Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature 9781501748721

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TASTING DIFFERENCE

TASTING DIFFERENCE Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature

Gitanjali G. Shahani

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shahani, Gitanjali, author. Title: Tasting difference : food, race, and cultural encounters in early modern literature / Gitanjali G. Shahani. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026547 (print) | LCCN 2019026548 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501748707 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501748714 (epub) | ISBN 9781501748721 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Food in literature. | Food habits in literature. | Race in literature. | Race relations in literature. | Cultural relations in literature. | Colonies in literature. Classification: LCC PR428.F66 S53 2020 (print) | LCC PR428.F66 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/356409031—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026547 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2019026548

For Rohit and Arihaan

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Spices: “The Spicèd Indian Air” in Shakespeare’s England

29

2. Sugar: “So Sweet Was Ne’er So Fatal”

52

3. Coffee: Eating Othello, Drinking Coffee

80

4. Bizarre Foods: Food, Filth, and the Foreign in the Culinary Contact Zone

107

5. Cannibal Foods: “Powdered Wife” and Other Tales of English Cannibalism 135 Coda: Global Foods Notes

167

Bibliography Index

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Ack nowledgments

It is fitting that a project on cultural encounters should be shaped by many generous people in many different parts of the world. My debts to them are manifold. At Emory University, I had the good fortune of working with an exceptional group of scholars and mentors. Sheila Cavanagh’s generous support and good humor have steered me through many years in academia. Deepika Bahri has been a cherished mentor and friend, whom I have looked to for so much. My interest in early modern cross-cultural encounters took shape in the course of my work with Patricia Cahill. She has helped me map out many iterations of this project and generously shared her insights over several years. Rick Rambuss offered valuable advice as the director of graduate studies. The late Lee Pederson’s kindness made my years in Atlanta memorable, and it is hard to think of the North Callaway building without him. This book benefited tremendously from the resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am particularly indebted to Ginger Vaughan for including me in her seminar “Emerging Ethnographies in Shakespeare’s England,” where I was first introduced to many of the primary texts that found their way into this project. At this seminar, I also had the good fortune of meeting Brinda Charry, who has since been a wonderful collaborator and dear friend. I am grateful for the support we both received in the course of our early collaborations from Ania Loomba, whose own work has made possible many fields of inquiry we continue to pursue. Jyotsna Singh has been an integral part of my academic family, and I am deeply grateful to her for all that she has done, both for me personally and for our field at large. At the Shakespeare Association of America meetings, where I have regularly presented early versions of this project, I have received valuable feedback from colleagues. Kim Coles and Jean Feerick have been especially generous in their feedback on chapter 1. Kim and I subsequently had the opportunity to collaborate with several scholars working in early modern food ix

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studies, including Ken Albala, Robert Appelbaum, Joan Fitzpatrick, Rebecca Laroche, Jennifer Munroe, and Barbara Sebek. I am grateful for these academic collaborations and the many wonderful friendships that followed. I am deeply indebted to Jennifer Park, who was kind enough to comment on early versions of several chapters. She generously shared her expertise on mumia and pointed me to important primary and secondary sources, which were especially useful to my introduction. Valérie Loichot’s work on food and postcolonial studies has been valuable to my work. I am especially grateful to her for sharing her original photographs of Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby, which I discuss extensively in chapter 2. Working in the field of early modern race studies has sometimes been a difficult terrain to negotiate, and I am grateful to the scholars who came together at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2016 to discuss the state of our profession, including Jonathan Burton, Kim Hall, and Marianne Montgomery, all of whom have supported my work in many different ways. Fran Dolan was generous in inviting me to present parts of my research on the spice trade with students in her graduate seminar at the University of California–Davis. More recently, I had the opportunity to share the theoretical frameworks in the introduction at the program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of California–Berkeley, where I benefited from comments by students and scholars in the Bay Area across various disciplines. I am grateful to be surrounded by a group of gifted scholars and generous friends in the Department of English at San Francisco State University. Bruce Avery, Jen Mylander, and Lehua Yim were part of a cohort of early modernists with whom I shared many early incarnations of this work, along with many enjoyable meals. Lehua has on several occasions used her own research time in the archive to locate sources for me, helped me navigate through parts of chapters when I stumbled, and supported me in countless other ways. Along with Sara Hackenberg, Julie Paulson, and Lynn Wardley, she has been part of a writing group that made this experience genuinely engaging. My chairs and coordinators, Bill Christmas, Sugie Goen-Salter, Loretta Stec, and Beverly Voloshin, have consistently supported this project, along with many other colleagues who contribute to the stimulating intellectual climate of our department. I am fortunate to have Shirin Khanmohamadi’s office so close to mine, and the many productive conversations we have had in the hallway continue to influence my work. Many of the ideas and arguments for this book took shape in courses on food, race, and Shakespeare that I taught in the English department. I am grateful to several generations of students who enriched these ideas with their animated responses and their

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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genuine engagement with my work. Grants from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at San Francisco State, along with release time from the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at various stages during my tenure here have helped me complete several chapters of this book. An early version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Spicèd Indian Air in Shakespeare’s England” in Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 122–37. I am grateful to the editors for granting permission to reproduce this section in my chapter. A section of chapter 5 originally appeared as “Of ‘Barren Islands’ and ‘Cursèd Gold’: Worth, Value, and Womanhood in The Sea Voyage” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2012): 5–27. I would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to reprint that material here. My chapter on “Bizarre Foods” appeared as “Food, Filth, and the Foreign: Disgust in the Seventeenth-Century Travelogue,” in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll (London: Routledge, 2016). I am grateful to the editors for their feedback on this essay and to Routledge for permission to use this material. At Cornell University Press, I am most grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Mahinder Kingra. His feedback on early drafts helped me work toward a far more cogent volume. His patience with the many delays in my schedule bordered on saintly. The feedback I received from the two anonymous peer reviewers helped me reframe many important aspects of this book. I am grateful to both readers for their detailed suggestions and the care with which they read this manuscript, although any errors are my own. Personally, I feel fortunate to have the inspirational example of my parents, Govind and Roshan Shahani, whose own scholarship has shaped mine in countless ways. I am indebted to them for first kindling in me a passion for literature, for being my best teachers, and, above all, for their love and support through everything. Nishant Shahani helped me leaf through several hundred recipes for my first chapter on spices. But it is his own culinary creations, with all the love that goes into them, that have brought me so much joy. Kala Shahani and Alan Mistri did not live to see this project completed, but it could not have been conceived without their blessings. The former taught me much through her stories of quiet determination and civil disobedience during the Indian freedom movement. The latter has taught me all I know about women’s intellectual labor in the realm of the household and inspired my work on recipe writing. Urvashi and Jagat Chopra have always helped me look for silver linings. Their optimism makes all obstacles seem surmountable.

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My largest debt is to Rohit Chopra, who has offered feedback on every chapter of this book, located numerous sources that he knew I would find useful here, and supported me in ways I did not think possible. I am grateful to him for embarking on this journey with me and for sharing in its joys and pleasures. This book is dedicated to him and to our son, Arihaan Chopra, whose grit and good humor make this world a better place.

TASTING DIFFERENCE

Introduction

In an evocative essay on local and global identities, Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist and activist, having moved to England in the 1950s, articulates his journey in terms of an edible metaphor. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others besides me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom.1 While waves of immigrant communities might mark their arrival in the Anglophone world in different historical moments, Hall would have all of us from the once-colonized world imagine our entry into Western consciousness at the very moment our teas, coffees, spices, and sugar—what has been called the “Genussmittel” or stimulants of empire—made their way there.2 He compels us to ask what it means to be the sugar at the bottom of the tea or indeed the tea itself. How did we become foodstuff and the affective desires associated with it, the craving and the very object of appetite? How are the earliest encounters with our difference registered in the tastes of our food? And crucially, what is the taste of difference?

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INTRODUCTION

This is the story my book strives to tell. It traces the colonial histories and racial formations by which people become food, by which subjects become edible objects. I look at a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that register otherness in culinary, gastronomic, and cibarious terms, recording encounters with different foods and, via these foods, with difference itself. Thus for instance, the idea of India is forged in the English imagination via some of its earliest encounters with Indian spices. While Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast of the Indian subcontinent as early as 1524, it was only in the 1600s with the establishment of the East India Company that England began its foray into the spice trade, increasing the scope and distribution of spices in ordinary English households on an unprecedented scale. Thus long before the average English household encountered “an Indian,” it encountered nutmeg and pepper in pies and possets, in homemade contraceptives and morning-after treatments. The “spicèd Indian air,” as Shakespeare called it, had made its way into England’s recipe collections and imaginative writing long before any large-scale migrant movement, thus shaping its conception of Indianness via the taste of its foodstuff.3 Likewise, the English housewife in the seventeenth century had no direct contact with the slave labor of the Caribbean plantation, but she sprinkled the products of their labor into her cordials and tasted their sugar in her sweetmeats and confections. It is in the writing about these tastes—in the imaginative literature of the period, in cookbooks, in dietary manuals—that a conception of racial, cultural, and religious difference is articulated. Indeed, the culinary realm is one that registers encounters with otherness on an unprecedented scale. While clothing and other physical markers have been optics for the analysis of difference in much work on the other, here it is the taste of difference that I analyze, arguing for its primacy in cross-cultural encounters that were impelled by foodstuffs.4 Put another way, what I am examining here is a variation of the principle that we are what we eat. Itself a corruption of the eighteenth-century gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s oft-quoted maxim on food and identity— “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are”—this principle underscores the ways in which our identities are constituted through and knowable by our foodways.5 While acknowledging this important relationship between food and the self, my project approaches the maxim differently. What I ask here is how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat. How did we become what I have called throughout this work the “taste of difference,” alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Seeking answers to these questions takes us back

INTRODUCTION

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several centuries, to England’s early ventures across different parts of the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the search for exotic foodstuffs resulted in the trafficking with difference. But before we delve into this period, I would like to briefly dwell in the present, when anxieties about food and otherness provide us with a template for understanding similar fears in the early modern period. In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we witnessed a collective frenzy in the news cycle about a grim future in which we were “going to have taco trucks on every corner,” the result of lax immigration policies that would allow the putatively “dominant culture” of Latinos to invade America.6 The controversy even generated its own hashtag, with #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner trending on social media, while users variously sympathized with the sentiment, humorously posted pictures of taco trucks to signal its onslaught, and casually celebrated such a future with a “bring it on” attitude. Earlier in the same year on Cinco de Mayo, then GOP candidate and later president Donald Trump had taken to Twitter to post a smiling picture of himself ready to dig into a taco bowl with a caption that declared “I love Hispanics.”7 While “bad hombres” were to be kept out, apparently their food would be welcome right into the inner sanctum of the Trump Tower. The contradiction at the heart of such an image might at first seem puzzling. Is it the immigrant we seek to keep out, while welcoming their culinary offerings? Are their culinary offerings somehow divested of foreign implications insofar as the taco bowl itself is now assimilated as American food? Even if that were the case, though, the caption “I love Hispanics” with the taco bowl seems to suggest that it is both people as the source of difference and food as the manifestation of difference that is being celebrated at once. But the contradiction is more easily explained when we consider that food frequently becomes the means of rendering difference more manageable or more palatable, if you will. The much-hyped wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, for instance, has been touted as one that will guard the national boundaries to keep out “bad hombres,” but the somatic boundaries of the body politic remain more porous and open to foreign foods. Ethnic food thus becomes a means of categorizing and sampling the other on one’s own terms, without any real threat to a more homogeneous identity. To use bell hooks’s influential phrase, “eating the other” is not only a form of fetishizing and commodifying difference, but a way of mitigating its threatening nature and eventually conquering it.8 Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, finds that “food is something that is often accepted in this country before

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we accept the immigrants themselves. . . . We happily buy hummus in our grocery store, but in the meantime, they were going to ban Muslims from entering this country.”9 What Lohman articulates here are the contradictory impulses of fear and desire associated with food and the outsider. She points out that the Italians, who brought us garlic, were initially “considered a separate race of people that were damaging to the climate of our country.”10 The trajectory she charts for the American context does not neatly translate into other contexts, but the policing of boundaries in terms of people and their food is a persistent historical phenomenon. In Britain, the postwar rise of the curry house has facilitated a different kind of migrant movement and brought with it a different kind of racial conflict. While former foreign secretary Robin Cook declared in 2001 that chicken tikka masala was “a true British national dish,” not only because of its growing popularity, “but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences,” others have found that the South Asian migrant has not always been as readily accepted as the curry house.11 Lizzie Collingham, author of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, argues that “although the British eat vast amounts of curry, they are not always welcoming towards the Asians who make it for them.”12 In fact, “the consumption of large quantities of curry has not necessarily made the British any less racist,” perhaps testing the claims of Cook’s curry analogy.13 Even the Brexit vote has been weighed in terms of its impact on the “curry crisis” and how it might affect a restaurant industry founded on immigrant labor. “Who Killed the Great British Curry House?” an article in The Guardian demands to know, noting that “the real blow came when a harsh new politics of immigration came in, which made it harder for skilled South Asian chefs to work in the country, just as the wider British public were changing the ways in which they consumed curry.”14 The crisis is one that embodies the confused politics of guarding national borders, while seemingly opening up national foodways. After all, how do you eat “an Indian” without the labor of an Indian or South Asian more generally? Indeed, to go out “for an Indian,” as it has come to be known in British parlance, is itself a quintessentially English tradition, arguably as British as roast beef or Yorkshire pudding. Collingham describes the “larger-loutish” ritual of rolling into a curry house drunk and proving one’s machismo by ordering the hottest curry in the house.15 An episode of Goodness Gracious Me, the Indian-British comedy show, even lampooned such eating culture in a sketch where a group of young, inebriated South Asians “Go Out for an English.”16 They start by mocking the server’s British accent, mispronounce his name, and then obnoxiously proceed to order “the blandest thing on

INTRODUCTION

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the menu,” even threatening to beat up the server when he suggests otherwise. The jest draws from its inversion of the rituals associated with getting drunk and eating “an Indian,” thereby purging the night’s excesses the morning after. As Anita Mannur points out in Culinary Fictions, the sketch works “to castigate the forms of consumption rendered normal within the cultural imaginary of English pubgoers such that bland English food, rather than ‘excessively’ spiced Indian food, comes to occupy the space of abject culinary matter.”17 In the episode, Englishness itself is understood in culinary terms, where Indianness typically occupies such a position. Beyond the jest, critical to my purpose here is the phrasing of the ritual—the eating of “an Indian”—in which an Indian subject is rendered edible object. Food is anthropomorphized in terms of its points of origins. If we are the sugar, the tea, the coffee, the spices, it would seem that they are also us. As foods, they are vested with difference, taking on the racial and national character from whence they came. This process by which food comes to be inscribed with racial character and, in turn, the racial other comes to be marked as edible begins in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine, before the xenophobic fear of a taco truck on every corner. The literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century provides us glimpses of some of the earliest encounters with otherness via food. It emerges from a period that historians conventionally refer to as the Age of Discovery, during which time, along with nautical discoveries, scientific inventions, and cartographic innovations, we see the discovery of new spice routes, the establishment of sugar plantations, and the earliest coffee houses in England. In fact, as Jyotsna Singh and others have pointed out, “the period traditionally designated as the European Renaissance is now increasingly re-configured as the Global Renaissance, characterized by various modes of boundary crossings, rather than conceived within national boundaries of Italy, England, and so forth.”18 Singh’s work makes a strong case for understanding early modern English literature in terms of England’s networks of travel and traffic with diverse regions that range from the Americas to North Africa to East India, with imperial powers such as Spain and Portugal, and with non-European regimes such as the Ottoman Turks and Mughals in India. Such a “re-Orienting” of the Renaissance world picture compels us to consider the many forms of contact outside of Europe that influenced the English cultural, economic, religious, and political imaginary in ways that we would now describe as global. It provides us with a framework to examine the culinary networks of exchange that fundamentally shaped not just early modern England, but the contours of the modern world as we know it.

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Tasting Difference chronicles how foods traveled through these networks of exchange and how their movements are imagined in the literature of the early modern period. It analyzes nascent discourses of racial, cultural, and religious alterity that emerged in the wake of English contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. In particular, it is the intricate trajectories of what Salman Rushdie has famously called “the hot stuff ”—pepper, clove, cardamom, nutmeg, and mace, along with foodstuffs like coffee, chocolate, and sugar—that I chart in this book.19 Collectively, these foods account for a vast majority of overseas voyages, newly discovered trade routes, and joint-stock companies that were formed throughout the early modern period. No doubt, the chronologies and trajectories of individual foodstuffs vary. Spices, for instance, were used by the elite during the medieval period in sacred and secular rituals of conspicuous consumption, propelling England’s somewhat belated ventures into the Iberian-controlled East India spice trade in the 1600s, when they take on a particularly racial dimension. Coffee, on the other hand, found its way from Ottoman territories into English public life much later in the seventeenth century, frequently via Jewish merchants, who supervised some of the earliest coffeehouses in Oliver Cromwell’s England. What they do share is the way they acquire the taste of difference, as racialized foods that are adapted to English rituals of consumption and absorbed into the English body politic. This taste is acquired over a period of time, concurrent with England’s mercantile and colonial trafficking with difference. It evolves throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, comprised of dominant, residual, and emergent cravings for different exotic foodstuffs. This book looks to different parts of Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic, where culinary, cultural, and economic networks of exchange were being forged, resulting in an unprecedented access to new kinds of edible commodities and changing culinary tastes across Europe. Their entry into the English household and their incorporation into the English diet were accompanied by pervasive anxieties about mixing and mingling with foreign entities. Making their way from the world into the home, these commodities veered between strange and familiar, healing and poisonous, in the early modern imagination. The fear of heathens, the threat of racial contamination, the dread of what we might retrospectively term miscegenation, variously coalesced onto these foods, even as they became highly coveted objects of conspicuous consumption in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marketplace. Despite their inanimate state, they took on a life of their own in the early modern mindset; they came to be personified as simultaneously

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alluring and dangerous incarnations of the cultural others that produced them. In the “social life” of these things—to use Arjun Appadurai’s conceit— we thus catch a glimpse of the lives that they were transforming across continents.20 In examining these lives, I draw on a range of genres—plays, pageants, recipe books, dietaries, domestic manuals, travelogues, ballads, and broadsides— all of which registered the impact of newly imported foods through a variety of realist and fantastic modes. If some invoked spices against the backdrop of fairyland, others were decidedly more prosaic in their depiction of spices as everyday kitchen ingredients. If some portrayed them in association with naked natives and black Indian queens, others showed them in close proximity to the English housewife, as things she would use to cure bad breath, to season her cheesecake, or to condition her hair. If coffee in some ballads was a black Othello contaminating a pure Desdemona-like water, in others it was a salubrious potion used to cure the infirm and the inebriated. As rarities from distant climes, they seemed to arouse an insatiable appetite for the exotic. But as foreign bodies from heathen lands, their admixture into the body politic provoked an acute sense of discomfort about cultural and corporeal boundaries. These anxieties about corporeal boundaries also extended beyond the immediate realm of the domestic to the broader global arena in which encounters with the other were being forged. Tasting Difference thus explores how, in a period when European and English travelers circumnavigated the globe on an unprecedented scale in search of foodstuffs, set up joint-stock companies to trade in them, and built warehouses to store them, the imaginative writing of the period registered the ensuing culinary and gastronomic changes. I am particularly interested in what travelers and emissaries themselves ate in the contact zone, how they chronicled their experiences, and the somatic effects they endured in the process. The archives of travel writing reveal moments when they savored the foods of the other and when they turned away in disgust. This project, as a whole, documents how the new foodstuffs they “discovered” were imported and incorporated in domestic cuisine. It asks what recipes did the foodstuffs inspire and what dishes were created with them. How did women learn to cook with them? What food fads and food fears emerged in relation to them? What was their impact on medical thought of the time, particularly in the Galenic paradigms available to practitioners? How did language register the changing tastes for them, as for instance, in the shift from sweetness as a word associated increasingly with sugar and less with honey? And finally, how did the domestic and colonial landscapes and foodscapes change in the process?

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I turn to a range of sources in search of answers to these questions, examining literary, heuristic, and didactic forms of writing that collectively provide us with important insights into the changing foodways of early modern England. Roland Barthes’s methodology outlined in one of his earliest pieces on the semiotic and symbolic power of food is particularly useful here: “Information about food must be gathered wherever it can be found: by direct observation in the economy, in techniques, usages, and advertising; and by indirect observation in the mental life of a given society.”21 Such a methodology involves gathering information about food as a system of communication in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in canonical and noncanonical texts, in conventional literary genres and lesser-known food genres. As with the receipt from Macbeth in the next section, my method frequently involves an examination of embedded food genres in canonical texts from the Shakespearean corpus. Equally, I turn to food genres such as receipt collections and dietaries to examine how they conjure up food in ways that are literary and often explicitly Shakespearean. This method requires turning to early modern food consumption in both domestic and foreign spaces. Broadly, it requires that the foodways of the early modern subjects inform all aspects of my critical practice in this work.

Nose of Turk, Liver of Jew, and “Other” Ingredients Third Witch

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron. ALL

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

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Second Witch

Cool it with a baboon’s blood, Then the charm is firm and good. —Macbeth, 4.1.22–38

The witches’ cauldron might seem like an unlikely starting point for a discussion of food in this period or at the very least an unappetizing one. Their “hell-broth” is an unsavory mix of dismembered humans and animals, with teeth, eyes, and fingers among its many ingredients (4.1.19). There is very little here for even the most intrepid bizarre-food-loving foodie and not much by way of the exotic foodstuffs that my previous section promises. And yet, the witches help me articulate my purpose here, which is to look at the earliest experiences of tasting the other. But before I say more about my own task in this work, I wish to dwell a little more on theirs. Their incantation, as several scholars have pointed out, closely follows the form of an early modern receipt (or “recipe” as we now call it). In his now classic work, “The Recipe, the Prescription, and the Experiment,” anthropologist Jack Goody defines the receipt as any “written formula for mixing ingredients for culinary, medical or magical purposes; it lists the items required for making preparations destined for human consumption.”22 Interestingly, his epigraph offers the witches’ incantation as the prototype of such a written formula, despite the fact that their concoction hardly seems to meet his “destined for human consumption” caveat. For the witches are indeed sharing a receipt. They share a receipt that, like any receipt, alternates ingredients with instructions. They tell of how to bake and boil, burn and cool, stir and bubble. They speak of consistency—“thick and slab,” “firm and good” (4.1.32, 38). Their ingredients are at best unusual. Scattered amid their list of snake entrails and dog tongues are stray references to human body parts. They belong to humans marked as distinctly other: we find the liver of a blaspheming Jew, the nose of a Turk, and the lips of a Tartar. Even the gruesome “finger of birth-strangled babe” is delivered by a “drab” or a prostitute and marked as other in the process. Collectively, these figures signify forms of difference in the receipt. For what uniquely Turkish or Jewish or Tartarian qualities could the Turkish nose or the Jewish liver or the Tartarian lips bring to the gruel? What is being imagined in the act of incorporating and ingesting such difference in their receipt? Put another way, how would they taste different? Granted, the Jew and the Turk as ingredients are forms of literary excess, invoked in the realm of the supernatural in Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Yet the fact that this excess is imagined and exaggerated through the figure of the other drives home my point that

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they are haunting specters of difference, conjured up to mark the sinister realm of the heath that eventually impinges on the hearth in Lady Macbeth’s images of warped maternal feeding and in her fatal feast for Duncan. Along with the animal entrails in the cauldron, they remain the stuff of the abject, at once dangerous and potent. If at this point the witches’ gruel still seems too exaggerated a concoction for the questions about taste and difference I ask above, we might do well to note Wendy Wall’s argument that “when the witches call for body parts in their grotesque brew, they don’t invert the medical remedies as much as exaggerate their sinister nature.”23 A quick glance at a selection of receipts from popular seventeenth-century receipt collections bears out Wall’s point that Macbeth “simply demonizes an already alarming domestic practice.”24 The materia medica of the early modern household variously included burned snails, dog turds, the chopped up ears of a cat, and live moles slit up and mixed in white wine.25 The English housewife literally had blood on her hands and sometimes on her face as, for instance, when she followed a receipt to “clear the skin” of freckles by smearing “the blood of any foul or beast” on it.26 Her receipts are close to the witches’ not only in her use of animal entrails, but also in the occasional use of human body parts and secretions. She pounded up umbilical cords into a beer concoction for children prone to bedwetting.27 She stirred human urine into a mixture to cure worms.28 Lady Elizabeth Grey’s Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets even recommended powdering a dead man’s skull for women with the falling sickness and a dead woman’s skull for men who suffered from the same.29 Skulls, specifically those of the criminally inclined Irish, also made their way into John Jacob Berlu’s The Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d (1690), a practical guide for drug merchants with handy information on the substances they sold.30 Among the many entries in the manual is a description of “Cranium Humanum,” a concoction made from “A skull of Man . . . which dieth a violent Death, (as War, or Criminal Execution) and never buried.” Belaru goes on to suggest that for this purpose, the skulls of those in Ireland are “best esteemed, being very clean and white, and often covered with Moss.”31 In effect, he advises drug merchants to “rove Ireland looking for moss-covered criminal’s skulls, then sell them to apothecaries so they can be ground into powder and drunk by sick English people.”32 In these concoctions, parts of the foreign body are sought out for their curative and culinary properties. While the Jew’s liver and Turk’s nose do not actually appear in receipt collections of the time, recipes for mummy, which in Paracelsian medical thought was considered valuable for its curative effects, do turn to the Moor’s decapitated body.33 In Purchas his Pilgrimage, Samuel Purchas anthologizes

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“Relations of Ethiopian rarities” in which Fray Luis de Urreta describes the method supposedly used to make mummy: [T]ake a captive Moor, of the best complexion; and after long dieting and medicining of him, cut off his head in his sleep, and gashing his body full of wounds, put therein all the best spices, and then wrap him up in hay, being before covered with a cerecloth; after which they bury him in a moist place, covering the body with earth. Five days being passed, they take him up again, and removing the cerecloth and hay, hang him up in the sun, whereby the body resolveth and droppeth a substance like pure balm, which liquor is of great price: the fragrant scent is such, while it hangeth in the sun, that it may be smelt.34 This description of decapitating the Moor, marinating the corpse with spices, and juicing it for its curative fluids carefully follows the form of a receipt, arguably more grisly than the witches’. Its purpose can hardly be for replication in the household. But it does serve to effectively link the substance that is mumia to the foreign body of the Moor. Received wisdom regarding mummy suggests that its efficacy depended on the violence inherent in its procurement. In a detailed study of medicinal cannibalism, Louise Noble notes that the most valuable mummy was obtained from a “fresh corpse,” preferably from “a youth who had died a sudden and violent death, because of the widespread belief that a swift death captured the body’s healing life force.”35 Noble acknowledges that bodies entered the early modern medical corpse market through different means, and it is impossible to establish the identity of those whose bodies were procured for medicine. But travelers’ reports, which speak of rummaging through mummy pits in Egypt and trampling on bodies “great and small” to bring back the profitable substance to England, suggest a premium placed on corpse medicine obtained from afar. George Sanderson, an apprentice with the Turkey Company, writes of his valiant efforts to procure mumia: The Momia . . . are thousands of imbalmed bodies, which were buried thousands of yeeres past in a sandy cave, at which there seemeth to have bin some citie in times past. We were let down by ropes, as into a well, with waxe candles burning in our hands, and so walked upon the bodies of all sorts and sizes, great and small, and some imbalmed in little earthen pots, which never had forme: these are set at the feet of the greater bodies. They gave no noysome smell at all, but are like pitch, being broken. For I broke of all the parts of the bodies to see how the flesh was turned to drugge, and brought home divers heads,

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hands, armes, and feet, for a shew. Wee brought also 600 pounds for the Turkie Companie in pieces; and brought into England in the Hercules, together with a whole body.36 The substance made its way into England on merchant ships and was stocked on apothecaries’ shelves through much of the late sixteenth century. That large quantities of the substance were in demand is apparent in the receipt collections of the time, which frequently called for its use in salves and balms. Hannah Wolley’s The Queen-like Closet Opened recommended it as an ingredient in “an excellent artificial balm” when mixed with rosemary, marjoram, and a resin called dragon’s blood.37 Lady Grey recommended an ounce of mumia in a receipt that mixed together precious ingredients, including gold, silver, spices, and oils, “to make the best Paracelsus salve.”38 Medical treatises suggested its benefits came from application as well as ingestion. Receipts for oral consumption prescribed cutting mummy into small slices, seasoning it to mitigate its acrid taste, and imbibing it with wine. Its taste was inevitably different. In 1647, the author Thomas Fuller referred to it as “good physic,” but “bad food,” perhaps to emphasize its putative ability to effect wondrous cures when ingested as food, even while acknowledging its unpalatable taste.39 Among the more hyperbolic descriptions is one that we hear from a character in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), who exclaims to another: “Your followers / Have swallowed you, like mummia and being sick / With such unnatural and horrid physic, / Vomit you up i’ th’ kennel.”40 His analogy suggests that in the early 1600s, playgoers were at some visceral level familiar with the taste for mummy, even if they had not necessarily tasted mummy per se. What we have here is a complex global process in which the mumia travels from the mummy pits of Egypt to the English kitchen, via the intrepid traveler to the resourceful housewife, becoming a recognizable (if somewhat acrid) taste in the everyday imagination. It is a process in which something of the foreign body is transported and incorporated into the domestic body, an eating of the other, if you will. What tastes of the other remain in this process? In a Derridean sense, is the other good to eat? (Or “bad” to eat, even when “good” for you, as Fuller suggests of mummy.) Does the other taste different? Conversely, how is difference (racial, cultural, or religious) experienced and imagined in terms of taste? Is it bitter like mummy, hot like pepper, or sweet like sugar? And, by extension, how are the affective connotations of terms like “sweet” tied to these culinary and colonial histories? The Jewish liver and the Turkish nose stirred into the witches’ hell broth are only slightly more sinister versions of a culinary and cultural practice in

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which the other is rendered edible and the edible is marked as other. Their exaggerated nature underscores the element of the bizarre in seemingly banal acts of routine everyday consumption in which the other is variously consumed, incorporated, digested, or expulsed. As ingredients, they are not unlike the mumia, whose curative properties derive from its associations with the body of the decapitated Moor. The ingredient becomes an incarnate form of the other. It recalls the racialized body that supposedly produced it or harvested it or trafficked in it; simultaneously, the other becomes inseparable from the ingredient, inscribed with the mark of edible difference. To use Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s term, they signify a form of “hyperembodied difference,” as racially marked subjects “that carry the burdens of difference and materiality.”41 My book examines early encounters with these racialized edible bodies, particularly in the experience of tasting foodstuffs like sugar, spices, and coffee. While I do not return to the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron, I see the receipts of their hell broth reincarnated in different forms throughout this project—in potions that use spices to make the blind see, in concoctions that blend a bruised cock, a unicorn’s horn, and white sugar to cure consumption, in pepper-based potions purported to prevent conception— in the simultaneously magical and mundane world of early modern food preparation and consumption. In effect, I engage with texts that imagine the tastes and sensations of “other ingredients,” arguing throughout that the other is constituted through the ingestion and incorporation of these ingredients in varied forms. This taste of difference, as I conceive it here, is a gustatory sensation experienced in the consumption of foreign foodstuff, but also, broadly speaking, a predilection for all that is exotic about it. Mummy, for instance, is not always tasted by the palate, nor are spices always ingested as food, as when used by women in facial treatments or contraceptive applications. But their incorporation and consumption in different forms represent a larger taste for foreignness and a conviction that their putative efficacy derives from it. These tastes are experienced most intensely in what I conceive throughout this project as a culinary contact zone.

The Mouth and the Culinary Contact Zone We might recall here Mary Louis Pratt’s definition of the contact zone as “the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”42 To reimagine the contact zone in culinary terms is to recognize just how

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crucially cross-cultural encounters in this period are propelled and shaped by foodstuffs. This is particularly so in a period of new appetites and aversions, pleasure and disgust in the realm of the gustatory. It is also a period of encounters with difference not just in geographically distant lands, but also in the domestic spaces of food preparation and consumption. As such, the contact zone in these encounters is demarcated not only in physical spaces from whence exotic foodstuffs are procured, but also in an affective and somatic realm in which the eating body encounters or incorporates the other and experiences the tastes of difference. Such a reading inevitably positions the mouth as a crucial site for the experience of difference. My book as a whole signals a shift from the emphasis on the gaze in colonial and postcolonial studies to the mouth of the eating body. Where early work on cross-cultural encounter turned to “Imperial Eyes” via Pratt’s work or the Orientalist gaze via Said’s work, in turning to the mouth I wish to emphasize the alimentary nature of this encounter, which was so often premised on the procuring, cultivating, transporting, preparing, and consuming of foodstuffs. In Alimentary Tracts, Parama Roy argues that “colonial politics often spoke in an indisputably visceral tongue: its experiments, engagements, and traumas were experienced in the mouth, belly, olfactory organs, and nerve endings, so that the stomach served as a kind of somatic political unconscious in which the phantasmagoria of colonialism came to be embodied.”43 For Roy, Marx’s image of vampire capitalism might be harnessed to an image of cannibal colonialism in order to understand the appetites that drove colonial regimes. Such an image might lead us to imagine empire itself as a greedy mouth, feeding off the teas, coffees, sugars, and spices—the “psychopharmacopoeia of empire.”44 Where Roy looks to anticolonial movements from the nineteenth century (chapattis in the Indian Mutiny, salt in the Satyagraha march, and fasts in Gandhi’s protest movements), my work looks to an earlier moment in the precolonial context, when such appetites and aversions were emerging and the racial narratives that accrued to foodstuffs were only just being forged. To turn from imperial eyes to the mouth, the gut, or the belly in this context as Roy does in Alimentary Tracts, as Valérie Loichot does in The Tropics Bite Back,45 and as I do in Tasting Difference, is to reckon with the ways in which the other was experienced at a sensory and somatic level. To do so allows us to grasp the full extent of tasting, eating, and incorporating otherness. It enables a more visceral understanding of the culinary contact zone. Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais is particularly useful here in theorizing the act of eating as one that facilitates the body’s interaction with

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the world: “The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself.”46 Anyone who has spent a few hours in the company of an infant could confirm the truth in Bakhtin’s claims, noting how a child gains sentient experience of the world s/he inhabits via the mouth, tasting and testing the universe through objects introduced into it. This primal instinct is also one that we see at work in the contact zone, where it is the mouth that tastes and tests the sensations of the other. As I show in my penultimate chapter, travelogue after travelogue in the seventeenth century records the intensely affective experience of taking in the world through mouth. Frequently, travelers register the impulse to not taste, as it were, turning away in gestures of revulsion; occasionally they report growing faint with the experience of an unknown taste; sometimes they speak of relishing the exotic and the bizarre. The generic conventions of the travelogue demand that these sensations be documented, ensuring a kind of immediacy and veracity in the reported taste of difference. No doubt, their ethnographic observations touch upon several other vectors of difference: dress, religion, dwelling, sexual mores, and governance get their due attention in travel narratives. But it is in gestures of the “open, biting, rending, chewing mouth” that the traveler establishes a palpable sense of actually having been there and having encountered the other at a visceral level. Importantly though, this experience of tasting the world is not confined to culinary contact zones in faraway lands. As foreign foods enter the domestic realm, the open mouth and other permeable orifices, in acts of ingestion and incorporation, create new contact zones in the home, in the kitchen, in commensal rituals and curative regimens where such foods are eaten and administered. Here too the act of tasting and ingesting is fraught with complex responses. If the immediacy of the traveler’s experiences in encountering an entirely new substance is sometimes absent, their intensity is not. In a medical treatise from the sixteenth century, for instance, Timothie Bright, who I discuss in my first chapter, wonders how the English can consume wares from the banks of the Nile and the fens of India, speculating facetiously if they will next turn to dragons and crocodiles.47 The physician’s image is striking in the way that it construes the act of eating in the home as one that takes place in relation to the topographies of foodstuff in the world at large. To consume spices is akin to consuming strange creatures in strange places. In effect, what is being imagined here is a form of contact with the other via the mouth.

