and other exotic aromatics long enough to sell them for higher prices when they envisioned that such opportunities would soon emerge, leading to our current practice of speculation. A spice speculator was considered a visionary, someone who could anticipate when a new story (or market) was emerging and help to shape it.
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
