Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan
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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 showed 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.
To be sure, many of the modes of spice commerce have changed over the centuries. Recently, much of the great market of Aleppo, Syria, has been destroyed by civil war, while others, such as the Souk al-Attarin in the Old City of Jerusalem, have been made into touristic facades of their former selves. To understand what once went on in these places, it has been necessary to dip into private archives, public libraries, and nearby museums. In some cases, traces of the former activities of these historic markets still linger around the corner, and there ancient fragrances and flavors, the modes of cooperation and elements of conflict or colonization, may still prevail.
And so, this narrative will weave at least two strands together again and again: the ancient practices that can be discerned from history, archaeology, ethnobotany, and linguistics of how spices were gathered, traded, and diffused into various cuisines and my own descriptions that bear witness to the remnants of those practices that remain in place. In fact, many of those customs retrace my own Arab ancestors’ participation in the spice trade or in cross-cultural cooperation and conflict. Yes, both personal and scholarly motives have driven me to undertake these journeys; I have wanted to decipher my own family’s historical role in developing the processes of globalization that inevitably affect my own behaviors, values, and consumption patterns. I have questions to ask of my ancestors and perhaps of yours as well. As an itinerant British geographer suggested in 1625, “Let our Merchants answer, [for they] owe their spices to Arabia.”
• • •
• MASTIC •
Mastic is one of the names given to the sun-dried resinous droplets of a gum that flows from the wounds of the cultivated Pistacia lentiscus var. chia tree, a close relative of the tree that yields pistachio nuts. Although the tree can be found throughout the Mediterranean basin and its many islands, the resinous gum with the sweetest fragrance and most distinctive terroir comes from only one area on the Greek island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea. There, the clear nectarlike resin that weeps from the