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The humoral frameworks current in the early modern medical thought that Gail Paster, John Sutton, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and other scholars have brought to light help us parse the anxieties that Bright and his contemporaries voiced.48 For Floyd-Wilson, “geohumoralism is fundamental to early modern English conceptions of how their own, more northern, bodies and minds were shaped and influenced by external forces.”49 She notes that “the environment—whether that meant the air, temperature, diet, and terrain, or the effects of education, rhetoric, or fashion—necessarily produced and destabilized early modern English selves.”50 In large measure, this vulnerability to the external and the environmental stems from an understanding of the body as open and permeable in its daily functioning. As Paster has argued in The Body Embarrassed, “bodies were always filled with humors, but the quantity of humors not only depended on such variables as age and gender but also differed from day to day as the body took in food and air, processed them, and released them.”51 In such a conception of the body, the internal environment and the external environment were, as Sutton puts it, “always in dynamic interrelation.”52 Sutton uses a valuable architectural metaphor to describe this imperative with regard to the humoral body: “Urgent steps could be taken to close off its vents and windows, barring the orifices by which external dangers could intrude.”53 The mouth was one such open orifice in need of constant regulation. The idea that foods could transform the English humoral makeup, and by extension, English ethnicity itself, inevitably resulted in genres like dietaries that sought to define English corporeal boundaries through diet. For Bright and others writing in this paradigm, routine acts of consumption necessarily revealed the vulnerability of the body to other. In a sense, food is always already other insofar as it is external to the self. The mouth marks the threshold through which the other becomes part of the self, transforming the self in the process. As an open orifice it threatens to dissolve the boundaries between the self and the world. Maggie Kilgour’s influential work, From Cannibalism to Communion, argues that “the basic model for all forms of incorporation is the physical act of eating, and food is the most important symbol for other external substances that are absorbed.”54 Viewed as such, it is easy to see why acts of ingesting the food of the other are carefully weighed and invested with significance, reflecting as they do the larger principles at work in the process of assimilating or eliminating that which is external to the self. This tension between the internal and external is played out in the many texts I examine here. The anthropomorphizing of foodstuffs as Indian boys or Moors, for instance, are ways of negotiating anxieties about the place of the foreign in the body politic. These

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“external substances,” in Kilgour’s terms, lurk at the threshold of the (often female) consuming mouth. They do not, of course, go down smoothly. As Racial Indigestion, the title of Tompkins’s work, suggests, the act of ingesting the other provokes anxieties about the boundaries between the self and the world. Thus it is that the mouth is, in Tompkins’s view, “the focus of a disciplinary project within which the correct embodiment of the individual was understood to be of deep importance to the burgeoning nation.”55 Tompkins is, no doubt, speaking of disciplinary projects in the context of the nineteenth century, when “different cultural and political anxieties, as well as various transnational relations, occupied the cultural imagination.”56 But it would not be anachronistic to think of such disciplinary imperatives in the early modern period as well, when a growing body of English conduct literature, domestic manuals, and dietaries came to be preoccupied with the ingestion and absorption of foreign foodstuffs. As Michael Schoenfeldt has shown, in the early modern period the stomach was understood as a “site of ethical discrimination.” He argues that the act of Renaissance self-fashioning is a fundamentally alimentary one, perhaps too easily ignored during the New Historicist turn to political acts of self-fashioning. The individual consumer at this time is pressured by various discourses, including Galenic physiology, classical ethics, and Protestant theology, to conceive all acts of ingestion and excretion as literal forms of self-fashioning. In Schoenfeldt’s words, digestion is thus “that magical yet mundane moment . . . when something alien is brought into the self and something alien is excreted by the self.”57 While I discuss this trope in full scatological detail in my chapter on coffee, for now we might note the ways in which acts of digestion require the stomach to negotiate the boundaries between the internal and the external, between the self and the other. Like the mouth, it is the subject of much debate, precisely because it is the organ that discriminates between what must be digested and what must be purged, what constitutes the self and what must be rendered other. It is in this context that the self must decide what it means to eat well and what is good to eat. Of course, the act of “Eating Well,” as Jacques Derrida reminds us, is always an ethically charged one. It is worth pausing here to consider the moral questions Derrida poses about the oral processes at work in such acts of eating: For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye and all the “senses” in general) the metonymy of “eating well” (bien manger) would always be the rule. The question is

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no longer one of knowing if it is “good” to eat the other or if the other is “good” to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him. The so called nonanthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropophagy and even construct their most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their morality, their politics, and their right, on this anthropophagy. Vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation. The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question, if you will, carnivorous?58 What Derrida offers here is a statement about an ethical dispensation toward the world, which is manifested in the ethical dispensation toward another or an other (be that human, animal, or even plant). To be, Derrida seems to be saying, is to consume the world. Thus he argues that vegetarians consume the world as much as flesh-eaters, suggesting that being a vegetarian is not necessarily more inherently ethical than being a meat-eater. “Eating well” consequently becomes a matter of how it is that we should take in, relate to, engage with—in short, consume—individuals, places, people, cultures, forms of life, life-worlds, whatever you may choose to call it, that are different from ours. It is a fundamental ethical question that guides human life itself both in routine, everyday life as well as in exceptional circumstances. For how we eat, whether we eat well or not, bears upon the fate of not just the person or culture we are eating but on the world that we inevitably share, the world that is the common ground of our being. If we harness this Derridean principle somewhat catachrestically to the early modern context, we come to understand its culinary, cultural, and colonial encounters as fundamentally preoccupied with the question of what it means to “eat well,” a question that in turn is intrinsically related to the question of what it means to “eat the other” and whether the other is “good to eat.” While our own period has grappled with these ethical dilemmas in a range of food fads and food movements (in the rise of paleo diets, in the ubiquity of gluten-free foods, or in debates about the omnivore’s dilemma, to name just a few), we might think of the early moderns as similarly

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invested in the question of what it means to eat well. Their answers do not always align with ours, of course. But like us, they are prolific in debating the implications of what happens as food crosses the threshold from the world into the self, or in Derrida’s terms, with things that happen “at the edge of the orifices.” Noted food historian Ken Albala estimates that from 1470 to 1650 nutritional guides appeared in the hundreds, frequently republished and translated in different editions. While many were printed in Latin tomes for the scholarly, others appeared in the vernacular for a lay audience, penned by everyone from physicians to philosophers, from poets to politicians. “Anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide,” Albala notes of a publishing trend in this period that ought to be familiar to us in the present moment.59 Their subject, as Albala’s title indicates, focuses a fundamental question about what it means to be “eating right in the Renaissance.” The ethics of eating right, as David Goldstein reminds us, is also deeply complicated in this period by the one act that “tore apart Western Christendom”— the taking of communion.60 “What was materially, spiritually, metaphorically present in the mouth of the believer when it closed down upon its contents? What was the edible constituent of belief ? What did faith do in the mouth?”61 These questions, Goldstein notes, had always been at the heart of Christian theology. But in the wake of the Reformation, “the stakes of that mystery grew so high that individuals and communities were called to account for their beliefs of the mouths.”62 At the heart of this theological debate was the question of how the body of God could be incorporated through the mouth and whether such an act was, in essence, cannibalistic. As implied in the title of Kilgour’s work, From Communion to Cannibalism, the idea of ingestion becomes fraught in the process, between “the literalist position, which bloodthirstily maintained that what the communicant ate really was Christ’s body, and the spiritualist position, which read the rite as purely symbolic.”63 But this denunciation of eating otherness was strategically selective. Noble points out that while detractors of Catholics as savage consumers of flesh and the cannibalistic implications of the Eucharist persisted through the period, corpse therapy and its use of mummy was more readily tolerated.64 Nevertheless, the line of questioning concerning the ethics of consuming another plagued numerous rituals of consumption as well as the consumption of specific foreign foodstuffs. The work of Thomas Tryon, which I take up in detail in the first two chapters, is a case in point. A polymath in the advice book tradition and one of the earliest known “vegetarians” in England, Tryon contemplates moral questions of what it means to ingest another. If his tirades against

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spices seem to follow the all too familiar rhetoric of guarding and disciplining the English housewife’s mouth, his discourse on sugar becomes more complex in its concerns with the implicit cannibalism at work in eating the products of slave labor from the Caribbean. Indeed, cannibalism, both literal and metaphoric, haunts several writers of the time as they ponder the implications of eating well in growing colonial economies. These concerns especially play out in imaginative dramas about the dangers endured by travelers in the course of their adventures in distant parts, travelers who must repeatedly negotiate the fine line between eating and being eaten. In a sense, the figure of the cannibal in these works is both the antithesis of eating well and the culmination of it. Cannibalism is imagined as the opposite of an ethical eating insofar as it involves eating another, but also feared as an inevitable process in the act of eating insofar as eating necessarily entails the consumption of another or an other. In many ways, the creation of the cannibal is a form of projecting the self ’s desire to eat the other onto that selfsame other. As Kilgour observes, “recent studies of imperialism and ‘colonial discourse’ have indicated how a society’s desire to appropriate other cultures can be disguised through the projection of that impulse onto the other.”65 In plays like The Sea Voyage, the subject of my final chapter, the dramatists’ inclusion of a plot involving Europeans stranded on a nameless island, reduced to near-cannibalism as they go native, seems to engage with these quandaries, testing the conventional markers of civilization and the trappings of aristocracy in circumstances of extreme privation. The concern with eating right in genres ranging from dramas to dietaries also brings to the fore questions of taste. Whether to eat right is to eat well is in one sense a moral choice; but in another sense, it is also a culinary choice that does not always align with the moral, as John Milton’s Eve would surely demonstrate. While the figure of the gastronome as an arbiter of culinary and artistic taste emerges later in the eighteenth century, Denise Gigante has traced the evolution of modern ideas of taste as a gustatory category to the seventeenth century, particularly in the writings of Milton and his contemporaries. “For at roughly the same time that ‘taste’ was gaining currency as a term for aesthetic experience, Milton was struggling to represent the gustatory metaphor in Paradise Lost and Regained,” Gigante argues.66 She points out that Eve does not give into temptation because she is hungry; rather, there is a sense of pleasure—aesthetic and gustatory—that Milton articulates in his work through characters like her. “The Miltonic fall involves more than an epistemological or moral errors of judgment: it also involves a kind of judgment inextricable from pleasure.”67 Gigante notes that whereas classical

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aesthetics were linked to higher senses like sight, modern aesthetics evolves from this sense of taste as related to pleasure. Importantly for my purposes here, it is worth noting that this conception of taste takes shape in Continental and English thought at a historical moment when the Western palate “discovers” the sensual pleasures of the East and other exotic lands. To elaborate on the example Gigante offers above, Eve entertains her “Angel guest” in Paradise Lost with delicacies from India, the West Indies, and the Mediterranean. Her “hospitable thoughts” require the exercising of fine taste and the right pairing of delicacies and exotic luxuries that Paradise affords her: What choice to chuse for delicacie best, What order, so contriv’d as not to mix Tastes, not well joynd, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change, Bestirs her then, and from each tender stalk Whatever Earth all-bearing Mother yields In India East or West, or middle shoare. (Book 5, 331–39)68

To have good taste is to know different tastes, which is also to know the tastes of difference. Eve is one of many figures in early modern literature who appears to have cultivated these tastes, with dire consequences, no doubt. In the pages that follow, I examine others like her, her predecessors, if you will. Titania, for instance, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream eagerly partakes of trifles brought to her by the Indian votaress, at least until Oberon intervenes in her fairy sorority. In a different register, Desdemona exercises a taste for Othello’s exotic “traveller’s history,” a kind of literary appreciation of his storytelling techniques, expressed with a “greedy ear” that according to Othello “devour[s] up” his discourse (Othello, 1.3.138, 148–49). In a conflation of the aesthetic and the culinary, Desdemona’s taste for the exotic tale is construed as a consumption of it, an act that is imagined as simultaneously gustatory and auditory. These characters’ sense of taste evolves in their discerning taste acts, which are expressed in their hunger for different cultural and racial others, variously signifying luxury, plenty, excess, and exoticism. That Shakespeare was alert to these changing principles of taste and the foodstuffs that inspired them is not surprising. As far back as 1935, Caroline Spurgeon documented the persistent images of food and appetite in his corpus, concluding that “Shakespeare shows evidence, as we should expect, of a keen discriminating palate.”69 Recent work that mines the intersections between food studies and Shakespeare studies has sought a more complex

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reading of Shakespeare’s culinary references, going well beyond Spurgeon’s list to create a field, rich in archives and methodological approaches. In a seminal work on Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections, Robert Appelbaum hones in on “the gastronomic interjections” of early modern writers and characters, arguing that interjection tells us something about the writer, the character, the writing, the culture, and ultimately about food in a given culture.70 Other literary scholars like Joan Fitzpatrick and food historians like Albala have explored the important relationship between the plays and the dietary literature of the period.71 Goldstein’s Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England alerts us to the commensal and ethical relations at work in the plays and the period at large.72 Wall’s Staging Domesticity, along with her more recent Recipes for Thought, has paved the way for scholarship on early modern receipt collections, providing us with an invaluable understanding of the relationship between early modern women’s textual practices and material labors.73 As is evident in the section on the witches’ receipts in Macbeth above, I draw extensively on the frameworks that Wall provides for reading receipt collection, domestic manuals, and household treatises in relation to the Shakespearean corpus. In fact, my project as a whole is indebted to the work of these scholars, who have laid the foundations for the field of early modern food studies. Tasting Difference brings to this body of work an insistent focus on the racial and colonial encounters that shaped the culinary histories in Shakespeare’s England. Throughout this book, I argue that the food references and food genres of this period must be approached in relation to England’s expansionary ventures across the globe and the racialist paradigms that emerged in relation to them. Whether in Shakespeare’s culinary metaphors or in the dietary literature that influences them, we glean a new vocabulary for understanding the new tastes that were forming in relation to these encounters. This project started out by looking to the culinary and the gastronomic as a way of piecing together a food archive that was missing in work on early cross-cultural encounters. In the process, it also ended up looking to colonial and racial histories to piece together what is missing in work on food and commodity in Shakespeare’s England. Viewed as such, the questions this book raises in the field of early modern studies necessarily intersects with work in food studies and postcolonial studies. It is organized around foods that create and circulate in the culinary contact zone, at the interface between the eating body and the eaten body. It includes a chapter each on spices, sugar, coffee, bizarre foods, and cannibal foods.74 I examine the complex trajectories of these foreign foods—the cultural, racial, and political implications of their transportation. Their social and

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affective “lives” tell us much about the lives that were in turn being transformed the world over, as England made the transition to a protocapitalist and protocolonial power. Importantly though, the narratives they reveal are not of England’s unopposed entry and unilateral expansion into other worlds. Rather, the history of contact that they embody is fraught with anxieties and resistances from a range of communities and cultural others. To use a phrase from Loichot, we might think of how the other “bites back.”75 The fear of “other” ingredients, the conjuring of the uncanny in say the witches’ hell broth, is often a sublimation of precisely such a fear, an anxiety born of their intermixture in the body politic. Throughout this project I attempt to trouble narratives of their “entry” or their “rise” or “conquest” of Europe through a closer consideration of the complex rituals and logistics that mark their acquisition, their distribution, their preparation, and their consumption. In drawing attention to this flow of foodstuffs and rituals of its consumption in domestic and colonial economies, in the home and the world, in the hands of the English housewife and those of the English merchant traveler, I try to tell literary histories anew through food. With a few exceptions, these intersections have been inadequately addressed in scholarly work. As Kim Hall puts it, “While language and sex/desire do produce intimate points of convergence . . . food is in literary studies a less theorized way that societies mark cross-cultural encounters and articulate changing notions of difference.”76 The discourses of racial and cultural alterity embedded in these economies of exchange and encounter are elided in many histories of early modern acquisition and consumption. The optic of food allows me to revisit these colonial and cross-cultural encounters and the ensuing tastes of difference. Despite my use of the postcolonial approach to theorize difference, I am mindful that these encounters did not inevitably culminate in the experience of colonialism. Several critics have been skeptical about reading England’s hesitant, speculative, and contingent overseas ventures in the early modern period as sowing the seeds of the latter-day British Empire. Jonathan Burton comments on this tendency in early modern scholarship, arguing: “It has become something of a commonplace among literary scholars that the early modern period was the crucible in which the practices of the later British Empire were formed. Indeed, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are regularly seen as the ground on which were erected the cultural and institutional foundations of the modern world.”77 My efforts to place early modern studies, postcolonial studies, and food studies in conversation are not aimed at positing this linear teleology. Rather, these approaches allow me to theorize historically specific experiences of the culinary contact zone in the early

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modern period, when food first facilitated encounters with racial, cultural, and religious difference. These experiences of difference are neither uniform nor monolithic. They are specific to foodstuffs; they vary by geographical location; they are gendered, varying in the texts of merchants who procure them and housewives who prepare them. Tasting Difference chronicles these varying experiences in the five chapters I summarize below.

The Home and the World In looking at the changing foodscapes and landscapes of the period, the concepts of “home” and “world” are important to the structure of this book. I approach both “home” and “world” as empirical spaces and as conceptual frames in which we might locate the circulation and flow of foodstuffs. The first three chapters are thus located in the space of the home, looking at the ways in which literary imaginings of domestic spaces are transformed by commodities like spices, sugar, and coffee. The first chapter dwells on spaces in the English kitchen. The second and third chapters are more broadly concerned with the domestic implications of foreign foodstuffs, circulating on the home front in spaces such as the early modern closet or in such rituals as the coffee service, the banquet, or the ceremony of the void. But these spaces are necessarily linked as, for instance, in the chapter on sugar that necessarily gestures to the spaces of the New World plantation that became a setting and subject for writers in the later part of the seventeenth century. The last two chapters shift to the spaces in the world at large on nameless islands, on faraway journeys, in opulent foreign courts, where travelers and adventurers embarked in search of foods, but frequently experienced hunger, starvation, strange foods, and confounding rituals of commensality. Together, these spaces constitute the culinary contact zone in which Tasting Difference unfolds. That newly imported foods and the rituals surrounding them created new spaces of shared consumption is by now a well-documented social and historical phenomenon. Jürgen Habermas’s thesis in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is among the most well known in this regard, positing an important connection between the introduction of new beverages in English social life and the creation of a public sphere through spaces such as the coffeehouses where such beverages were consumed. Habermas locates the golden age of coffeehouses in Great Britain during the eighteenth century but traces its beginnings to the mid-seventeenth century, when tea, coffee, and chocolate became popular with the well-to-do and the bourgeoisie. A few coffeehouses grew to cater to these needs in the seventeenth century,

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but by the next century he estimates that there were at least three thousand in England. Unlike the salons of France, however, the coffeehouse remained predominantly masculine, refusing to admit women, thereby limiting their participation in its newly formed public spheres and its forms of intellectual exchange. The birth of the public sphere, according to Habermas, was thus also a gendered division of it into public and private, a division that was marked by rituals of consumption.78 Even while accounting for these gendered divisions, though, I want to emphasize that coffee consumption need not be the model for understanding women’s participation in the public debates and public spaces with regard to other foodstuffs. The conflation of the public and the social in the case of the coffeehouse has tended to demarcate the private and the domestic, by implication, as less social spheres of intellectual exchange and debate. However, I argue here that it is possible to consider the domestic realm as representing another mode of sociality. The household participates in the public realm through different interactions and via different foodstuff. The unprecedented publication of receipt collections by and for women during the seventeenth century, their shared networks of exchange for passing down expertise about new foodstuffs, their instructional modes and heuristic forms create other kinds of public spheres that we are in a position to examine when we turn to other foodstuffs and their circulation in different spaces. The kitchen, the closet, and the banquet are but a few of these spaces I take up in this project. Thus in structuring this work around the home and the world, I resist demarcating either as public or private. If I trace women’s participation in colonial economies through the realm of the home, it is because the “home” as a conceptual space allows me to map women’s participation in the “world,” in debates about food in the public sphere, and trace their participation in growing colonial economies. Likewise, the venturing of travelers into “the world” at large allows me to chronicle the impact on the “home” and other domestic consuming units. I thus examine both “the home” and “the world” in the five chapters below. Chapter 1, “Spices: ‘The Spicèd Indian Air’ in Shakespeare’s England,” takes up the early modern spice trade and the transformations it wrought in the English household. It looks at a period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when English explorers, merchants, and factors embarked on a transnational quest for the “hot stuff,” setting into motion a long-term intercourse with the Indies. Pepper, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and ginger were only some of the rare commodities that infiltrated the English marketplace, via the newly formed East India Company. But even as the pungent odors of these condiments wafted into ordinary

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English homes on an unprecedented scale, several writers worried about the implications of consuming the wares of “Blackamores” and “Bantamen.” This chapter explores the unique forms in which early modern writers grappled with emergent notions of racial, cultural, and religious alterity in their responses to the spice trade. Beginning with an overview of the new global culinary circuits of exchange, it goes on to focus on the intricate trajectories of the “hot stuff.” Analyzing such diverse genres as plays, pageants, domestic manuals, and receipt collections, this chapter looks at the racial incarnations of Indian spices as Indian subjects in the writings of authors like Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. Focusing in particular on the fairy subplot in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it approaches the conflict between Oberon and Titania in terms of a larger gendered conflict about the appropriate domestic consumption of foreign merchandise. It reads both the Indian boy and Bottom as incarnations of the monstrosities supposedly bred as a result of the female appetite for exotic “trifles” from the “spicèd Indian air.” Chapter 2, “Sugar: ‘So Sweet Was Ne’er So Fatal,’ ” traces the affective life of sugar in the long seventeenth century in two spatiotemporal contexts: the recipe closet in the first part of the century and the New World plantation in the later seventeenth century. While all commodities examined in this project have a sensual and emotional dimension, sugar is unique in the way that it both comes to stand for an affect and alters the very conception of it in the English language. Sugar is sweet, but sweetness itself, both in lexical and affective terms, evolves in relation to the trajectories of sugar in seventeenth-century England. The multiplicity of meanings sugar took on in relation to its use as ornament, as preservative, as remedy, as stimulant— all informed connotations of sweetness in the seventeenth century. But rather than treating this relation as axiomatic, this chapter examines the specific ways in which sugar comes to imply sweetness and sweetness in turn comes to be associated with sugar, including moments when other darker affects inform this relationship. For sweetness itself is a shifting signifier in relation to sugar’s many incarnations. There is a sense of wonder in its artifice and a sense of triumph in its ability to stall time, but later in the century, there is also fear, guilt, and horror in its exploitative colonial economies. As the title to this chapter implies, its pleasures are sweet but ultimately tinged with a sense of the fatal. The figure of the black laboring body that emerges in the plantation narratives of Richard Ligon and Thomas Tryon as well as in heroic romances like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko conjure up a scene of impossible sweetness, a kind of racial indigestion provoked by sugar consumption. This chapter draws on the seminal work of anthropologists like Sidney Mintz to mine an archive of texts that emerged

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in relation to the “sweetness and power” of sugar, adding to these affects a sense of guilt and horror in its cultivation.79 Chapter 3, “Coffee: Eating Othello, Drinking Coffee,” moves from ingredients like sugar and spices to the caffeinated beverages that had transformed English social life. It looks at the circulation of the edible Othello trope both in our own culture and in early modern culture, especially in relation to transgressive, exotic drinks like coffee, tea, and chocolate. To consume Othello coffee in these narratives is to consume the entire discourse of his exotic role in the play—his thrilling traveler’s tales, his dangerous yet alluring blackness, his tragic grandeur—all in one delectable serving. Their invocation of Othello crucially points to ways in which foreign foods that came to be consumed in English domestic life, as a result of new trade networks and global traffic, were being imagined in terms of the most immediately accessible symbols of otherness—as “extravagant and wheeling strangers / Of here and everywhere” (Othello, 1.1.137–38). The chapter begins with an analysis of the “devouring discourse” of Shakespeare’s play in which different characters are preoccupied with “eating the other”—to use bell hooks’s term. It then goes on to examine ways in which this devouring discourse is picked up by a coffee ballad that reimagines the Othello narrative as a story of Moorish infiltration that results in the corruption of pure English water. Chapter 4, “Bizarre Foods: Food, Filth, and the Foreign in the Culinary Contact Zone,” focuses on the affective expressions of disgust and pleasure articulated in the protoethnographic observations of the early modern travelogue. It marks a shift from previous chapters that unfold in the spaces of the home to a global arena in the world. The travelogues considered here vary in geographical scope, some written in the Cape of Good Hope, a few chronicling the customs of the Mughal court, others emerging from travels in the Ottoman Empire, and still others expansive in their consideration of peoples of the world. Despite their diverging approaches, however, these travelogues and emerging ethnographies are remarkably consistent in the vectors of sameness and difference they chart vis-à-vis the cultural and corporeal practices of the other. Why does food so frequently become the locus of disgust and distaste? How does it relate to the other categories of observation in the travelogue, including the sexual practices of the other? What does the persistent return to diet as a category tell us about the generic conventions of the travelogue? In considering these questions, this chapter turns to the rich archive of culinary experiences found in the writings of European travelers to different parts of Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic, including Thomas Roe, George Sandys, Henry Blount, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

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and Niccolao Manucci. It takes up their encounters with the rituals of hospitality, their accounts of foreign food and filth, and their narratives of the pleasures and dangers of the culinary contact zone. In their gastronomic experiences we catch an early glimpse of the affective responses to global cuisines and culinary movements that continue to shape diet and identity in our own period. Chapter 5, “Cannibal Foods: ‘Powdered Wife’ and Other Tales of English Cannibalism,” moves to the realm of the abject, examining the hunger topos of early colonial settlement and the myths surrounding the primal scenes of English cannibalism. It begins by taking up the recent archeological discovery of the remains of a fourteen-year-old girl at the site of the Jamestown colony, which it reads in relation to travelogues and plays that recount the privation of English travelers during a period that has come to be known as the Starving Time. In addition to conflicting accounts written for the Virginia Council, it takes up the performance of starvation and near cannibalism on the English stage, most notably in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Sea Voyage. While The Sea Voyage has often been read in relation to its more well-known source, The Tempest, a comparative analysis of their vanishing, absent, and cannibal foods has not been taken on by critics in a sustained analysis. I argue that Prospero’s magic, particularly in the scene of the vanishing banquet, controls the hunger topos of The Tempest; but its absence in Fletcher’s sequel allows for a more abject language of hunger and privation in The Sea Voyage, resulting in a darker exploration of colonial enterprise. My concluding section takes us to a metaphoric analysis of cannibal colonialism that is revealed in the various tales of anthropophagous consumption associated with the Starving Time. They are tales in which the self comes to be alienated from itself, blurring the lines between self and other in acts of consumption. Collectively, these chapters seek to imagine the journey that Stuart Hall contemplated in his essay on the local and the global with which I began this introduction. It is a journey that entails traversing across different spatial and temporal frameworks. We were there before we were actually there, before we could be physically there. Yet it is a story that cannot be told without us. We are the sugar and the tea itself. For where did the tea come from, Hall reminds us to ask. From Sri Lanka, from India. “That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history. . . . As a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.”80 This outside history that is also on the inside is the story that we will read in the pages that follow.

Ch a p ter 1

Spices “The Spicèd Indian Air” in Shakespeare’s England

From the beginning what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight clear. . . . They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart. —Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

The “hot stuff ” is indeed an essential ingredient in Salman Rushdie’s epic saga of the Indies. For it is pepper, the pungent “Black Gold” of the Malabar Coast, that brings together the many fantastic strands of this narrative. Its powerful odors waft through the novel’s tropical setting, mingling with the secretions of Aurora and Abraham’s lovemaking, forever haunting their hybrid progeny. “If it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun,” the eponymous Moor tells us at the very outset of his tale. What is true of his story is true of history itself. It was for pepper that Vasco da Gama’s ships set sail from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast of the Indian subcontinent, the Moor reminds us.1 And likewise, it was for aromatic spices that the Dutch, the French, and the English ventured East, following in the wake of the first arrived Portuguese. They all came in pursuit of precious foodstuff, and their prolonged intercourse with the Indies would irrevocably change the course of world history. The intricate trajectories of these spices are the subject of my chapter as well. I explore here a particular set of responses to the early modern spice trade, a conflicted discourse of fear and desire that attached itself to commodities like pepper, nutmeg, mace, and cloves, as they infiltrated the English marketplace, via the newly formed East India Company.2 Like Rushdie’s account, mine is concerned with the ways in which their scents and 29

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flavors traveled across oceans and permeated everyday lives. The Moor, who leafs through ancestral cookbooks to piece together his past, provides me with an analogue for my own methods in this chapter. I too am interested in culling together a narrative from the culinary potions and concoctions that figure in the receipts of the past.3 I look to such genres as the early modern receipt collection and household companion in order to unearth some of the rare “secrets” and “delights” hidden therein.4 Their rich amalgam of ingredients contains important histories. In these spice-laden mixtures we can trace the nascent origins of what would be a monumental cultural encounter between two worlds. “Of all the world’s commodities,” writes Paul Freedman in Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, “spices most dramatically affected history because they launched Europe on the path to eventual overseas conquest, a conquest whose success and failure affects every aspect of contemporary world politics.”5 Freedman traces the European craving for spices to the Middle Ages, arguing that much of their allure had to do with their status as objects of conspicuous consumption. Like other historians, he gives the lie to the popular belief that spices were procured as commodities that could preserve spoiling meats. In fact, he argues, spices do little in this regard, compared with salting, smoking, or pickling. Rather, it was their mysterious origins, their efficacy as medicines and cosmetics, their incorporation in sacred rituals, and their associations with sophisticated cuisine that account for their popularity through the medieval and early modern periods. By the eighteenth century, this popularity was already waning, and by the time European colonial expansion reached its zenith, Europe had shifted to a decidedly blander cuisine. Yet they had set in motion a series of events that would irrevocably change culinary habits and cuisines throughout Europe and England. In what follows, I look at a particular historical moment in this long culinary history, during which the taste of spices came to be associated with the taste of difference. By this I mean that the experience of tasting these ingredients was also an experience of imagining the racial others associated with their production or cultivation. In imaginative renderings of the spice trade, they were incarnated as Indian boys and Indian queens, Blackamores and Bantamen. They became foreign bodies that threatened the cultural and corporeal boundaries of the body politic. They aroused appetites as well as aversions, both of which were expressed in specifically racialist terms. In examining the affective response to these foreign bodies, I turn to different sites in the early modern milieu. My narrative shifts from the inventive spaces of the early modern English kitchen to the fairy bowers of the Shakespearean

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stage to the bustling commercial streets of seventeenth-century London. In the first section of this chapter I look to the domestic literature on the incorporation of spices into English cuisine, where I trace a gendered controversy over the ingestion of seemingly dangerous exotic ingredients. In the second, I turn to “the spicèd Indian air” of Shakespeare’s fairy world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which I examine the conflict between Oberon and Titania in terms of this larger gendered conflict about the appropriate domestic consumption of foreign merchandise. In the final part of this chapter, I offer an example of an imagined resolution to these controversies in an analysis of Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, in which an Indian queen assuages anxieties about the taste of difference through her conversion narrative. Each section dwells on a particular embodied incarnation of Indian spices: In the first, we have a specter of a monstrous racial hybrid created in the imagination of domestic writers, who rue the housewife’s mixing of Indian spices with English ingredients, the very cause of such monstrosities in their opinion. In the second, we have an imaginative rendering of these same gendered anxieties in the figure of the Indian boy, the contentious object of Oberon and Titania’s discord in fairyland. In the third, we have a black Indian queen who dispels all of the above anxieties by mitigating her threatening otherness and affirming her willing submission to English values. Each incarnation speaks to consistent desires and anxieties associated with spices as commodities that were simultaneously strange and familiar, potentially healing and poisonous. Each represents a foreign body, external to the self, whose possible admixture into the body politic provokes visceral anxieties about the racial transformation of the self through its incorporation of the other. “Nay, which is yet more absurd, that the health of so many Christian nations should hang upon the courtesy of those Heathen and barbarous nations, to whom nothing is more odious then the very name of Christianity?” demanded Timothie Bright in a tract first published in the 1580s.6 The sixteenth-century physician was one among many critics of the newfangled English reliance on Indian spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg to cure numerous bodily ailments and disorders. Bright decried the “unlearned” merchants, who jeopardized the English constitution by bringing these strange drugs into the local marketplace, solely to “reape gaine.”7 Extolling the virtues of native ingredients like rosemary, basil, sage, and thyme, he pleaded with his countrymen to look to their own fields and “leave the banks of Nilus, and the Fens of India.”8 After all, unlike the Indians and Egyptians, the English had not taken to eating “Lizards, Dragons, and Crocodiles”; why then did they eagerly consume the “outlandish medicines” of these

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strangers, the physician wondered.9 For Bright, Indian spices were fundamentally incommensurate with the English physiognomy. Imported from dangerous heathen lands, they would not only destroy “our English bodies” but also “our custom of life,” he asserted.10 Bright was not alone in fearing the long-term repercussions of this foreign merchandise. This understanding of English ethnicity in geohumoral terms and the identification of particular foodstuffs in terms of their effects on English bodies were echoed throughout the period. In several contemporary tracts and treatises, critics expressed apprehensions about how the English humoral makeup would withstand these alien entities. Would English men and women morph into swarthy “Blackamores,” like the barbarous inhabitants of strange nations, from whence these spices came?11 Reared on a precariously heterogeneous diet of foreign and domestic ingredients, would English children grow into hybrid monstrosities? Would these costly luxuries eventually replace the “simples” and herbs of the quintessential English kitchen garden?12 How would they fare in the hands of the English housewife, the chief agent through whom culinary, medicinal, and pharmacological concoctions were made available to men, children, and attendants in the early modern household? In particular, it was the potent role these spices played in women’s kitchen physic that troubled a number of authors. Stirred into cordials, sprinkled into pies, or distilled into perfumes, these commodities could unobtrusively enter the highly permeable orifices of the English body. That the vulnerable boundaries of the body natural—and by extension, those of the body politic—were under female supervision caused much unease among self-proclaimed guardians of the national well-being. This controversial female proximity to the world of spices is central to my argument. The texts I examine here reveal to us a range of female rituals and intimate bodily practices that were dependent on a steady supply of spices from the East. More generally, they reveal to us how the early modern woman became pivotal to both the legitimization as well as the condemnation of an emerging system of global trade. In elaborating on this aspect of my argument, I draw on a key concept from Hall’s work on the seventeenth-century English sugar trade. Hall suggests that “the shaping of the English woman’s role in the household was necessary, not only for maintaining domestic order, but for the absorption of the foreign necessitated by colonialism.”13 She thus speaks in terms of the “gendering” of sugar to describe the highly fraught processes by which this foreign commodity was incorporated into English domestic life. Likewise, it is the “gendering” of spices that I investigate in this chapter. For if the procuring of colonial merchandise had been an exclusively male enterprise, the domesticating of this

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merchandise had fallen rather precariously in the female domain. In fact, it is the former narrative rather than the latter that has predominated in the story of spices. As Hall puts it, “While we are familiar with the search for new territories and precious substances that fueled colonial expansion, the more mundane byproducts of this trade—the exposure to new foodstuffs and the gradual incorporation of those foods into European diets—is often accepted as a ‘natural’ occurrence rather than one which is often contested.”14 If we are to avoid such a fallacy we must necessarily examine the complex modes in which spices transitioned from the realm of the foreign to the realm of the domestic, from the purview of the merchant to the purview of the housewife. That such a transition was uneven, inconsistent, and frequently contentious is evident in the numerous texts I address in this chapter.

