Taste Paradise: See how spices, coffee, tobacco, and wine create the secret paradise of the human world

Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Every society has its pleasures and narcotics. Society enjoys them, needs them, and can afford them. When the Scottish King visited King Richard I of England in 1194, to show exceptional hospitality, he received a special tribute of two pounds of pepper and four pounds of cinnamon daily. Today, such a gift seems strange, but in medieval Christian Europe, it was commonplace: pepper was not only used as a spice but also a symbol of wealth and status, often serving as a substitute for money in transactions. People's tastes began to become more refined, Eastern luxuries began to transform the rough knight culture, and after the discovery of sea routes to India, they became a decisive factor in the European economy. Why did Europe introduce entirely new pleasure goods during a specific period? Were coffee, tea, or tobacco mere discoveries of colonial rule, or did they meet people's previously unmet needs? What were these new needs? Germany had no colonies at the time and had to import coffee, which led to a massive campaign against foreign beverages. When beer and wine could no longer resist the frenzy of coffee consumption, chicory coffee was discovered as a substitute. At the time, people drank not only "bean coffee" but also this substitute coffee. Tobacco was similar to coffee; in the 17th century, it was also considered a "beverage." Later, people began to smoke it in pipes, and it was not until the rapidly developing industrial era that it was rolled into cigarettes for consumption. The development of alcoholic beverages was also rapid and equally worthy of attention: the bar in taverns became very convenient and welcoming, largely meeting the needs of heavy drinkers in the industrial era. A critic from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung once described the author of this book as follows: "Wolfgang Schivelbusch dares to break the mold. He tries to explain to people how pleasure goods have influenced the history of medieval and modern Europe."