Essential aromatics from plants

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Essential aromatics from plants
dogmouth.net/photos/thailand/doi-suthep/
www.buiga.com/images/vanilla20Beans.jpg
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Another olfactory system

• Vomeronasal organ (Jacobsons organ)
• Used for larger molecules
• Implication of involvement in sensing pheromones
• Important in reptiles and some mammals
• flehming
• Function in humans is controversial

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Terminology

• Secondary plant products
• not critical for metabolism
• Essential oils
• volatile chemical compounds
• used in aromatherapy
• Herbs (botanical vs culinary)
• Spices (usually tropical)
• Perfumes
• later

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Why did humans start using herbs and spices?

• Word spice has the same root as species, meant
  small products
• Evidence is that people started using spices all
  over the world
• By the mid-1300s a Florence merchant listed 200
  spices in his catalog

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Why did humans start using herbs and spices?

• Did people use spices because of antimicrobial
  activity?

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• Some spices have antimicrobial activity

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Ancient methods of food preservation

• Drying
• Freezing
• Curing (salt, etc.)
• Smoking (evidence from Ireland 2000 BC)
• Pickling
• Fermentation processes

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Spices as preservatives

• Unlikely that the expensive spices (pepper,
  cloves, etc.) were ever used this way
• Onion and garlicmaybe
• thiosulfonates

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• Correlation between number of spices in recipes
  and average temperature
• Data from Paul Sherman, Cornell, March 1998
  issue of the journal Quarterly Review of Biology.
  
• Why?

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Wondering about spices

• Pliny the Elder, in Natural History around 79 AD,
  says that
• "Long pepper ... is fifteen denarii per pound,
  while that of white pepper is seven, and of
  black, four." Pliny also complains "there is no
  year in which India does not drain the Roman
  Empire of fifty million sesterces."

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More from Pliny the Elder

• It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has
  come so much into fashion, seeing that in other
  substances which we use, it is sometimes their
  sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that
  has attracted our notice whereas, pepper has
  nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation
  to either fruit or berry, its only desirable
  quality being a certain pungency and yet it is
  for this that we import it all the way from
  India! Who was the first to make trial of it as
  an article of food? and who, I wonder, was the
  man that was not content to prepare himself by
  hunger only for the satisfying of a greedy
  appetite?8

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Early History of Spices/Aromatics/Essences
5000 BC Evidence of spices being usedpeppers in
Peru 3000 Egypt Use of spices in
embalming 2000 Incense road Egypt to Arabia
(for 2000 years 1500 Queen Hathepshut imports
spices from East Africa to Egypt 500 Greece Imp
ortance of spices in diet as medicine 200 China C
loves imported from Spice Islands 100
AD Rome Extravagant use of spices
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We always look to Europe

• Peppers
• Found in prehistoric sites in Peru
• Thought first cultivated circa 6000 BC

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Egyptian use of spices

• Queen Hathepsut sent an expedition to East Africa
  in about 1500 BC to bring back 31 frankincense
  trees, myrrh (and myrrh trees), cinnamon,
  numerous varieties of other incenses, cosmetics
  and perfumes.

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Image from Wikipedia.orgc
Myrrh is a sap from several African trees Burned
at funerals, used in embalming in Egypt and Rome
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Image from Wikipedia.org

• Frankincense, from tree sap also (Boswellia
  species)
• Best from Oman, Yemen

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Benzoin, flowers of Benjamin

• Styrax species
• Again its a gum from the plant
• Burned as incense, also medicinal

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Egyptian Embalming

• Religious motivations
• preserve the body for the return of the soul
• two peppercorns were inserted in the nostrils of
  the mummy of Ramses II in 1224BC
• Mostly about drying and sodium bicarbonate

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Early spice trade routes
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Earliest uses of spices

• One of the earliest documented records of spices
  is in the 1550 B.C. medical document "Ebers
  Papyrus" which stated that anise, cassia,
  cardamom, mustard and other aromatics were used
  by Egyptians.
• Kyphirecipe for incense, said to be found here

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Elettaria cardamomum

• Cardamom is in the ginger family
• Digestive as well as spice uses
• We associate more with India

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Anise

• Pimpinella anisum L
• Same family as parsley, seeds are used
• Culinary and medicinal purposes since prehistoric
  times
• Digestion, toothache, as well as cakes

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• Recipe for an asthma treatment involving several
  herbs heated on a brick
• Aromatherapy!

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Coriander

• Cilantro and Chinese Parsley
• Same family as anise
• Possible fruits from Israel, about 6000 BC
• Described in Sanskrit writings from India
• Egypt

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Arabs dominated the spice trade from 3000-200
BC Romans broke monopoly, went to India via the
Red Sea
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• Romans spread spices into Europe
• Europe-Asia trade left with the fall of the
  empire, 476 AD
• Dark ages--Europe mostly uses herbs
• Marco Polo--25 yrs in orient, wrote about it

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Venice Dominates Spice Trade

• Middle Ages in Europe
• Spices extremely valuable
• a pound of ginger was worth the price of a sheep
• a pound of mace would buy three sheep or half cow
• cloves cost the equivalent of about 20 a pound
• many towns kept their accounts in pepper taxes
  and rents were assessed and paid in this spice
  and a sack of. pepper was worth a man's life.
• Overland route the sea routes were disrupted by
  Turks, others

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Pepper (Piper nigrum)

• From India
• Long pepper, rarely used now

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• In the sole surviving cookery book from Latin
  antiquity, the De re coquinaria of Apicius,
  pepper appears in 349 of the 468 recipes

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• Perhaps the single most important stimulus to the
  Age of Exploration
• Marco Polo
• Age of Exploration
• Trade controlled by Portugal, then the Dutch,
  then the English
• Columbus was searching for Eastern spices
• New World spices--only vanilla, chili, allspice

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Spice Islands
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Cloves

• Chinese breath sweetener
• Spice Islands
• Dutch destroyed many plantations to drive up the
  price (1700s)
• Unopened flower buds

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Ginger
Zingiber officinale From Asia, today grown in
Jamaica From a rhizome Many uses
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Saffron

• Worlds most expensive spice today
• Mediterranean
• Important commodity in ancient lands too
• From crocus stigmas, difficult to harvest
• 240 per oz
• Color and flavor

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History of Spices

• Egyptians used herbs and spices over 3500 yrs ago
• included cinnamon, from Asia and China
• Greeks traded spices with Far East, Arab
  middlemen
• cinnamon, pepper, ginger
• Romans
• Broke Arab monopoly, went to India via Red Sea

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