English Housewives and Indian Ingredients I begin by examining one of the earliest domestic manuals that explicitly yokes the housewife’s moral character to her abstinence from foreign ingredients. Entitled The English Housewife (1615), Gervase Markham’s text begins with a list of “inward virtues of the mind which ought to be in every housewife.”15 The list includes such dictates as “A housewife must be religious,” “She must be temperate,” her garments “must be altogether without toyish garishness.”16 Like several early modern conduct manuals, Markham’s is intent on regulating female speech: the good housewife must refrain from “uncomely language,” which is “deformed though uttered even to servants, but most monstrous and ugly when it appears before the presence of a husband.”17 But as Markham proceeds, we find that he is as concerned with what goes into the housewife’s mouth as he is with what comes out it. Among the chief prescriptions laid down for the housewife is one on her diet, specifying that it must proceed “more from the provision of her own yard, than the furniture of the markets.”18 It must “be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries,” Markham insists.19 By looking beyond her own yard, the housewife seriously compromises her moral character, according to Markham. In a sentence riddled with sexual connotations, he instructs her to proportion her diet according to her husband’s means, “making her circle rather strait than large.”20 His invocation of this enlarged circle, as Natasha Korda has noted, simultaneously alludes to “the shrew’s big mouth, the wantonness or ‘want’ of female sexuality (‘circle’ being a cant term for the female genitalia), and to the threat of an unbridled, unproductive expenditure that is cast at once in sexual and

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economic terms.”21 The housewife’s appetite for foreign commodities is thus implicitly linked to other kinds of quintessentially female appetites and excesses. Her mouth, her vagina, and her household are together conflated as sites of potential subversion and unruliness. In order to govern these, one of the many things she must do is to confine herself to wholesome domestic ingredients, which are “apter to kill hunger than revive new appetites.”22 Markham’s vision of the ideal English housewife is thus contingent upon her use of unpretentious domestic fare, rather than outlandish foreign ware. Her Englishness, it would seem, is dependent upon the Englishness of her ingredients. Yet paradoxically, as Markham progresses further with his guidebook he violates his own stipulations, compiling over a hundred receipts that would require the English housewife to use one or the other variety of exotic spice. His concoctions are literally peppered with rare and costly ingredients, all of which would necessarily have come from the Indies, rather than the housewife’s own yard. He recommends inhaling a “fine powder” made of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and mace to be taken “when the passion of the mother cometh.”23 He promises that an oil of nutmeg “hath very great virtue” in assuaging “the pain of the mother and sciatica.”24 He suggests a pepper snuff for “stinking nostrils” and quartered nutmegs “for the wind colic.”25 Likewise, his recipes—whether for pudding pie, for gingerbread, for herb tarts, or for jelly—are all strewn with an assorted mix of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and ginger. This blatant contradiction in The English Housewife has elicited comment from several critics, who wonder at Markham’s willingness to incorporate foreign spices into his culinary repertoire, despite his fetishization of indigenous ingredients. Is this sheer carelessness on the author’s part? Did Markham simply forget to practice what he preached, as he proceeded with his compendious domestic volume? Critics like Hall are inclined to think not. In a persuasive reading of The English Housewife, Hall suggests that we need not dismiss “this simultaneous inclusion of, and disdain for, the ‘strange’ as a mere inconsistency” on Markham’s part. “It might be that the woman’s ‘familiar acquaintance’ is the very thing necessary to remove the threat of strangeness: as substances pass through the English home and are transformed from raw material to ‘food,’ they lose their foreign taint,” according to Hall.26 Viewed as such, Markham’s English housewife is bestowed with the power to render strange commodities familiar. It is she, rather than the merchant, who can somehow “English” foreign ingredients, through her daily rituals and routines. Unlike Markham, however, later seventeenth-century authors like Thomas Tryon were less convinced about the English housewife’s ability to

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domesticate these alien entities. Where Markham wrote in the early part of the century, Tryon, who wrote after the Civil War and the growing transatlantic slave trade, was among those who publicly rebuked the housewife for the sheer indiscretion with which she consumed all sorts of spices from the Indies. A prolific author and a “Student in Physick,” Tryon wrote extensively about the English health and diet in assorted advice manuals, cookery books, and philosophical tracts.27 In the next chapter, I will address his complex responses to the Atlantic sugar trade and his vehement critique of the English planters’ treatment of slaves on the plantation, but here I wish to dwell on his more scathing attack on the English housewife. In The Good House-wife Made a Doctor (1692), Tryon was especially concerned with the female proclivity to mix all sorts of Indian spices into what he called “our Domestick Productions.”28 He attributed this pernicious habit to the essentially appetitive nature of the English housewife. Her irrepressible covetousness for foreign novelties and her irresponsible fusion of these into daily preparations were sure to endanger the English constitution, Tryon contended. After all, what “agreement” or “affinity” could there be between English fruits, grains, herbs, and seeds, and those that came from the Indies, he demanded. “Not so much as between the complexion of a Fat-nosed Lubber-lipp’d Blackamore, or swarthy Bantamen, with a head like a Sugar loaf, and our most Florid Beauties,” Tryon offered by way of reply to his own question.29 By mixing English staples with the produce of these Blackamores and Bantamen (by which Tryon means the Javanese islanders), the English housewife was, in essence, committing a grossly unnatural act. Tryon proceeds to elaborate on this point in more explicitly visual terms, by invoking an image of the monstrous creature that could grow from such heterogeneous mixing: [W]hat likeness or correspondence is there between Cloves, Mace, Nutmegs, Cinnamon, Ginger, or Pomento and . . . Apples, Milk, Butter, Herbs or Flesh? Verily there is no simile between them, and the foolish Painter, that to a Mans Head added a Stags Neck and a Fishes Body, did not Limn a more deformed Monster, than those prepare a monstrous unwholsom Diet for either the well or sick, who jumble together Ingredients so heterogeneous, and as it were diametrically opposite.30 Tryon’s repeated emphasis on “affinity,” “agreement,” “likeness,” or “correspondence” is telling in more ways than one. It bespeaks a distinct obsession with homogeneity and sameness, even racial purity, as we might term it. His views, as Hall has pointed out, are premised upon “a vision of national bodies with discrete boundaries that are linked to their geographic origin.”31

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When these boundaries are penetrated, as it were, with foreign foods, the English physiognomy itself stands the risk of mutating into a “deformed” hybrid. Thus it is that Tryon’s culminating image—a figure with a man’s head, a stag’s neck, and a fish’s body—is the very antithesis of “likeness” or “correspondence.” Part beast, part man, it is an incarnation of the grotesque incongruities that result when opposites mix. Drawn from Horace’s Ars Poetica, as Hall notes, this creature embodies a “literally monstrous cross-species.”32 Its deformity hints at other kinds of deformities that could take shape when “swarthy Bantamen” and “Fat-nosed, Lubber-lipp’d Blackamore[s]” came into contact with England’s “Florid Beauties.” In its cross-bred nature, it conjures up dangerous visions of the racial hybrid that could be born of England’s long-term intercourse with the Indies. Most importantly, in the context of spices, Tryon holds the English housewife culpable for creating such a monster. Like the “foolish Painter,” it is she who jumbles together heterogeneities and blurs boundaries, in the bargain jeopardizing English purity. Her aspirational nature comes under scathing attack from Tryon: [O]ur English have such an itching desire after Novelties, and every Joan is so proud to be of my Lady Fiddle Faddles Humour, and long for things Far-fetcht and Dear-bought, that if we had ten times as many more brought over as we have, there be those amongst us would cry up the excellent Vertues of them tho’ there is scarce any one thing so much destroys and hurts our Health, both of Body and Mind, as the eating and drinking Foreign Ingredients.33 Tryon is especially outraged by the fact that these profligate women squandered away so much on costly spices. In his portrait of the English housewife—or “every Joan” as he dubs her—she appears as an appetitive creature, carelessly depleting her husband’s resources on “Far-fetcht” and “Dear-bought” ingredients. She is anything but “The Good House-wife” that his title invokes; certainly not when it comes to her liberal use of spices. Unlike Markham’s housewife in the early part of the century, who successfully transforms dangerous foreign products into innocuous ingredients, Tryon’s housewife in the later seventeenth century greedily consumes them, rendering them even stranger and more monstrous. Perhaps by the time Tryon was writing, the practices that Markham had singled out became more entrenched in the household. Despite their different approaches and the many years between the publication of their work, both Tryon and Markham position the English housewife as a figure responsible for protecting the boundaries of the body politic. Where Markham’s housewife guards a distinct English

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cultural identity, Tryon’s housewife guards (albeit ineffectually) a form of English physiological purity. Both are fundamentally preoccupied with regulating the female proximity to these potentially dangerous goods. They share a common conviction in the English housewife’s power to purify and contaminate the apparently porous English body politic. She is pivotal to their respective fantasies of an insulated domestic realm that must remain unchanged by England’s cultural and mercantile encounters across the globe. If the vast majority of early modern cookbooks are anything to go by, however, Markham’s and Tryon’s nativist fantasies, articulated at different points in the century, were at a far remove from the lived reality of women’s lives. Frequently written by women, circulating in print and manuscript form, these receipt collections reveal the many culinary and medicinal uses that Englishwomen had for spices from the East. For instance, in the early years of the seventeenth century, a certain Mistress Sarah Longe’s handwritten Receipt Book (ca. 1610) is strewn with many references to spices. She sprinkles mace in her gooseberry fool, an ounce of nutmeg in her rice pudding, and pepper in a receipt to aid women “such as are subject to miscarry.”34 Like Longe, other seventeenth-century women relied on Indian spices for the most intimate practices. They did indeed come into close proximity with the hot stuff, which permeated their bodies in different forms, through different orifices. One manual from the 1650s suggests that they used pepper in the “natural place” after they had “known a man carnally,” in order to hinder conception.35 Another receipt from Hannah Wolley’s widely read The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (1675) notes the use of pepper to “provoke terms” or to bring on a menstrual cycle.36 “Take Wormwood and Rue, of each one handful,” Wolley instructs her readers, “with five or six Pepper-corns, boyl them all together in a quart of white-wine or Malmsey, strain it, and drink thereof.”37 Elsewhere in the same manual, Wolley offers an “Excellent Remedy to Procure Conception,” which calls for two drams of candied nutmegs, dates, and cinnamon, all of which must be mixed together in a mortar. “Take of this Electuary the quantity of a good Nutmeg, in a little Glass full of White-Wine in the Morning Fasting, and at four a Clock After-noon and as much at Night going to Bed,” Wolley writes, adding a cautionary note, “but be sure do no violent Exercise.”38 Spices could also be put to cosmetic uses, and Wolley made sure to include them in a potion that promised “To make the Hair Fair,” in a “Sweet water for the Hands,” and in what she called “The Queens perfume,” the last of which required no less than thirty cloves.39 Wolley’s recipes for pies, sugar-cakes, and cheesecakes indicate that women used spices in ways that are easily recognizable to us today. Occasionally

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though, we come across a concoction that attributes almost quasi-magical qualities to spices and the potions in which they were mixed. A remedial water in Wolley’s manual, for instance, requires ingredients that range from thirty peppercorns to a man child’s urine, purportedly to cure blindness: A Water for the Eyes, to make a Man see in forty days, who hath been Blind seven Years before, if he be under fifty years of Age. Take Smalledge, Fennel, Rue, Betony, Vervain, Agrimony, Cinquef oil, Pimpernel, Eye-bright, Celandine, Sage, of each a quarter; wash them clean, and stamp them, do them in a fair mashing pan, put thereto a quart of good White-Wine, and the powder of thirty Peppercorns, six spoonfuls of Live Honey, and ten spoonfuls of the Urine of a Man-Child that is wholesome; mingle them well together, and boyl them till half be wasted, then take it down, and strain it, and afterwards Clarifie it, and put it into a Glass Vessel well stopt, and put thereof with a Feather into the Eyes of the Blind; and let the Patient use this Medicine at Night when he goeth to Bed, and within forty days he shall see: It is good for all manner of sore Eyes.40 While we might be dubious about the efficacy of a potion that promises to cure blindness by applying a mix of pepper and urine on the eyes, its value to modern readers lies in the glimpse it offers us of the many elaborate rituals that constitute early modern kitchen physic. Mixing together diverse ingredients, the English housewife sought to heal, transform, and control the body in ways that seem both strange and familiar to us. She administered clyster pipes, supervised purges, and worked with items as varied as pepper, urine, blood, breast milk, human bones, and umbilical cords.41 Her domestic realm, as Wall argues, came to be represented simultaneously as “a reassuringly ‘common’ sphere in which people immersed themselves in familiar rhythms, and as a profoundly alienating site that could never be fully inhabited or comprehended.”42 Wall describes her preindustrial household as “a busy, chaotic, threatening, playful, transgressive, and gory workplace [that] exceeded the symbolic functions outlined in state and church manifestos.”43 For the Protestant ethic had deemed the husband as the sovereign of the household, yet his somatic needs in this domain were governed by the housewife. She was simultaneously a cook, doctor, butcher, herbalist, and surgeon, attending to the bodily distempers and disorders that plagued different members of her household.44 If a woman was to perform these roles effectively, according to Wolley, she had to be well acquainted with a range of herbs and spices. Thus in The Gentlewomans Companion (1673), Wolley lays out a detailed taxonomy of ingredients like pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon. She notes each

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of their curative properties and informs her readers of their precise origins in the Indies. She concedes that the Englishwoman is likely to have in her own garden such aromatic plants as rosemary, lavender, thyme, or sage that need no introduction or explanation. “The great plenty we have of these excellent Plants,” she observes, “hath made many judicious persons admire, that being supplied at home with such admirable simples, we should hunt so eagerly after Outlandish Spices.”45 But Wolley herself seems noncommittal about the opinion of these “judicious persons.” She does not at any point in the manual suggest that her female readers should refrain from using these so-called outlandish ingredients. She does, however, attribute their shortcomings to “the carelessness of the Merchant,” complaining that they are frequently “imported rotten, or worm-eaten . . . so long before they come to our hands, that they have lost half their virtue.”46 It appears then that Wolley is cognizant of the debate surrounding the English housewife’s habitual use of Indian spices, but is not as concerned about the mixing of strange and familiar ingredients. In her many published manuals on cookery, confectionary, medicine, and entertaining etiquette, she readily mingles native herbs with foreign spices. Taken together, these domestic manuals present competing visions of the Englishwoman and her domestic domain. Where Markham and Tryon as writers of domestic manuals, at different points in the century, seek to recuperate the household from a colonial or market economy, Wolley as a writer of a receipt books fashions a household that is enmeshed in it. The different genres seem to tell a different story of spices. In fact, Wolley’s receipt collections themselves function as commodities for sale in a marketplace, sales from which she hoped to garner an income.47 It is not surprising then that the “Queen-like” closet she opens up to her readers is well stocked with a range of commodities from the marketplace, available via newly formed circuits of commerce and exchange. Wolley best sums up her endeavors in the preface to The Queen-Like Closet, where she likens her text to a cabinet containing rarities. This analogy was to be a popular one in the period and one that I will return to in the next chapter. For Wolley, as for several other writers of receipt collections, it signaled a domestic domain, a storehouse of precious commodities: Ladies, I do here present you That which sure will well content A Queen-like Closet rich and brave; (Such) not many Ladies have: Or Cabinet, in which doth set Gems richer than in Karkanet;

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(They) only Eyes and Fancies please, These keep your Bodies in good ease; They please the Taste, also the Eye; Would I might be a stander by, Yet rather I would wish to eat, Since ’bout them I my Brains do beat; And ’tis but reason you may say, If that I come within your way; I sit here sad while you are merry, Eating Dainties, drinking Perry; But I’m content you should so feed, So I may have to serve my need.48 Much like the wonder cabinet that became fashionable in early modern homes across Europe, Wolley’s “Queen-like” closet displays many exotic items. But while objects found in the wunderkammer simply offer visual pleasure (“only Eyes and Fancies please”), this closet provides its audience with the more immediate pleasures of consumption (“These keep your Bodies in good ease”). Its gastronomic “gems” implicitly link this female domain to an emergent system of global trade. For pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, and ginger, as we have already seen, have pride of place in it.

The Queen of Fairies, Indian Trifles, and Colonial Plunder in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The domestic manuals dealt with in the previous section present us with a range of everyday scenarios in which Englishwomen work closely with Indian spices. In this section and the next, I turn to the more fantastic representations of Indian merchandise that appear in the dramatic literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1594–96) and Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue (1622) respectively, these sections analyze the incarnate forms that spices take on in the contemporary imagination. I am particularly interested in the portrayal of Indian subjects in these texts and the processes by which they morph into Indian objects. I look at the ways in which they become synonymous with the merchandise of their land; they exist, as it were, to be exchanged, possessed, and consumed. Their otherness, even as it is repeatedly underscored, is carefully subverted through multiple kinds of erasures. The playful subplot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem like an unlikely starting point for a discussion of colonial plunder. And yet, as

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Marjorie Swann has amply demonstrated, Shakespeare’s fairy society is not as far removed from the world of things as it might seem. In a compelling essay on “The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature,” Swann elaborates on the significance of fairy literature in the Tudor and Stuart period, emphasizing its importance as a new form of material display, grounded in a nascent capitalism.49 Swann traces the shift in fairy lore from its roots in residual folk culture to its participation in new rituals of socioeconomic exchange, a shift that parallels England’s transition from a rural, household-based economy to an emerging mercantile entity. Shakespeare’s fairy world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream both registers and effects this paradigm shift, according to Swann. The merry sprites in Oberon and Titania’s train are depicted as willing (if somewhat mischievous) participants in a rustic, agrarian economy. Robin Goodfellow is known to playfully frighten “the maidens of the villag’ry, / Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern” (2.1.35–36).50 He teases gossips yet readily takes on their household tasks, when they affectionately call out for “sweet puck” (2.1.40). Like the diminutive creatures in Titania’s retinue, who make coats out of bats’ wings (2.2.4–5) and fashion candles from the “waxen thighs of bumblebees” (3.1.168–69), Robin Goodfellow contributes to an indigenous domestic economy. He recalls a vernacular tradition in which fairies rewarded good household behavior and punished errant housewives. “At the same time,” Swann argues, “Shakespeare subtly connects the fairies with a world of commerce and material display far removed from an agrarian household economy.”51 It is not without significance, for instance, that Oberon and Titania’s conflict is centered on an Indian changeling. The language of their quarrel is suffused with images of trade, mercantile ventures, and Eastern riches. While they are as preoccupied with domestic order as traditional English fairies (they bless the lovers’ marriage beds and ensure reproductive continuity), they are much more invested in the world of commerce and exchange than their traditional counterparts. The play thus invokes England’s precapitalist, folkloric past only to imbricate it in England’s protocolonial, mercantile present. Its fairy world effectively captures the tensions between precapitalist modalities of everyday social relations and emerging capitalist rituals of value, exchange, and conspicuous consumption. Significantly, India becomes a key site for the enactment of these tensions. Written and performed in a historical moment when “India” was a shifting signifier, the play interweaves residual and emergent understandings of the term. On the one hand, it invokes India in conjunction with the imaginative spaces of fairyland; on the other, it configures India in more geographically

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precise terms, yoking it with actual mercantile expeditions to the East. It conjures up a mythical past in which the King of Fairies hails “from the farthest step of India” and the Queen of Fairies spends many a night gossiping with her votaress along the Indian shore (2.1.69). Simultaneously, it points to a mercantile present in which this Indian shore is dotted with trading vessels in search of spices and other Eastern wares. In its imaginative framework, “India” retains Mandevillian connotations of a land with monsters and marvels, but this vision is nevertheless informed by a more geographically specific and racially inflected perception of the Indies, shaped in large part by actual European and English mercantile expeditions to the Indian subcontinent and the Spice Islands.52 To use the language of the play itself, one might say it depicts India as a kind of “airy nothing,” even as it gives to India “a local habitation and a name” (5.1.16–17). In its part mythical, part mercantile setting we can see the workings of a peculiarly gendered struggle over the acquisition and consumption of colonial merchandise from the Indies. Early historicist scholarship has been especially cognizant of this Indian subtext in the Dream play-text. Critics such as Margo Hendricks and Shankar Raman have drawn attention to the invisible, yet ever-present Indian boy in the Dream—the root cause of all discord in fairyland, the “absent center” of the play, in Raman’s words.53 The distinctly Indian genealogy of the otherwise nameless changeling and his central role in the play’s economies of exchange have led these critics to a broader discussion of the ways in which the Dream text participates in early modern racial, imperial, and mercantilist discourses on the Indies. My own interest in this absent-present figure is specifically tied to Titania’s interest in him. I contextualize her obsession with him in terms of the growing female fascination with Indian novelties that had been incorporated into the domestic rhythms of the early modern household. Her appetite for the exotic and the ensuing disorder in the natural world can be read in terms of emerging debates regarding the Englishwoman’s supposedly insatiable appetite for Indian commodities that had similarly impacted the local economy. It is not without significance, for instance, that her very first mention of the changeling is in conjunction with the “trifles” she consumes by his mother’s side, “Marking th’embarkèd traders on the flood” (2.1.133, 127). Imbued with nautical and mercantile metaphors, Titania’s speech explicitly links her desire for the Indian boy with her desire for Indian merchandise: The fairyland buys not the child of me. His mother was a votaress of my order: And, in the spicèd Indian air, by night,

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Full often hath she gossip’d by my side, And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’embarkèd traders on the flood, When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following, her womb then rich with my young squire, Would imitate, and sail upon the land, To fetch me trifles, and return again, As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him. (2.1.122–37)

In this fertile vision, the Indian mother’s womb is “rich” with the young squire in much the same way that the “big-bellied” trading ships are brimming with Indian merchandise. Literally and metaphorically overladen with riches, both vessels contain a promise of the East. Both deliver treasures that are destined to fulfill a nascent Occidental desire to consume and possess India. In essence, the Indian boy is analogous to the exotic merchandise plundered from the Indian shore. His absence, as Raman puts it, is “nothing less than the immense distance that separates Europe from India”; conversely his presence is “nothing less than the bridging of that distance in the form of Europe’s consumption of Eastern wares.”54 He is an incarnation of the other tokens and trifles from the “spicèd Indian air” that his mother so willingly presents Titania and she so eagerly accepts. Their female bond requires no intermediaries or agents of exchange; in fact, men appear to be altogether redundant in this vision of intercourse with the Indies. India benignly offers up her riches, thereby precluding the possibility of ravishment and colonial plunder at the hands of conquistadors and merchants. Interestingly, while critics have made a persuasive case for the maternal nature of Titania’s claims over the Indian boy, they have frequently elided the mercantile nature of these claims. In “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” for instance, Louis Montrose contends that Titania’s bond with her votaress is “rooted in an experience of female fecundity, an experience for which men must seek mercantile compensation.”55 Montrose makes this point as part of a larger argument in which he addresses the play’s preoccupation with female authority and its related discomfort with Amazonian and other kinds of female societies.

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He thus views Oberon’s clash with Titania as an effort “to gain possession, not only of the boy but of the woman’s desire and obedience.”56 My own analysis of the conflict in fairyland both draws on and diverges from Montrose’s. Following Montrose, I read Oberon’s struggle with Titania as one among many efforts in the play to intervene in and exert control over an allfemale realm. Unlike Montrose, however, I see this realm as steeped in the mercantile rather than separated from it. In more specific terms, I argue that Titania, as much as Oberon, is invested in the Indian boy as a token of exchange. Even in her fecund description of his birth, Titania configures him as a product of global intercourse, one that she claims for use in her own female economy. Her fairy sorority, replicating the rhythms of the early modern domestic unit, readily absorbs the spoils of colonial trade and plunder. Her discord with Oberon stems not so much from her disavowal of the mercantile project, but from a desire to partake in it on her own terms. Her willful assertion, “The fairyland buys not the child of me” (2.1.122), precludes any further possibility of exchange, grounded as it is in a desire to possess the exotic rather than trade with it. Oberon’s struggle to gain control over the Indian boy is thus also a struggle to regulate this female obsession with foreign merchandise. The uneasy male dependence on mothers/nurses/wives that Montrose so astutely notes in the play is especially relevant in this context. For it is through these seemingly unruly female agents that foreign merchandise would have penetrated the boundaries of the early modern household. It is through them that commodities like spices would transition from the realm of trade and conquest and end up in the realm of domesticity and homemaking. Oberon’s mastery of Titania thus constitutes an effort to gain mastery over this female domain. By seizing the Indian boy, Oberon effectively chastens Titania for her fixation with the exotic. In this respect, the Queen of Fairies shares much in common with other early modern female consumers, who were similarly rebuked for their inappropriate consumption of newly imported Indian merchandise in medical treatises and household manuals like Markham’s. In a sense, she is a precursor to the controversial housewives of Markham’s and Tryon’s manuals, stubbornly refusing to part with her prized Indian ware. The simples in her fairy bower—mustardseed, peaseblossom, cobweb, and moth—are the familiar stuff of kitchen gardens and home physic.57 Their many remedial uses are outlined in the domestic manuals of the period and alluded to in the play itself. We learn from Bottom that Cobweb is handy for a bleeding finger and Mustardseed makes for an excellent condiment in oxbeef (3.1.164–77). And yet, Titania hankers after trifles from the “spicèd Indian

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air.” It is not surprising, then, that like Tryon’s housewife later, she is confronted with a monstrous hybrid. Part beast, part man, Bottom hints at the dangers of mixing and mingling with foreign entities. This asinine creature has traditionally been the source of much comedy in the play; yet his monstrous physical form has also been seen by critics as embodying more subliminal fears vis-à-vis early modern cross-cultural and cross-racial encounters in India, encounters that were increasingly being forged as a result of the spice trade. Most notably, Hendricks has read Bottom’s transformation as exemplifying the fundamental condition of a racial hybrid. His transplantation into fairyland, Hendricks argues, results in a unique kind of mixedness—that of human and equine, literally a mulatto. In a play where substitutions and transformations abound, his metamorphosis takes on a more particularized ethnic or racial form, according to Hendricks. His part-human, part-beast avatar represents for her “a mixture of the familiar and the foreign.”58 He is an incarnation of the grotesque incongruities that result when florid beauties become enamored with strange subjects/objects, what Tryon would warn of more trenchantly later in the seventeenth century. His hybrid form invokes the dangerous consequences of an intercourse with the Indies. By conjuring up this creature, Oberon punishes Titania in multiple ways. His elaborate shaming device mocks the overzealousness with which she performs her role as mother/nurse/lover. As she fusses over Bottom, feeds him, purges him, and generally tries to control his bodily needs, we are painfully aware of her own complete lack of control. Titania’s devotion, as Gail Paster points out, is “grounded in an intended imposition of shame, in misrecognition and manipulation, in her own unconscious physical submission to Oberon’s magical skill.”59 Her illusion of reigning over an autonomous female realm is just that—an illusion. Her remedies and rituals in tending to Bottom seem laughable, knowing as we do that Oberon’s love juice controls all. Furthermore, by substituting the Indian boy with a monster, Oberon performs yet another conceptual trick. He calls attention to the implicit monstrosity of the Indian boy himself and the sheer unnaturalness of Titania’s obsession with him. “Methought I was enamored of an ass,” she confesses when the effects of the love juice have worn off and Bottom has been removed from her fairy bower (4.1.73). Yet her revulsion for Bottom somehow extends to the Indian boy as well. For she now desires neither the boy nor the beast. The two are rendered homologous through Oberon’s magic. The beast simply calls attention to the boy as a racialized subject, compelling Titania to view him as such. Having cured “the hateful imperfection of her eyes,” Oberon is also able to cure Titania’s longing for monsters and marvels (4.1.60). Thus it is that their

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famed “debate” or “dissension” comes to an end and the play moves swiftly toward its comic resolution (2.1.116). The mortals are united, their progeny is blessed, and natural order is restored. But no such closure is in store for the Indian boy. Removed from Titania’s bower he is merely transferred to Oberon’s. In the many transactions involving him, he has neither agency nor voice. Till the very end we are left with a series of questions about his trajectory from East to West. Was he violently stolen from an Indian king or was he willingly offered up by an Indian votaress? Was he destined to fulfill female appetites or was he meant to serve as an emblem of male conquest? Was he sought after as a rarity or was he reviled as a monstrosity? His life, as both subject and object, encapsulates many contested histories. Even in his silence, he speaks volumes about the violence and plunder that went hand in hand with the spice trade.

The Black Queen and Her Merchandise In 1622, Thomas Middleton was commissioned to write his third pageant for the Company of Grocers in order to celebrate the inauguration of the new lord mayor of London. Much like his earlier mayoral pageants, The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue is a lavish celebration not only of commerce and traffic in the city of London, but also of their colonial potential in more distant lands. In this thoroughly local celebration of global possibility, Middleton presents with much fanfare the figure of a black Indian queen. Part of a larger tableau in which different figures come into the streets of London to perform exemplary mercantile values, the queen is an opening device in the pageant. Described as a “black personage representing India,” she is carried in on a bed of spices by Indians dressed in “antique habits.”60 After a speech that inaugurates the pageant, she all but disappears from the scene, presumably merging with other personages in the procession. Yet she is central to its conceit—a living exemplar of the virtues of commerce and its powers of conversion. She speaks only to testify to the fairness of the English trading in her land. She offers them spices; in turn they offer her Christianity. Her speech is in an interesting study in fair trade agreements: a case of spices for salvation, a bargain made possible by English merchants rather than missionaries. Like Shakespeare’s Indian votaress, Middleton’s Indian queen is closely tied to the exotic merchandise of her land, particularly to spices. If the votaress is associated with “the spicèd Indian air” (2.1.122), the queen is similarly conjured up in relation to “spice plants and trees bearing odour” (B1v). Both evoke the powerful sensory experiences of spice consumption. The queen’s

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arrival, in particular, would have been an intensely olfactory experience, with commodities like nutmeg, mace, ginger, and cloves liberally strewn among the gathered crowds.61 Like the votaress, she willingly offers up her prized wares, eventually becoming synonymous with these wares; both exist, as it were, to be exchanged, possessed, and consumed. Unlike Shakespeare’s votaress, however, Middleton’s queen is granted a voice. In this respect, she is different from other black personages regularly featured in Jacobean mayoral shows. Anthony Munday’s The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia (1605), for instance, featured an Indian king and queen coming to England with large quantities of gold, and his show for the Ironmongers in 1609 featured a whale with a “Black More” in its mouth.62 But for the most part, these exotic figures remained mute emblems of the East, playing their part in silent splendor. According to Ania Loomba, Middleton was arguably the first “to give blacks a speaking part in the civic pageants, although Jonson’s Masque of Blackness had done so earlier with respect to courtly shows.”63 The Indian queen’s conversation is therefore noteworthy, as are the complex terms of her conversion. Yet this racialized incarnation of Indian spice has received surprisingly little critical attention. Perhaps it is the brevity of the Indian queen’s role and her appearance in one of Middleton’s lesser-known dramatic texts that accounts for this omission. In fact, it is only with Jonathan Burton’s study of Islam and English drama in Traffic and Turning that we see a sustained analysis of her public conversion and the racialized language through which it is constructed. Burton sees the queen as an important inversion of the “Turning Turk” trope: she “makes no attempt to lure Christians into sin and apostasy, but instead expresses thanks for . . . her own conversion to Christianity.”64 He situates her in a larger English narrative of Islam and the East, one that bears “no resemblance to reality,” as it seeks to “restructure and posit authority over the Islamic East.”65 In essence, he argues, she is the product a well-wrought fiction of “docile and tractable Easterners.”66 Burton goes on to analyze the many commercial interests that were vested in perpetuating this fiction of a compliant East. Particularly important from my point of view is his reading of the masque as an instance of “Traffic in the Streets”—a commercially sponsored public spectacle, in praise of England’s spice trade. For it enables us to compare the ready endorsement of this trade in a public arena with the vehement objections leveled against it in the domestic arena. “Traffic in the Streets” is desirable and feasible, legitimated through the presence of a range of civic authorities and agents; but its entry into the home, as we have already seen, is a far more controversial issue.

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The pageant’s task is thus a complex one: it must necessarily cast India as fantastic yet domesticated, as “a blacke personage” yet one with Christian potential. It must disassociate India from its early associations with monsters and marvels, even while underscoring its distance and its difference from everyday life in England. While it cannot afford the absolute immersion in a fantastic world to be found in Shakespeare’s construction of India/fairyland (for India has to be rendered immediate, palpable, and viable in this celebration of mercantile achievement), it can conjure up an equally enticing vision of the East and the spice trade. Middleton’s Indian queen becomes precisely the medium through which these contrary objectives are negotiated. As Burton argues, it is through her conversion that “the English merchant is transformed from apostate to apostle, Eastern trafficking is presented as both financially and spiritually profitable and hence worthy of not only admiration but investment.”67 The fears of trafficking with heathens and pagans that preoccupied writers of the domestic manual I dealt with in the first section are rendered baseless in this lavish paean to the glories of commerce, spoken by the very object of these anxieties. In order to better understand this figure, we need to understand the context in which she appeared before her English audience, the Lord Mayor’s Show. This annual ceremony celebrated the inauguration of London’s new mayor, chosen from among twelve guilds or companies.68 The pageants held to commemorate his installation were traditionally sponsored by the guild from which he was elected, thus prompting fierce competition among the companies, each determined to outdo the other in grandeur and scale. Like Elizabethan and Jacobean royal entries, the mayoral pageants involved “a tour of the city and the presentation of dramatic vignettes performed on scaffolds, or arches, or other special structures.”69 Returning from Westminster, via the Thames, the mayor would land at St. Paul’s, where he was met by the first pageant of the procession. Their route was cleared “by fencers, masked ‘wildmen’ bearing fireballs or flaming wheels, and the mounted city marshall.”70 Large crowds of boisterous Londoners gathered to witness this spectacle, including courtiers, liveried guildsmen, merchants, and ordinary citizens. What did it mean to have the figure of an Indian queen perform her racial and religious identity before such a crowd? How did this motley bunch react when they saw “a blacke personage, representing India,” carried in on a bed of spices by Indians dressed in “antique habit” (B1v)? Perhaps they cheered on and blew their trumpets, as the Indian queen’s attendants sprinkled sugar, dates, ginger, almonds, and nutmeg into the crowd.71 If they were made uneasy by the queen’s visible otherness, their anxieties were quickly

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assuaged. At the very outset of her speech, the queen begged them to ignore her “native dye” and view her with “an intellectual eye”: You that have eyes of judgement, and discern Things that the best of man and life concern, Draw near, this black is but my native dye, But view me with an intellectual eye, As wisemen shoot their beams forth, you’ll then find A change in the complexion of the mind; I’m beauteous in my blackness. (B1v–B2r)

Here the Indian queen formulates an important conception of race as a “native dye”—a seemingly innocuous cosmetic pigmentation. Possibly like the dye smeared on the actor playing the Indian queen, her blackness is simply an external attribute, a mere illusion that has more to do with the “complexion of the mind” than the complexion of the body. While it is a “native dye,” and in that sense irrevocable, her intercourse with the English (particularly as they “shoot their beams forth”) renders her pure, acceptable, even “beauteous in [her] blackness” (emphasis added). Her invocation of a dye is also telling in other ways. As Hall has pointed out in her discussion of “Fair Texts/Dark Ladies,” references to dyes, pigments, and cosmetics are never quite as innocuous as they seem. For Hall, the “language of blackness and the language of cosmetic beauty are often mutually constitutive.”72 She cites John Bulwer’s condemnation of face painting in which he argues that blackness began as a kind of cosmetic practice, a “tincture” that first corrupted Adam’s seed: [I]t may be the seed of Adam might first receive this tincture, and became black by an advenient and articificall way of denigration, which at first was a mere affectation arising from some conceit they might have of the beauty of blacknesse, and an Apish desire which might move them to change the complexion of their bodies into a new and more fashionable hue, which will appeare somewhat more probable by divers affectations of painting in other Nations. . . . And so from this Artifice the Moores might possibly become Negroes. . . . For thus perhaps this which at the beginning of this Complexion was an artificiall device, and thence induced by imagination, having once impregnated the seed, found afterwards concurring productions, which were continued by Climes, whose constitution advantaged the artificially into a natural impression.73

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Bulwer’s climatic, somatic, and cosmetic description of blackness might help us parse the Indian queen’s similarly conflated description of her complexion as a “native dye.” Her allusion to a dye also reminds us that the commodities of her land were in fact the very ingredients that went into dyes and cosmetics. Domestic manuals, medical treatises, and receipt collections testified to their curative abilities and cosmetic value, as for instance, in Wolley’s “To make the Hair Fair” recipe discussed in the first section. Perhaps the Indian queen is especially well positioned to reap the benefits of their transformative power and change her “native dye.” Yet underlying such a language of cosmetic transformation is a threat of artifice and mutability. Thus it is that her speech turns to the English merchant who can solely change the “complexion of her mind.” The queen then moves on to a more plaintive plea to recognize the beauty in her blackness. This poignant echo of the Song of Solomon is followed by a more expedient appeal. The Indian queen now convinces her audience that she is no dark heathen or devil-worshipping pagan, but a converted Christian, brought to “celestiall knowledge” by none other than the English merchant. What did it matter then if he helped himself to the abundant spices of her land? After all, England sent her more precious “plants,” the youthful merchants of her land: Of gums and fragrant spices, I confess My climate heaven does with abundance bless, And those you have from me, but what are they Compared with odours whose scent ne’re decay, And those I have from you, plants of your youth, The Savour of eternall life sweet Truth, Exceeding all the odiferous scent, That from the beds of spices ever went: I that command, (being prosp’rously possest) The Riches and the Sweetnesse of the East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Account my blessings not in those to stand, Though they be large and fruitfull, but confess All wealth consists in Christian holiness, To such celestiall knowledge I was led; By English Merchants first Enlightened. (B2r)

In a sense, the merchant was the harbinger of the Enlightenment itself, carrying knowledge into her dark continent. His profits were meager when compared with her incalculable gains. His “blest commerce” had effected a

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racial and a religious transformation. In Loomba’s words, he had made possible “what was once impossible—washing the Ethiope white.”74 Viewed as such, Middleton’s pageant confers the ultimate honor on English mercantile achievement in the East. For if a change in “native dye” is possibly revocable, futile, indeed impossible, a change in “the complexion of the mind” can wash the Ethiope white. And it is the spice trade that will provide opportunities for precisely such a change and conversion. It is not a mere coincidence that this spectacle of public conversion was sponsored by the Company of Grocers, one of England’s earliest commercial corporations, which had had in previous centuries been known as the Fraternity of Pepperers.75 Among other tasks, they were entrusted with the duty of “garbling‘ or preventing the impairment of spices and drugs.”76 Like several other guilds in this period, they stood to make a hefty profit from England’s spice trade with the East. Thus the masque ends with a calculated placement of the Grocers’ coat of arms with that of the “Noble East-India Companies”— both advertised on a banner and proudly held up by figures in the pageant. As grocers, members of this guild would have been the conduits through which spices purchased by the overseas merchant made their way into the local marketplace. Many of them were also among the founding members of the East India Company. It was in their best interests then to present the East India trade as both materially and spiritually profitable. Middleton’s pageant had deftly achieved this feat. It had subtly asserted the worth of Indian goods, which the Indian queen (even in her self-effacing manner) had cast as precious, worthy, equal in value to the most precious plants of England. More importantly, it had rendered India knowable: it had brought her into the streets of London, it had affirmed her Christian potential, it had demonstrated her submission to the forces of Commerce, Adventure, and Traffic. In this vision of India there were neither monsters nor marvels, neither Blackamores nor Bantamen; just a fertile female India, who gladly proffered the riches of her land. It is with this telling protocolonial vision that I end this saga of spices. The many figures I have invoked along the way—monstrous racial hybrids, silent Indian boys, supplicant Indian queens—represent different facets of the East India spice trade. Each embodies English fantasies and nightmares of an intercourse with the Indies. Their incarnate forms bear testimony to the ambivalent career of England in the East, with all its attendant desires and anxieties. Each points to the early tastes of India that the English palate sampled in their search for the “hot stuff.”

Ch a p ter 2

Sugar “So Sweet Was Ne’er So Fatal”

In late spring 2014, the controversial African American artist Kara Walker converted Brooklyn’s abandoned Domino Sugar Factory into an exhibition site for a monumental art installation. Commissioned by Creative Time New York, Walker created a large-scale sugar confection that was a response to the complex histories of the factory, which itself would soon be demolished to make way for condos and office buildings.1 Characteristically, Walker’s title was something of a mouthful. Provocatively long, sweeping in its historical breadth, and written in the manner of a frontispiece to an early modern printed tract, the exhibit was called “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.”2 Nor is this the only reference in Walker’s work to an early modern form. It soon becomes clear that her “Subtlety” recalls earlier “sotilties” or “subtleties”—ornamental figures and elaborate scenes, sculpted entirely out of sugar or marzipan pastes, that were mentioned in cookbooks as early as the fifteenth century and became especially fashionable in banqueting rituals by the sixteenth century.3 But while early modern subtleties typically took the form of birds, towers, and castles, Walker’s subtlety is a large, naked, sphinx woman, made with eight tons of confectionary sugar (figure 1). “What we’re seeing, for 52

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lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features,” Walker explains in an interview with NPR.4 She is a mammy-like figure, naked but for a kerchief on her head. She squats on all fours, with her arms flat across the ground, her breasts spilling out from under her. Sugar Baby, as she is called, elicits a visceral response from viewers. Valérie Loichot’s review of the exhibit notes that visitors’ “mouths gape in a unanimous ‘wow’” that betrays horror as much as admiration.5 For there is nothing quite so subtle about Walker’s subtlety. Sugar Baby’s black features and white body are jarringly incongruous, her buttocks protrude like those of the Hottentot Venus, the outlines of her vulva, her areolas, and her nipples are clearly marked. She contains, in Walker’s words, “assorted meanings about imperialism, about slavery, about a slave trade that traded sugar for bodies and bodies for sugar.”6 She is a monument and, like all monuments, stands testament to the bloody histories of those who erected her. In a brief introductory film about the project, Nato Thompson, chief curator at Creative Time, goes so far as to compare her with the pyramids of Egypt: People tend to “think of it as this piece of awe to be inspired by and don’t really worry about the fact that

Figure 1. Photograph inside Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (New York, 2014). Reprinted with permission from Valérie Loichot. Originally published in “Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” Southern Spaces, July 8, 2014, https://southernspaces.org.

