, and supermarket tomatoes, available all year round, lack the taste of a good fruit. The distinctive flavour and smell of a ripe tomato come from a complex series of chemicals, including volatile aromatics, acids and sugars, some of which have been partially bred out of commercial varieties. Scientists are trying to breed them back in, although the experiment with genetically modified tomatoes in the 1990s has been abandoned. Commercial tomatoes are often picked green for transportation, and ethylene, produced naturally in the ripening process, is sprayed on them when ready for display. These issues have encouraged increased interest in ‘heritage’ (or ‘heirloom’) tomatoes, many of them older varieties.