From Cure to Flavor: A Short History of Spices

People were seasoning food long before anyone wrote about it. In 2013, archaeologists reported traces of garlic mustard seed inside cooking pots from northern Europe that were roughly 6,000 years old. Garlic mustard has almost no calories. The only reason to put it in a pot is flavor. As long as there has been cooking, it seems, there has been spice.

Most of the classic spices grew in a narrow band of the tropics. Pepper came from the southwest coast of India. Cinnamon came from Sri Lanka, and its cousin cassia from southern China. Ginger and turmeric came from South and Southeast Asia. Cloves, nutmeg, and mace came from a handful of small volcanic islands in what is now eastern Indonesia, the islands Europeans would one day call simply the Spice Islands.

Chili peppers were the latecomers. They came from the Americas and would not reach the rest of the world until the 1500s.

That geography is the whole story in one sentence. Spices grew in a few places, and the people who wanted them lived everywhere else.

The earliest written records treat spices as medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from around 1550 BCE, collects more than 700 remedies, most of them made from plants, with garlic among the ingredients. Egyptians also used aromatic spices in embalming, preparing the dead with the most precious materials they had.

In India, the healing tradition known as Ayurveda built whole systems of medicine around turmeric, ginger, black pepper, and dozens more, and has used them for thousands of years. In the first century, the Greek physician Dioscorides catalogued hundreds of plant medicines in a book called De Materia Medica. Doctors across Europe and the Middle East relied on it for more than 1,500 years, and its pages are full of pepper, ginger, and cinnamon.

For most of history, nobody drew a hard line between food and medicine. What you ate was part of how you stayed well.

After Rome fell, the spices kept moving, just through more hands. Arab and Persian merchants sailed the Indian Ocean and ran caravans overland. The spices reached Mediterranean ports, where the merchants of Venice and Genoa sold them on to the rest of Europe. Every handoff added a markup, and by the time pepper reached a kitchen in northern Europe it was a luxury good.

In medieval England, pepper was valuable enough that rents were sometimes paid in peppercorns. That is where the phrase "peppercorn rent" comes from, though today it means a rent so small it is only symbolic.

Medieval doctors still treated spices as medicine too. Under the theory of the four humors, foods were classified as hot, cold, wet, or dry, and warming spices were prescribed to balance a meal and keep the body in order.

Did people use spices to hide rotten meat?

No, and this is one of the most repeated myths in food history. The idea spread from a 1939 book on the English diet, and food historians have been knocking it down ever since. The logic does not hold up. Spices cost far more than meat, and the only people who could afford them were the people who could also afford fresh meat. Medieval cooks used spices for the same reasons we do: they tasted good, and people believed they were good for you.

By the 1400s, European powers wanted to cut out the middlemen. That ambition launched the age of exploration.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west looking for a sea route to the spices of Asia. He never found pepper. What he found in the Caribbean was a fiery pod the local people had been cultivating for thousands of years, and he called it a pepper anyway. The name stuck, which is why a chili pepper and black pepper share a name while having nothing else in common.

In 1498, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and reached Calicut on India's pepper coast. For the first time, Europeans had a direct sea route to the spices.

Then something remarkable happened. Chili peppers, carried by Portuguese traders, spread across the world within a few generations. The cuisines of India, Thailand, China, and Korea, which are hard to picture today without chilies, adopted them in the century after Columbus.

No spice shows how far people would go better than nutmeg. For centuries, every nutmeg tree on Earth grew on the tiny Banda Islands, part of the Spice Islands.

The Dutch East India Company wanted all of them. In 1621, the Dutch took the Banda Islands by force, killing or enslaving most of the people who lived there. One island held out under English control: a speck of land called Run.

The standoff ended with the Treaty of Breda in 1667. Each side kept what it held. England kept a small colony it had seized in North America called New Amsterdam, and renamed it New York. The Dutch kept Run, and with it a monopoly on nutmeg. The swap is often told as "nutmeg for Manhattan." The reality was a peace deal, not a trade, but the fact that a nutmeg island sat on the scale against Manhattan says everything about what spices were worth.

Over the 1700s and 1800s, spices got cheap. European powers moved spice plants to plantations in new colonies, the monopolies broke, and prices fell. Pepper stopped being a luxury and became a table staple.

As spices became ordinary, their role shifted. Modern medicine drew a line between food and drugs, and spices landed on the food side. The medicine chest became a spice rack.

Now the story is turning again. Researchers are putting the old remedies to the test: turmeric, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, and chili peppers have all been studied in modern clinical trials. Some old reputations are holding up in specific ways. Many are not. We walk through what the research actually says in The 10 Healthiest Spices.

Every jar in your spice drawer is a survivor of this story. The pepper was once a ransom. The nutmeg was once worth a colony. The chili flakes crossed an ocean by accident on the way to somewhere else.

We think about that more than you might expect. Our 78 Spicy Ketchup and 78 Spicy Mustard run on real chili peppers, the spice Columbus found while looking for a different one. Our 78 Yellow Mustard is built on mustard seed, a spice people were cooking with 6,000 years ago. We did not invent any of it. We just try to use it well: short recipes, real ingredients, and respect for the thousands of years of cooks who figured it out first.

The 78 team believes the old cooks had it right: food and spices are part of how we take care of our bodies, and a lot of it starts with gut health. Spices were used for centuries not only to flavor food but to support the body, and we think they still belong in a daily diet. Know your spices, though. Every body processes food differently, so learn which ones work for you and which ones your body does not need.

• 78 Yellow Mustard is mustard-seed rich, and its yellow comes from the seed itself, not a dye.
• 78 Spicy Mustard gets its warmth from real peppers.
• 78 Spicy Ketchup layers real peppers over a 78% tomato base.
• 78 Original Ketchup keeps it simple: 78% tomatoes and real sugar.

78 spices are coming soon. We are bringing the same real-ingredient approach behind our ketchup and mustard to a line of spices, under the 78 Brand umbrella.