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slaves kind of built the whole thing. . . . The same kind of knife is turning at this whole project, which is to say there’s a kind of critique of our own fascination with the monumentality of this,” he says.7 As he speaks, the camera cuts from him standing in the candy aisle of a grocery store to the exhibit, where large groups of visitors hold up their cell phones to photograph Sugar Baby. For all the cameras on her, though, Walker’s subtlety is decidedly not a feast for the eyes. She resists easy consumption in every sense of the word. Visitors are prohibited from tasting any sugar, and no confectionary samples are handed out. If at first they are beguiled by familiar sights of confectionary, their other senses are soon assaulted by an acrid smell, “sweet rancid air mixes with urine and corroding iron.” The effect, Loichot notes, is “a reflex of nausea rather than hunger, an indigestion created by our consumption of sugar made possible by our exploitation of fellow humans.”8 What we see here, to invoke a term from Tompkins that I discussed earlier in the introduction, is a kind of racial indigestion. “The fantasy of a body’s edibility does not mean that body will always go down smoothly,” Tompkins writes of the desire to consume black bodies inscribed with the mark of difference.9 Sugar Baby, while seemingly an edible confection, challenges us to consume her as such, ultimately thwarting all our efforts to do so. As part of the larger installation, she is surrounded by five-feet-high sculptures of brown-skinned boys carrying baskets, made entirely of molasses. Fifteen of these “candied boys” point the way to Sugar Baby (figure 2). At first glance, they are what a reviewer calls “cute and apple-cheeked.”10 But given the duration of the exhibit and Walker’s choice of sugary substance to mold them, many have started to disintegrate. Their melting faces look alarmingly like bloodied bodies. Walker acknowledges this is their desired effect. They, like the monument they lead us to, are artistic renditions of blood sugar—reminders of the many ways in which sugar will not go down easily. “I knew that the candy ones wouldn’t last,” Walker admits. “That was part of the point . . . that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating.” In fact, as they “lost” two of the boys, who inevitably dissolved in the course of the exhibit, Walker placed their limbs and other body parts in the baskets of the “unbroken boys” that had managed to stay relatively intact.11 Audie Cornish sums it up best in her interview with Walker on NPR: “Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.”12 They are the arms, limbs, and lives that went into the making of sugar. If I have begun this chapter, somewhat anachronistically, with Walker’s subtlety in a study of early modern sugar, it is chiefly because her confection

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Figure 2. Photographs of a child carrying a basket inside Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (New York, 2014.) Reprinted with permission from Valérie Loichot. Originally published in “Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” Southern Spaces, July 8, 2014, https:// southernspaces.org.

brings to the fore what is left implicit in its early modern counterpart. Sugar Baby’s past recalls the bloody histories of slavery, imperialism, and indentured labor in plantation economies of the global South. She bares their collective ecological impact. Yet housed as she is, in the relics of a Domino

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factory in Brooklyn, the site of one of New York’s largest labor strikes in urban history, on land that is in the process of being redeveloped, her presence is also a reminder of the continuum along which such an impact takes place.13 Like the sphinx of Greek mythology, Sugar Baby demands a riddle of us to get past her. I would like to think of what follows in this chapter as an attempt to think through this riddle. It is provoked by Sugar Baby’s monumental presence—why does she stand there, how did she get there, and in what sense is she, dare I use the term, “sweet”? What is the affective life of sugar that she embodies? It is not a riddle that gets easily solved, for its questions are tied to larger histories of consumption that complicate its sweetness. She is edible, yet not quite food. She evokes tastes that are sweet, yet histories that are bitter. Her name certainly implies the term of endearment entailed in the use of “sugar,” the more so when paired with “baby,” but her large body is jarringly at odds with the appellation. The questions we ask of Sugar Baby are thus questions we might ask about the complex relationship between sugar and sweetness more broadly. Sugar is not unique in having an affective life. Spices and other edible commodities discussed throughout this project have an emotional and sensual dimension that is revealed in the rituals of their circulation and consumption. Nor are these affects always overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced in the visceral sense of disgust provoked by the strange, foreign foods I discuss in chapter 4. But sugar is unlike other commodities in the way that it both comes to stand for an affect and alters the very conception of it in the English language. In other words, sugar is sweet, but sweetness itself, both in lexical and affective terms, evolves in relation to the trajectories of sugar in seventeenth-century England. Sidney Mintz, whose history of sugar remains the most influential work on the subject, argues that sugar imagery became an important part of written usage and everyday talk, “competing with or supplanting honey imagery among the terms of endearment and affection.”14 Whereas the tropes of honey predominated in ancient and classical writing, sugar came to replace these as a way of evoking specific kinds of sentiments and desires. Francis Meres’s now oft-quoted praise of Shakespeare’s verse in 1598 is an interesting case in point, invoking both commodities to speak of poetic sweetness, yet signaling a shift from the one to the other: “The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugar’d sonnets among his private friends.”15 It would seem then that in echoing the “soul of Ovid” Shakespeare is “honey-tongued,” but in his invention of newer poetic forms, he channels the sweetness of the newly imported commodity through his “sugar’d sonnets.”

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Indeed, as I show in the course of this chapter, the multiplicity of meanings sugar took on in relation to its use as ornament, as preservative, as remedy, as stimulant, all informed connotations of sweetness in the seventeenth century. But rather than treating this relation as axiomatic, I wish to examine the specific ways in which sugar comes to imply sweetness and sweetness, in turn, comes to be associated with sugar, including moments when other darker affects inform this relationship. For sweetness itself is a shifting signifier in relation to sugar’s many incarnations. There is a sense of wonder in its artifice and a sense of triumph in its ability to stall time, but later in the century, there is also fear, guilt, and horror in its exploitative colonial economies. As the title to this chapter implies, its pleasures are sweet but ultimately tinged with a sense of the fatal. These darker associations should not be hard for us as modern readers to fathom. While we have inherited the vocabularies of sweetness associated with sugar, we are nevertheless alert to its more dire connotations in recent medical and nutritional discourse. In fact, it is far more likely that we would speak of sugar in the language of craving, addiction, and toxicity than unmitigated sweetness. Perhaps a spoonful of sugar does not quite help the medicine go down, nor does it go down smoothly. To eat it, as we shall see later in this chapter, is to partake of a strange cannibalism in which we also eat the bodies that cultivated it. What we taste, as Walker reminds us, is blood sugar. The trope of racial indigestion is particularly relevant here. This sensation remains as we work through the tastes and appetites that shaped sugar consumption. Sugar Baby is a visual manifestation of this indigestion. She is a monument to the networks of trade and colonialism that link the domain of the English housewife with slave labor, kitchen with plantation, home with world. We might think of her as a memorial to the nameless “Blackamores,” “Bantamen,” and “Indian boys,” we have already encountered in the previous chapters—figures who feed the appetite for difference in early colonial economies. In tracing the circulation of sugar in domestic and colonial economies and thinking through the affective dimension of its consumption, Roland Barthes’s methodology is particularly useful. In “The Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” Barthes argues that sugar need not be conceived as merchandise alone. As an edible commodity that permeates daily meals, commensal rituals, and leisure activities, it is “an attitude,” if you will, “bound to certain usages, certain ‘protocols,’ that have to do with more than food.” Offering an example of sugar consumption in the United States, Barthes argues that consuming a sweet relish or a Coca-Cola with a meal might reflect eating habits, but “to go regularly to a dairy bar, where

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the absence of alcohol coincides with a great abundance of sweet beverages, means more than to consume sugar; through the sugar, it also means to experience the day, periods of rest, traveling, and leisure in a specific fashion that is certain to have an impact on the American.” Like wine, sugar is an institution. “And these institutions necessarily imply a set of dreams, tastes, choices, and values.”16 To think of sugar as an attitude, rather than simply a commodity, also allows us to better understand its incorporation into English rituals of consumption and the “dreams, tastes, choices, and values” such rituals represent in the seventeenth century. I examine this attitude in two different spatiotemporal contexts: the first is the English household, the kitchen and the closet specifically, in the early part of the seventeenth century; the second is the English plantation in the later part of the seventeenth century. Taken together, these two contexts are important to the trajectory of sugar in England. England’s transition, from acquiring small quantities of sugar via Mediterranean traders, to importing larger quantities from the Portuguese, to establishing its own sugar plantation in Barbados, marks a larger historical shift to a colonial economy and an outward expansion of its territories. The home and the plantation are important sites for examining this shift, especially as they become connected through networks of consumption. Both are contact zones in which sugar is encountered by way of different “protocols” and “usages,” to use Barthes’s terminology. These protocols emerge in a range of printed works from the seventeenth century—cookbooks, receipt collections, and advice manuals. As with spices, different genres tell different stories. In the receipt collections and domestic manuals of the early seventeenth century, we see the development of a heuristic narrative that teaches women, in particular, about the culinary, curative, and cosmetic uses of sugar. More generally, they teach of how to cultivate a kind of sweetness itself in the domestic realm. In contrast, the printed works of planters that emerge in the later part of the seventeenth century are more ambivalent about sugar cultivation and consumption, and it is here that the specter of the laboring black body emerges in relation to its sweetness. The impossibility of sweetness and the violence entailed in its quest is foremost in narratives of the plantation like those of Richard Ligon and Thomas Tryon. I conclude by arguing that Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, particularly the quartered black body of its eponymous hero, represents this impossible sweetness. The brief but grisly scene of torture, in which the royal slave’s limbs, ears, and sexual organs are cut off in the presence of a female audience, ultimately disrupts the sweetness of the plantation romance. It provokes a sense of racial indigestion that becomes part of a larger discourse of sugar consumption

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and later abolitionist narratives of blood sugar. Importantly, this trope of indigestion is part of the primal scene of the plantation, shaping the colonial enterprise in ways that trouble it from its inception.

“Sweet Words” and English Domestic Life Biron: White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee. Princess: Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three. Biron: Nay then, two treys, and if you grow so nice, Metheglin, wort, and malmsey: well run, dice! There’s half-a-dozen sweets. Princess: Seventh sweet, adieu: Since you can cog, I’ll play no more with you. Biron: One word in secret. Princess: Let it not be sweet. Biron: Thou grievest my gall. Princess: Gall! bitter. Biron: Therefore meet. (5.2.230–40) This brief moment of banter in Love’s Labours Lost, one of Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies, is worth pondering: What is the “sweet word” that Biron seeks with the princess and in what sense is it sweet? As much as honey, milk, or sugar? Metheglin, wort, or malmsey? And in what sense are any of these variously creamy, solid, viscous, or fermented substances sweet? Perhaps to the extent that they do not gall? It would seem that the “half-a-dozen sweets” that Biron lists are all part of the “sweet words” in circulation before sugar comes to be the predominant affect associated with it. The word “sweet” derives from the Indo-European root word swa¯ d, which in Sanskrit means flavor or taste. Sanskrit itself uses the word madhu as both noun and adjective for sweet, which is also the word given to honey. This idiomatic use of madhu continues into modern Hindi verse and song, where sugar would even now be too prosaic a substitute for poetic expression. In the English context, this association between sweetness and honey is not quite as seamless with the arrival of sugar. The particular shift to sugar and the connotations that accrue to sweetness in the wake of its usage are specific to culinary tastes that emerge in the seventeenth century. Mintz observes that there are scant references to sugar in Chaucer, but by the time Shakespeare is writing the associations between sugar and sweetness are far more numerous, despite the fact that Shakespeare died half a century before Barbadian sugar made its way to England.17 Indeed, Biron’s “sweet words” are among

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the many references to sugar in Shakespeare. But in all of these idiomatic uses of sweetness, sugar still retains its associations with rarity and luxury. One of the most important sites for the performance of sugar as luxury is the banquet. In the early modern period, the term “banquet,” as Patricia Fumerton has shown, did not connote, as it does now, a feast with many courses; rather, it was used to refer to a single course in itself. Also called a “void,” it was “the serving after a meal, or sometimes between meals, of decorative sugar molds and sweetmeats (confectioned flowers, nuts, spices, and fruit) together with sweet spiced wines and distilled spirits.”18 Sugar’s role in these banqueting rituals is intricately linked to its role in the display of royal, aristocratic, and later, mercantile wealth. As a rare, dear-bought commodity, sugar afforded the wealthy a medium of display, via elaborate sugar sculptures and monuments. To provide guests with these beautiful forms of edible art was to perform one’s power via sugar, and for guests to partake of it was to validate such power. Mintz notes that while these elaborate displays of social status via sugar were confined to the court during the reign of Henry V, by the late sixteenth century, merchants as much as kings had become “showmen and consumers” through their participation in this ritual.19 For Mintz, this performative dimension of sugar is key to understanding its popularity as an item of conspicuous consumption. He notes, “As sugar came closer to the ceremonial nexus of certain forms of consumption, it acquired greater symbolic weight or ‘volgate’ in English life.”20 For my purposes here, this “ceremonial nexus” is key. It captures what is at the heart of the subtlety—a performative ritual that binds the domestic and foreign, with the performance of the latter in the former. Sugar effectively comes to be prized for its decorative value, its artifice, which itself is tied to its status as exotic and foreign. In its guise as subtlety, it exists in a semipublic domain that is within the home, but for the performance of a more public display of mercantile and later colonial networks that strategically link this home with the world. Sugar in these instances is sweet precisely for its ability to perform luxury, by placing the home in relation to the world. As sugar becomes more common in ordinary households, so do the “howto” genres that instruct Englishwomen in its uses. Sugar is unique in this respect, since cookbooks as a genre develop in relation to it. Lynette Hunter explains that the unprecedented publication of receipt collections had as much to do with the development of print culture, specifically the invention of moveable type and the inauguration of the Caxton press, as it had to do with the introduction of new foodstuffs like sugar into the kitchen. In the medieval period, the banquet and its display of sugar subtleties had been confined to royal and aristocratic households. But with the increasing supply

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of imported sugar in the early modern period, the gentry sought to imitate these spectacular displays of sugar work. As more households needed to know how to make these foods, the greater was the need for books that imparted specialized know-how and detailed instruction to help them do so. “Indeed, the result of these factors is that sugar-work and sweetmeats made up the earliest printed cookery books in the English language,” Hunter notes.21 Among the first books in this vein is John Partridge’s Treasurie of Commodius Conceits and Hidden Secrets, Commonly Called the Good Huswives Closet of Provision for the Health of her Household. Meete and Necessarie for the Profitable Use of all Estates, published in 1584. The closet that Partridge speaks of is a term that would appear in titles for a full century after Partridge’s work. Recall, for instance, the analogy of a receipt collection as a closet in Hannah Wolley’s Queen-Like Closet, which we encountered in the previous chapter, published almost a century after Partridge’s work. In the gesture of opening up the closet and revealing its “hidden secrets,” writers like Partridge cast sugar and sweetness as a kind of rarity. Its protocols and usages are assumed to come from secret and specialized instruction. To understand the topos of the recipe closet, we might look to scholarship on the closet as an architectural space, one that signals a realm of polite entertainment and intimate exchange. Work in queer theory has especially shaped conceptions of the early modern closet as a space of interiority, devotion, eroticism, and sexuality.22 Alan Stewart, for instance, has productively argued that “the crisis of the epistemology of the closet in the 1990s is inherent to and prefigured in the closet as an architectural reality and topos in the sixteenth century.”23 Stewart notes that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick too alludes to the early modern connotations of the term in her preface to “The Epistemology of the Closet.” Stewart proposes a reading of the early modern closet that challenges its connotations of secret subjectivity, in favor of a reading that complicates the binaries in which it operates, proposing “an alternative reading of the closet as a politically crucial transactive space.”24 Such a valence might also enrich our understanding of the recipe closet as an intimate domestic space where transactions with the world were recorded and revealed. In the context of the receipt collections, Wall builds on this argument to note that closets were multifunctional spaces that housed valuable consumer goods, including foodstuffs such as spices, drugs, and sweetmeats. “The closet, with its multiple functions, dispositions, and affects, endowed goods and activities lodged within it with prestige.”25 These formulations of the recipe closet help us understand its transactive relationship with the colonial economies of which it is made up. The

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gesture of opening it up, revealing its secrets and delights, is viable precisely because it is constituted by commodities like sugar. By this I mean that if the recipe closet derives its value and prestige from the commodities that were obtained from afar; it is necessarily constituted through a relationship with the colonial and mercantile networks that supplied it with such foodstuffs and made such value possible. As a physical and as a conceptual space in the home, it marks a connection to the world. In fact, the term “closet” belies its connectedness with entities outside of it. We might more productively think of it as a wonder cabinet of foodstuffs that signals the exchange of goods between home and the world. Such an idea of the recipe closet also enables us to see the economic connections between the foodscapes of the home and the landscapes from which it draws. It places sugar at the nexus of such landscapes, rendering it precious, exotic, and domestic all at once. Its protocols and usages derive from this nexus, and therein lies its sweetness. This theorization of the closet also allows us to imagine it as a space that facilitated women’s exchanges with the world at large and registered their participation in public spheres. As I have discussed in my introduction, it is the coffeehouse that has figured prominently in Habermas’s argument as facilitating what the title of his work describes as “the structural transformation of the public sphere.” In the case of England, it is a space that allows for intellectual exchange among men of different social strata, who come to consume potables that range from coffee to tea to chocolate and participate in economic and political issues of the day. Habermas notes: “As in the salons where ‘intellectuals’ met with the aristocracy, literature had to legitimate itself in these coffee houses. In this case, however, the nobility joining the upper bourgeois stratum still possessed the social functions lost by the French; it represented landed and moneyed interests. Thus critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes.”26 But as an exclusively male space, unlike the French salon, the coffeehouse afforded women no access to such intellectual exchange. Rather, it is the closet that registers their participation in the larger economies of exchange, and it is in the writing on the closet that we might see their material and intellectual contributions to the public sphere. Indeed, as we progress further into the century, it becomes a crucial space of woman’s self-fashioning in the culinary and material realm. The receipts for sugar, in particular, allow us to chronicle the opening up of their closets to worldly goods. Even when it is men like Partridge and Hugh Plat who write these receipts, woman remains central to the topos of the closet. As such, sugar’s sweetness is feminized in these writings. Where addresses to men often took the form of “sweet,” as Jefferey Masten has shown in Queer Philologies, this

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epithet comes to be feminized in relation to sugar, and printed receipt collections play an important role in this process.27 Partridge begins with an apostrophe to his book of receipts, instructing it to travel to the mistress of the household and offer up its contents and commodities for her pleasure and use: Go little book, of profit and pleasance, Unto thy good Mistress without delay: And tell her I send thee for performance Of her earnest suit, sith she would have no nay. Let her use thy commodities as right well she may To profit her friends, for health’s preservation And also to pleasure them for recreation.28 Of the commodities that Partridge describes above on the verso page of his Treasurie, white sugar is the first to appear on the recto page of his 1591 edition. Here Partridge offers a recipe “To Make Marchpaine” with blanched almonds and a quarter pound of white sugar, to be mixed with rose water and damask water, grounded together to make a paste. If thoroughly dried and stored in dry, warm air, it will “laste many yeares,” Partridge assures his readers, adding that it is a comfortable sweetmeat, ideal “for weak folks,” especially those whose tastes are hampered by sickness. Its value here is both preservative and medicinal. The very next recipe moves to the ornamental as Partridge offers techniques for gilding the marzipan or “marchpane” with leaf of gold to create desired motifs such as “the name of Jesus, or any other strange thing whatsoever.”29 A similar ornamental use is called for in the making of a Manus Christi, which requires half a pound of white sugar, mixed with rose water, seethed on coals to harden, and finished with exotic substances like powder of pearl and leaf of gold.30 Its most elaborate use comes in a receipt for a paste that could be used in the fashioning of the very instruments of dining, such as platters, cups, glasses, “and such like things, wherewith you may furnish a table.” Here sugar is both the what and the how of the meal. In other words, it is the food and the dish, the means and the end, as it were. It is also a performance, which is the principle at the heart of the banquet. The paste itself is made of gum dragon steeped in rose water, which is to be ground in a mortar and pestle with white sugar. Partridge recommends adding the white of an egg to this powder, until it forms a paste. With this paste, he declares, you can make “what things you will,” particularly items that may serve the table. At the end of the banquet, he suggests inviting guests “to break all and eat the platters, dishes, glasses, cups, and such like for this paste is very delicate and

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savorous.” As the title of his receipt promises, this is “a pleasant thing for them at the table.”31 Partridge here envisions a commensal ritual made out of sugar, primarily for its communal display and consumption. In the century that followed, this ritual would become so fashionable that authors of cookbooks would outdo each other in their receipts for sugar work and subtleties, with knots, flowers, knives, gloves, and other elaborate conceits cast in sugar. Partridge’s Treasurie itself went through several editions and was published consistently till 1637. Others soon followed in his wake, with similar receipts for subtleties and sugar conceits cast in marzipan paste. Where Partridge offered treasure, others strove to offer pleasure and delights. This affect inaugurates Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, which first appeared in 1602. In the frontispiece itself, Plat promises that the “Delightes” he offers are sure to adorn a lady’s person, her table, her closet, and her “distillatories.”32 In short, every household practice stands to benefit from his curated delights. Their sweetness is such that his very quills are imbued with it: But now my pen and paper are perfum’d, I scorne to write with Coppres or with galle, Barbarian canes are now become my quils, Rosewater is the inke I write withal: Of sweets the sweetest I will now commend, To sweetest creatures that the earthe doth beare . . .33 In this dedicatory epistle, Plat continues in the vein of unmitigated (even cloying) sweetness that his frontispiece announces, renouncing all sense of gall and vitriol that may intrude on his work. He no longer writes with “Coppres” or copperas—a raw material used as pigment in dyes and writing ink. This “green vitriol,” as it was commonly known, has no place in his work.34 Rather, he writes with “Barbarian canes,” dipped in fragrant rosewater for the “sweetest creatures that the earthe doth beare.” Hall describes Plat’s enterprise as one that equates “the feminine and the foreign.” Women and their confections are rendered “almost indistinguishable” here, both defined in terms of their sweetness.35 Plat’s epistle then briefly turns to matters of national pride, marking the publication of this work in a post-Armada context, a moment when the “Spanish fear” has subsided and “piercing bullets turn to sugar balls.” Victory itself is rendered sweet, as the image of explosive ammunition gives way to confectionary delights. We turn from war-torn battlefield to the safe environs of the home, from a genre that is decidedly male to one that is delightfully female. Plat goes on to list the realms of instruction his work will cover

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for the benefit of his female readership. In the process, his work provides valuable insights not only into the many decorative, preservative, medicinal, and cosmetic uses to which sugar would be put, but also into the household skills that would fall within the purview of his female audience at this time: Of Musked sugars I intend to wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . Affording to each Lady her delight. I teach both fruits and flowers to preserve, And candie them, so Nutmegs, cloves and mace. To make both marchpane paste, and sugared plate, And cast the same in formes of sweetest grace. Each bird and foul so moulded from the life, And after cast in sweet compounds of arte, As if the flesh and form which nature gave, Did still remain in every lim and part. When crystal frosts have nipt the tender grape, And clean consum’d the fruits of every vine, Yet here behold the clusters fresh and faire, Fed from the branch, or hanging on the line, The walnut, small nut, and the Chestunut sweete, Whose sugared kernels loose their pleasing taste, Are here from year to year preserved, And made by art with strongest fruites to last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For ladies closets and their stillatories, Both waters, ointments, and sweet smelling bals, In easie terms without affected speech, I here present most ready at their cals. And least with careless pen I should omit, The wrongs that nature on their persons wrought, Or parching sun, with his hot fiery rays, For these likewise, relieving meanes I sought.36 I reproduce at length this passage from Plat’s epistle, since it presents a vivid picture of household practices that rely on sugar and strive for a ubiquitous sweetness. In each instance of its use, sugar manipulates, as it were, the warring impulses of art and nature. Plat instructs his female audience in the art of fashioning subtleties, creating “formes of sweetest grace,” out of “marchpane paste” and “sugared plate.” He teaches them how to make sugar works shaped like birds and fowl, molded from life and cast in compounds of art.

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Their forms, while made of sugar, are lifelike and reminiscent of all that “nature gave.” They are thus immortalized in sugar, “As if the flesh and form which nature gave” brings alive every “lim and part.” His preserves defy the very seasonal cycle of nature, allowing for fruits to be consumed long after “crystal frosts” have nipped them on the vine. Sugar, in a sense, stalls nature. Its uses are inextricably tied up with its mastery over time. As Barthes, recalling a popular American song, pithily sums it up: “Sugar is a time, a category of the world.”37 But in stalling time and thus triumphing over nature, sugar is also art. When fruits lose their “pleasing taste,” it is with sugar that they are “from year to year preserved” and “made by art with strongest fruites to last.” If fashioning lifelike sugar works of birds and beasts from marzipan paste implies one kind of art, the conquest over seasonal decay via the act of preserving suggests another possibility for the triumph of art over nature. And finally, when nature errs in their persons, Plat offers cosmetic cures for women. When the sun casts its “fiery rays” on them, his art undoes the ravages of time. Elizabeth Spiller explains that sugar in the English imagination “was often regarded as a substance that could transform or arrest the ordinary workings of nature.” It bespeaks “an understanding of sugar as a substance, not quite of nature but rather to be used on nature.”38 This principle is at work in Plat’s receipts for banqueting stuff, as is apparent in their titles. In one such receipt he promises “A most delicate and stiff sugar paste whereof to cast Rabbits, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast, either from the life of carved molds.” Here isinglass is dissolved in a rosewater paste and powdered sugar, which is then applied to molds made of live animals or those carved into wood. These molds are oiled and then covered in sugar paste to make birds, rabbits, and other foul, which can be dredged with a mix of bread crusts, cinnamon, and sugar. The performative element here is that the banquet is presented to look like a supper and thus ends up being “a verie rare and strange device.”39 For his marchpane pastes, Plat recommends “the whitest refined sugar you can get,” which might lead us to believe that not all white sugar available was of the same grade.40 His receipt for this paste then goes on to censure a certain country gentlewoman whose sugar cakes he deems overpowering for their excessive use of sugar and improper mixture of almonds. To avoid such pitfalls, Plat recommends using almonds that have had their oil dried and mixing the occasional cinnamon and ginger in the paste. Later in Delightes, Plat offers variations in his marchpane paste including the use of caraway seeds. He recommends gilding this paste as comfit makers do when they make knots, letters, coats of arm, birds, beasts, and other fancies.

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Plat’s Delightes marks a phase in the publication of receipt collections that continued well into the mid-seventeenth century. By the Restoration, Robert May was already harking back to the days of aristocratic glory in banquets that performed the English household’s grandeur in its edible displays. Having lived through the reigns of Elizabeth, James, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II, May had considerable experience in chronicling aristocratic banquets of the era. During the Commonwealth he cooked for exiled families in France. According to Mintz, he “wrote for wealthy commoners, and his recipes suggest a real attempt to ape the pretensions of royalty—a kind of confectioner’s lèse majesté.”41 His sense of nostalgia in conjuring up an era of lost household glory is most apparent in his opening section of The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery, which first appeared in 1660. In the “Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery, to be used in Festival Times” May instructs readers in the process of fashioning the likeness of a ship out of sugar paste.42 The ship is then adorned with cannons and carriages made out paste. This edible display of artillery is placed on a charger and surrounded with eggshells that are filled with sweet water. Next to it, May recommends arranging another charger with another sugar sculpture, the likeness of a stag’s head, stuffed with claret wine, topped off with an arrow piercing its side. By the stag are pies made with coarse paste and stuffed with live frogs and birds. When ready to serve, a performance of sorts begins. The sugar work artillery is fired, and the ladies are persuaded to pluck the arrow out of the stag so that it “bleeds” claret wine from the “wound.” After a short pause for admiration, the battleships are fired. To sweeten the air of their gunpowder odors, the ladies are invited to take the eggshells filled with sweet water and throw them at each other. Finally, when they come to the pies and lift their lids off, out skips a frog, which is certain to make the ladies shriek. Then will come the birds, who are sure to fly at the lights, thus putting out the candles, so that the “flying birds and skipping frogs, the one above, the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company.”43 The scene ends with music and the partaking of the banquet. “These were formerly the delights of the Nobility, before good Housekeeping had left England,” May laments, as he brings this spectacular display of sugar work to a close. Once again, what we have here, to recall the song that Barthes mentioned, is “Sugartime,” a nostalgic desire to stall time in sugar. But time had a different kind of urgency in some of the receipt collections that followed May’s. Hannah Wolley’s receipts for sugar work appeared to be more inspired by her present circumstances and by a more expedient demand for receipts on sugar work than May’s. She opened her recipe closet specifically for women who were newly entering the workforce as servants

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and others who had a more supervisory role in the household. First published in 1670, her Queen-Like Closet promises to open up a “Rich Cabinet,” stocked with a variety of hitherto secret recipes, to “all ingenious persons of the FEMALE SEX.”44 Wolley sees her task as one of national import: “I have taken this pains to impart these things for the general good of my Country,” she informs her readers. She is aware that many women have been “forced to serve” as a result of the “late Calamities, viz. the Late Wars, Plague, and Fire,” and she seeks to equip them with the skills they would require for this service.45 Herself a victim of this fluctuating social order, Wolley clearly hopes to profit from sharing her household expertise. In “An Advertisment” that opens A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (1674) she offers “any Gentlewoman or other Maids, who desire to go forth to service” the benefit of her instructions and her letters of recommendation, all for “a reasonable Gratuity.”46 In doing so, her receipts not only bring together commodities from the home and the marketplace, they act themselves as commodities that circulate between home and marketplace, bringing together forms of female labor in both spaces. Wolley’s receipts for sugar work range from the medicinal to the ornamental to the sinister. Sugar candy is used in the making of aqua mirabilis and sugar loaf in the making of orange cordial water.47 A receipt for the fainting of the heart simply calls for “a little sugar.”48 Her receipts for making sugar plate and marchpane paste lack the performative elements of May and others, but her kitchen space is not without its share of drama.49 A receipt for a water to cure consumption reads a little like the witches’ receipt for the hell broth that I addressed earlier in my introduction. Here Wolley calls for her readers to “take a red cock and pluck him alive.”50 After slitting its back and removing its entrails, its head, leg, heart, liver, and gizzard are to be “bruised” with a mortar.51 Among the many ingredients to be added to this mixture are “one pound of Sugar-Candy beaten very small, twelve pennyworth of leaf-gold, seven graines of Musk, eleven graines of Amber-Greece, seven graines of Unicorns Horns, seven graines of Bezar Stone,” which are then distilled and taken every morning for a month, as part of this curative remedy. The mix of domestic, imported, and seemingly supernatural ingredients all appear to be stirred into this “cock water” that ends up having miraculous effects, Wolley promises. Indeed, she vouches for its efficacy personally (“proved by myself ” she assures us in the title) and claims it has succeeded where doctors have failed.52 Sugar is also used in a cosmetic recipe to clear the skin of blemishes and freckles. Like the cock water, this one entails bleeding a fowl or beast. This blood is applied overnight to the face and washed off the following morning with white wine and white sugar candy.

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This facial of sorts is complete when “you hold your face over the smoke of Brimstone for a while” with your eyes closed.53 Wolley’s queen-like closet seeks a more modest audience than Partridge’s closet of hidden secrets in the previous century, but at either end of the spectrum we have a closet that is constituted by foodstuffs brought from afar. Thus book-ended by two closets, we get a sense of the affective life of the goods contained therein. They house delights, rarities, mysteries, and secrets. Sugar is all of these at once. Indeed, sweetness itself is all of these at once. But sugar, and by extension sweetness, as my next section shows, becomes more complicated with the expansion of England’s plantation economies. Its feminine qualities come to be mired in the language of blood and toil. It becomes blood sugar, cannibalistic and, ultimately, fatal. If sweetness is the defining feature of the recipe closet, it becomes impossible outside of it. It eludes life on the plantation, where sweetness and femininity become impossible.

“Sweet Sugar and Most Ill Nature” on the Plantation In 1647, only twenty years after the first English settlement in the Caribbean, Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados, fleeing the political turmoil of the English Civil War. At this early stage in the history of settlement, Ligon was in a unique position to observe the transition from a primarily English labor force to indentured African labor that grew exponentially with the establishment of sugar plantations. His portrait of Barbados includes a lengthy section on slave life, along with detailed maps and topographies of the land, bills of fare with all manner of dishes enjoyed by plantation owners, and precise descriptions of sugar cultivation. These records have made his work valuable to scholarship on the English colonial project in the Caribbean. For my purposes here, it is a brief series of moments in True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, when Ligon pauses to turn from the description of the land to the description of its women, that is noteworthy. Early in his voyage to Cape Verde, stopping by a spring, he comes across “Negro Virgins” playing by the well.54 Their beauty distracts him to such a degree that he digresses at length, ultimately offering an apologia of sorts to the reader for veering from his course. Such beauty, he concedes, would have puzzled even Albert Durer, “the great Master of Proportion” (58). They appear to be so ravishing that Ligon projects onto them a sense of being violated: “they commit rapes upon our affections,” he claims after his voyeuristic gaze lingers over their shape, their clothes, their ornaments, and their speech (60). Later, as the narrative moves from Cape Verde to Barbados, the

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proportions of the Negro woman come up again. Except, this time, Ligon appears to be repulsed by her form. Albert Durer “the master of Proportion” is invoked once more, but only so Ligon can note how the “faulty” proportions of Negro women appear to violate his sense of form (103). Their shoulders are broad, the young women have breasts that are too hard, and the older women have breasts that “hang almost down to the ground, that at a distance, you would think they had six legs” (103). The vision of nymphlike beauties with which we began True and Exact History is thus disrupted by the sight of the laboring black body. The intensely opposing responses are striking, especially in the way that Durer’s sense of proportion defines them both. Of course, it is possible that Ligon felt both sentiments in ways that were not always logical or consistent. But importantly, the latter is occasioned by the scene of women at work rather than play. Ligon is not unaware of the hardships endured by the slave’s body. He notes that it is the custom of carrying children on their back while they do the work of weeding in the plantation that makes them appear so deformed. Just a little earlier in the narrative, he remarks on the “ill usage” of all those in servitude (96). Mainly, he wonders why the Negroes, despite being more in number than Christians and despite being accounted “a bloody people,” have not committed some “horrid massacre” upon the Christians to enfranchise themselves as masters of the islands (96). He speculates that this has as much to do with their broken spirits as their awe of their masters’ guns. Not only were they denied access to any weapons, their spirits were “subjugated to so low a condition, as they dare not look up to any bold attempt” (96). The scenes of labor appear to reinvoke this discomfort and become occasions for revulsion rather than reverie that we see earlier in his travelogue. When he chronicles the sensual experiences of Barbados, he grants that the tastes of Barbados are pleasing to the palate and rewarding to the Epicurean. But the sense of touch is more problematic in West Indian climes. Here Ligon once again brings up an image of the perspiring female body at work in the plantation. The “skins of women . . . are so sweaty and clammy, as the hand cannot pass over, without being glued and cemented in the passage or motion” (181). Consequently the sense of touch itself affords “little pleasure” and we may “decline it as useless in [such] a country” (181). These antithetical responses to taste and touch once again reveal an anxiety about the laboring body. The closer we get to the site of cultivation, the greater the revulsion for the black female body working in proximity with it. Sweetness itself becomes impossible when faced with this seemingly grotesque misshapen form. What Ligon expresses here is not quite clearly a desire for

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“eating the other” in bell hooks’s sense of the term, nor is it a kind of “racial indigestion” in Tompkins’s sense of the term. Rather, it is a sensation somewhere on this spectrum, where the specter of the black laboring body hampers its easy consumption. This sensation associated with sugar cultivation becomes part of the affective life of sugar. What for Ligon is an impossible sweetness is for Thomas Tryon an outright bitterness that stems from the harsh conditions of sugar production and its ability to contaminate what we might call the domestic ecosystem. The sense of racial indigestion, and the ensuing indignation that emerges, in his work on plantation life merits closer attention, especially for the ways in which it altogether disavows sweetness. In The Good House-wife Made a Doctor (1692), Tryon rues “The compounding of these Foreign Ingredients with our Domestick Productions that chiefly destroys the Health of our People.”55 This mixing of the domestic and foreign, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, was especially troubling for Tryon. Sugar, much like spices, comes under scrutiny in this regard. Tryon dismisses the very idea that fruits are “Preserv’d,” insisting that “Destroy’d” is a more apt way to describe the violence wrought on them. He wonders what good can come of a practice that requires the housewife to gather fruits while they are still immature, except “to please Children and Fools, and indulge wanton Liquorish Palates.”56 The art of preserving, insofar as it is art rather than nature, is for Tryon a form of meddling with divine purpose. It is a practice for which he denounces the moral character of the English housewife. “[H]ow many pounds do some Women trifle away in a year on these harmful Vanities and Superfluities? yea and think themselves rare Housewives too, for this Prodigality,” Tryon laments in a rant that goes on to condemn every kind of sugar consumption, whether in the form of sweet-meats, conserves, preserves, or confectionary ware.57 But if this tirade against the housewife’s appetites appears by now familiar from my discussion in chapter 1, we might turn to Friendly Advice to Gentleman Planters of the East and West Indies (1684), in which Tryon takes a different approach. His diatribe against sugar in this volume appears to be more complex than his vilification of female appetites in The Good House-wife. If in The Good House-wife it is the eponymous housewife who is culpable for such violence in her consumption of sugar and spice (thereby negating the virtue the title bestows on her), in Friendly Advice it is the English planter who is squarely allotted blame for the violent practices he uses in sugar cultivation. Taken together, these texts suggest that Tryon’s unease with sugar stems from something akin to racial indigestion. His injunctions against the household consumption of sugar possibly arise from his awareness of its

