Old Spices

Everybody knows the Romans used loads of spices (they even put cumin in some desserts), and so did medieval Europeans. It would seem clear that Europe was just keeping up the Roman tradition, right?

Not so fast. For one thing, the Roman and medieval tastes were totally different. The Romans liked hot spices: pepper, cumin, caraway, mustard, asafetida, sometimes ginger. They did like fennel, celery seed and celery-like lovage, but the only purely sweet spice they used much of, to judge from the one surviving Roman cookbook, was coriander. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg? Not even mentioned in the book.

In medieval Europe, people still used ginger and mustard, and pepper continued to be the most popular spice (as it still is, of course). But the rest of the top medieval spices were all sweet ones: cinnamon, clove, coriander, nutmeg, mace, galangal. Medieval food was spicy, sure, but in a quite un-Roman way.

We have to remember that the spice trade was interrupted after the fall of the Roman Empire and Roman cookery was totally forgotten. When the spice trade revived, Europeans may have picked up a taste for sweet spices from the Middle East. Or maybe they simply preferred sweet spices. (Arab cooks never had such a tight focus on them.)

There’s another thing to remember. Most sweet spices had to be imported from Asia, so they were expensive and a good way to show off your wealth. Only three of the Romans’ favorite spices were imported; in the Middle Ages, only two weren’t. Medieval wealthy people might not have had as much choice of luxuries to blow their money on as the Romans did.