Tasting Difference

Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature

Gitanjali G. Shahani

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501748707
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748714
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters.

From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.

Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.

CHAPTER 1

Spices

“The Spicèd Indian Air” in Shakespeare’s England

From the beginning what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight clear. . . . They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.

—Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

The “hot stuff” is indeed an essential ingredient in Salman Rushdie’s epic saga of the Indies. For it is pepper, the pungent “Black Gold” of the Malabar Coast, that brings together the many fantastic strands of this narrative. Its powerful odors waft through the novel’s tropical setting, mingling with the secretions of Aurora and Abraham’s lovemaking, forever haunting their hybrid progeny. “If it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun,” the eponymous Moor tells us at the very outset of his tale. What is true of his story is true of history itself. It was for pepper that Vasco da Gama’s ships set sail from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast of the Indian subcontinent, the Moor reminds us.1 And likewise, it was for aromatic spices that the Dutch, the French, and the English ventured East, following in the wake of the first arrived Portuguese. They all came in pursuit of precious foodstuff, and their prolonged intercourse with the Indies would irrevocably change the course of world history.

The intricate trajectories of these spices are the subject of my chapter as well. I explore here a particular set of responses to the early modern spice trade, a conflicted discourse of fear and desire that attached itself to commodities like pepper, nutmeg, mace, and cloves, as they infiltrated the English marketplace, via the newly formed East India Company.2 Like Rush-die’s account, mine is concerned with the ways in which their scents and flavors traveled across oceans and permeated everyday lives. The Moor, who leafs through ancestral cookbooks to piece together his past, provides me with an analogue for my own methods in this chapter. I too am interested in culling together a narrative from the culinary potions and concoctions that figure in the receipts of the past.3 I look to such genres as the early modern receipt collection and household companion in order to unearth some of the rare “secrets” and “delights” hidden therein.4 Their rich amalgam of ingredients contains important histories. In these spice-laden mixtures we can trace the nascent origins of what would be a monumental cultural encounter between two worlds.

“Of all the world’s commodities,” writes Paul Freedman in Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, “spices most dramatically affected history because they launched Europe on the path to eventual overseas conquest, a conquest whose success and failure affects every aspect of contemporary world politics.”5 Freedman traces the European craving for spices to the Middle Ages, arguing that much of their allure had to do with their status as objects of conspicuous consumption. Like other historians, he gives the lie to the popular belief that spices were procured as commodities that could preserve spoiling meats. In fact, he argues, spices do little in this regard, compared with salting, smoking, or pickling. Rather, it was their mysterious origins, their efficacy as medicines and cosmetics, their incorporation in sacred rituals, and their associations with sophisticated cuisine that account for their popularity through the medieval and early modern periods. By the eighteenth century, this popularity was already waning, and by the time European colonial expansion reached its zenith, Europe had shifted to a decidedly blander cuisine. Yet they had set in motion a series of events that would irrevocably change culinary habits and cuisines throughout Europe and England.

In what follows, I look at a particular historical moment in this long culinary history, during which the taste of spices came to be associated with the taste of difference. By this I mean that the experience of tasting these ingredients was also an experience of imagining the racial others associated with their production or cultivation. In imaginative renderings of the spice trade, they were incarnated as Indian boys and Indian queens, Blackamores and Bantamen. They became foreign bodies that threatened the cultural and corporeal boundaries of the body politic. They aroused appetites as well as aversions, both of which were expressed in specifically racialist terms. In examining the affective response to these foreign bodies, I turn to different sites in the early modern milieu. My narrative shifts from the inventive spaces of the early modern English kitchen to the fairy bowers of the Shakespearean stage to the bustling commercial streets of seventeenth-century London. In the first section of this chapter I look to the domestic literature on the incorporation of spices into English cuisine, where I trace a gendered controversy over the ingestion of seemingly dangerous exotic ingredients. In the second, I turn to “the spicèd Indian air” of Shakespeare’s fairy world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which I examine the conflict between Oberon and Titania in terms of this larger gendered conflict about the appropriate domestic consumption of foreign merchandise. In the final part of this chapter, I offer an example of an imagined resolution to these controversies in an analysis of Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, in which an Indian queen assuages anxieties about the taste of difference through her conversion narrative. Each section dwells on a particular embodied incarnation of Indian spices: In the first, we have a specter of a monstrous racial hybrid created in the imagination of domestic writers, who rue the housewife’s mixing of Indian spices with English ingredients, the very cause of such monstrosities in their opinion. In the second, we have an imaginative rendering of these same gendered anxieties in the figure of the Indian boy, the contentious object of Oberon and Titania’s discord in fairyland. In the third, we have a black Indian queen who dispels all of the above anxieties by mitigating her threatening otherness and affirming her willing submission to English values. Each incarnation speaks to consistent desires and anxieties associated with spices as commodities that were simultaneously strange and familiar, potentially healing and poisonous. Each represents a foreign body, external to the self, whose possible admixture into the body politic provokes visceral anxieties about the racial transformation of the self through its incorporation of the other.