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implication in brutal slaveholdings on the plantation, gleaned from his five years in Barbados. They are part of his dietary philosophy that forbade the eating of anything procured with violence.58 Indeed, this philosophical belief has earned Tryon much attention in recent scholarship as one of the earliest “vegetarians” in England. In The Bloodless Revolution, a work on influential vegetarians in English history, Tristram Stuart heralds Tryon as “the Brahmin of Britain.” Of course the term “vegetarian” is more aptly used in the later nineteenth century, but Tryon was among the earliest proponents of such a dietary regimen in England. Although he notes he did not succeed in converting his own wife, a “sober young woman” named Susannah, to his own “innocent way of living,” his writings did have a tremendous influence on the likes of Aphra Behn and Benjamin Franklin.59 In his writings on diet, Tryon consistently harnessed his version of Hindu philosophy to advocate for a Golden Age of vegetarianism in the West.60 He held firm to the belief that meat eaters were digging their graves with their teeth. Interestingly, Stuart sets up the primal scene for Tryon’s vegetarianism in the sugar plantations of Barbados, where Tryon witnessed the cruelty of Christian men, who fed off the labor of expatriated Africans, themselves reduced to starvation. As the slaves lost their limbs in the sugar mills, as the forests of the Americas were depleted, as Barbados became so rocky that nothing grew without fertilizer, Restoration England grew fat. It is this scene of excess, according to Stuart, that inspired Tryon’s syncretic philosophy and his disavowal of all things procured with violence. It is unusual to think of a strain of vegetarianism as being born from a distaste of sugar and the ethics of its cultivation, but Tryon’s dietary experiments stand out in this regard. Seventeenth-century travelogues had begun documenting Hindu and Jain interactions with the animal and the nonhuman world, their establishment of animal hospitals, and their apparent refusal to hurt even a flea, so that “they live in perfect Unity and Amity with all the numberless Inhabitants of the four Worlds.”61 For writers like Tryon, these principles exerted a moral pressure on the West to seek in the ways of the East a prelapsarian harmony with the universe. While he wrote extensively about Eastern philosophy in A Dialogue between an East-Indian Brackmanny or Heathen Philosopher, and a French Gentleman (1683), his horror at the violence and vanity of the English diet took root earlier in Friendly Advice, which is more concerned with the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Tryon’s Friendly Advice includes a section entitled “The Negro’s Complaint of their Hard Servitude and the Cruelties Practiced upon them by diverse Masters professing Christianity in the West Indian Plantations,” written in the voice of a disaffected slave called “Sambo.” Daniel Carey notes that

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“the generic complexity of Tryon’s text—combining natural history, guidebook, dialogue, harangue—makes it a protean document for considering the nature of early modern colonial settlement and travel.”62 For my purposes here, it is the pointed harangue in “Negro’s Complaint” that is particularly important. Sambo begins the “Negro’s Complaint” with a grim play on the idea of planting and transplanting. The slave hopes in vain for Christian compassion and charity from his masters, the planters, even as he acknowledges these virtues are “plants that scarce grow in these Islands,” where nothing thrives as much as “poisonous Tobacco and furious Pride, sweet Sugar and most ill Nature.”63 If we continue to read sugar as an attitude, the associations that accrue to it in Sambo’s plea draw from the poisonous and the ill. Sweetness itself conjures up a violence that I have taken up in the title of this chapter, drawing on a moment in the final acts of Othello, only a little before we witness the violence Othello commits on Desdemona’s body. But here it is the violence on the black body that calls to mind this phrase. For in what follows we are to witness that “so sweet was ne’er so fatal,” indeed (5.2.20).64 Sambo paints a devastating picture of sugar cultivation as a form of cannibalistic consumption, in which the English household feeds off the slave’s body. For the English are imagined in terms of their gross alimentarity. To fatten their paunches and please their palates, they wreak a form of untold destruction on the plantation and its people. Rather than living out the ideal of man created in God’s own image, the planter has turned into “a Tyrant, a Plague, a professed Enemy, Hunter, Betrayer, Destroyer, and Devourer of all the Inhabitants of Earth, Air, and Water ” (79). In this evocative image of man’s unbridled colonial greed, he becomes one who ravages the earth rather than one who tends it, leaving an elemental destruction in his wake. Significantly, this ecological destruction to earth, air, and water is imagined as being rooted in appetite. The planter has become the very “Enemy” of the earth that Man was born to tend by virtue of being a “Devourer.” This destruction begins with the transplanting of slaves from the lands of their nativity. Husbands are separated from loving wives, mothers from their helpless babes, youths from mournful parents whom they will never see again. Traveling through deserts and seacoasts, they endure hunger and drought. To these familiar indignities of the middle passage, Tryon adds a striking image of slaves as a kind of food themselves. Fettered in chains and thrust close together into the overcrowded hold of the ship, they begin to decay, as it were. They are “suffocated, stewed and parboiled altogether in a Crowd,” till they “almost rot each other and our selves,” in the scorching heat (82–83). In yet another vision of the edible black body that mutates into food, Tryon describes slaves burning into the sugar during its production. Working

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in close proximity to the hot “sulpherous fumes” of the sugar cauldrons until they are overcome with weariness, they “fall into the fierce boiling syrups” (89). In a still more gruesome anecdote, a vengeful mistress punishes her slave for attempted escape by roasting him alive. In this horrific inversion of the innocuous rituals of the English kitchen, it is the black body that is imagined as stewing, boiling, and roasting, rather than the more pleasing fruits of their labor. But the latter is implicated in the former in the ecological system that Tryon sets up. Sambo even begs his masters to consider that his blackness does not preclude his shared humanity with the white man. “Are not all our Senses as good and quick as yours?” he pleads. “Have we not the same Faculties, Understandings, Memory and Will?” he demands. “Are we not, if we had the advantages of Education, altogether as docible, and apt to learn Arts and Sciences as any of you?” he asserts. As for the blackness of his skin, Sambo draws on common poetic allusions of the time, including Morocco’s in Merchant of Venice, who says he merely takes on “The shadowed livery of the burnished sun / To whom I am neighbor and near bred” (2.1.2–3). Here Sambo is likely channeling a common theory of blackness at this time, in demanding of his auditor, “Can we help it, if by the Sun to Close and fervent Kisses, and the nature of the Climate and Soil where we were Born, hath tinctur’d us with a dark Complexion?” He asks his master if sable is any more prized than ermines or ivory any more than ebony in his society? Have they not a range of hues and complexions and does it seem fair that hierarchies are marked solely in terms of appearances? “In a word, if our Hue be the only difference, since White is as contrary to Black, as Black is to White, there is as much reason that you should be our slaves as we yours,” Sambo concludes (115–16). A constant theme in the “Negro’s Complaint” is the abject hunger of the slave, rendered more painful as he labors to feed his master. Starvation plagues many slaves on the very ships that bring them to the island, “for the Ship Masters out of Covetousness, and for their own Lucre, will not allow us fit or competent, Meats or Drinks.” Many choose a death by starvation, rather than a life that entails slaving for another’s profit. Those who survive are enfeebled by their treatment on the plantation. Their masters grant them but a little a land for their own food and sustenance. With very little leisure, except on the Sabbath day, to tend this “small pittance of Ground,” most of them do not have the strength to toil for their own nourishment. Without rest or refreshment, many weary slaves become deprived of their natural senses and “fall into danger,” as their arms and limbs are “crusht to pieces” during their long hours at the windmill (89). It is perhaps this image that haunts artists like Walker, who chose to honor the bodies of slaves who lost

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their limbs in the service of sweetness. The slaves themselves hardly partake of this sweetness, except when they are reduced to pilfering small quantities of sugar or molasses to sell it for poor quality fish or flesh that they might consume in times of extreme hunger. With this rotting meat and the occasional potato or yam, they give their herbs and roots some taste. The women, in particular, suffer abject misery when they must nurse their infants, nourish themselves, and till the land. “They make our Wives, during the time of their Pregnancy, work equally with the rest, even until the very day of their delivery,” Sambo reveals (103). They are forced to suckle their infants, with no proper foods to provide them with moist or dry nourishment. While they cannot hope to receive any ale or caudles to comfort them, they are sometimes given a few dry potatoes, stinking mackerel, and “broths of unwholesome putrid flesh.” The distribution of rotting flesh among the slave population appears to come up time and again in Tryon’s text. “So when they pretend to buy us food more than our Plantation-Provisions, viz. either Fish or Flesh, they will go to all the Merchants in the Town, and diligently inquire out, and buy the worst they can lay their hands on, viz. stinking decayed Flesh and rotten fish, and cry, It is good enough for Negro’s, they care not how bad it is, so they can buy it cheap” (107). Those who cannot get even this rotting flesh are reduced to extreme measures. Sambo claims that if a horse dies and the slaves find out about it, “they will dig up the putrefied stinking Carrion, and make good Chear of it.” Others are reduced to eating dogs, cats, and mice when they can lay their hands on them (107). For Sambo, their privation in the face of the planters’ gluttony is the most galling feature of plantation life. On this count he lashes out at his masters in a direct address: “O you brave and swaggering Christians who sport yourselves in all manner of superfluity and wantonness, and grow fat with our Blood and Sweat, gormandizing with the fruits procured by our Slavery and sore Labor; set by your Rum pots, your Punch-Bowls, your BrandyBottles, and the rest of your intoxicating Enchantments for a while . . . to tell us . . . what strength or courage any man can have that goes to sleep late with half his belly full” (96–97). This speech gives way to a broader critique of plantation excess as Sambo proceeds with his diatribe. English commensal rituals, banquets, and sugar consumption are all invoked here as forms of consumption that feed off slave labor. The images of gluttony—“liquorish palates” and “insatiate paunches”—become persistent as Tryon, via Sambo, starts to describe the English sipping sugary cordials and gorging “various sorts of brave noble Fruits, Tarts, Sweet-Meats, and a thousand other Novelties brought from Foreign regions” (123–24). He thus conjures yet again the vision of the English colonial cannibal, who consumes black bodies, while

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hankering after superfluities from distant lands. As with the other instances I have offered in this project, the edible becomes the other in Sambo’s harangue. To eat sugar is to consume him, his people, his labor. But if the edible other in previous instances has been variously exotic, enticing, or dangerous, in this instance the other is desperate. Unlike, say, the Indian boy who remains silent or the Indian queen who allays our fears of foreign foods, Sambo seeks a change in the ethics of consumption that have resulted from the colonial economies that feed off him.

Final Scenes and Primal Scenes In the imaginative literature of the seventeenth century, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) affords us one of the earliest romances of the sugar plantation. Where the genre of the harangue allows Tryon the opportunity for a scathing critique of the sugar plantation, the genre of the heroic romance must engage in what Keith A. Sandiford, drawing on a phrase from Ligon, has called “sweete negotiation.”65 As a romance set on the sugar plantation it is rooted in an overwhelmingly feminized sweetness; but as a tragedy set on the sugar plantation it is rooted in a gruesome form of violence committed on the black body. Like Sambo, its eponymous hero is allowed a harangue, but unlike Sambo he must die for it. Its genre is then particularly apt for chronicling the affective range of sugar, as the sweet and fatal elements of the heroic romance come together in its tragic denouement. No doubt, sugar itself is hardly mentioned in Behn’s novella, except to note that negro slaves are bought to work in the sugar plantations. But if we continue to think of sugar as an attitude, it becomes easier to see its presence at work in Behn’s narrative. In particular, the many women characters of the novella stand in for this sweetness. Critics have long noted the presence of woman as audience, narrator, and subject in Oroonoko. Laura Brown even observes that the narrative “generates female figures at every turn.”66 After all, we are told that Oroonoko exists only as a result of the narrator’s “female pen.” His love story centers on Imoinda. His duration as royal slave on the plantation is spent almost entirely in the company of women. He variously saves them from ferocious beasts and organizes their visit to an Indian village. In these interactions, he facilitates the feminized sweetness of the narrative. Importantly though, even his death takes place before a primarily female audience. The narrator herself is not present at this scene, but she is careful to inform readers that her mother and sister witnessed the gruesome spectacle. The violence of this scene is in many ways perplexing, given the consistently female audience the text seeks every opportunity to underscore.

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Appearing at the very end of the novella, the scene of torture is presented in lurid detail. Oroonoko takes a pipe in his mouth as the quartering of his body ensues: He had learn’d to take tobacco; and when he was assur’d he should die, he desir’d they would give him a pipe in his mouth, ready lighted; which they did: And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire; after that, with an ill-favour’d knife, they cut off his ears and his nose, and burn’d them; he still smoak’d on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they hack’d off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropt and he gave up the ghost, without a groan, or a reproach. My mother and sister were by him all the while, but not suffer’d to save him; so rude and wild were the rabble, and so inhuman were the justices who stood by to see the execution, who after paid dearly enough for their insolence. They cut Caesar in quarters, and sent them to several of the chief plantations.67 Critics have commented extensively on the narrative function of this scene. Cynthia Richards finds it both unsettling and unsettled. The reader inevitably has a visceral response to its violence, particularly the gruesome ritual of mutilating the hero’s limbs, ears, and members. Nothing of him is allowed to remain, as his sexual organs are burned and the remaining quarters of his body distributed on the plantations. It is unsettling for all of these reasons, but according to Richards it is also unsettled because its place in the narrative seems perplexing: “On a more analytical level, the scene remains unsettled since it is so difficult to determine its exact function in the novel, a question made more pressing by the seeming dissonance between the text’s reputation as largely humanitarian and its reproduction of a scene alternately termed “gruesome,” “grisly,” or “grotesque.”68 If Behn’s sympathies clearly lie with the royal slave rather than the villainous governor, why does she risk reproducing his cruelty on the hero’s body? The fundamental question about the torture scene remains: “What effect does Behn seek?”69 Richards answers this question by offering a nuanced reading of the torture spectacle as offering retributive justice for a political traitor. Given the politics of the English Civil War, Behn can muster sympathy for Oroonoko the prince, but not for Oroonoko the rebel. Certainly the scene of violence betrays Behn’s political sympathies, but I would like to push this argument further to account for the specifically female audience before which it is performed. As a finale, it registers the violence in their consumption of the narrative. Indeed, the violence is

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performed precisely for this female audience that has thus far been consuming its sweet romance. In yet another instance of impossible sweetness on the plantation, Oroonoko cannot easily and indefinitely afford the female audience the pleasures of the plantation. In his rousing speech of rebellion to the slaves, he lists the indignities of their condition. Behn offers his “harangue” to readers as follows: Caesar, having singled out these men from the women and children, made an harangue to ’em, of the miseries and ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens and drudgeries, as were fitter for beasts than men; senseless brutes, than human souls. He told ’em, it was not for days, months or years, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes: They suffer’d not like men, who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression; but like dogs, that lov’d the whip and bell, and fawn’d the more they were beaten: That they had lost the divine quality of men, and were become insensible asses, fit only to bear: nay, worse; an ass, or dog, or horse, having done his duty, could lie down in retreat, and rise to work again, and while he did his duty, indur’d no stripes; but men, villanous, senseless men. such as they, toil’d on all the tedious week till Black Friday: and then, whether they work’d or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they, promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffer’d the infamous whip the sordid stripes, from their fellow-slaves, till their blood trickled from all parts of their body; blood, whose every drop ought to be revenged with a life of some of those tyrants that impose it.70 Their beast-like conditions, their bloody toil, and the unending nature of their labor is by now familiar to us. But in Behn’s narrative it ruptures what could be a sweet ending to Oroonoko and Imoinda’s union. The uprising is violent and begets further violence, so that what could be a tragicomic narrative of loss and gain in the New World ends once again in tragedy. Valerie Forman points out that the reunion of Oroonoko and Imoinda, away from their lecherous grandfather, is importantly facilitated by their captivity. As such, this narrative “rewrites slavery as joyful,” their betrayal into slavery becoming the source of their more “prosperous reunion.”71 But their joy is brief, and Oroonoko’s eventual unwillingness for himself, for Imoinda, and for their unborn child to be incorporated by the plantation economy does not allow for such a denouement. The torture scene at the end does not necessarily serve as retribution for his recalcitrance in the slave economy. Behn’s sympathies, as those of the

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female audience in the novella, remain with its heroic slave. But the scene of rebellion leads to the scene of torture as an inevitable condition of plantation life. In this respect, his final scene is in many ways the primal scene of sugar cultivation. Oroonoko is like sugar, not necessarily in the same ways as the Indian boy is like spices. The latter metonymically evokes spices, whereas Oroonoko is more tied to the complex affects associated with sugar and slavery. But he is part of the topos of sweetness on the plantation, which by the end of the novella becomes fatal. He affords his female audience the pleasures of the plantation and enables their partaking of its romance but ultimately becomes a version of the racial body that cannot be consumed easily. Previous scholarship has identified Oroonoko with exotic commodities. Susan B. Iwanisziw proposes that the history of Oroonoko cannot be separated from the economic history of tobacco of that same name.72 His final gesture of taking tobacco and dying with the pipe in his mouth would certainly lend credence to this argument, as would the frequent association between the blackamoor and tobacco in advertisements of the time. But in negotiating the sweet and fatal aspects of life on the plantation, Oroonoko also comes to be representative of the affective life of sugar. He becomes one with the plantation itself, as his remains are scattered in different sites. In a larger historical sense, he becomes what Stuart Hall described in identifying himself as “the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea,” one among the many racial bodies that become the taste of difference.73

Ch a p ter 3

Coffee Eating Othello, Drinking Coffee

The question is no longer one of knowing if it is “good” to eat the other or if the other is “good” to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him. —Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”

Of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Othello appears to have had the most persistent afterlife in food and drink. No doubt, Macbeth-inspired menus appear on the occasional Pinterest board in Halloween specials that include “eye of newt” and “toe of frog” culinary creations.1 King Lear lends his name to a brand of old ale.2 Even Coriolanus has an exclusive hibiscus tea named after him, claiming to capture the bitter tastes of political exile in its rich blends.3 But Othello, more so than others, has routinely mutated into something edible. Consumers over the years have been strangely amenable to a kind of anthropophagous consumption of Othellorelated foodstuffs, where the pleasure of devouring the edible object also lies in the pleasure of devouring Othello himself. It is a pleasure that results from consuming all that is exotic and intriguingly other about him. Thus, for instance, an American manufacturer of a signature blend Othello tea promises a flavorful “cross between a dessert tea, a green tea, and a chai, a light blend including chocolate, spice, and hints of fruit.”4 Its ingredients, we are told, include cinnamon bark, ginger root, spices, and cocoa nibs, among others. Together, they create something that is uniquely Othello—dark, spicy, earthy. Its exotic associations derive from its Othello affiliations. Other Othello foods are even more grounded in the play’s plot and the eventual fate of its tragic hero. A bean-to-bar chocolate menu in Dayton, Ohio, boasts a special kind of artisanal chocolate called Othello, a blend of coffee and cacao 80

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nibs, “classic tragedy—sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end.”5 More local iterations of Othello delicacies abound. Café Venetia in Palo Alto, California, offers up a special autumn drink inspired by Othello—chocolate with one shot of espresso and whipped cream.6 Other Othello concoctions are part of traditional dessert menus. The famous Danish Othellolagkage (apparently the “crème da la crème of layered cakes,” reserved for special occasions) is a culinary homage to the play’s black and white characters with its dark chocolate frosting and white marzipan coating.7 Luxury food brands have their own versions of edible Othellos. Neuhaus Belgian chocolates include a special hazelnut and coffee-based chocolate named after Othello, while Williams-Sonoma’s baking cookbook includes a recipe for rich chocolate cookies called “Othellos.” As Hall observes, “All of these acts of naming assume that even people who have never read the play ‘know’ Othello.”8 At the very least, the assorted Othello teas, coffees, chocolates, and cookies share in the knowledge of Othello’s otherness, alluding to it subtly (and on occasion not so subtly) in their references to dark ingredients, exotic spices, and earthy flavors. In all of these instances, “Othello” is shorthand for that which is different, transgressive, and therefore enjoyable. As bell hooks contends in “Eating the Other,” mass culture increasingly thrives on the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the fetishization of racial difference: “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”9 Othello, we might argue, is precisely such a spice or seasoning in the eponymous foodstuffs he continues to inspire. To consume Othello tea or coffee or chocolate is to consume the entire discourse of his exotic role in the play—his thrilling traveler’s tales, his dangerous yet alluring blackness, his tragic grandeur—all in one delectable serving. If, as Edward Pechter and others have argued, Othello “has become the tragedy of choice for the present generation,” it hardly seems surprising that its protagonist has a ubiquitous presence in contemporary popular culture, where he is easily co-opted into commodity names and logos.10 His name appears to have the particularly unforgettable brand recall that manufacturers routinely rely on to purvey their exotic edible goods. Douglas Lanier has shown that the trend for brand names inspired by Shakespearean characters dates as far back as the late nineteenth century when advertisers frequently relied on the Bard to sell their products. Thus in the Golden Age of Shakespeare advertising in both England and America, “there were Cordelia sofas

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and Romeo and Juliet tobacco, Antony and Cleopatra cigars, Othello dresses, Hamlet stoves, Macbeth bicycles, Falstaff beer—Shakespearean names gave goods an air of quality and familiarity, even if the relationship between name and product was arbitrary.”11 Many of these Shakespearean characters hawked food. Lanier documents a rich archive of advertisements that range from Oberon and Titania endorsing tinned meat on Victorian trade cards, to King Lear and Julius Caesar endorsing Coca-Cola in a print campaign from the 1920s. But where these associations between food and character are more random, generally relying on the audience’s familiarity (or the audience’s aspirations of familiarity) with Shakespeare, in the case of the Othello examples I have offered above we see more emphasis on the seemingly Othelloesque qualities of the food and drink. It is dark; it is sinful; it is (at least in the case of coffee) Moorish in its origins. Othello doesn’t simply endorse these foods; he is the food. This edible Othello has a historical precedent that predates the Othello brands of our own late capitalist era, indicating ways in which Shakespeare’s Moor has a longer and more complex history of mutating into something that can be consumed. In one of its earliest incarnations, comestible Othello takes the form of coffee. Unlike more recent Othello foods, this late seventeenth-century incarnation of the Moor was not created to sell exotic substances but to deter their consumption. Yet it anticipates the trope of a dangerous, alluring, and inherently consumable Othello. Printed in London in 1672, A Broadside against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk was part of a growing invective against the infiltration of coffee in the English body politic. Its brief and caricatured reenactment of the Othello plot tells us much about the broader discourse of coffee consumption in England during its infancy, even as it tells us something about the circulation of the Othello tale as one of illicit consumption. Both the Othello plot and the coffee plot (especially as it appears in anticoffee propaganda) hinge on a trajectory of conversion and contamination. The edible Othello trope therefore becomes particularly viable for the coffee ballad. Its invocation of Othello crucially points to ways in which foreign foodstuffs, which had recently entered English domestic life as a result of new trade networks, were being imagined in terms of the most immediately accessible symbols of otherness—as an “extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (1.1.137–38).12 A Broadside against Coffee is for the most part not unusual in its diatribes against the popular beverage. Its associations between Islam, religious apostasy, and coffee would continue well into the eighteenth century at the

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height of the thriving coffeehouse culture, when the beverage was variously described in ballads and broadsides as a “Mahometan gruel,” an “ugly Turkish enchantress,” and a “Satanick Tipple.”13 Yet its Shakespearean reference makes A Broadside against Coffee particularly noteworthy. In its allegorical representation of coffee preparation, it casts Othello as coffee and the hapless Desdemona as water. Thus it is that we have the eponymous marriage of the Turk and the Christian—by nature bound for a “contrary course,” yet joined together with “a great stir.” The melting Nymph distils herself to do’t Whilst the Slave Coffee must be beaten to’t: Incorporate him close as close may be, Pause but a while, and he is none of he; Which for a truth, and not a story tells, No faith is to be kept with Infidels. Sure he suspects, and shuns her as a Whore, And loves, and kills, like the Venetian Moor; Bold Asian Brat! with speed our confines flee; Water, though common, is too good for thee. Sure Coffee’s vext he has the breeches lost, For she’s above and he lies undermost; What shall I add but this? (and sure ’tis right) The Groom is heavy, ’cause the Bride is light. This canting Coffee has his Crew inricht, And both the Water and the Men bewitcht.14 As Kasey Evans notes, the broadside’s receipt for coffee preparation is remarkably accurate. We have “the grinding of the coffee beans (‘Coffee must be beaten to’t’); the stirring of the grinds and the water together (‘Incorporate him close as close may be’); the delay for the grounds to settle to the bottom (‘Pause but a while’); the process of such settling (‘he . . . shuns her as a Whore’); and finally, the cup of coffee ready to drink, with the water on top and the grounds below (‘For she’s above, and he lies undermost’).”15 Through much of this receipt, Othello remains a key ingredient. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Moor as an interloper infiltrating the body politic is central to the ballad’s narrative of coffee preparation and consumption. This trope of consuming Othello will be the subject of this chapter. Put another way, this chapter examines Shakespeare’s play in light of the many comestible Othellos that have emerged in its wake, with a particular focus

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on its reenactment in the anonymous coffee poem. What accounts for the appearance of a potable Othello in a late seventeenth-century broadside, anthologized with a series of antitobacco tracts? Why does Shakespeare’s tragic hero so easily transform into banal edible stuff, whether in an early modern coffee receipt or in a Williams-Sonoma cookbook? What about the play’s alimentary imagery makes possible a lingering identification of Shakespeare’s Moor with narratives of decadent consumption, conversion, and contamination? In answering these questions, I attempt to outline what I would like to call “the devouring discourse” of the play in particular and the enduring Othello narrative in our cultural memory at large. Desdemona, it would seem, inaugurates this discourse. As Othello tells us in his Africanusinspired “traveller’s history,” she longed for his tales and would “with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse” (1.3.138, 148–49). This striking image of an appetitive Desdemona consuming Othello’s story merits close attention here. Inevitably, this image has elicited commentary from several critics. According to Patricia Parker, Desdemona here embodies the European appetite for tales of exotic terrains and outlandish creatures—an appetite fed by the repeated sixteenth-century publications and translations of Mandeville’s Travels, Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie, and Ambrose Pare’s Des monstres et prodigies, among others. Othello’s speech, as Parker notes, reproduces elements of both Mandeville’s fabulous reports as well as of Africanus’s Historie. In the process, it feeds what Othello calls Desdemona’s “greedy ear” as readily as it does the play’s audience, hungering for exotic tales of the unknown:16 I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence, And portance in my traveller’s history: Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak. Such was the process, And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline, But still the house affairs would draw her thence,

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Which ever as she could with haste dispatch She’d come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse: which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate . . . (1.3.133–52)

For Othello, Desdemona is drawn to his tale precisely because it is exotic— “’twas strange, ’twas passing strange” (1.3.159). She voraciously consumes it as a story of “disastrous chances” and “hair-breadth scapes,” of “the Cannibals that each other eat” and “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders,” even neglecting the house affairs to partake of Othello’s discourse. Yet with all the monsters and marvels invoked in these lines, arguably it is the image of Desdemona’s “greedy ear” that stands out as most monstrous. For Parker, this synecdochical “greedy ear” with which Desdemona devours Othello’s story chiastically links her to the figures of the cannibals he mentions only a few lines above.17 Christopher Pye, likewise, notes the strangeness of the image itself: “Mouths devour. Even the consuming eye is a familiar enough trope. But the devouring ear is arresting because hearing is not supposed to entail agency. Yet because language prompts desire, including the desire for meaning, when it is unmoored from any source—told as a tale passed on—meaning derives as much from the ear as from the mouth.”18 For Pye, insofar as Desdemona hears the tale and the tale she hears is hers (“her fantasy, her construction, the image of her own desire”), she is configured like the anthropophagy, consuming her own.19 The anthropophagous quality of the devouring discourse is important here. As Derrida reminds us, discourse is by nature cannibalistic. As I show in my introduction, the very notion of comprehending the other is for Derrida a kind of eating, an incorporation or assimilation. To “Eat Well” is to necessarily feed off the other, to be inserted into a relationship with the other. Derrida explains: One must eat well—here is a maxim whose modalities and contents need only be varied, ad infinitum. This evokes a law of need or desire . . ., orexis, hunger, and thirst (“one must,” “one must [eat] well”), respect for the other at the very moment when, in experience (I am speaking here of metonymical “eating” as well as the very concept of experience), one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (something one can never do absolutely without addressing oneself to the other and without

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absolutely limiting understanding itself, the identifying appropriation) speak to him in words that also pass through the mouth, the ear, and sight . . .20 It is in this sense that we might parse Othello’s image of Desdemona’s “greedy ear” eating, as it were, words that come from his mouth. He sees her as feeding off his discourse to assimilate him, interiorize him, and ultimately to become one with him. She is described as eating the other and in the Derridean sense “eats well” because the other is good to eat. But consuming the other appears to entail opening many different orifices. To the proliferating holes of devouring ears and feeding mouths, we might also add a sexual opening that is implied in Othello’s speech. For Parker, this sexual opening is hinted at in the image of dilating that Othello invokes in the telling of his pilgrimage. She argues that the act of dilating in its early modern usage comes with a sense of opening up or enlarging, of unwrapping or displaying a secret.21 When Othello dilates his pilgrimage to Desdemona, he appears to open up something hidden, something sexual in her. The effects on Desdemona are remarkable. As Peter Womack notes, “Drawn repeatedly to the discourse, greedily devouring it, moved by it to sighs and incoherent responses, she seems in a more than casual sense to be under its spell.”22 The devouring discourse is thus revealed as simultaneously sexual and gustatory in Othello’s speech. Both are central to the ways in which Desdemona is depicted as consuming the other. Othello’s tale is peculiar in the way that it invites this anthropophagous consumption. Indeed, his “round unvarnished tale” is anything but (1.3.90). In Pye’s words, it is a tale of “indirect courses—triangulated addresses, voyeuristic auditions—although who beguiles whom remains unresolved.”23 It is revealed before the signori as a conversation between Brabantio and Othello (“Her father lov’d me, oft invited me; / Still question’d me the story of my life”), overheard in fragments by Desdemona (“Whereof by parcels she had something heard, / But not intentively”), in the presence of a play-going audience that has consumed the very narratives of Africanus and Mandeville it channels (1.3.127–28, 153–54). Like Desdemona, as auditors of his speech we too partake in its devouring discourse of monsters and marvels. We consume Othello’s tale and via him Africanus’s tale of “Of being taken by the insolent foe” and the mythical Mandeville’s tales of “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” In listening to this long speech, we risk what Pye has eloquently called “the perils of the devouring ear.”24 As Pye puts it: “Self-consuming, self-producing, a tale that inscribes teller and addressee alike, Othello’s oral history is a cannibal narrative and also, like the ‘men

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whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders,’ an encephalic one, a narrative without head or source.”25 The consuming properties of this speech are most apparent in its effects. Desdemona is not the only one beguiled by it. Even the Duke alerts us to these effects with his admission that “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.170). Indeed, it is a tale that threatens to consume Othello himself. For Stephen Greenblatt, it is a “Borges-like narrative . . . a narrative in which the storyteller is constantly swallowed up by the story.”26 Even clarifying his genre for us (the Folio has Othello telling us his “traveller’s history”), Othello “comes dangerously close to recognizing his status as a text.”27 Importantly, it is he who configures Desdemona as consuming him and the story. It is a moment when Othello, acting as storyteller, also becomes aware of himself as story, as a subject of a “traveller’s history” that we all consume. As such, it is a tale that exceeds itself, telling us something of its status as tale, but also of the larger tale in which it unfolds and of its reception and consumption. In listening to this tale with a greedy ear, auditors beyond Desdemona have sought to devour Othello’s discourse. In the process, Othello himself has frequently morphed into something we seek to consume. In his guise as a potable Othello or an edible Othello, as coffee or as chocolate, he is more than simply recalling the blackness of his character in the Shakespearean text. Rather, the edible Othello recalls the devouring discourse itself—the propensity of audiences over the years to consume his entire tale (the one he tells and the one that unfolds after its telling) with a “greedy ear.” The play as a whole frequently alerts us to the ways in which Othello can be consumed and the appetite with which he is desired. It is deeply invested in the workings of the devouring discourse. It sets up a complex gastronomic framework in which characters are acutely aware of the alimentary effects of ingesting, digesting, and purging that which is alien. While Iago most often initiates the imagery of a grotesque Othello consumption, we see how images of other kinds of consumption and transformation pervade the entire play. In the next section of this chapter, I take a closer look at this gastronomic framework and the ways in which different characters are positioned within it. In the final section, I return to the coffee ballad to look at how it picks up on the language of appetite in its own retelling of the Othello tale. Its place in the coffee debates of the period might arguably seem inconsequential. Only a few historians and literary critics have made note of it, usually as one among many ballads and broadsides that proliferated in the early coffee debates. But its Othello incarnation makes it an important testament to early ideas about coffee consumption, Moorish infiltration, and a kind of dietary

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miscegenation that we have already seen in the previous chapter on spices. As much as the play that inspires it, the ballad shows us something of the ways in which peoples and things, ideas and appetites traveled across borders and boundaries in the early modern period.

