Professor Butter Beard’s Medieval Spice Trade
“He who controls the spice controls the universe.” – Frank Herbert, “Dune”
I have always been a wee bit fanatical about spices. My family did wonder so when I started adding curry powder to the Kraft Mac and Cheese, or fresh tarragon to our scrambled eggs, or cinnamon to my grandmother’s beef stew, or “heaven help the child” when I started adding chili powder to my chocolate chip cookies! I could calm down the generations of history academics staring at me if I smiled through my most precocious face and remined them that “spices were an important commodity in the Middle Ages with an allure and mythology dating back to Antiquity.” I can still see them shaking their heads while grabbing another chocolate chip cookie on the sly.
During the Roman Empire, the available spices were exorbitantly expensive and thus a true sign of status. Fortunately, they were easy to transport due the safe and maintained routes controlled by the Romans. When the Empire fell, the local authorities took control of travel routes and trade became more challenging as neighbors engaged in war, embraced different religions and neglected required maintenance of the cobblestone roads. As a tragic result, during the early Middle Ages, the household chefs in Western Europe lacked consistent access to spices.
It was those wacky religious crusaders who renewed a taste for spice during the high Middle Ages after they tasted the surprising cuisines of the Middle East. According to written journals and recipes, merchants procured a dizzying range of spices, including black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, clove and saffron, as well as now lost spices such as “grains of paradise” and “spikenard.”
These European merchants sought out the flavor-awakening spices of Asia, travelling the hazardous routes through the Middle East and Africa and facing constant physical danger and economic strain from the local tariffs and taxes. One delicious outcome was, due to the journeymen’s challenges, wild stories developed into mythologies such as the belief that pepper trees were guarded by slithering serpents who had to be chased back with fire (which would burn the white peppercorns black). And, cinnamon required harvesting from nests of grotesque birds called “Cinnamologus” who built their cinnamon bark nests on terrifying cliffs. What an ingenious way to add to the spice’s mystique and justify the enormous expense!
Throughout the Middle Ages, spices remained a status symbol and sign of luxury where only the wealthiest merchants were able to acquire large quantities of spices to then sell for culinary and medicinal purposes. According to culinary historians, meals in noble households were often ostentatious affairs, even the small and relatively private meals. Fountains flowing with spiced wine might be installed in or near a great hall and this lavish service of wine would scent an entire room with spices like cloves, grains of paradise, ginger, and cinnamon. Nearly every dish, whether roasted, stewed, or baked, would include an impressive array of these imported bewitching spices.
In my chosen image for this week, a nobleman’s meal from the fifteenth-century prayerbook “Heures à l’usage de Rome,” two wealthy diners share a private meal, heavily spiced for taste, with the hope of enjoying some resulting spicy passion. The joyful couple are being served a pie, which in the Middle Ages consisted of a meat or fish mixture baked in a decorated pastry crust brushed with an egg wash with saffron, a remarkably expensive spice made from the hand-picked threads of crocus flowers, which transformed the finished dish into a gleaming, golden work of art.
Roman recipes began to re-emerge such as this recipe for a pear custard in Apicius’ “De re culinarian,” published in Basel in 1541. Dating back to between the first and fourth centuries, this recipe continued to be published and produced in kitchens well into the Renaissance: “Patina of pears: core and boil the pears, pound them with pepper, cumin, honey, passum, liquamen, and a little oil. Add eggs to make a patina, sprinkle with pepper and serve.”
My inspired bake, with all this humming of tantalizing spices, developed into a re-imagined Pain d'Épice Bundt Cake enriched with roasted bananas, dark molasses, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and freshly grated nutmeg. Yes, another chance to roast those bananas! Trust me! It multiplies the banana flavor in such a delicious way! Take a chance before entering the season of Lent and treat your taste buds to a sensory explosion of spice and passion and life.
Roasted Banana Pain D’Épices with a Clementine Glaze
Makes one Bundt Cake
Cake:
4 medium bananas, roasted in a 400-degree oven for 15 minutes
1/3 cup dark molasses
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
½ tsp fine sea salt
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
8 ounces unsalted butter (1 cup / 2 sticks), room temperature
1 ¾ cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla paste
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup sour cream
Clementine Glaze:
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Juice and zest of two clementine oranges
1) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Place the bananas on a parchment lined sheet and roast for 15 minutes. The skins will blacken. Let cool while moving forward with the recipe. Reduce the oven to 350 degrees.
2) Spray your chosen bundt pan (12 cup) with cooking spray with flour.
3) Whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt and spices.
4) In a medium bowl, mash the cooled bananas with the molasses.
5) In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. On low, beat in the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time. Add the banana mixture. Add half the dry mix, then the sour cream, and finally the remaining dry mix. Scrape the batter into your prepared pan.
6) Bake the cake for 65-75 minutes until set. Let the cake cool on a wire rack ten minutes before leasing the cake. Let the cake cool completely on the wire rack.
7) When the cake is cool, whisk the zest and juice of the clementines into the confectioners’ sugar until you have a glaze that is thin enough to drizzle over and down the cake.
