Nothing could be more common than the salt and pepper on our tables. In our cuisine these two seasonings are always paired. Their containers are as alike as two eggs, indistinguishable except for the inscription on each. Yet in coupling them this way, two distinct epochs of world history are being conjoined. Salt and pepper represent two fundamentally different phases of human civilization.
I’m not in the habit of compulsively re-reading books, even those that prove to be influential in my life. Of course, there are exceptions:
- The early beer writings of Michael Jackson, as in The World Guide to Beer
- Jim Bouton’s ribald baseball tell-all Ball Four
- A Confederacy of Dunces, the classic New Orleans comic novel from John Kennedy Toole
- A Distant Mirror, medieval history by Barbara Tuchman
Another personal favorite is Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants by the wonderfully named Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1941 – 2023).
He was not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a very real German-born cultural historian operating from “the perch of an adroit and amiable Marxist sociology,” as Publishers Weekly once put it.
Decades after Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise book was first published in English (it dates to 1980 in the original German), I still consult it with frequency.
It is neither long nor “heavy,” and boasts thoughtful essays on coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium and alcoholic beverages. Taken together, these have the effect of guiding readers from the Middle Ages through modern times, with the focal point being not pharmacology, but sociology.
For instance, there is coffee.
“The logic of coffee drinking for Arabic-Islamic civilization is incontestable,” Schivelbusch writes. “As a nonalcoholic, non-intoxicating, indeed even sobering and mentally stimulating drink, it seemed to be tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics. Arabic culture is dominated by abstraction more than any other culture in human history. Coffee has rightly been called the wine of Islam.”
When the Muslim world introduced Europe to coffee, the beverage’s “dry” and sobering qualities were aligned perfectly with developing notions of a work ethic in the context of expanding capitalism — or, the junction where Calvinism meets the Industrial Revolution. Coffee made workers more efficient, while alcoholic beverages rendered them less productive.
Even today, while at work, you’re generally free to consume as much coffee as you please, although not ale or lager … and that’s a real shame.
The 17th-century coffeehouse in Europe’s evolving...Read more