Devouring Discourse To speak of eating and digestion in the context of Othello is to risk focusing on the banal and quotidian in one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. Other essays broach the subject with similar hesitation. Ben Saunders begins his article on “Iago’s Clyster” with an apology to any readers who might be offended by its vulgar subject matter.28 But as Schoenfeldt notes in “Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England,” the stomach is a central site of ethical discrimination in early modern culture. Digestion (or concoction as medical discourse of the time refers to it) constitutes a fundamental act of self-fashioning. “The exigencies of the stomach require the individual to confront on a daily basis the thin yet necessarily permeable line separating the self and other.”29 Schoenfeldt explains the contemporary understanding of digestion as “that magical yet mundane moment when . . . something alien is brought into the self and something alien is excreted by the self, when, as Edward Reynolds suggests, the object of appetite is rendered the source of repugnance.”30 An English bishop writing in the 1640s, Reynolds elaborates on the sense of desire and loathing that accompany the process of ingestion and excretion. In A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man he writes, “We love our food when it is meat, we loathe it when it is excrement. When it goes into us we desire it, when it passeth through us we despise it. And the secret work of concoction, (which is as it were the Review of our Meat) doth distinguish that in them which the Appetite tooke in a lumpe, and together.”31 Iago, more so than any other character in the play, employs this language of digestion. The bodily functions associated with the stomach form a central conceit in his conspiratorial conversations with Roderigo. In the first of these conversations, he speaks of both Othello and Desdemona’s desire as a form of digestion. Both will hunger for each other and then grow sick with the very thing they eagerly sought to consume. The Moor is changeable in his will, Iago tells Roderigo, hence “The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida” (1.3.340–42). Most editors suggest that “locusts” were a sweet, exotic fruit, possibly carob or honeysuckle, whereas “coloquintida” or colocynth was a bitter apple, probably a purgative. Saunders thus parses Iago’s food imagery as follows: “Iago

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is hinting that Othello’s diet of lust will eventually have unpleasantly laxative consequences.”32 The object of his desire will soon be the object of his disgust. Likewise, Desdemona will loathe Othello, once she has had her fill of him: “When she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice” (1.3.343–44). But as Iago proceeds in his machinations, this digestive trope attaches itself more and more to Desdemona. As if picking up on Othello’s reference to her “greedy ear,” Iago configures her as voracious in the extreme. She consumes Othello with a kind of sexual and gustatory excess that is sure to end in repugnance for that which was consumed. Mark me with what violence she first loved the Moor, but for bragging and telling her fantastical lies. To love him still for prating?—let not thy discreet heart think it. Her eye must be fed, and what delight shall she have to look on the devil? When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be again to inflame it, and to give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favour sympathy in years, manners, and beauties, all which the Moor is defective in. Now for want of these required conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor. Very nature will instruct her in it. (2.1.220–28) The digestive process that Iago invokes here is important. It casts Othello as both food and vomit—the object of both desire and disgust. The same appetite with which Desdemona consumed him will now cause her to grow sick with him. She will “heave the gorge”; she will “disrelish” the Moor; she will “abhor” him. In digestive terms, she will grow nauseous with consuming him, she will develop a distaste for him, and she will feel an aversion to him. The digestive process, as Iago conceives it here, is remarkably similar to the one described by Reynolds, wherein the object of desire during ingestion inevitably becomes the object of revulsion during expulsion: “We love our food when it is meat, we loathe it when it is excrement.” Othello has gone from exotic food to emetic waste in Iago’s speech. His digestive metaphor works on the principle of concoction that would require the body to make the necessary distinction between what it assimilates and what it expulses. For if digestion, as Schoenfeldt notes, is that moment when the body distinguishes between the self and the other, purging itself of the alien, then there are no better terms for Iago to describe exactly what Desdemona’s greedy consumption of Othello will result in. In Reynolds’s terms, digestion is a “Review” and such a review is sure to result in her evacuating that “which the Appetite tooke in a lumpe, and together.”33 She will purge her

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body of the foreign substance that she ate. “Very nature will instruct her in it,” Iago tells Roderigo. By the time Iago’s plot is in motion—or to use his own terms, by the time he swears to “diet my revenge”—the imagery of feeding and appetite pervades the play (2.3.281). Thus jealousy itself becomes “the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (3.3.170–71). In a reversal of the desire-ingestion/disgust-expulsion trope, jealousy is configured as an entity that feeds with disgust and mockery rather than desire and longing. Othello himself, taking his cue from Iago, starts to speak of Desdemona’s voracious appetite. In his most profound moment of doubt, he wonders first if it is his blackness or his declined youth that cost him Desdemona, but then quickly turns to her appetite: “O curse of marriage, / That we call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!” (3.3.272–74). He fears the general camp, the laborers, and all men in his vicinity have “tasted her sweet body” (3.3.351). Touching Desdemona’s hand a little later, he suggests “fasting, and prayer” as a remedy for her sweaty palm, which was thought to be a sign of active desire and indiscriminate appetite (3.4.38).34 Significantly, Emilia remains the only character who struggles to reverse Iago’s imagery of the gorging-vomiting female by drawing attention to the workings of male appetites: “They are all but stomachs, and we all but food. / They eat us hungrily, and when they are full, / They belch us” (3.4.100–102). Emilia does not simply speak of male appetite; she casts masculinity itself as appetite. “They are all stomachs” metonymically invokes men as the sum total of their hungers. Correspondingly, women become the waste they belch out in disgust when sated. But no other character picks up on this trope. We never know if Desdemona responds since Iago comes back on stage and Emilia does not pick up on the language of appetite until much later in act 4. Here Emilia tries to justify women’s sensual appetites, in the face of their husbands’ many acts of infidelity, jealousy, and violence: “Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour, / As husbands have.” (4.3.91–94). But Emilia, as we know, remains the lone voice speaking for women in the play. It is Iago’s vision of appetitive woman that endures. More broadly speaking, what we see here is the endurance of the devouring discourse. Whether in Othello’s vision of her greedy ear or in Iago’s vision of her feeding eye, Desdemona engages in an act of anthropophagous consumption. If Othello imagines her voraciously consuming all that is exotic about him, Iago takes this act of gorging to its logical extreme in his description of her disgorging him. The devouring discourse vacillates between a representation of Othello as desirable food and a representation

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of Othello as disgusting excrement. And it is on Desdemona’s body that the gustatory and sexual implications of this process are borne out. He goes from being the thing one desires as one ingests to the thing one despises as one expulses. He is the alien that, in digestive terms, the self cannot assimilate. What is captured in the digestive analogy is of course true of his status in the play as a whole. He is the Moor that Venice cannot truly assimilate; the alien that is briefly desirable but must necessarily be purged. In essence, Othello becomes what Julia Kristeva has termed the polluting object. For Kristeva, polluting objects fall into two types, “excremental and menstrual.” With regard to the former, Kristeva writes that “excrement and its equivalents . . . stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside.”35 While in his guise as food Othello can be assimilated into Venetian society, in his guise as waste he becomes precisely the polluting object that must be expelled from it. John Gillies, in turn drawing on the anthropological formulations of Mary Douglas, describes Othello’s threatening presence in the play as a “pollution danger.”36 Gillies points out that Shakespeare’s Moors, while different from the stock Moorish villains of the Elizabethan stage, are all “imagined in terms of polluting sexual contact with European partners.” Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, Cleopatra, even the “Ethiope” to whom Claribel is lost in The Tempest are all part of a scenario of miscegenation in which they act as polluting agents.37 But I would emphasize that this pollution danger is imagined as much in gustatory as in sexual terms. Indeed, the pollution danger posed by the presence of the outsider-insider (that which should have been outside but is within us) is repeatedly figured in terms that have to do with oral consumption. As such, much depends on the eating of Othello. The devouring discourse evolves from a crisis of whether (in Derridean terms) the other is good to eat and whether it is good to eat the other. The digestive trope raises the question of whether one can eat the other, whether the other can be assimilated, and, in the end, whether the other must be purged for fear of polluting the body politic itself. Then to answer a question with which I began this chapter about the preponderance of edible and comestible Othellos, Shakespeare’s Moor so often mutates into food because the play itself grapples with issues of his assimilability versus his inassimilability in gustatory terms. The contradictions embedded in the play’s title about whether Othello can be “Moor” and still, in fact, be “of Venice” are borne out in the digestive tropes that pervade the play as a whole. If Desdemona is seen as willingly consuming that which is exotic and thus allows for its assimilation, Iago emphasizes an abstemious consumption that

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has no room for it. He advocates an extreme form of self-control over bodily ingestion, only a few lines before he mocks Othello and Desdemona’s excessive consumption. In a passage that seems very much in accordance with the dietaries of the period, he presents a vision of homegrown, reasoned consumption in which the will exercises absolute control over the body. ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners; so that if we plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. (1.3.316–22) In this familiar Renaissance image of the body as garden, Iago stresses the role of the will as gardener. The will exercises absolute control over the planting and sowing of nettles, lettuce, hyssop (all indigenous species of vegetables and herbs). In other words, it is the will as gardener that decides what must be ingested by the body that is our garden. Governing the body is the task of the individual, according to Iago: “why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.” Even excrement here, as Saunders points out, “is no bad thing.”38 Rather than a polluting agent, it is manure that feeds back into the garden that is the body. As against the image of uncontrolled digestion that in Iago’s view characterizes Othello and Desdemona, this image is one of self-contained consumption. Other characters seem more vulnerable precisely because they are unable to exercise their will in matters of consumption. Cassio, for example, confesses to his “poor and unhappy brains for drinking” but eventually gives in to the “potations pottle-deep” that Iago plies him with (2.3.29–30, 47). The consequences of such weakness, as we know, are disastrous. Othello’s oft-quoted exclamation at the ensuing brawl—“Are we turned Turks”—is telling (2.3.153). It construes the transformation brought on by drink as a form of conversion itself, a defection to the ways of the barbaric enemy that Venice had just sought to vanquish. In Cassio’s more sober moments, drink itself becomes the other or the enemy. He recalls with shame his act of uncontrolled ingestion: “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains” (2.3.269–70; emphasis mine). The “nice and wat’rish diet” he speaks of later in compunction (3.3.15), while convincing Desdemona to plead his case, has frequently elicited editorial commentary. Dr. Johnson parsed the phrase to mean Othello would not be “satisfied with such slight reasons.”39 But more recent explanations suggest that Cassio here appears to be dreading a successor “who is scrupulous (‘nice’) in a way that

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he has failed to be the night before, and who is temperate (‘wat’rish’) to boot, and therefore not prone to incontinence” in the way Cassio himself has been.40 The very language of the drunken episode and all that follows in its wake calls to mind the perils of indiscriminate consumption. Ingestion thus becomes a weighted bodily function. Indeed, the play presents us with a veritable pharmakon of potions, poisons, medicines, and drinks that threaten to alter (or actually succeed in altering) the body upon ingestion. Time and again, Brabantio insists that Desdemona has been altered by “medicines,” and various kinds of “drugs or minerals” (1.2.75). His grief, which itself he describes in uniquely oral terms as one that “engluts and swallows other sorrows,” convinces him that her body and mind have been “corrupted” by Othello with “spells and medicines bought of mountebanks” (1.3.57, 1.3.61). The witchcraft he imagines Othello performing is grounded in the use of ingestible substances like “mixtures” and “drams” that would change her constitution and thereby her inclinations: I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o’er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her. (1.3.103–6)

In response, a senator seriously inquires of Othello about the courses he may have taken to “Subdue and poison this young maid’s affections” (1.3.112). While the Duke and others dismiss Brabantio’s accusations against Othello’s use of potions, the body’s vulnerability to such exotic substances is hardly disputed. Othello’s own insistence on the charms and subduing effects of the handkerchief dyed in mummy a few acts later suggests his own belief in the powerful transformative potential of exotic objects on subjects who possess them. Iago’s references to these transformative effects are frequently metaphorical. He confesses that the thought of Emilia with Othello “Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards” (2.1.284). Later, having convinced Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity and observing him swoon in a trance, Iago sees his revenge as a remedy: “Work on; my medicine works” (4.1.42). What begins for Iago as a kind of poison is best cured with a kind of medicine. But crucially, it is Othello as foreign object who presents that poisonous threat and it is Othello who must be worked on and eliminated by the medicine. As Thomas Tryon would put it in The Good House-wife Made a Doctor, foreign foods worked much like poison when ingested by English bodies,

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because they were antithetical to the English constitution: “What is Poyson, but a violent Antipathy or Contrariety in Nature?”41 In the dietary framework set up by Iago, Othello is precisely such a foreign body, contrary to the well-being of the body politic. His “medicine” is intended to effectively purge such a poison. It hardly seems surprising then that Othello would make his way into anticoffee propaganda by the late seventeenth century, when the beverage was becoming a part of English social life, even while retaining its Moorish affiliations. The play’s many references to the subversive effects of potent drinks, potions, medicines, and poisons on the body provide a convenient point of departure for conversations about similar threats posed by coffee. There is, of course, an Iago-esque perversity to the characterization of Othello as coffee and polluting agent. But such a perversity stems from an awareness of a Desdemona-esque hunger for the exotic beverage. The drama of conversion and contamination so central to Othello plays out once again in the coffee narratives, which likewise conjure up fears of apostasy and turning Turk. Daniel Vitkus in his analysis of “Othello Turning Turk” argues that “Shakespeare’s play, like the culture that produced it, exhibits a conflation of various tropes of conversion—transformations from Christian to Turk, from virgin to whore, from good to evil, and from gracious virtue to black damnation.”42 In A Broadside against Coffee the conversion of water (with its Christian baptismal associations) to coffee (with its Islamic associations) entails all of these. The section that follows takes a closer look at these tropes of conversion both in terms of the coffee narrative, at large, and A Broadside against Coffee, in particular.

Turks, Moors, Jews, and Coffee In Tastes of Paradise, a landmark work on the history of “Genussmittel”— the spices, stimulants, and other pleasurable substances of European luxury culture—Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that until the seventeenth century coffee had been no more than a curiosity for Europeans. By the middle of the century, however, “coffee became as fashionable as the new chinoiserie, or the young blackamoor kept as a sort of mascot in one’s retinue.”43 The analogy is a telling one for my purposes. Schivelbusch is, of course, emphasizing here that the rituals surrounding coffee consumption and the paraphernalia accompanying it were as crucial to European social life as the beverage itself. But the general associations between the consumption of coffee and the consumption of otherness implied in such an analogy are significant. They underscore the taste for difference that characterized the foodways of early moderns and propelled the movements for new foodstuffs across the

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globe. As Schivelbusch shows, it is a taste that manifested itself in the vogue for newly imported oriental-style serving objects, Chinese porcelain rooms, “native” costumes that consumers wore to drink their coffee, and the young blackamoor who was called upon to serve it.44 That the blackamoor had become part of the coffee service and its associated paraphernalia is well documented in later eighteenth-century European art. William H. Uker’s encyclopedic study of coffee reproduces a rich collection of paintings detailing scenes of coffee consumption in the century, starting with William Hogarth in the 1700s.45 In Carl Van Loo’s portrait from the 1750s, Madame de Pompadour, second mistress and political adviser of Louis XV of France, is served coffee by a Nubian servant (figure 3). The young slave girl holds a covered oriental pot and a demitasse, which is offered to the marquise. The two women are a contrast in dark and light, with the ritual of the coffee service defining their interaction. Auguste de Creuse’s portrait of Madame du Barry at Versailles shows us the infamous Zamore, her young slave boy, bringing her coffee. Much like Othello, Zamore was

Figure 3. Carl Van Loo’s portrait from the 1750s, Madame de Pompadour, second mistress and political adviser of Louis XV of France, is served coffee by a Nubian servant. Image from Alamy Stock photos.

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sold into slavery at an early age (figure 4). Of Bengali origin, he was brought from Chittagong via Madagascar by English slave traders and sold to the court of Louis XV when he was eleven. Madame du Barry, whom he served, wrote of his mischievous ways dotingly in memoirs, later educating him and arranging for his appointment as governor. He would betray her eventually when he joined the French Revolution, but in de Creuse’s portrait he is still a young, loyal servant, offering the exotic beverage to his mistress.

Figure 4. Auguste de Creuse’s portrait of Madame du Barry at Versailles shows us the infamous Zamore, her young slave boy, bringing her coffee. Much like Othello, Zamore was sold into slavery at an early age. Image from Alamy Stock photos.

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Before these well-formed artistic associations between coffee and the young blackamoor, however, its cultural and geographical affiliations remained fluid. Through much of the late seventeenth century, coffee was variously associated with Turks, Moors, and Jews. Sylvestre Dufour’s Traitez nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate: ouvrage également necessaire aux medecins, & à tous ceux qui aiment leur santé (1685), a treatise on coffee, tea, and chocolate that circulated in numerous editions and translations in the period, sought to identify coffee with other new and exotic drinks, which in turn were associated with new and exotic peoples. The frontispiece accompanying the title page depicts each drink in the hands of the figure that best personifies it (figure 5). Thus a turbaned Turk holds a bowl of coffee, an ornately dressed man from China holds a vessel with tea, and an Indian in a feathered headdress holds a pot of chocolate. Each man is positioned near the appropriate container: a curved coffee pot beside the Turk, a spouted teapot by the Chinese man, and a tall chocolate pot with a stirrer by the Indian.46 On display here are the men rather than the beverages they drink, which seem indistinguishable but for the containers in which they are stored. Depicted in an act of consumption, they are equally figures to be consumed by the reader, who is invited to identify each with the taste of difference. The coffee, tea, and chocolate of the title are thus presented as incarnate forms, even as they are presented as edible commodities. In England the associations between coffee and the turbaned Turk were evident in social spaces. In The Social Life of Coffee, Brian Cowan notes that at least thirty-seven London coffeehouses adopted the name “Turk’s Head,” and many of them used a symbol of the turbaned Turk as the identifying sign above their entrances and on their trade tokens.47 Frequently, the face of the late sultan Murad IV appeared on coffee house signs, despite the fact that he had denounced coffee throughout the Ottoman Empire in his lifetime.48 For Cowan, this display of exotic cultures for commercial purposes constitutes an early version of what he calls “consumer Orientalism.”49 Nabil Matar argues that these oriental signs also served to deflect fears associated with the dreaded Ottoman, in much the same way as the Saracen’s face served as a target for arrow shooters earlier in the Elizabethan period.50 “By associating coffee with the bust of Murad whose cruelty had been notorious,” Matar writes, “Englishmen were trying to domesticate their fear of the Turks—a fear that was generated not only by Muslim military danger but by what seemed to many anti-coffee alarmists Muslim cultural penetration of English social life.”51 Where some writers identified this fear of cultural penetration and religious conversion in specifically Islamic terms, others associated it with the figure of the Jew as infidel. As such, coffee was so outlandish that it could

Figure 5. Frontispiece to Sylvestre Dufour’s Traitez nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate: ouvrage également necessaire aux medecins, & à tous ceux qui aiment leur santé (1685). Used by permission of the Bancroft Library.

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call to mind either form of religious contamination in Protestant England. According to Anthony à Wood, this specifically Jewish identification might have to do with the fact that it was a Jewish merchant from the Ottoman territories who had supposedly opened the first coffeehouse in Christendom.52 Matar adds that several London coffeehouses were supervised by Jews, who had been admitted into England under Oliver Cromwell. Their spoken English was the subject of much mirth in the anticoffee propaganda of the period.53 Thus for instance, in a 1663 broadside on A Cup of Coffee, the anonymous author claimed that if “some Jew” brought the beverage in from Jerusalem, it was sure to captivate the English imagination, the more so if he listed its virtues in “Strange Hebrew-English.”54 A Cup of Coffee is interesting in this regard. It begins with the image of Christians turning Turk through their consumption of a diabolical drink— “Coffee’s extraction has its heats from Hell.” It is, in general, “A meer Decoction of the Devils.” By the middle of the broadside its hellish nature goes from being a “Turkish Spell” to the “Jew or Infidel.” But in the final sections, both its religious affiliations suddenly become tied to bodily waste. In a grossly scatological turn, the author offers a recipe for making coffee out of human excrement: But whine not, Dunces, nor despair, ye Fools; Ye have Back-sides left yet, and good Close stools, Large as the Coffee-Kettles: make good use Of these; they shall an equal gain produce. Remember Coff ’, can ye but Piss and Cack? Jumble’t together, call it Scythian Sack, . . . or but some New name, not known in English Christendome; Or let some Jew derive its stock and stem At least as far as from Jerusalem, . . . . . . . . . . . You’ll be beseig’d with Money and good Words For the rare Juyce that your Back-sides affords; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ’Tshall ne’er be said, a Turdy Turk could do More with a meer Sirreverence then you.55 What we see in this final section of A Cup of Coffee is yet another invocation of the food and waste trope, not unlike in Othello, where the object of appetite is rendered the object of repugnance in Iago’s speech. But where Iago imagines the inevitable purging of waste, the broadside imagines its grotesque

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reconsumption. The “rare Juyce” or “Scythian Sack” coveted by the English is merely “Sirreverence” or human feces, offered up by the Turk and served up by the Jew, but just as easily produced by their own bodily expulsion if they simply tried to “Coff . . . Piss and Cack.” The “Review” that Reynolds had spoken of in the context of digestion has clearly gone awry here. The appetite takes in that which, by all counts, it should expel as alien waste. Coffee’s alien character is doubly marked here, both as excrement and as cultural other. Thus it is that the broadside culminates with the image of the “Turdy Turk,” the epitome of this alien waste. The depiction of coffee’s otherness in ballads and broadsides of the period are not always as revoltingly scatological as A Cup of Coffee. Yet they might persuade us to pause before accepting Schivelbusch’s thesis about coffee consumption as inherent to the Protestant ethic. For Schivelbusch, coffee achieved pharmacologically what the Protestant ethic sought to achieve spiritually: “With coffee, the principle of rationality entered human physiology, transforming it to conform with its own requirements. The result was a body which functioned in accord with the new demands—a rationalistic, middle-class, forward looking body.”56 But Matar cautions against such a reading, arguing that numerous writers throughout the seventeenth century identified it with the very antithesis of English religious culture: “as far as they were concerned, coffee was not the drink of the practitioners of the Protestant work ethic, but was a ‘Mahometan gruel’ drunk by potential renegades from Christianity.”57 Put another way, coffee did not enter the English body politic without resistance, without fears of the religious conversion and racial contamination it could effect. In fact, through much of the century, it was associated with Islamic influences that had pervaded England, possibly preparing Englishmen for a dangerous apostasy.58 Thus in A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses, an anonymous writer bemoaned his countrymen’s slavish imitation of the culinary fashions of Turkey and India, complaining that the “Palats of the English were as Fanatical, as their Brains.”59 Another writer worried about how easily translations of the Qu’ran had followed in the wake of coffee: “When coffee once was vended here, / The Al’cron shortly did appear,” referring to Alexander Ross’s translation of the Qur’an into English during the Interregnum, which had been in circulation at the height of English coffeehouse culture.60 It was feared that coffee altered the Christian soul as much as the Christian body, so that those who drank it began to look like Turks and Moors. The writer of The Maidens Complain against Coffee ended his short drama in the coffeehouse with an epigraph claiming that coffee “makes a Christian blacker far

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within, / then ever was the Negars outward skin.”61 The blackness of coffee here simultaneously evokes moral depravity and racial otherness, more threatening because it is “within” that the drink appears to have its most dangerous impact. Taken together, these ballads and broadsides articulate pervasive anxieties about the incorporation of difference, its appearance, its textures, its taste, and its effects. Difference as an abstract concept finds an embodied form in the foodstuffs that threaten to effect humoral, racial, and religious transformations within. Shakespeare’s Moor as a liminal insider-outsider figure becomes a fitting embodiment of this difference and the threats it might pose within the body politic. A Broadside against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk, where Othello makes one of his earliest appearances as a potable commodity, was printed at the height of anticoffee propaganda. It was included at the very end of a volume that primarily reserved its ire for an earlier import from England’s colonial territories—tobacco. In this late seventeenth-century edition of King James’s Counterblaste to Tobacco, printer John Hancock thought it fit to anthologize several additional tirades against the “Indian weede.” As a selfproclaimed “well wisher to thy health,” Hancock made sure to offer readers an assortment of medical treatises, sermons, and some final “Witty Poems against Tobacco,” all following the Counterblaste. Yet Hancock’s preface hints that his concerns for the commonweal go beyond its “evil custom of taking tobacco” to other, newer kinds of excesses that have emerged since James first wrote his treatise in 1604. It appears that the ills of the coffeehouse are as much a concern for Hancock. The frontispiece accompanying his preface is a study in English immoderation (figure 6). It depicts two Englishmen flanked by a turbaned Turk and a blackamoor, surrounded by a haze of the “noxious fume,” amid pipes, pots, and coffee paraphernalia. The four men sit in uneasy proximity, immersed in an act of dangerous shared consumption. The many concerns of blackness and heathenish otherness associated with tobacco in the early part of the century here appear to accrue to coffee as well. While the anthology then proceeds to focus primarily on tobacco, it picks up on the introductory injunctions against coffee once again in A Broadside against Coffee, which closes the volume. The coffee plot follows the Othello plot somewhat loosely in A Broadside against Coffee. Othello in this version is not quite the “valiant” hero of Shakespeare’s play, who fights “the general enemy Ottoman” on the side of Christianity (1.3.48–49). Rather, he has morphed into the very enemy that the Venetian state sought to vanquish at Cyprus. In a manner of speaking, he has already turned Turk. His Moorish origins are conflated with coffee’s

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Figure 6. From Two broad-sides against tobacco (London, 1672), page 63. Call # J147. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Turkish origins, so that the poem begins with a description in which he is an interloper in England: Coffee, a kind of Turkish Renegade, Has late a match with Christian water made.62

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This match between coffee and water, much like the marriage between Othello and Desdemona at the start of Shakespeare’s play, comes together “but not without a great stir.” Where Iago conjures up the image of “an old black ram . . . tupping a white ewe” in the primal scene of Othello and Desdemona’s copulation (1.1.88), the ballad transposes this black and white sexual imagery onto the dark coffee beans mixing together with the pure water. Coffee so brown as berry does appear Too swarthy for a Nymph so fair, so clear: And yet his sails he did for England hoist, Though cold and dry, to court the cold and moist.63 The tastes and textures of both ingredients are invoked through national, religious, and racial descriptors. If coffee is classed as a brown, turbaned, Turkish Othello, water is characterized in opposite terms as a pure, white Desdemona. She is a nymph “so fair” and “so clear.” She is not just any water, but “Christian water” and not just any Christian water but uniquely English. “Coffee was cold as Earth, Water as Thames,” the ballad informs us, localizing the Venetian Desdemona in this uniquely English version. Casting Desdemona as water is interesting insofar as it has some textual basis. In the final act of the play, when Othello first admits to Emilia, “’Twas I that killed her,” his characterization of her infidelity is presented in the language of the elements (5.2.139). “She was false as water,” he offers by way of explanation (5.2.143), in a line that perhaps becomes the basis for the ballad’s characterization of a Desdemona who turns treacherous. The mingling of this English water with the Turkish renegade is chronicled in terms that are consistent with both coffee preparation and mock-Shakespearean tragedy. As the ballad proceeds, it is at pains to emphasize the heat that fuels coffee preparation, which it couches in the language of passion that brings together Othello and Desdemona. If there be ought we can, as love admit; ’Tis a hot love, and lasteth but a fit. For this indeed the cause is of their stay, New castle’s bowels warmer are than they.64 Without “recommending flames” neither coffee and water nor Othello and Desdemona would form a union. The analogy rests on practical aspects of coffee preparation, wherein coffee grounds and water can only mix thoroughly when heat is applied. Equally, it alludes to an Iago-esque vision of Othello and Desdemona, who come together only in heat and lust. Of course, it is a lust that eventually wanes—“a hot love . . . lasteth but a fit” in

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the ballad’s words and “is made dull with the act of sport” in Iago’s words (2.1.222). But it leads to a kind of mixing and miscegenation in which the pure and fair is forever doomed to contamination. The ballad goes on to describe this mixing in allegorical terms that combine what Evans calls “the descriptive precision” of coffee making with a range of racial stereotypes about its cultural affiliations.65 The melting Nymph distills her self to do’t Whilst the Slave Coffee must be beaten to’t: Incorporate him close as close may be, Pause but a while, and he is none of he; Which for a truth, and not a story tells, No faith is to be kept with Infidels.66 The immediate reference here is to the grinding of coffee beans, which must be “beaten” to mix with the “melting Nymph” that is water, while the latter easily “distills” itself into the union. In Evans’s words, Slave Coffee becomes “a recalcitrant, atavistic figure who must be ‘beaten’ into compliance.”67 But the reference to the Slave Coffee also invokes Othello’s own narrative in which he recalls being “sold to slavery” and his “redemption thence” (1.3.137). His entry into the mix, as it were, is always already forced and troubled. Slave Coffee’s identity is also treacherous and continually shifting. We are reminded that in the process of mixing, “he is none of he.” Just as Othello is tragically transformed in the course of the play, coffee loses its original strength and character in the process of incorporation and stirring. Such a process, we are given to understand, is inevitable. “No faith is to be kept with Infidels.” We now have a protagonist who despises the very union he sought: Sure he suspects, and shuns her as a Whore, And loves, and kills, like the Venetian Moor; Bold Asian Brat! with speed our confines flee; Water, though common, is too good for thee. Sure Coffee’s vext he has the breeches lost, For she’s above and he lies undermost; What shall I add but this? (and sure ’tis right) The Groom is heavy, ’cause the Bride is light. This canting Coffee has his Crew inricht, And both the Water and the Men bewitcht.68 Thus it is that we have the tragic conclusion of the coffee/Othello narrative. Coffee now shuns the watery nymph, who in his eyes has turned whore. She is “above” and he lies “undermost”—a literal reference to the coffee dregs that

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settle at the bottom, but also an allusion to a “light” or “common” Desdemona who becomes the cuckolding bride. The groom is thus “heavy” with sorrow and the bride is “light” with lechery. In this version she seems to fit Iago’s vision of a woman as “blessed” as a “fig’s end,” which is to say, not at all (2.1.243). He thus kills her as did his Shakespearean counterpart, the Venetian Moor. Coffee thus goes from being a Turkish Renegade, to a Slave, to an Infidel, to a Venetian Moor, to a Bold Asian Brat. Each personification stems from particular fears of invasion, contamination, and conversion associated with the drink. The shifting associations are at once puzzling and consistent with early modern notions of the other. If we wonder how this conceit has coffee as Othello and at the same time Turkish, Moorish, Asian, infidel, and slavish to boot, we might do well to consider the fluid racial, cultural, and religious associations of otherness that coalesce onto each marker. Othello somehow manages to embody them all. The Orientalist paradigms that Said alerts us to in relation to later eighteenth-century discourse appear to be forming here, as coffee goes from being a figure that is variously hypermasculine, effeminate, lascivious, and emasculated.69 As Turkish Renegade the other infiltrates the pure realms of Christian water, as Slave he is beaten into mixing with the realm, as Infidel he treacherously betrays those in the realm, as Venetian Moor he destroys the very essence of all that is pure in the realm, and as Bold Asian Brat he is the enemy banished from the realm. In each incarnation, we have a form of edible otherness—where the other is rendered edible and the edible is rendered other. The black body, particularly Othello’s black body, bears these inscriptions of edible otherness. As other, he has proven “good to eat” in the Derridean sense. For it is in the act of consuming him that one of the earliest tastes of difference is articulated. If as Tompkins has argued, eating is central to the performative production of raced and gendered bodies, eating Othello proves to be particularly conducive to such a performance.70 His body carries the burden of the devouring discourse that lives on long after the play ends. In a speech that closes Shakespeare’s play, Othello appears to beg otherwise. It is a momentary effort to halt the concluding scene, to perhaps alter the afterlife of the play: Soft you, a word or two before you go. . . . . . . . . . . . . . I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate . . . (5.2.347–351)

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In this final moment of eloquence, Othello appears to exceed the text. It is as if he imagines how he will live on in the world of letters and how his deeds will be recounted in posterity. “Nothing extenuate” is his last plea, before he delivers yet another “round and unvarnished tale” that harks back to his speech before the signori in act 1. It is an attempt at taking control of a narrative that has spun out of control. And yet, it seems like audiences have consistently disregarded this plea. We do extenuate. His tale is told and retold. In these versions he becomes, among other things, tea and coffee, chocolate and cake. He becomes the banal edible matter of a devouring discourse in which we consume him and his tale with our very own greedy ears and mouths.

Ch a p ter 4

Bizarre Foods Food, Filth, and the Foreign in the Culinary Contact Zone

While chronicling the “social life” of edible commodities in the last three chapters, I have in many ways been counting on my readers’ familiarity with the affective response they evoke. My audience is likely acquainted with the taste of spices in a dish, the texture of candied sugar, or the liquid sensations of hot coffee as it touches the mouth. I do not mean to assume that they are universally liked or entrenched in our foodways, although that it is certainly possible for many of us. Rather, I am suggesting that they fall within the realm of the domestic and the familiar, the result of historical processes that have made them globally accessible commodities. Many of our kitchen shelves are well stocked with them, even if we put them to different uses than the early moderns did. By contrast, the foods I turn to in this chapter do not occupy that same status as domestic staples in household economies across the globe. They are the seemingly strange and outlandish foods that appear in travel accounts, objects of intrigue for both travelers and their audiences at home. I call these “bizarre foods,” after Andrew Zimmern’s popular show on the Travel Channel, one of many recent culinary adventure shows in which intrepid hosts travel to remote parts as food ethnographers, sampling everything from tarantulas in Cambodia to horse rectum sausages in Kazakhstan.1 Unlike the foodstuffs of the previous chapters, bizarre foods do not travel back to the realm of the home, through circuits of commerce and exchange. They remain behind as 107

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unassimilable vestiges of otherness. But they are as crucial to any account of the culinary contact zone as the more recognizable foodstuffs I have discussed earlier, representing yet another (dis)taste of difference. In turning to these foods, I mark a shift from encounters in the culinary contact zones of the home to those of the world, where travelers encountered and tasted difference. Here, the modality of difference that is encountered is the absolute other of food, that is, filth, the abjectly nonedible, waste or excrement being the “purest” embodiment of such inedibility. No doubt, the trope of the inedible is one we have already seen in the many moral and cultural objections to newly imported foodstuffs. Thomas Tryon’s concerns with “likeness” or “sameness” construe the inedible as that which comes from a dangerous form of mixing.2 The anticoffee tracts that compare the “Satanic tipple” to “piss” and “cack” signal its inedibility in even more abject terms.3 But the particular form of inedibility in the travelers’ accounts I discuss here is that which differentiates the human from the nonhuman. The questions about the consumption of filth they raise, where filth is the absolute opposite and negation of food, are crucially linked to discourses of racial difference that are predicated on the inhumanity, nonhumanity, or lesser humanity of the racial other. The limit of the edible converges with the limit of humanity in these accounts. The affective response to such inedibility entails what we might call, borrowing a term from Sianne Ngai’s influential work, “ugly feelings.”4 These negative affects are played out with a kind of aesthetic complexity in the seventeenth-century travelogue, most intensely in its description of food. Yet the formal conventions at work in the expression of such feelings have been inadequately theorized. While the genre of the travelogue has received scholarly attention in both postcolonial studies and early modern studies, its creation of the culinary contact zone and the travelers’ responses to food therein remain unexplored for the most part. It is the traveler’s gaze rather than his gut that receives more consistent attention. To some degree, this has to do with the traveler’s own frequent description of himself as an eyewitness, what Mary Louis Pratt has called “the seeing man.”5 As Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh note in Travel Knowledge, “the gaze or simply the act of seeing functions as an important structural device, whereby our travelers interpret and record European cultural encounters.”6 But while the traveler himself underscores his acts of seeing as empirical evidence of his being in the contact zone, we need not take his word for it. By this I mean that encounter is always more embodied and messy than the eyewitness account suggests. His gut responses expose the seemingly objective ethnographic categories

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by which he classifies another as an other. Pratt has argued that travelogues are texts that “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process.”7 Extrapolating on Pratt, if we think of this process as a production of affect as much as a production of knowledge, we gain important insights into how the other was sensed, felt, and tasted, even by audiences at home. It allows for a consideration of the visceral as much as the visual in cross-cultural contact in different regions throughout this period. Yet another reason we may have neglected these responses has to do with the fact that they fall within the realm of the obvious, even the clichéd. The mark of a cultural other is so consistently signaled in the seeming inedibility of their food in any cultural encounter, in any historical moment, that it is taken as self-explanatory, a form of difference that bears no theorizing. It is where such clichés as “one man’s food is another man’s poison” draw from. But clichés about food are fertile territory, as I have been arguing throughout this book. Elspeth Probyn observes that “what is interesting about clichéd food statements is the ways in which they are normally sugar coated; they slide down the throat, encouraging other similar statements.”8 In other words, the ease with which we reproduce the sentiment allows it to become a given, to camouflage what she calls the “nasty bits” underlying such clichés. For Probyn, they tell us much about what is “eating us” as a culture. In drawing our attention to these sentiments, what she calls for is a turn to the aesthetics of the negative affect. “There is after all something rather wonderful about the adamant admission of ‘I hate that,’ ‘that’s disgusting.’” Probyn argues, adding, “It’s hard to say which is more sociologically interesting: the sincerity of a white middle-class man as he cooks an intricate and ‘authentic’ Thai meal, or the alimentary racism that seemingly naturally asserts what’s edible and what’s not.”9 What Probyn emphasizes here is that in acts of cooption as much as in acts of aversion, both of which operate through clichés, we see forms in which the self defines what is other. That it is a cliché to call another man’s food poison should not then prevent us from analyzing the historical moments when that food is marked as bizarre or disgusting, the rituals by which it is marked as such, or the racial formations that emerge in relation to it. Frequently, these are moments rich with untold stories and culinary histories. Foods that are considered beyond the realm of the human are often associated with the most abject of groups, the wretched of the earth, who are treated as less than human. For instance, a Dalit group in the Indian state of Bihar, the Musahars, are so called because their name means “rat eaters” in Bhojpuri. Their practice of harvesting vermin continues into the present, one of the few options they

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have during harvesting season as a community that remains one of the most impoverished in the country.10 Chitlins (formerly chitterlings), the innards of swine that were the staple of slaves in the American South, are now part of soul food traditions being archived in work on the foodways of the African American community.11 The histories of these foods are as important as the histories by which the communities that partake of them are marked as other and their foods are marked as disgusting. To theorize such histories is to engage with the ugly feelings that give rise to them. For Ngai, there is a way in which disgust is the “ugliest of ‘ugly feelings.’”12 It is the other of desire, dialectically related to it. Ngai turns to Kant to examine this dialectic of desire and disgust: “In the Critique of Judgment, what makes the object abhorrent is precisely its outrageous claim for desirability. The disgusting seems to say, ‘You want me,’ imposing itself on the subject as something to be mingled with and perhaps even enjoyed.”13 Disgust is a process of turning away from an object, but one that is occasioned by our proximity to it in the first place. It thus becomes an especially powerful feeling in the contact zone where it is provoked by the traveler’s fascination with the seemingly inedible precisely because it is, in fact, edible for another. The expression of disgust becomes a moment of disavowing the instinct that says “you want me.” Its performance becomes the most powerful mode of signaling that which is irresolutely other, that which cannot be absorbed, assimilated, or digested. It is a moment of severing any proximity to that other. Of course, as we know from the previous chapters, ugly feelings do not attach themselves to all foods of the other. Indeed, some of these foods do cross the threshold as foods that are wanted, foods that are sought after in bodily cravings, and foods that are incorporated into the body to satisfy such cravings. Even when they do, they are not exempt from ugly feelings, as we have seen with coffee. But this ability of some foods to cross the threshold only makes the boundaries between desire and disgust less distinct and more easily permeable. It thus becomes more important to make the “adamant admission” that Probyn refers to—“That’s disgusting”—as a way of signaling what cannot be allowed to cross the threshold. But if we consider that ugly feelings attach themselves to some objects and not others, we are also compelled to consider whether objects can be inherently disgusting. For Sara Ahmed, who discusses this question extensively in The Cultural Poetics of Emotion, the answer lies in the surface relations between bodies, objects, and others. She argues that disgust is dependent on the nature of contact between these. “It is not that an object we encounter is inherently disgusting; rather, an object becomes disgusting

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through its contact with other objects that have already, as it were, been designated as disgusting before the encounter has taken place.”14 This, in turn, begs several questions of encounters in the contact zone: Are foods perceived to be disgusting because they are the foods of the other? Or is the other perceived to be disgusting because their foods are perceived as such? Perhaps the scene as a whole occasions disgust insofar as it entails a form of contact that comes with proximity and a subsequent pulling away. Ahmed’s conception that disgust is itself a contact zone is useful here: “it is about how things come into contact with other things.”15 Viewed as such, the travelogue as a genre, occasioned by experiences in the contact zone, is as much a genre about the sensations of disgust experienced through such contact. Its performance thus becomes crucial in marking hierarchies as a way of separating the self from the abjectness of the other, for which particular foods are deemed disgusting. That I have repeatedly been calling disgust a performance bears some clarification here. I do not mean to imply that travelers always feigned the sensations they wrote about. Certainly ugly feelings plagued them in the course of their travels. But I argue that its utterance becomes necessary at a critical juncture in the travelogue to serve the narrative function of the genre as a whole. It establishes, as I show later in this chapter, veracity through a sense of immediacy. Ahmed points out that Judith Butler’s argument about performativity is useful here, pointing as it does to “the way in which a signifier, rather than simply naming something that already exists, works to generate that which it apparently names.”16 To say “That’s disgusting” is then not to name an object that is disgusting, but to generate a performance of disgust around it. Such a performance has a temporal dimension, for Ahmed. It is futural in anticipating a sensation of contact that is yet to occur; but it is also a sedimentation of past performances of such a sensation, recalling what is already in existence. Thus “it both lags behind the object from which it recoils, and generates the object in the very event of recoiling.”17 This “paradoxical temporality” is especially at work in the seventeenth-century travelogue, which works off previous iterations of disgust to confirm their observations and paves the way for future travelogues that will, in turn, confirm their observations.18 The resulting rhetorical effect is to establish the “truth” claims through a cumulative reiterative effect. To affirm what the previous traveler experienced is to verify in some sense that “I was there.” Food, without a doubt, is critical to this performance. Literally, disgust is a kind of distaste, or that which is offensive to taste. Several scholars have traced its roots, noting that the word comes from the French desgoust

