Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Read online

  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 sug
gested 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 s
howed 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.