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Title details for Spice by Jack Turner - Available

Spice

by Jack Turner
ebook
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In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era—from ancient times through the Renaissance—when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood.
Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were often kept under lock and key. For some, spices represented Paradise, for others, the road to perdition, but they were potent symbols of wealth and power, and the wish to possess them drove explorers to circumnavigate the globe—and even to savagery.
Following spices across continents and through literature and mythology, Spice is a beguiling narrative about the surprisingly vast influence spices have had on human desire.
Includes eight pages of color photographs.
One of the Best Books of the Year: Discover Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle 
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Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book

  • Release date: December 10, 2008

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780307491220
  • Release date: December 10, 2008

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9780307491220
  • File size: 3212 KB
  • Release date: December 10, 2008
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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Cooking & Food History Nonfiction

Languages

English

In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era—from ancient times through the Renaissance—when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood.
Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were often kept under lock and key. For some, spices represented Paradise, for others, the road to perdition, but they were potent symbols of wealth and power, and the wish to possess them drove explorers to circumnavigate the globe—and even to savagery.
Following spices across continents and through literature and mythology, Spice is a beguiling narrative about the surprisingly vast influence spices have had on human desire.
Includes eight pages of color photographs.
One of the Best Books of the Year: Discover Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle 
Expand title description text
Cooking & Food History Nonfiction