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(modern dégoût), which, in turn, comes from the Latin dis- and gustus (“distaste”) and refers to the physical sense of taste.19 This etymological connection signals to us the primacy of taste in the traveler’s experience of both distaste and disgust. Foodstuffs and the rituals surrounding their consumption bear out the many valences of the phrase “good taste,” both in a literal culinary sense and in a broader metaphorical sense of qualitative judgment. As I have argued earlier in the introduction, taste acts reveal the body’s vulnerability to the other, even as they expose the body’s dependence on another. Taste thus easily transforms to distaste in moments when the body must contend with its own open orifices that allow the other to become part of the self. The performance of disgust, as distaste, thereby marks the corporeal boundaries between the self and other, an act that becomes especially important in the contact zone. The element of performance is also a critical reminder that there was an audience back home, eager to consume spectacles of desire and disgust. In the previous chapter, I have discussed the reference to Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie in the opening act of Othello, drawing attention to the metaphors of appetite and the “greedy ear” with which such travelers’ tales were consumed. That Africanus’s travel history was widely published and frequently translated across early modern Europe is indicative of its popularity as an account of exotic and faraway lands. While Africanus was unique in offering an autoethnography, other ethnographies, chorographies, and travelogues penned by European voyagers venturing to foreign lands were similarly popular. Particularly important for my purposes here is the way in which these writers reflect on their chosen genre as one that feeds audiences back home. For instance, Henry Blount, whose Voyage into the Levant was first published in 1636, is self-reflexive in considering the criteria he draws upon in the contact zone and the impact of his performance on readers. He argues that the foremost privilege of the traveler is his role as an observer of human affairs in other cultures. Like others, he is at pains to position himself as the seeing man: “For above all the senses, the eye having the most immediate, and quicke commerce with the soule.”20 Despite granting primacy to these acts of objective witnessing, however, Blount is aware of the subjective position that ultimately shapes the traveler’s perspective. Importantly, he explains this subjectivity through matters of taste. Every travel writer has a “frame” through which he records observations, so that his reader is “like one feasted with dishes fitter for another man’s stomacke, then his own” (80). This is the privilege of the traveler, according to Blount. He “takes with his eye, and eare, only such occurents into observation, as his owne apprehension affects

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and through that sympathy can digest them into experience more natural for himselfe” (80). Interestingly then, while imagining the act of travel writing as a knowledge gathering that takes place through the visual or auditory, he concedes that its consumption is ultimately gustatory, a form of digesting on the part of the reader, who takes in what the traveler has prepared to his own taste. In expounding this theory, Blount explicitly points readers to his own part in the creation and construction of narrative, hoping they can “digest” what is peculiar to his own taste. As it turns out, we have evidence that suggests Blount’s stories were indeed pleasing to the taste of his audience. In 1657, Bishop Henry King published a panegyric in praise of Blount’s travelogue. For the bishop, who “never mov’d” far “from my Country’s smoke,” travelogues like Blount’s endowed those who stay behind with the imaginative capacity to conjure up unknown continents and discover exotic spaces in their mind’s eye.21 It bestows the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reading public with the conceptual ability to perceive the outside world. King describes the ease with which he can now catalog the many strange practices of Turk, Arab, Saracen, and Jew, their “manners and their rites,” their “habits and their houses.”22 His stance complements Blount’s perspective in interesting ways. While Blount chooses to undertake travel and endure travail as a firsthand eyewitness, King appreciates the ability to traverse these spaces in the comfort of his native soil. Together, they offer a consciously articulated theory on travel literature, each expounding on the specific role of the traveler and his narrative obligations to those who stay behind. Each grapples with the limits and licenses of the seventeenth-century travelogue as a genre that circulates in the space between the home and the world. Their writings about travel, along with texts like Thomas Palmer’s detailed guidebook on How to Make Our Trauailes . . . Profitable (1606), which includes, among other things, detailed taxonomies on the ideal traveler and stipulations about who should travel (emissaries, merchants, factors) and who should not (women, lunatics, infants), can lead us to an understanding of the travelogue as a much theorized genre even in the seventeenth century.23 During a period in which Europe established networks of exchange and circuits of commerce across the globe, when foods and other commodities moved across borders and boundaries, the travelogue is evidence of the narratives that accompanied them. It is in this context that we might understand its status as a genre that fed imaginative appetites for a taste of difference. It seems inevitable that such a feeding takes place via scenes of vicarious food consumption and food preparation. To a great extent, modern audiences are familiar with such appetites. Indeed, the travelogue as a genre revels in these elements, even in its most

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recent incarnations. Shows like Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods or Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, for instance, come to mind as contemporary variants of this genre, unfolding in a culinary contact zone where culinary heroes test the thresholds of the disgusting, the exotic, and the unfamiliar for the benefit of a stay-at-home audience. Perhaps the popularity of Bizarre Foods as a show is that it so cleverly tests the limits of such a threshold, feeding off the dialectic between desire and disgust. The Travel Channel describes the show’s adventurous host as “possessed by a strong curiosity and, apparently, an even stronger digestive system.”24 A chef and food writer, Zimmern “traverses the world in pursuit of unusual regional delicacies and startling native ‘delights’ on the menu, as he tries to ferret out the weirdest foods a location has to offer—possibly including ferret, actually.” Zimmern is careful with the resonances of “bizarre,” taking a show that started with the bizarre foods of Asia to new and different locales thereafter, from Iceland to Taiwan, from Ecuador to Minnesota, “because not all ‘unique’ foods are found in exotic locations,” the promos insist. But the show’s success, as its name suggests, is predicated on the audience’s fascination with “other” foods—foods like coral worms in Samoa and beetles in Madagascar—that have not been incorporated into the mainstream in the way that ramen or curry have. In the sections that follow, I examine different sites where iterations of disgust are articulated and chronicled, in ways that are specific to the geographic setting and the peoples encountered. I offer two detailed case studies of disgust. The first section takes up observations of travelers passing through the Cape of Good Hope, contrasting their expressions of disgust with those to be found in writings on the New World. I am particularly interested in the dialectic of disgust and desire as it unfolds in the tension between disgust and wonder in these settings. The second section moves to Anglo-Islamic encounters in the Ottoman and Mughal court, where the sources of disgust become the hypercivilized foodways of the Islamic East as against the savage ways of the primitive Hottentots. Here, the experiences of disgust (and on occasion pleasure) are more varied than the Cape and reveal much about the exigencies of early modern encounters in the East. Some of the authors considered here traveled to the Cape en route to their journey to the Mughal court. Consequently, their travelogues present important comparative frameworks of disgust in their encounters with different cultural groups. The final travelogue examined in this chapter presents us with opportunities to look at the traveler himself as the potential object of disgust, an embodiment of all that is filthy and foreign to the peoples and cultures being observed and recorded in the travelogue, particularly in the culinary contact zone where

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issues of purity and danger become heightened through the ritual sharing of food. Collectively, these travelogues have much to tell us about the literal and symbolic importance of food and the affective responses to it in early modern cross-cultural encounters across the globe.

“Nasty Bits” in the Discourse of the Cape One day I went out by myself to fetch a walk. . . . I saw some of those huts which the Hottentots dwell in. Upon sight of which, my curiosity led me to go and see what kind of life those people led. I went into one of ’em, and there I saw a parcel of ’em lying upon the ground like so many hogs, and fast asleep: But as soon as they awaked and saw me, they sprung up and came to me, making noises like turkies. . . . I pulled out a piece of tobacco and gave it them: They were mightily pleased with that present. . . . For no sooner had I given them this, but they all lifted up those flaps of sheep-skin which hang before their privy-parts to give me a sight of ’em. What with this beastly behavior, and what with the nasty stench of their kennels, (as I think I may properly call ’em) I made all haste to be gone. Some of ’em I found at dinner, or rather eating, (for that is a word of too much order and decency for them). They had only a piece of cow-hide, laid upon the coals a broyling, and to make the carbonnade more pleasant, they had squeezed the dung out of the guts, and spread it finely on the hide to moisten it, and to give it relish; and this they take when it is broyl’d, and chop it, and so eat it. The very ordering of it in this manner, turn’d my stomach so, that I could not stay to see the eating of it: But I made all the haste I could to be gone. —Christopher Fryke, A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made into the East-Indies

Disgust is a commonplace sentiment in the “Discourse of the Cape.”25 In this body of protoethnographic writing by seventeenth-century European travelers halting at the Cape of Good Hope en route to the East Indies, disgust becomes a kind of generic convention. In particular, the dietary habits of the native inhabitants provoke the expression of unmitigated disgust. Traveler after traveler suspends his seemingly objective narrative voice to note the stench of raw entrails eaten by the Hottentots, the sight of excrement smeared on their food, or their ability to taste food “like dogs.”26 A series of anthropological observations regarding their dwelling, their dress, and their language inevitably culminate in commentary about the gross intermingling of their food and filth.

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Christopher Fryke’s “relation” of his travels, quoted at length above, is in many ways exemplary of this ethnographic disgust.27 Traveling as a surgeon to the Dutch East India Company, Fryke begins his narrative as the prototype of the “seeing-man.”28 He is drawn into the Hottentot dwellings by the traveler’s reasonable, objective curiosity to “see what kind of life those people led.” At this point he is simply what Pratt has called “the landscanning, selfeffacing producer of information.”29 But as the Hottentots wake up, disgust hampers Fryke’s inventory of the hut. The ritual offering of gifts, in this case tobacco, is apparently greeted by the Hottentots’ gratuitous display of their “privy-parts.” If the sight of their seemingly bizarre sexual ritual is not enough to drive Fryke away, the smell of their food preparation is. His body immediately registers disgust. As Silvan Tomkins tell us, the physiological markers of disgust are evolutionarily designed to put as much distance as possible between the self and the object of disgust: “Although the face and nostrils and throat and even the stomach are unpleasantly involved in disgust and nausea, . . . attention is most likely to be referred to the source, the object, rather than to the self or the face. This happens because the response intends to maximize the distance between the face and the object which disgusts the self. It is a literal pulling away from the object.”30 Fryke’s recorded response in his travelogue is then a case study in disgust. “The very ordering of it in this manner, turn’d my stomach so, that I could not stay to see the eating of it: But I made all the haste I could to be gone,” he writes. Per Tomkins, he must pull away from the object; he must distance himself from the very sight he set out to record; he must leave hastily. Disgust, it would seem, gets in the way of the proper ethnographic observation that the “seeing man” sought out in the hut to begin with. And yet, it is entirely possible that Fryke felt no disgust at all. Perhaps he never saw raw entrails or a dung relish or a Hottentot partaking of this concoction. In the long tradition of travel writing, John Mandeville onwards, Fryke would hardly be the first to fabricate or exaggerate. For J. M. Coetzee, who examines the “Discourse of the Cape” in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, the historical veracity of Fryke’s narrative is much to be doubted.31 Shortly after the episode in the hut, Fryke describes the unlikely sight of a serpent eating a Hottentot, which for Coetzee is evidence enough of his proclivity to exaggerate throughout the travelogue. But I would suggest it is not any one improbable episode that renders Fryke’s disgusting experience in the hut dubious. Rather, it is the routine expression of disgust at this particular juncture in the travelogue that suggests it is expected, rehearsed, and contrived as the “seeing man” happens upon the native’s food and filth. In writing about his physiological reaction to the

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Hottentot food preparation, Fryke places himself in an evolving tradition of ethnographic observation seemingly interrupted by disgust or culminating in disgust, inscribing disgust itself as a textual convention of the travelogues and protoethnographies that proliferated in the seventeenth century. Disgust, as it were, lends an authenticity to the very observations it interrupts. It anchors the traveler’s narrative in an affective experience that seems to verify his act of seeing. In fact, it situates him as more than just the “seeing man”; he is one who feels, smells, and on occasion tastes. Its performance therefore becomes central to the very performance of credibility in the narrative. It is in the disgusting moment that the travelogue becomes most acutely aware of the categories of sameness and difference through which it operates. This staged moment of disgust, as I have argued in the previous section, is particularly unique to the cibarious experiences of the contact zone. As Fryke’s observations suggest, Hottentot dwelling arrangements, sleeping habits, and sexual mores are all sources of disgust; but it is the Hottentot food preparation that clinches the sensation of disgust, as it were. Put another way, disgusting food is particularly disgusting. It is telling that Tomkins’s explication of what he terms “contempt-disgust” centers on food: “If the food about to be ingested activates disgust, the upper lip and the nose is raised and the head is drawn away from the apparent source of offending odor. If the substance has been taken into the mouth, it will be spit out and the head drawn away from it. If it has been swallowed, it will produce nausea and it will be vomited out either through the mouth or the nostrils.”32 Here and elsewhere in Tomkins’s work disgust is conceived in oral terms, especially in relation to acts of food consumption. While other orifices (the nostrils, for example) are involved in its expression, it is the mouth that most acutely registers disgust, whether in its consumption of food or its expulsion. According to Darwin, “Disgust would have been shown at a very early period by movements round the mouth, like those of vomiting—that is, if the view which I have suggested respecting the source of expression is correct, namely that our progenitors had the power, and used it, of voluntarily and quickly rejecting any food from their stomachs which they disliked.”33 Evolutionarily speaking, the mouth as orifice must guard against the disgusting rather than consume it. But the act of disgusting food consumption inverts this logic, willingly allowing the polluting object into the mouth. As in the discussion of Othello and coffee as excrement in the previous chapter, it is useful here to reiterate Kristeva’s argument that polluting objects “always relate to corporeal orifices.” Kristeva writes that “excrement and its

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equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside.”34 It is such a danger that the Hottentot seems to represent in the “Discourse of the Cape.” The revolting image of excrement on Hottentot food (whether or not it is fabricated) arguably stems from fear: the mark of the outside threatening the inside, the other threatening the self. Its invocation at this point in the travel narrative is thus strategic; it is shorthand for describing the entire experience of Hottentot life as perverse and abject. The point then is not so much to ascertain whether Fryke and his predecessors actually witnessed the comingling of food and filth. Rather, it is to examine what the repeated, lurid description of such a comingling in their narratives implies for the genre as a whole. If as anthropologist Mary Douglas notes in Purity and Danger, “there is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder,” then the traveler as “seeing man” reveals much in his vision of food, filth, and the foreign.35 In the contact zone, particularly, food is frequently the object of disgust precisely because it is the marker of sameness and difference. Fryke, for instance, records the Hottentots’ food preparation along such an axis of sameness and difference. They appear to be broiling, chopping, and seasoning. But they are after all broiling an animal’s entrails, chopping up cowhide, and seasoning with dung. He comes close to describing their ritual as “dinner,” but checks himself, “for that is a word of too much order and decency for them.” But it is this obvious difference that makes the episode worthy of ethnographic record. It is fascinating because it is disgusting. For without the elements that make the Hottentot “dinner” both same (insofar as it involves eating) and different (insofar as it entails eating dung-seasoned entrails), the acts of broiling, chopping, or seasoning would be simply banal routines, not particularly noteworthy for the traveler or his audience. Coetzee explains the process of recording the most obvious difference between the native and the European: “while they are certainly differences, these items are perceived and conceived within a framework of sameness, a framework that derives from the generally accepted thesis . . . that although the Hottentots may seem to be no more than beasts, they are in fact men. Hottentot society being a human society, it must be amenable to description within a framework common to all human societies.”36 Diet, along with categories such as dress, language, customs, trade, habitation, and recreation, all belong to such a framework. Contempt-disgust is aroused in terms of this framework. The Hottentot diet is disgusting to the travel writer because the Hottentot is human rather than beast. But the Hottentot diet is also of interest to the travel writer because it shows the Hottentot as more beast-like

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than human. It is for this very reason worthy of observation, repetition, and (where necessary) fabrication in travelogue after travelogue. Versions of Fryke’s narrative abound in the “Discourse of the Cape.” Travelers well after Fryke and in different parts of the globe tend to record some version of his disgust at the scene of bizarre foods. It is therefore worth contextualizing Fryke’s “relation” in terms of the larger narrative at work in the genre. As Steve Clark has noted in his study of the travelogue, “its force is collective and incremental rather than singular and aesthetic. The tactic of singling out texts . . . as isolated masterpieces simply devalues the vast majority of these narratives.”37 In what follows, I briefly consider this incremental effect in the narratives of the Cape. Among the earliest travel writers to note the Hottentot custom of eating raw animal entrails is the Dutch traveler Cornelis de Houtman, who commanded an expedition to the East in 1595. De Houtman’s experience of disgust is established early in the narrative: They always stank greatly, since they besmeared themselves with fat and grease. We could find none of their dwellings, far less any of their women. . . . When we killed any oxen they begged for the entrails, which they ate quite raw after shaking out most of the dung, or stretched it over the fire on four sticks, or warming up a little of the paunch ate it up. . . . I could learn no more of them but that they speak very clumsily, like the folk in Germany . . . who suffer from goiter. . . . Also they had some pieces of dried meat hanging round their necks. (18)38 Here the traveler’s ethnographic observations are general, charting the appearance (smeared with grease), language (clumsy like people with goiter), and diet (raw entrails) of his subjects, noting with regret where observation is impossible. Their dwellings and their women, for instance, were not to be found. Disgust appears to be common to all categories in his case, evoked by the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Hottentot existence. This range of sensory experiences serves in the interests of verisimilitude. To see, to hear, to smell, to taste is to confirm the act of witnessing central to the genre itself. As Singh argues in Travel Knowledge, “If witnessing was the primal act in the discourse of travel, it meant that travelers/writers could then attempt to record, objectify, and claim the world they encountered.”39 In the travelogues of early visitors to the Cape like de Houtman, such an attempt to record and objectify is achieved through the checking off of each ethnographic category, which in turn serves to record and objectify difference through sameness.

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By 1605, we see other travel writers reiterating de Houtman’s observations about the Hottentot consumption of waste. The anonymous writer aboard Sir Edward Michelbourne’s fleet brings little variation to de Houtman’s narrative in his travelogue. However, Samuel Purchas’s marginal notes near the journal entry on Hottentot nakedness bring a new point of interest to the observations recorded by the anonymous writer. Purchas indicates that their “women are well featured” but “some of their men have but one stone” (33). This sexual attribute would be recorded consistently in later travelogues, possibly reflecting what sociologist George Steinmetz suggests is a fascination with ritual circumcision among Hottentot men to the point where it becomes a kind of fetish. According to Steinmetz, “Their partial ‘self-castration’ afforded the European male colonizer an opportunity to simultaneously acknowledge the threat of castration and to displace the anxieties associated with this threat onto a distant and exotic other, in an act of disavowal.”40 More generally, the repeated mention of their ritualized castration bespeaks an obsession with lack in Hottentot society. They are without language, without law or government, and frequently without religion. Diet, as a category, most obviously reflects this sense of lack. As such, the Hottentots have no cuisine. They subsist on the food scraps that the English travelers cast away. For instance, the following is noted in the journal entry kept on Middlebourne’s voyage: In all the time of our being there they lived upon the guts and filth of the meate which we did cast away feeding in most beastly fashion, for they would neither wash nor make cleane the guts, but take them and cover them with hote ashes, and before they were through hote, they pulled them out, shaking them a little in their hands, and so eate the guts the excrements and the ashes. (33) This same scavenging habit is observed again by John Jourdain, captain on board an East India vessel in 1608. Jourdain claims to have seen the natives eating the waste that his crew could not bear to smell, fifteen days after it had begun to rot. It is their diet that confirms for him that a more heathenish and beastly people have yet to be found: And having brought our boates laden with these seals, we cutt the fatt from them for oyle, and the rest was throwne a good distance from the tents because of the noysomnes; upon which fish the Saldanians fed very heartily on, after it had lyen in a heape 15 daies, standing the loathsomnes of the smell, these people would eate of it as if it had bene better meate, and would not take of that which laye upon the

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top, which were the sweetest, but would search under for those which were the most rotte, and laye it on the coals without any ceremoneys of washinge; and beeinge a little scorched with the fire, would eate it with a good stomacke; in soe much that my opinion is, that if without danger they could come to eate mans flesh, they would not make any scruple of it, for I think the world doth not yield a more heathenish people and more beastlie. (42) Perhaps the thing that disgusts Jourdain most is that the Hottentots feel no disgust. They seem not to smell the “loathsomnes” of rotting meat that had been decaying for days; they eat it with “good stomacke” as if it were “better meate” and nothing was wrong with it; they seek out the festering parts and make no effort at washing. As with Fryke’s travelogue, the Hottentots’ disgusting diet becomes the culminating moment of ethnographic description in Jourdain’s narrative. Since they are such a “heathenish” and “beastlie” people, nothing further need be noted about them. The point at which the author asserts their beastliness is then also the point at which he deems ethnographic record no longer feasible within the categories of the recognizably human. Yet in recording their beastliness Jourdain also slips in, as it were, an ethnographic observation that appears to confirm the observations of those before him. “Off these kind of people and there behaviour I neede not to write, because it is sufficientlie knowne to many of our countrymen,” Jourdain writes before moving on to observations on the flora and fauna of the land.41 The Hottentots’ cannibalistic tendencies that Jourdain only speculates on here are offered with greater certainty by later travelers. Cornelis Claesz. Van Purmerendt, who sailed to the Cape aboard the Bantam in 1609, writes that there was “good water” and “fine refreshing” to be had at the Cape, but its inhabitants were most likely cannibals: “As far as we could perceive they were cannibals. . . . In a word, it is a beast-like people” (46). Nicholas Downton, who sailed aboard the English vessel Peppercorn in 1610, lends a new perspective to the theme of disgusting consumption in Hottentot life, chronicling ways in which they sought out disgusting food and filth with which to anoint their bodies. Like others before him Downton interrupts his narrative of trade and exchange with an interjection about the particularly loathsome ways of the Hottentots, who smell much like a butcher’s slaughterhouse: These people are the filthiest for the usage of there bodyes that I ever have heard of for besides the natural uncleanes (as by Sweat or otherwise) whereto all people are subject, which the most by washing cleare

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them selfes of, contraryewise these people doe augment by anointing their bodyes with a filthy substance which I suppose to be the Juice of hearbes, which on there bodyes sheweth like Cow doung. . . . [A]lso another most strange and filthy wearing, to what purpose I knowe not, as the guts of cattle about there neckes, which makes them smell like a Butchers slaughter house. (48) For Downton, the Hottentots are disgusting precisely because they seek out the polluting objects that “all people” are supposed to shun. The rituals of cleansing are reversed as they anoint themselves with herbs and dung, food and filth, rather than purge themselves of it. Thus it is that they are “the filthiest for the usage of there bodyes.” By around 1614 travel writers were noting a new manner of disgusting food consumption among the Hottentots. Travelers aboard Thomas Best’s fleet to the East observed the peculiar Hottentot habit of adorning their necks with “fat guts” and “greasie Tripes, which sometimes they would pull off and eat raw” (60, 59). They were frequently to be found “slavering” at the mouth as they ate off these adornments. “They will eate any garbage,” concluded Nicholas Withington of this “miserable people” (60). For the French general Augustin de Beaulieu who commanded an armed expedition to the East Indies in 1620, the Hottentots’ extreme appetite might account for their revolting dietary habits: They always seemed to be “dying of hunger,” he observed of their women (100). Of the men, he wrote that “When they meet us, the first thing they do is to point to their stomach, which they so pull into their body that it seems as if they had a great cavity in their chest. But they do not eat human flesh” (100–101). While de Beaulieu, unlike his predecessors, did not necessarily think the Hottentots were cannibals, it seemed like they could eat that “which neither the wolves nor other ravenous beasts would touch” (100). While later nineteenth-century medical and anthropological discourse would scrutinize the entire sexual anatomy of Hottentot women—most notoriously in the case of the Hottentot Venus whose body was studied and displayed throughout European salons in the early 1800s—in early writings on the Cape, it is the lactating female’s body that draws particular attention.42 Steinmetz notes that one of the standard symbols of Hottentot debasement (also frequently visually depicted in etchings accompanying the travelogues) was the Hottentot woman’s distended breast slung over her shoulder to feed her child.43 In the travelogue of Reverend Edward Terry, who was to serve as chaplain to the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe in the Mughal court and who stopped at the Cape in 1616, we see an early depiction of this Hottentot female feeding her young.

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God . . . they . . . acknowledge none . . . their speech it seemed to us inarticulate noise, rather than language, like the clucking of hens, or gabling of turkeys. . . . Their ornaments and jewels [are] bullocks or sheeps guts, full of excrement, about their necks . . . and when they were hungry . . . [they] would gnaw and eat the raw guts. The women, as the men, are thus adorned, thus habited and thus dieted; only they wear more about their lower parts than the men; and . . . carry their sucking infants under their skins upon their backs, and their breasts, hanging down like bag-pipes, they put up with their hands to their children, that they may suck them over their shoulders. Both sexes make coverings to their heads like to skull-caps, with cow-dung . . . mingled with a little stinking grease, with which they likewise besmear their faces, which makes their company insufferable, if they get the wind of you . . . they would eat any refuse thing, as rotten and mouldy biskets. (83) Diet hardly seems like a unified category of observation in Terry, following quickly after his observations on the Hottentot religion or the lack thereof, the Hottentot language or the lack thereof, and the Hottentot clothing or the lack thereof. Viewed carefully though, Terry appears to be suggesting ways in which these categories merge. Their habit is also their diet. They eat off their “clothes,” which happen to be raw guts. Their headgear is smeared with waste and their faces with grease. The overall effect is one that makes it “insufferable” to withstand their presence if the wind blows their way. The Hottentot female is mentioned somewhere in between these observations, with Terry noting that children suckle at her “bag-pipe” like breasts. As such the observation seems neither as disgusting as Hottentot diet, nor as revolting as Hottentot attire. But the general air of disgust that accrues to such an image is captured in an etching that accompanies Thomas Herbert’s account to the Cape from 1627 (figure 7). Here a partially clad Hottentot woman holds up animal entrails dripping with blood, while a child on her back suckles at a distorted breast thrown over her shoulder. A Hottentot male, naked but for the sheepskin on his loins, stands beside her, pointing his spear at the animal intestines, as if to draw the readers’ attention to the dismembered part. Hottentot feeding and Hottentot sexuality strangely merge in this tableau of the grotesque.44 One of the few relativized considerations of Hottentot diet comes only in the eighteenth century from Peter Kolb’s travelogue, first published in German in 1719 and subsequently translated into English, French, and Dutch.45 In addition to explaining Hottentot ideas of beauty as well as

Figure 7. Sir Thomas Herbert (1606–82), A Relation of Some Yeares of Travaile, begun Anno 1626 (London, 1634), 13. Call #: STC 13191. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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their advanced learning in medicine, surgery, and botany, Kolb attempts to understand their dietary preferences. He argues that while their food might appear “nauseous and uncleanly” to Europeans, it “agrees very well with their Constitutions.”46 Kolb points out that Africans would likely find butter “inedible,” raising a valid question about “Who are the barbarians and who the civilized.”47 Yet Kolb appears to be the exception in testing the categories at work in the genre of the travelogue. The general consensus in the “Discourse of the Cape” is that the Hottentots are the “most savage and beastly people as ever . . . God created” (32), and diet as an ethnography category works to confirm this sense of disgust in spaces where European travelers make contact with them. In thus emphasizing disgust in the travelogue, this chapter might seem to contradict one of the most influential arguments about the genre that Stephen Greenblatt proposed in Marvelous Possessions. For Greenblatt wonder is the defining experience of the early modern travelogue. “Columbus’s voyage initiated a century of intense wonder,” he writes in his New Historicist work from 1991: “European culture experienced something like the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole body momentarily convulsed. But what does it mean to experience wonder? What are its origins, its uses, and its limits? Is it closer to pleasure or pain, longing or horror?”48 And further, we might ask, what room could disgust have in such a conception of wonder? Perhaps it is accounted for in the sense of horror that Greenblatt includes within the spectrum of wonder. Conversely, it is possible that disgust takes the place of wonder in some travelogues. The myth of the New World as a terrestrial paradise allows for wonder in this body of travel narratives, whereas the myth of the Cape as degenerate only provokes disgust. Coetzee puts it succinctly: “Africa could never, in the European imagination, be the home of the earthly paradise because Africa was not a new world. The western Eden drew its power from a confluence of circumstances none of which would hold for a rival African paradise”49 It might be tempting to suggest that wonder, as with disgust, is geographically specific. Yet I want to propose the contrary. Disgust finds different modes of articulation in the different geographical terrains of the early modern travelogue, but it nevertheless persists across geographical boundaries. Interestingly, Greenblatt’s first explication of the ambiguities associated with wonder in the New World draws on Jean de Lery’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, in which the Huguenot pastor is overcome with revulsion at the religious assembly of the Tupinamba in the Bay of Rio.50 Just as he is sitting down to breakfast, de Lery hears their low murmuring, sees them

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alternately swaying and foaming at the mouth, and concludes that the devil had taken possession of their bodies. For Greenblatt it is in this moment that wonder manifests itself as a shudder of revulsion, before being transformed into ravishment at the harmony of their singing voices. Viewed as such, wonder need not preclude the experience of revulsion or disgust, allowing as it does an intense experience of the other. In the “Discourse of the Cape” ravishment rarely follows revulsion. But its interjections of disgust, as with de Lery’s experience of an interrupted breakfast and a strange Satanic ritual, convey the writers’ sense of the bizarre amid the banal.

“Ugly Feelings” in Anglo-Islamic Encounters If disgust is not confined to particular geographical regions, neither is it confined to the perceived savage or the primitive. In travel writing on the Mughal and the Ottoman empires, where, as Ania Loomba has pointed out, “medieval notions of wealth, despotism, and power attaching to the East (and especially to the Islamic East) were . . . reworked to create an alternate version of savagery understood not as lack of civilization but as an excess of it, as decadence rather than primitivism,” disgust persists, albeit differently inflected.51 George Sandys, who traveled to the Ottoman court around 1610, dwells extensively on the disgusting food habits of Sultan Ahmet I. His travelogue here reads like a blazon of disgust, moving from one body part to the next, each noting the sultan’s excess and corpulence: He is, in this yeare 1610, about the age of three and twenty, strongly limd, & of a just stature, yet greatly inclining to be fat: insomuch as sometimes he is ready to choke as he feeds, and some do purposely attend to free him from that danger. . . . His aspect is as hauty as his Empire is large, he beginneth already to abstaine from exercise; yet are there pillars with inscriptions in his Seraglio, betweene which he threw a great iron mace, that memorise both his strength, and activity. Being on a time rebuked by his father Mahomet that he neglected so much his exercises and studies, he made this reply: that, Now he was too old to begin to learne . . . whereat the Sultan wept bitterly.52 Unlike the inhabitants of the Cape where Sandys’s contemporaries traveled, the Sultan feeds off neither entrails nor cow dung. The description of his gastronomic rituals is nevertheless intended to provoke disgust. It is a disgust that is strangely tempered by awe, but disgusting nevertheless. Sandys moves quickly from one to the other. In this respect, his narrative

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embodies the many contradictions that Daniel Vitkus and others have shown are typical of the early modern English construction of Islamic power.53 He notes the sultan’s “just stature,” his well-proportioned face, and his extraordinary eyes. This admiring gaze, however, is interrupted by a passage on the sultan’s gluttony. He is “inclining to be fat,” so much so that “sometimes he is ready to choke as he feeds.” Sultan Ahmat I appears alternately as an omnipotent godlike figure and a helpless infantile creature. In likening his expansive body to his vastly impressive empire, Sandys grudgingly admires the larger-than-life monarch. Almost immediately, however, he reduces the ruler to a stubborn child who, despite admonishments from his father, will exercise neither his mental nor physical abilities. Likewise, the sultan’s sexuality is evoked through opposing images of virility and emasculation. We are told of the many virgins and “choicest beauties of the Empire” that the sultan keeps in his seraglio, apparently purged and dieted for several months, in preparation for his pleasure. Despite his lascivious ways, however, the sultan is only slightly more virile than his castrated eunuchs: “For all his multitude of women, he hath yet begotten but two sonnes and three daughters, though he be that way unsatiably given.”54 He even consumes “all sorts of foods that may inable performance,” but they appear to have done him little good.55 Cast paradoxically in terms of excess and lack, the sultan’s rituals of sexual and gustatory consumption together become the locus of contempt-disgust. If particular foodstuffs take on ugly feelings in travel narratives to the Ottoman court, it is not because they are mired in filth as with the Hottentots, but because they come to be associated with filthy rituals. The lore of cucumbers and the illicit uses to which they could be put in the female seraglio is a case in point. Edward Grimestone’s English translation of a French description of the Ottoman court provides the salacious details of how food might be a source of sexual pleasure in the women’s chambers and the precautions taken against it: Fruits are sent unto them with circumspection: If their appetites demand any pompeons which are somewhat long, or cowcumbers, and such other fruits, they cut them at the Gate in slices, not suffering them to passe among them any slight occasion of doing evill, so bad an opinion they have of their continencie. It is (without doubt) a signe of the Turks violent jealousie: for who can in the like case hinder a vicious women from doing evill?56 Pleasure and disgust mingle in this writer’s erotic speculation about food and female transgression in the Ottoman court. Likewise, in writings on the

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Mughal court the libidinal and the culinary come to be closely linked. Reverend Terry, whose encounter with the Hottentots is discussed above, had a very different perception of food and the foreign in the Islamic East. Yet ugly feelings are common to both ethnographic experiences. In a passage on the monarch’s private realm he chronicles in detail the fine culinary preparations for which the court is renowned. But Terry’s discussion of the culinary pleasures of the court is framed by his salaciousness at its sexual excesses: There lodge none in the Kings house but his women and eunuches, and some little boyes which hee keepes about him for a wicked use. Hee alwayes eates in private among his women upon great varietie of excellent dishes, which dressed and prooved by the taster are served in vessels of gold (as they say), covered and sealed up, and so by eunuchs brought to the King. He hath meate ready at all houres, and calls for it at pleasure. They feede not freely on full dishes of beefe and mutton (as we), but much on rice boyled with pieces of flesh or dressed many other ways. They have not many roast or baked meats, but stew most of their flesh. Among many dishes of this kinde He take notice but of one they call Deu Pario made of venison cut in slices, to which they put onions and herbs, some rootes, with a little spice and butter: the most savorie meate I ever tasted, and doe almost thinke it that very dish which Jacob made ready for his father, when he got the blessing.57 The dish in question, what Terry calls “Deu Pario,” was in fact, dupiyazah, a dish that continues to be a staple of Mughlai cuisine on the Indian subcontinent.58 Terry’s pleasure in partaking of it is apparent. He appears to relish the seasoning, the spices, and the meats, the extolling of which culminates in his description of “Deu Pario” as a preparation of biblical proportions. But the general air of degenerate consumption in his description is unmistakable. The king’s women, his eunuchs, his boys kept about for “a wicked use” frame this vignette of culinary indulgence. If Terry’s readers are to join in the pleasures of Mughal cuisine, they are also to deplore its sexual licentiousness. Terry’s travelogue seems intent on presenting the culinary and the sexual together as evidence of a regime that is hedonistic in the extreme. By contrast, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a rare female voice in the midst of the male travelers who wrote during this period, is a more gracious guest. Accompanying her ambassador husband through the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary wrote in epistolary form and kept journals as records of her voyage. Her collected writings are the only known travelogues written by an Englishwoman who had journeyed through Asia, Africa, and the

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Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Throughout her letters, Montagu is conscious of her position of privilege as a female traveler, entering spaces that no Englishman had been able to access. As she traverses these segregated female spaces, Montagu assumes a voyeuristic gaze on behalf of her contemporaries. Whether in the hot baths or in the harems, her descriptions linger over female subjects, establishing a privileged vantage point from which to describe a predominantly female domain. She begins her description of the grand vizier’s lady’s house by first noting the presence of a eunuch who escorts her in. She is mildly disappointed in the spare setting that is apparently devoid of the Orientalist splendor that she expects. But she is informed by her host, who appears to read her thoughts, that she is not given to superfluities, having turned her attention to charity and devotion. Lady Mary then describes at length the commensal rituals of their dinner, “which was served one dish at a time, to a vast number, all finely dressed after their manner, which I do not think so bad as you have perhaps heard it represented.”59 She then breaks off from her description of this meal to inform her reader that she is well qualified in making judgments about “their eating, having lived three weeks in the house of an Effendi at Belgrade, who gave us very magnificent dinners dressed by his own cooks.” Having established such authority, however, Lady Mary admits that their food is not to her taste. Yet even in matters of distaste, Lady Mary strives to be tasteful. She admits that she has grown weary of it and “desired our own cook might add a dish or two after our manner, but I attribute this to custom.”60 She thus follows the conventions of the travelogue, interrupting her narrative account to reflect on a gustatory experience, but does not allow for a visceral gut response as do her male counterparts. As with her journey into the Turkish hamam, she ventures into the culinary contact zone and participates in its shared rituals, but limits the nature of the encounter so that she can contain her affective responses to it. Among the travelers most willing to partake of the bizarre foods of the Mughal court and immerse himself in its unfamiliar food-related rituals is the Italian runaway Niccolao Manucci. As Jonathan Gil Harris puts it, Manucci’s travelogue is a “foodie’s dream.”61 In his characteristic playful tone, Manucci devotes long passages of his Storia do Mogor to his gastronomic experiences. In such passages, we see a range of affective experiences from pleasure to disgust to shock. While traveling through Surat in the late seventeenth century, for instance, Manucci suddenly notices everyone spitting blood. When he enquires of a female English acquaintance whether the people of the town suffer from a malady or from broken teeth, she clarifies it is their habit of consuming the betel leaf and invites him to share one with her. Manucci

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gladly accepts the paan, but the taste has him in such shock that he swoons, faints, and has to be treated with smelling salts: Having taken them, my head swam to such an extent that I feared I was dying. It caused me to fall down; I lost my colour, and endured agonies; but she poured into my mouth a little salt, and brought me to my senses. The lady assured me that everyone who ate it for the first time felt the same effects.62 In the schema of contempt-disgust that we have seen at work in travel writing on the Hottentots and others, Manucci’s physiological response here seems atypical. As such, it appears to be neither contempt nor disgust, simply shock brought on by his distaste for paan. But as I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, it is important to note the word “disgust” as drawing its origins from the Latin dis- and gustus (“distaste”).63 This etymological connection signals the connections between the traveler’s experience of both distaste and disgust. In marking the distaste of food, the traveler expresses a kind of “good taste,” a qualitative judgment. The travelers to the Cape, for instance, express distaste in an evaluative sense that links it to disgust. But as far as we know they did not risk tasting the dung-seasoned entrails they claimed to have seen and in a literal culinary sense feel no distaste. That Manucci is among the few to readily take on the dangers of the culinary contact zone makes him an especially good candidate for a consideration of disgust as well as distaste. Around April 1661, when an embassy from the province of Balkh in modern-day Afghanistan visits the Mughal court and Manucci’s services as physician are called upon, he feels an unmistakable sense of distaste and disgust. While he appears to be intrigued by the gifts they bring for the monarch, particularly the nuts, fruits, and aphrodisiacs made from a certain kind of fish spawn, in general Manucci is not impressed by their rustic habits. When called upon to provide his medical expertise to one of the sick members of this entourage, Manucci confesses to his readers that he has little skill for the necessary treatment, but is anxious to see how “these savages” live.64 But when Manucci makes it to their dwelling place, like Fryke in the Hottentot hut, he is overcome with revulsion by its odors. As a physician he cannot flee the site of observation in the way that Fryke did, so he feigns “great solemnity,” but confesses his disgust to his readers: “When I had gone in I found the patient on a very dirty bed in a fetid sweat with the odour of very rotten cheese. I ordered his urine to be shown, and it, too, smelt the same.”65

