Author(s): Jack Turner

Cooking/Wine

Spices: for centuries the staple of cuisine, remedies and ritual, they have commanded the highest of prices.To this day, Saffron is, per ounce, one of the most expensive commodities known to man. For their sake, fortunes have been made and lost, empires built and destroyed, and new worlds discovered. Astoundingly, in the seventeenth century more people died for the sake of cloves than in all the European dynastic wars of the period.The spice trade dates thousands of years before this though. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depict a merchant fleet sailing south to the Horn of Africa and returning triumphantly with a priceless cargo of cinnamon. Only the story of mankind