Taste Paradise: See how spices, coffee, tobacco, and wine create a private paradise on earth

Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Every society has its pleasures and narcotics; society enjoys them, needs them, and can afford them. In 1194, when King of Scotland visited King Richard I of England, to show exceptional hospitality, the Scottish king received a special offering of two pounds of pepper and four pounds of cinnamon daily. To us today, this gift seems strange, but in medieval Christianity, it was commonplace: pepper was not only used as a spice but also a symbol of wealth and status, and often served as a substitute for money as a medium of exchange. People's tastes began to become more refined, Eastern luxury goods began to transform the coarse knight culture, and after the sea route to India was discovered, they became a decisive factor in the European economy. Why did Europe introduce entirely new pleasure goods in a specific period? Were coffee, tea, or tobacco mere accidental discoveries of colonial rule, or did they satisfy people's previously unprecedented new needs? What were these new needs? Germany had no colonies at the time and had to import coffee from abroad, which led to a massive campaign against foreign beverages. When beer and wine could no longer resist people's fervent passion for coffee, a substitute chicory coffee was discovered. At the time, people drank not only "bean coffee" but also this substitute coffee. Similar to coffee was tobacco, which was considered a "beverage" in people's minds in the 17th century. 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 speed of alcoholic beverages was also quite close and worthy of attention: the bar of taverns became very convenient and approachable, which largely met the needs of hard-drinking enthusiasts in the industrial era. A critic from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung once commented on the author of this book: "Wolfgang Schivelbusch dares to break the mold. He tries to explain to people how pleasure goods have affected the history of medieval and modern Europe."