The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great

The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

The smell of sweet cinnamon on your morning oatmeal, the gentle heat of gingerbread, the sharp piquant bite from your everyday peppermill. The tales these spices could tell: of lavish Renaissance banquets perfumed with cloves, and flimsy sailing ships sent around the world to secure a scented prize; of cinnamon-dusted custard tarts and nutmeg-induced genocide; of pungent elixirs and the quest for the pepper groves of paradise.

The Taste of Conquest offers up a riveting, globe-trotting tale of unquenchable desire, fanatical religion, raw greed, fickle fashion, and mouthwatering cuisineâ€“in short, the very stuff of which our world is made. In this engaging, enlightening, and anecdote-filled history, Michael Krondl, a noted chef turned writer and food historian, tells the story of three legendary citiesâ€“Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdamâ€“and how their single-minded pursuit of spice helped to make (and remake) the Western diet and set in motion the first great wave of globalization.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the worldâ€™s peoples were irrevocably brought together as a result of the spice trade. Before the great voyages of discovery, Venice controlled the business in Eastern seasonings and thereby became medieval Europeâ€™s most cosmopolitan urban center. Driven to dominate this trade, Portugalâ€™s mariners pioneered sea routes to the New World and around the Cape of Good Hope to India to unseat Venice as Europeâ€™s chief pepper dealer. Then, in the 1600s, the savvy businessmen of Amsterdam â€œinventedâ€ the modern corporationâ€“the Dutch East India Companyâ€“and took over as spice merchants to the world.

Sharing meals and stories with Indian pepper planters, Portuguese sailors, and Venetian foodies, Krondl takes every opportunity to explore the world of long ago and sample its many flavors. The spice trade and its cultural exchanges didnâ€™t merely lend kick to the traditional Venetian cookies called peverini, or add flavor to Portuguese sausages of every description, or even make the Indonesian rice table more popular than Chinese takeout in trendy Amsterdam. No, the taste for spice of a few wealthy Europeans led to great crusades, astonishing feats of bravery, and even wholesale slaughter.

As stimulating as it is pleasurable, and filled with surprising insights, The Taste of Conquest offers a fascinating perspective on how, in search of a tastier dish, the world has been transformed.

Country	USA
Author	Michael Krondl
Binding	Hardcover
EAN	9780345480835
ISBN	034548083X
Label	Ballantine Books
Manufacturer	Ballantine Books
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	320
PublicationDate	2007-11-06
Publisher	Ballantine Books
ReleaseDate	2007-11-06
Studio	Ballantine Books

The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

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