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

A fascinating tapestry of how Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam flourished in the exotic spice trade. Too many tidbits of knowledge to list, but much to savor : Morsels : ——————— “In Renaissance Italy, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron, and cloves adorned not merely the tables of merchants and potentates,......more

We may take it for granted, but our food has been formed and is still formed by spices, for which many wars were fought in the past. In this book, Michael Krondl offers a tale of unquenchable desire, greed, fake fashion and a tasteful insight in our cuisine during the ages. You probably can not expec......more

The commonplace theory is that the search for cod and spice largely drove the history of European expansions. I think that theory ignores too many things, such as whale oil, furs, gold, and of course, religion. But there’s no question the hunger for spice, and especially pepper, drove centuries of l......more

This was an incredibly good book, although I could have done without calling the Muslims Infidels and the use of a less than appropriate vernacular term for a Nubian woman, but it adds to the authenticity of the time period he writes about I suppose. However, that is my only qualm with this. It is e......more

More of a breezy travel & culinary log than an analytical history of the spice trade. The low score here is for the audible version: the narrator's rendering of Portuguese names and words was so awful that I had to guess how the word might be spelled if it were an English word to know what he was sa......more