“Nay, which is yet more absurd, that the health of so many Christian nations should hang upon the courtesy of those Heathen and barbarous nations, to whom nothing is more odious then the very name of Christianity?” demanded Timothie Bright in a tract first published in the 1580s.6 The sixteenth-century physician was one among many critics of the newfangled English reliance on Indian spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg to cure numerous bodily ailments and disorders. Bright decried the “unlearned” merchants, who jeopardized the English constitution by bringing these strange drugs into the local marketplace, solely to “reape gaine.”7 Extolling the virtues of native ingredients like rosemary, basil, sage, and thyme, he pleaded with his countrymen to look to their own fields and “leave the banks of Nilus, and the Fens of India.”8 After all, unlike the Indians and Egyptians, the English had not taken to eating “Lizards, Dragons, and Crocodiles”; why then did they eagerly consume the “outlandish medicines” of these strangers, the physician wondered.9 For Bright, Indian spices were fundamentally incommensurate with the English physiognomy. Imported from dangerous heathen lands, they would not only destroy “our English bodies” but also “our custom of life,” he asserted.10

Bright was not alone in fearing the long-term repercussions of this foreign merchandise. This understanding of English ethnicity in geohumoral terms and the identification of particular foodstuffs in terms of their effects on English bodies were echoed throughout the period. In several contemporary tracts and treatises, critics expressed apprehensions about how the English humoral makeup would withstand these alien entities. Would English men and women morph into swarthy “Blackamores,” like the barbarous inhabitants of strange nations, from whence these spices came?11 Reared on a precariously heterogeneous diet of foreign and domestic ingredients, would English children grow into hybrid monstrosities? Would these costly luxuries eventually replace the “simples” and herbs of the quintessential English kitchen garden?12 How would they fare in the hands of the English housewife, the chief agent through whom culinary, medicinal, and pharmacological concoctions were made available to men, children, and attendants in the early modern household? In particular, it was the potent role these spices played in women’s kitchen physic that troubled a number of authors. Stirred into cordials, sprinkled into pies, or distilled into perfumes, these commodities could unobtrusively enter the highly permeable orifices of the English body. That the vulnerable boundaries of the body natural—and by extension, those of the body politic—were under female supervision caused much unease among self-proclaimed guardians of the national well-being.

This controversial female proximity to the world of spices is central to my argument. The texts I examine here reveal to us a range of female rituals and intimate bodily practices that were dependent on a steady supply of spices from the East. More generally, they reveal to us how the early modern woman became pivotal to both the legitimization as well as the condemnation of an emerging system of global trade. In elaborating on this aspect of my argument, I draw on a key concept from Hall’s work on the seventeenth-century English sugar trade. Hall suggests that “the shaping of the English woman’s role in the household was necessary, not only for maintaining domestic order, but for the absorption of the foreign necessitated by colonialism.”13 She thus speaks in terms of the “gendering” of sugar to describe the highly fraught processes by which this foreign commodity was incorporated into English domestic life. Likewise, it is the “gendering” of spices that I investigate in this chapter. For if the procuring of colonial merchandise had been an exclusively male enterprise, the domesticating of this merchandise had fallen rather precariously in the female domain. In fact, it is the former narrative rather than the latter that has predominated in the story of spices. As Hall puts it, “While we are familiar with the search for new territories and precious substances that fueled colonial expansion, the more mundane byproducts of this trade—the exposure to new foodstuffs and the gradual incorporation of those foods into European diets—is often accepted as a ‘natural’ occurrence rather than one which is often contested.”14 If we are to avoid such a fallacy we must necessarily examine the complex modes in which spices transitioned from the realm of the foreign to the realm of the domestic, from the purview of the merchant to the purview of the housewife. That such a transition was uneven, inconsistent, and frequently contentious is evident in the numerous texts I address in this chapter.

English Housewives and Indian Ingredients

I begin by examining one of the earliest domestic manuals that explicitly yokes the housewife’s moral character to her abstinence from foreign ingredients. Entitled The English Housewife (1615), Gervase Markham’s text begins with a list of “inward virtues of the mind which ought to be in every housewife.”15 The list includes such dictates as “A housewife must be religious,” “She must be temperate,” her garments “must be altogether without toyish garishness.”16 Like several early modern conduct manuals, Markham’s is intent on regulating female speech: the good housewife must refrain from “uncomely language,” which is “deformed though uttered even to servants, but most monstrous and ugly when it appears before the presence of a husband.”17 But as Markham proceeds, we find that he is as concerned with what goes into the housewife’s mouth as he is with what comes out it. Among the chief prescriptions laid down for the housewife is one on her diet, specifying that it must proceed “more from the provision of her own yard, than the furniture of the markets.”18 It must “be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries,” Markham insists.19

By looking beyond her own yard, the housewife seriously compromises her moral character, according to Markham. In a sentence riddled with sexual connotations, he instructs her to proportion her diet according to her husband’s means, “making her circle rather strait than large.”20 His invocation of this enlarged circle, as Natasha Korda has noted, simultaneously alludes to “the shrew’s big mouth, the wantonness or ‘want’ of female sexuality (‘circle’ being a cant term for the female genitalia), and to the threat of an unbridled, unproductive expenditure that is cast at once in sexual and economic terms.”21 The housewife’s appetite for foreign commodities is thus implicitly linked to other kinds of quintessentially female appetites and excesses. Her mouth, her vagina, and her household are together conflated as sites of potential subversion and unruliness. In order to govern these, one of the many things she must do is to confine herself to wholesome domestic ingredients, which are “apter to kill hunger than revive new appetites.”22

Markham’s vision of the ideal English housewife is thus contingent upon her use of unpretentious domestic fare, rather than outlandish foreign ware. Her Englishness, it would seem, is dependent upon the Englishness of her ingredients. Yet paradoxic...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Spices: “The Spicèd Indian Air” in Shakespeare’s England
• 2. Sugar: “So Sweet Was Ne’er So Fatal”
• 3. Coffee: Eating Othello, Drinking Coffee
• 4. Bizarre Foods: Food, Filth, and the Foreign in the Culinary Contact Zone
• 5. Cannibal Foods: “Powdered Wife” and Other Tales of English Cannibalism
• Coda: Global Foods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index