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Manucci’s distaste and disgust become most apparent when he has to dine with the envoys. In a particularly vivid passage he presents a scene of men with food-stained mustaches, digging into the flesh of camels with their bare hands, begging for more fat in their already greasy food, and concluding the meal with their “eructations” as loud as bulls: Almost every day that I went there I was obliged to dine with the envoy, and I thus had the chance of observing their mode of eating. . . . The food was flesh of camels and of horses cooked with salt in water, and some dishes of pulao of goat’s flesh. The cloth, spread upon a carpet, was very dirty. . . . It was disgusting to see how these Uzbak nobles ate, smearing their hands, lips, and faces with grease while eating, they having neither forks nor spoons. . . . Mahomedans are accustomed after eating to wash their hands with pea-flour to remove grease, and most carefully clean their moustaches. But the Uzbak nobles do not stand on such ceremony. When they have done eating, they lick their fingers, so as not to lose a grain of rice; they rub one hand against the other to warm the fat, and then pass both hands over face, moustaches, and beard. He is most lovely who is the most greasy. . . . The conversation hardly gets beyond talk of fat, with complaints that in the Mogul territory they cannot get anything fat to eat, and that the pulaos are deficient in butter. As a salute to their repletion, they emit loud eructations, just like the bellowing of bulls.66 What Manucci evinces here is distaste in the complex sense of a literal culinary judgment about what they eat, but also in a more metaphorical sense of an evaluative judgment about the commensal rituals at work in the way they eat. Perhaps his writings provide us with more opportunities for such a distinction since the medical practitioner more willingly ingests substances and is in turn more involved in what his subjects ingest. His experiences in the culinary contact zone, whether experimenting with paan, relishing a pulao, or sharing in a greasy meal with a seemingly unmannerly group of visiting dignitaries, suggest ways in which the traveler is equally transformed by the experiences of pleasure and disgust. But what of the subject being chronicled? In the many travelogues discussed above, we get few opportunities to observe their transformation, their affective responses to the foreign travelers in their domains, and their own sense of disgust at the outsiders’ dietary practices and foodways. For the most part, as Singh observes of Reverend Terry’s narrative, the traveler plays the part of ventriloquist, offering us little by way of his subjects’ motives, feelings, or reactions.67 But as this chapter concludes it seems fitting

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to look at a rare moment in which the writer of the travelogue becomes aware of his subjects’ disgust. Darwin reminds us of this in his own account of a Tierra del Fuego man touching his food and the mutual sense of disgust experienced by the traveler and the native: “In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.”68 It is a moment in which the traveler is made conscious of his own status as a polluting object. And crucially, it is a moment during a ritualized meal. The example I wish to consider here is a shared meal between an English traveler and a Mughal official. The traveler in question is Sir Thomas Roe, King James’s ambassador to the court of Emperor Jahangir. An employee of the East India Company, Roe traveled to the Mughal Court from 1615 to 1619 to secure trading rights in the region. Stopping at the Cape of Good Hope, Roe reiterated much of what we have already encountered in the “Discourse of the Cape.” The Hottentots are “the most barbarous in the world,” they eat carrion, they wear the guts of sheep about their neck, and they rub their heads with dirt and the dung of beasts.69 The image of food and filth that Roe’s predecessors and contemporaries had recorded in the “Discourse of the Cape” is reproduced almost verbatim in Roe’s narrative. But in the Mughal court Roe encounters a slightly different sense of food, filth, and the foreign, particularly in an encounter recorded in August 1616. Before we turn to this particular exchange, it is worth noting that Roe’s embassy had been a complex one to begin with. Despite his official title as King James’s ambassador, for all practical purposes he was an employee of the fledgling (and often parsimonious) East India Company, sent on a mission to secure trading privileges for English factors in India. But with nothing of worth to offer the Mughal emperor, Roe’s part-diplomatic part-mercantile task had become virtually insurmountable. In his letters to company officials, he begged them to send more valuable objects to India. “The presents you have this yeare sent are extremely despised by those [who] have seen them,” the ambassador complained.70 Their virginals were apparently “scorned” for the faded velvet in which they were wrapped; their knives likewise seemed “little and mean”; and their gilded looking glasses had “fallen to pieces” by the time they reached Indian shores.71 Though newly arrived, Roe was painfully aware that without presents he had little hope of advancing himself in the ranks of Mughal bureaucracy. For “it is neither person, quality, commission that will distinguish an ambassador,” he wrote in the letter, “but only presents; for which I am worst furnished, having nothing at all.”72

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This sense of inadequacy set the tone for Roe’s embassy in Jahangir’s court. With little to offer, he resented the gift-giving culture of the Mughal court. His embassy had brought too little and too late, in a land where crosscultural trade had thrived for centuries before the English arrived on the scene.73 His meager gifts became a constant source of tension between him and the Mughal monarch. Nearly every object that changed hands between them—maps, paintings, fabrics, coaches—came to be vested with competing territorial and cultural claims. In these “gifts gone wrong”—to use Natalie Zemon Davis’s terminology—we catch a glimpse of some of the earliest encounters between two monumental civilizational entities in the AngloIslamic world.74 The hierarchies at work between East and West in this context do not consistently conform to the frameworks Said identifies in a post-Enlightenment context. While the “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés, or learning about the East” that Said defines as “Orientalism” had yet to be codified as such, Roe appeared to be grappling with the categories of difference that would preoccupy later travelers to the East.75 Food, as always, played a key role in defining the terms of etiquette in this encounter. As with gift giving, Roe was frequently confounded by the culinary and commensal etiquette he encountered at court. For the most part, he found the many food-related rituals he encountered tiresome. In an irate journal entry he complained about the twenty melons that had been sent to him as a present by an official: “Doubtlesse they suppose our felicitye lyes in the palate, for all that ever I received was eatable and drinkable—yet no aurum potabile.”76 While the potable gold that Roe had wished for never comes his way, a much sought-after invitation to dine with Mir Jamal-uddin Husain finally arrives. Roe gladly accepts, hoping to benefit from the strategic alliance with an important official at court. Thus the meal is planned in the king’s gardens, an elaborate tent is erected, and a banquet is prepared. But after several warm exchanges, when a cloth is laid out and dinner is brought, Jamaluddin begins to retreat from the scene so he can eat with his own people. Roe becomes painfully aware that their rituals would not permit them to dine with him, “they houlding it a kind of uncleanness to mingle with us.” He feebly objects: “Whereat I tould him hee promised wee should eate bread and salt together: that without his company I had little appetite. Soe hee rose and sate by mee, and wee fell roundly to our victuals.”77 After his host politely agrees to dine with him, Roe goes on to describe the many fruits and nuts that were served as part of the banquet, but reveals that another guest that same evening confessed his countrymen would take it amiss if they ate together. In many ways, the archive limits our access to the responses Roe evoked in his guarded host. Since we hear these voices only as Roe channels them, we

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never get the full range of their affective resonances. Yet we sense that Roe here represents the polluting object. The traveler, as outsider, perhaps poses the greatest danger to the rituals of purity associated with food preparation and food consumption. While this is only hinted at in Roe’s travelogue, we might begin to imagine what such a potential for disgust from the object of disgust implies for other cultural encounters chronicled in the travelogue. We might think of how such lived experiences of disgust (and pleasure), possibly mutual, necessitated by the logistics of travel, shaped the genre as a whole. More generally, we might think of the implications of these cibarious experiences in the contact zone, where the food habits of diverse groups come into contact or conflict or confluence in ways that have not been adequately explored. It is in genres like the early modern travelogue that we see cultural differences in taste constantly articulated and negotiated in the affective responses of the traveler and his subjects, most obviously so when they settle down to the simultaneously banal and bizarre routine of a meal.

Ch a p ter 5

Cannibal Foods “Powdered Wife” and Other Tales of English Cannibalism

In April 2013, a study conducted by a team of archeologists and forensic anthropologists at the Smithsonian National Museum in Washington D.C. confirmed what early modern travelogues and plays had long speculated and staged in wild flights of fancy: that starving settlers in the Jamestown colony had taken recourse to cannibalism during times of extreme privation.1 The excavation at the historic site of the colony revealed the carcasses of dogs, cats, and horses that had been consumed by early settlers, but the most gruesome discovery was in the remains of a fourteen-year-old girl of British ancestry, whose bones suggest she was dismembered and cannibalized. Lead researchers appeared on different media outlets to reconstruct the physical features of “Jane,” the name they gave to the girl. It was not clear to them whether she died of natural causes before she was consumed or whether she was killed for the express purposes of consumption. Nor was there any evidence to confirm whether she was butchered by a man or a woman. Yet the butchery itself remained indubitable. According to Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed her bones, the marks on her skull confirmed signs of cannibalism. “The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption. These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used,” Owsley noted at a televised press conference. “The person that was doing this was not experienced and did not know how to 135

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butcher an animal. Instead, we see hesitancy, trial, tentativeness and a total lack of experience,” he surmised of the circumstances in which this horrific act was carried out.2 There is no mention of this particular fourteen-year-old in documents of the period, but early accounts from Virginia chronicle some of the desperate measures that the colonists had to take during the winter of 1609–10, a period that is now well known in the history of settlement as “the Starving Time.” Some estimates suggest that three-quarters of the English colonists in Virginia died of starvation or starvation-related diseases during this period.3 But while the specter of cannibalism universally haunts these accounts, the veracity of the claims made therein have remained mired in controversy for several generations of historians. This controversy has its roots in the conflicting reports and refutations of cannibalism that reached the Virginia Company, resulting in what would be a modern-day public relations nightmare for its investors. While one set of accounts described in lurid detail the circumstances that led colonists to such gruesome acts, another pointed to the improbabilities and inconsistencies in these accounts. In both narratives, we see something akin to a poetics of hunger in which writers put to words the “tastes” of what they endured. It might seem paradoxical to speak of hunger as having a taste, yet the abject sense of lack it entails is articulated in precisely these terms. Hunger is imagined as an imagination of food. Its acuteness is conveyed in the language of missing, absent, or disappearing foods, through a description of what it would mean to taste such foods in moments of deprivation. Its perils are communicated in the imagery of consuming food substitutes, the worst of which is human flesh. In these accounts, the tastes of hunger become the tastes of difference, particularly in conditions when the civilized self turns savage. If in the previous chapter we saw travelers navigate different cultural others through their rituals of bizarre food preparation, in this chapter they are imagined as taking on such rituals themselves, the result of their abject circumstances in the colonies. In themselves sensational, these accounts of the Starving Time become even more so when they make their way onto the early modern stage, particularly in their depiction of cannibalism. In crucial ways, the performance of privation on the stage brings to the fore questions about the validity of the colonial enterprise and its promise of culinary abundance. Islands, in particular, become ideal stage settings for expressing the poetics of hunger. As liminal spaces, they allow for a keen observation of food systems and food supplies that feed marooned adventurers in the play, but also English colonial appetites more generally. In this chapter, I will take up the depiction of hunger in two such island plays, The Tempest and its lesser-known

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sequel The Sea Voyage, with a particular focus on attempted cannibalism in the latter. Together with travel accounts of the Starving Time, these plays provide us with some sense of the circumstances in which early cannibal narratives circulated in the colonies and possibly the conditions in which Jane was butchered. It is especially tempting to read the depiction of a young woman’s “almost” consumption in The Sea Voyage as a meditation on the plight of Jane, and it might well be a story of others like her. But the play itself never promises to offer a “true relation,” nor does it make any claim to such accuracy.4 Its characters certainly reflect on how their story has precedence in the travelogues that came before them, but only to marvel at the improbability of the situation in which they find themselves. At the heart of such cannibal narratives then is a sense that “this could not have happened” or “this cannot be us,” even as they attempt to come to terms with a sense that “this is happening” and “this is us.” Both prose and dramatic accounts grapple with the improbability of their cannibalistic tales, so that we repeatedly see a kind of dialectic of belief and disbelief at work in the primal scenes of English colonial cannibalism. This skepticism has in many ways been a defining feature of scholarship on cannibalism. As Appelbaum puts it, cannibalism is “not only a concept with a bad reputation, but a phenomenon that has been the object of considerable controversy and that is surprisingly complex and resistant to analysis.”5 The controversies associated with its study can be dated back to William Arens’s influential work on The Man-Eating Myth from the seventies, in which he was dubious about the actual existence of cannibalism in any time and place: “Recourse to cannibalism under survival conditions or as rare instances of antisocial behavior is not denied for any culture. But whenever it occurs this is considered a regrettable act rather than a custom.”6 In this assertion, Arens took on a broad disciplinary critique of anthropology, arguing that its methods had not “maintained the usual standards of documentation and intellectual rigor” in its study of cannibalism. He located the invention of the cannibal in colonial discourse, their discovery usually restricted to “faraway lands just prior to their ‘pacification’ by various agents of Western civilization,” including assorted explorers, conquistadors, missionaries, traders, and colonizers responsible for the civilizing mission.7 Peter Hulme in his own landmark study on Cannibalism and the Colonial World assesses the impact of The Man-Eating Myth as a work that touched a raw nerve, variously described as “dangerous,” “offensive,” and “mischievous.”8 In Hulme’s volume, Arens revisits this controversy only to affirm his original conclusion: “The pattern was, and still is, to document—in a

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literal sense—the existence of cannibalism after the cessation of the presumed activity, rather than to observe and describe it in the present tense.”9 Here Arens maintains that he never sought to address questions of veracity: “the question of whether or not people eat each other is taken as interesting but moot.”10 His aim was to test the validity of anthropological practices that had recorded it as observable fact, after-the-fact. Importantly for my purposes here, Arens offers us a metacritical framework—a methodology for studying the methods by which cannibalism is observed and reported—that is especially valuable to an analysis of reports of the Starving Time. Viewed from this perspective, the question of veracity, which is as present in the cannibal accounts as in studies of these accounts, is less a question per se and more a narrative convention that frames the cannibal scene, particularly in the case of those that emerge from the Starving Time. Beyond the question of veracity is the question of the cannibal scene itself. Several scholars from different disciplinary traditions have asked why this particular form of eating another persistently frames encounters with difference. Geoffrey Sanborn, for instance, asks, “Why were Western travelers to the Americas, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa so obsessed with the thought of cannibalism, even before their hosts provided them with a reason to think it?”11 He suggests that this has to do with the anxiety of encounter. Drawing on Joan Copjec, he parses anxiety as “‘that which nothing precedes,’ that which signals the ‘overproximity of nothingness.’” In this argument, the cannibal is less a projection of a European fantasy onto the other and more “the trace of a secret lack.”12 The discourses that circulate around the cannibal scenes of the Starving Time are better understood if we think of them in these terms. It is lack, or more precisely in this case, lack configured as hunger, that appears to raise the specter of the cannibal. This anxiety, as Claude Rawson has argued, is encoded into the very etymology of the word “cannibal.” From classical antiquity onward, societies have ascribed anthropophagous practices onto other societies, for a range of reasons according to Rawson. The cannibal emerges at a particular moment in this long history. Unlike “anthropophagy,” which signals its own meaning etymologically, the word “cannibal” is “a geographical and ethnic term” that points to a particular people and dates from 1492 when Christopher Columbus ascribed anthropophagous practices to the Caribs, the Amerindian people of the Caribbean islands and South America.13 The invention of the cannibal is thus part of the primal scene of New World colonialism. But Rawson appears to test Arens’s claims that cannibalism as a practice has always been imputed, but never actually carried out: “That it was sometimes a lie and usually an intended defamation is demonstrable. That it was sometimes true

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is also demonstrable by the kind of evidence usually accepted for other historical events: reports and descriptions by witnesses and a variety of archival, anthropological, journalistic sources.”14 The discourse of anthropophagous consumption itself, even prior to the invention of the New World cannibal, coalesces onto various intellectual currents of the early modern period. Chief among these, as Heather Blurton argues, are “the popularity of the Marvels of the East tradition with its emphasis on thinking about monstrous figures as portents, and the elaboration of eucharistic theology, with its suggestion that cannibalism is the sine qua non of Christian identity.”15 The former derives as much from the literary imaginations of Homer and Herodotus as the natural histories of Pliny. In this discourse “the literary representation of cannibalism and the literary representations of barbarism, alterity, and colonization are inextricably linked.”16 The latter derives from discourses of incorporation in the symbol of the mass, where “the pejorative resonances of cannibalism in the classical tradition are transmuted and the image of anthropophagy becomes an extended metaphor for the positively charged creation of religious and social identity.”17 For Blurton, the fact that these two ways of theorizing cannibalism seem incompatible is precisely what makes it so rich as a literary trope. Viewed as such, the discourse of anthropophagy was materially and conceptually familiar to early moderns in a range of contexts, many of which we have already encountered in earlier sections of this book. The materia medica of the early modern household, as I have shown in chapter 1, was frequently comprised of mummy and other substances derived from human flesh. These practices speak to the elasticity of cannibalism as a conceptual practice that had been weighed from a range of medical, theological, and literary perspectives well before the Starving Time. In some respects, the scenes of cannibalism described in these circumstances are predictable. They speak to what Rawson describes as long-standing anxieties about imperial exploitation, subtle agendas of self-justification and self-definition that are at the heart of cannibal narratives. But in other ways it is also a unique cannibal scene to begin with. For one, it offers us reports of English travelers who were reduced to eating their own, rather than natives who are typically described as engaging in such anthropophagous consumption. It also offers, in Arens’s terms, an example of “recourse to cannibalism under survival conditions,” and in that sense allows for a different kind of analysis than the primal scenes of cannibalism that exist in the imagination of conquistadors, paving the way for their civilizing mission. Yet the problems around the “man-eating myth” that Arens describes accrue as much to the cannibal scenes of the Starving Time as those putatively carried

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out by natives and recorded by travelers. Rachel B. Herman is among the most recent historians to take up the question of veracity in her piece on “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” arguing that historians writing about early colonial Virginia take for granted the case of cannibalism in Jamestown. She notes how accounts in U.S. history textbooks as often as those in National Geographic documentaries portray with certainty this gruesome episode of American history. Written before the news of Jane’s discovery, Herman’s essay goes on to test these claims, looking at the inconsistencies in travel accounts of the time, making a compelling case for why “this episode should no longer be stated as a bare fact in the chronology of early Jamestown.”18 But rather than rehearse the it-may-or-may-not-have-happened claims she cites, I want to take these accounts on their own terms, close-reading their unique language of taste, hunger, and eventual cannibalism in colonial landscapes. For me, the question becomes less about whether or not the Englishmen committed cannibalism, a question that might well be settled once and for all by the discovery of Jane. Rather, it is the anxieties revealed in their hunger narratives about the colonial enterprise and the search for foodstuff that interest me here. In their tales of anthropophagous consumption, we see an attempt to grapple with a more metaphoric cannibalism in assessing the effects of colonial venturing. They reflect on appetite as the ultimate undoing of the self. As we draw closer to the conclusion of Tasting Difference, it becomes particularly useful to consider ways in which the questions I have been asking about eating the other in earlier chapters are complicated in acts of eating one’s own. These are acts in which the self comes to be estranged from itself, thus blurring the boundaries between self and other. The trope of belief and disbelief becomes a way of reckoning with the self in states of abject hunger and debased consumption. The tastes of hunger evoked in these narratives are imagined in terms that are simultaneously strange and familiar. By this I mean that the sensations of hunger are articulated in the only vocabulary available to those who endure it—the language of tasting and consuming that which is absent and unavailable. Travelers yearn for the familiar sensations of chewing something, settling upon strange objects like a clyster pipe if they can find it. Another replicates the rituals of seasoning and salting, only it is in the seasoning and salting of his wife, whom he consumes as food. In interesting ways, these too are the tastes of difference. They compel travelers to confront the abject otherness of foods that are not quite foods and the pressing appetites that result in their consumption. In some accounts these become opportunities to confront the irredeemable otherness of the traveler himself, who turns cannibalistic like

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the native. In others, cannibalistic hunger affords a pretext for moral injunctions against appetite. Still others invoke the cannibal scenes to imagine new forms of colonial venturing and investment that will not repeat the errors of Jamestown. Each account of starvation then resolves its crisis of hunger in discrete ways. In the sections that follow, I will begin by addressing the hunger topos and the cannibal scenes evoked in the Virginia Council’s accounts of the Starving Time, followed in the next section by their re-creation in the island plays. In their collective evocation of the poetics of hunger, we get a sense of the complex and frequently treacherous terrains early settlers and colonists negotiated in their journeys beyond the realm of the home. As with the previous chapter, we also get a sense of their troubling engagement with the categories of sameness and difference, civilized and savage, strange and familiar, all of which rapidly blur in the face of starvation.

The Bitter Taste of Hunger George Percy, the English explorer and colonial governor of Virginia, who served under John Smith, provides one version of the primal scene of English cannibalism. In A Trewe Relacyon of the procedeings and ocurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia, which was written in the 1620s, but remained unpublished right until the 1920s, he offers a dismal picture of the Starving Time. Anticipating skepticism of his account, he claims that no man can “trewly descrybe” what he is about to attempt, except one who “hathe Tasted the bitternesse thereof.”19 His turn of phrase is interesting here in that it imagines hunger both as flavor and as affect, fundamentally characterized by its bitterness. Perhaps it is the lingering acrid taste in the mouth brought on by starvation that he refers to as bitterness. Equally, it is the rancor brought on by an empty stomach. Percy underscores the impossibility of fully capturing a taste that is constituted through lack for an audience that may never experience such lack. Its “sharp prick” becomes almost ineffable, indescribable, and therefore improbable to all who have been fortunate enough to escape such a sensation. In claiming such authenticity of experience, he also strategically situates himself as the most well positioned to refute contradictory accounts that inevitably ensued. Things get steadily worse as Percy delves further into the state of hunger his countrymen endured. He begins with want, then desperation, and finally depravity. Appelbaum, in turn drawing on Herman Pleji, calls this trajectory the “hunger topos.”20 Its narrative arc is predictable. They started out by eating their horses and then “were glad to make shift” with cats and rats. When their “crewell hunger” persisted, they were ready to eat their boots or any

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other leather they could come by. Many searched the woods for serpents and snakes, others plundered the soil for unknown roots. Some were killed by natives in the process, a fate that seemed more merciful than the plight of the survivors. Percy goes on to give us some inkling of the desperate measures that would have led to the cannibalistic eating of inhabitants like Jane. For when the famine was beginning to “looke gastley and pale in every face,” nothing was spared. They started to dig up dead corpses out of graves to eat them. In a strange kind of vampiric eating, some of his compatriots even began licking the blood of their weaker fellowmen. In one case, Percy claims a man called Collines, “murdered his wyfe Ripped the Childe outt of her woambe and threwe itt into the River and after Chopped the Mother in pieces and sallted her for his foode.” By the time he was discovered, he had already consumed parts of her. For this inhuman act, Percy had him tortured, a scene he describes in as much gruesome detail as the cannibalistic act for which he was being tried. It is hard to imagine which of Collines’s acts seems the most gruesome—his ripping out of the unborn child so that he would not be guilty of consuming it, the murder of his wife so that he could consume her, or his final act of salting her body so that it would resemble food. Percy seems to suggest first a kind of calculated desperation, followed by a vaguely ethical choice in sparing the child, and a final effort at rendering the inedible edible. As we gloss Percy’s words, we too are confronted with the conundrum of belief and disbelief in the cannibalistic scene. We must come to terms with what aspect of this scene seems most repugnant to us. Is it the taste of human flesh that the narrative compels us to consider? Is it the effort to have such flesh taste palatable in the act of salting that most disgusts us? Or is the entire scene itself in bad taste? Indeed, his cumulative gestures trouble our ideas of taste, but Percy drives home the point that such is the taste of hunger. He goes on to note that of the five hundred men, only sixty remained, the others having withered away in hunger or killed by the “savages.” In the faces of those who were alive, we “mighte Reade a lecture of miserie.” Many, through extreme hunger, ran out their beds, naked and lean, looking like skeletons, crying out, “We are starved. We are starved.” Others went to bed alive, but were discovered dead the next morning. Yet even in such scenes of despair, Percy is careful to include a sense of divine purpose. His morality tale appears in the form of one Hugh Pryse. Being “pinched with famine,” in a state of utter distraction, Pryse came into the open marketplace and blasphemously cried out, “There was noe god,” alleging that if there were a god, he would not allow his flock to endure such miseries and perish for want of sustenance. But the Almighty made his displeasure known that same

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afternoon, when Pryse, along with a corpulent butcher, set into the woods to seek some sustenance. Both were slain by “savages,” but Pryse’s lean and spare body was torn to pieces by wolves who fed on him thereafter, while the fat butcher lay untouched a few yards away from him. The pathos of the man’s search for food ending in the man becoming food is not lost on readers, but for Percy it appears to be mitigated by a loftier moral about hunger as a kind of divine will. As in the above episode, “savages” come up briefly in Percy’s account and in others from this time. But the extent of their savagery appears to be in the withholding of food from the colonists and the occasional attack on encroaching Englishmen. An excerpt from John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, titled “Of such a dish as powdered wife,” likewise notes that the only thing to be had from the savages were mortal wounds. But its title indicates that the savagery rather characterized his own countrymen and their diet. Indeed, of all the bizarre foods I have analyzed in the previous chapter, “powdered wife” takes the cake (if I might invoke a food metaphor) as the most outlandish dish we have encountered thus far in this work. The account in Smith’s Historie takes recourse to gallows humor in describing the preparation of the ersatz dish. The author describes how the man killed his wife, seasoned her, and ate her before he was discovered in the act, but pauses to wonder whether “shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d,” concluding “I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I neuer heard of.”21 This, in a nutshell, was what the author called “the staruing time.” Acknowledging the improbable nature of his account, he adds that “it was too vile to say, and scarce to be beleeued, what we endured.” And yet he says it and writes it, even as he notes the impossibility of describing the indescribable depths of cannibalism. Percy’s account and the account in Smith’s Historie share much common ground. Both start with the all pervasiveness of the hunger topos. They move from dwindling foods in a state of scarcity, to absent foods in a state of starvation, to more and more scandalous food substitutes that eventually culminate in cannibalism. In the Historie, the colonists are first described as improvising with roots, herbs, acorns, berries, and the occasional fish. Then they turn to the “skinnes of our horses.” Ultimately, they take recourse to the body of the savage. “Nay, so great was our famine, that a Saluage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort tooke him vp againe and eat him, and so did diuers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbs.” The inversion of civilized and savage is not lost on the narrator, who is careful to clarify that this was the final recourse taken by the “poorer sort.” As with Percy’s narrative, the dreadfulness of the deed is compounded by the “boyl[ing]” and

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“stew[ing]” as well as the pairing of human flesh with “roots and herbs.” It would seem that the account draws its sense of horror from the act of applying putatively civilized rituals to a fundamentally savage act. As Appelbaum puts it, the cannibalism of these accounts “follows from a sequence of deprivation and depravity: the hungry move down the scale of edibles, ending in the consumption of the most unpalatable things of all.”22 That both accounts climax in the killing, salting, and eating of the wife, with some departure in the details that resulted in her consumption, might make us wonder if these claims are grounded in fact. Yet both narratives culminate in a reflection on the improbable nature of their accounts, which they are certain would be believed by no one but those who endured its extremes. Paradoxically, they try to dispel our sense of dubiousness, even as they work to encourage it in their narrative conventions. Such is the nature of their tale. Their concerns as raconteurs are well founded. Their truth claims would be contradicted by several authorities in the Virginia Council. Thomas Gates’s A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia was one of the first refutations, appearing as early as 1610, even before Smith’s account was published, suggesting that it had circulated with Percy’s unpublished account even earlier than its appearance in print. A True Declaration, in attempting to address the bad press that the Starving Time brought to the Virginia Company, starts out by extolling the higher cause of colonial enterprise. To those who cast aspersions on its unlawfulness and injustice, Gates offers an elaborate justificatory logic that quickly shifts from the language of divine intervention to the language of profitable trade. In interesting ways, his argument anticipates the rhetoric of Thomas Middleton’s Indian queen, whom we have already encountered in the first chapter. Middleton’s civic pageant would not be staged for another decade, but Gates’s case for colonialism and salvation appears to have become familiar in the language of joint-stock companies. He insists it is the duty of Christians to convert the natives, or as he puts it, to “set their soules at liberty, when we have brought their bodies to slaverie.”23 Trading with them is a kind of salvation for them, since the colonists buy from them “the pearles of the earth,” but “sell to them the pearles of heaven.” The largest bounty, though, is to be reaped in the natural abundance of the terrain. In contrast to the visions of fallow land and emaciated men in Percy’s and Smith’s accounts, we see fertility and plenitude. The corn grows in profusion. The sugar cane yields refreshing cordials. Peas, herbs, and fruits “return an increase immeasurable.” Beasts roam in multitude. Indeed, “all things committed to the earth, do multiply with an incredible usurie.” Food here becomes the central conceit defining profitable colonial enterprise.

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How then might we reconcile the disconnect between this vision of plenty and the wastelands of hunger and cannibalism in the previous accounts? Gates offers a series of explanations, but not before preempting any accusations of falsehood in his account: “If any man shall accuse these reports of partiall falshood, supposing them to be but Utopian, and legendarie fables, because he cannot conceive, that plentie and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities, and miseries can be reconciled together, let him now reade with judgement, but let him not judge before he hath read.” As with the other reports, Gates too must negotiate the contradictory impulses in his narrative, working through simultaneously utopian and dystopian visions of the colony. He clings faithfully to former, while acknowledging that the famine in the face of plenty and the distempered bodies in temperate climes were merely the result of fateful accidents. Indeed, the calamities his brethren encountered were the consequence of illness and idleness. The ebb and flow of salt water sent forth “unwholesome and contagious vapour,” incapacitating large numbers in the colony. Many were undone by the violent storm that would also find its way into William Strachey’s account, which in turn became source material for The Tempest. According to Gates, the next “fountaine of our woes” was the extreme improvidence of their crew, where “every man sharked for his present bootie, but was altogether carelesse of succeeding penurie.” These treasonous men abandoned their colony, leaving their brethren in extreme misery. Gates’s biggest narrative challenge, no doubt, comes in the form of the cannibal rumors that he must work to dispel. He declares this is entirely the mischief of pirates, who “beeing pinched with famine and penurie,” set upon the roving seas for their own profit and resolved to return to England with a mutual oath to spread false reports and discredit the land. “These are they, that roared out the tragicall historie of the man eating of his dead wife in Virginia; when the master of this Ship willingly confessed before 40 witnesses, that at their comming awaie, they left three moneths victuals, and all the cattell living in the Fort.” Gates dismisses their reports as so ridden with inconsistencies that it is tainted with “false colours, which hold no likenesses and proportion.” As peculiar as the account of the powdered wife is, Gates’s rationale for it is more so. He insists there was a member of the Virginia Company who loathed his wife and therefore secretly killed her, cut her into pieces, and hid parts of her in his house. When she was discovered, to excuse himself, he claimed his wife had died and he hid her to satisfy his hunger, feeding upon her daily. Yet Gates insists his house was well stocked with large quantities of beans, peas, and oatmeal, thus giving the lie to his tale of cannibalistic

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consumption. It is not very clear in Gates’s narrative why the version of the story offered by the killer would have exonerated him or why the fact of his starvation would make the murder more palatable. In both versions of this grisly drama, though, the powdered wife and the murderous husband remain a constant; what varies are the circumstances of her death, one brought on by fear and famine, the other by vengefulness and loathing. That Gates sought to mitigate the “tragicall historie” by accounting for the quartered woman, but refuting her consumption, is in itself telling. It works to mitigate the hunger topos of previous narratives, even while allowing for its gruesomeness. As such, Percy, Smith, and Gates offer a different version of the episode, in the process raising a different set of questions about the wife as food. In each, a culinary framework troubles the ethical implications of the cannibal act. Percy speaks of the man seasoning the mother of his child before eating her. Smith’s version describes him as powdering her and wonders if she was better roasted, boiled, or carbonated. Gates’s refutation of his cannibalism relies on the apparent discovery of more conventionally edible foodstuffs at his disposal. In all, the dreadfulness of the cannibal act is measured along an axis of its intermingling with other culinary rituals. The consumption of the raw versus the cooked appears to have some bearing on the ethical implications of the act, with each successive act of cooking rendering it more morally questionable. Collectively, their accounts, along with others in circulation, define the primal scene of English cannibalism against the backdrop of English colonialism, compelling us to consider the two in relation to each other. While the discourse of cannibalism looms large in accounts of pre-Columbian America, its rewriting in narratives of the Starving Time suggests ways in which the colonial was also imagined as the cannibal and colonialism itself as a kind of cannibalism. As I have discussed in the introduction, postcolonial scholars have often drawn on Marx’s notion of vampire capitalism to elaborate on a trope of cannibal colonialism.24 Perhaps the case of the infamous Collines, real or imagined, becomes the archetype of such colonial appetites. He becomes the savage within. Versions of this figure continue to haunt our imagination in characters like Hannibal Lecter, arguably the most renowned fictional cannibal of our times, frightening for the ways in which he incorporates the rituals of civilized food preparation and consumption into his acts of savagery. The appetites of such “civilized” cannibals frequently become metaphors for what Crystal Bartolovich has called “consumerism, or the cultural logic of late cannibalism.”25 Collines does not necessarily anticipate these figures in his desperate appetite. Nor do I want to suggest that the inconsistent

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accounts of the Starving Time offer him up as a critique of colonial enterprise. Rather, he unwittingly comes to stand in for its darker undercurrents. The reappearance of figures like him on the English stage offers us interesting opportunities to see how these appetites were variously quelled and controlled.

Staging Cannibalism and the Economic Logic of Colonialism Since it was first performed at the Globe Theater in 1622, The Sea Voyage has been repeatedly and unfavorably compared with its more well-known source, The Tempest.26 Samuel Pepys was among the first to make these disparaging comparisons, noting in his diary that he went to see a “so-so” play called The Storme (a Restoration title for The Sea Voyage), but “without much pleasure, it being but a mean play compared with The Tempest.”27 It is John Dryden’s verdict, however, that echoes the most frequent grouse against John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s island romance: that it could not replicate the magic of Shakespeare’s play, nor could it match the magic in Shakespeare’s play: The Storm which vanish’d on the Neighb’ring shore, Was taught by Shakespear’s Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear’s Magick could not copy’d be.28 From its opening scene depicting a storm at sea to its island setting to its inclusion of a Miranda-like virgin who has never looked upon a man, the playwrights’ debt to Shakespeare is apparent. But The Sea Voyage has neither Prospero nor his “rough magic” to control the island’s natural elements; what’s more, there is neither an obliging Ariel nor a defiant Caliban to do the dispossessed Duke’s bidding. As Zachary Lesser sums it up: “no colonial fantasy of magically enforced work disturbs this island’s barrenness.”29 In fact, contrary to early assertions, the “island logic” (to borrow Roland Greene’s phrase) in each of these plays is radically different, with the magus allowing for the illusion of control and habitability in one play, his absence in the other only calling attention to the hardships of the liminal space that is the island.30 Hunger becomes chief among these hardships. Indeed the island affords a closer look at the hunger topos. “Islands make possible the observation of their own constructedness,” Greene argues, “because they enforce a certain clarity: they have definable

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borders, they are conceptually autonomous from the world at large, and they encourage attention to the conditions of indigeneity and importation.”31 Situated as such, island plays afford a vantage point from which to view the machinations of capital: “Suddenly, in the light of island logic, the exertions with which capital fashions a world according to its own unquestioned values come to look like exertions; we are encouraged to notice the trail of investment that furnishes the island with people and materials.”32 The crisis of The Sea Voyage is precisely the stasis of its people and materials, neither of which can be placed in a productive relation with the other in the absence of food. Whereas The Tempest resolves the crisis of its hungry, feckless gallants with Prospero’s magic, its sequel affords no such resolution. The omission of magic, which might harness its people and resources into a productive relationship, is by all counts essential to the dramatization of this crisis and to its eventual resolution. In fact, its conspicuous absence makes possible the play’s drama of hunger and cannibalism, both of which must be resolved before the play’s tragicomic denouement can unfold. The hunger games of The Tempest are nowhere near as dire as those of The Sea Voyage, with Prospero close at hand to keep the castaways relatively unharmed. But his magic takes on a puzzling dimension in the play’s most critical food scene—the vanishing banquet. How does the device of the banquet specifically serve to punish the “three men of sin” gathered? What does its appearance and disappearance before the castaways signify, especially in light of the play’s many allusions to the Virginia Colony at Jamestown? While much ink has been spilled on the play’s New World setting, its scene of disappearing foods in relation to this setting has received little critical attention. Jacqueline E. M. Latham, one of the few critics to take up the magic banquet, suggests it is the incongruity of this scene in the play as a whole that has confused many critics: “its use of spectacle and mythological symbolism, remains oddly obtrusive in The Tempest’s texture and not fully related to the play’s ideas.”33 She notes that one clue as to how we might read it can be found in a gloss in Frank Kermode’s Arden edition of the play, where he parses the magic banquet as a scene of temptation and retribution. Kermode notes that magicians in the writing of this period typically enjoyed the power to conjure up illusory banquets, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, John Milton’s Comus, and Shakespeare’s Prospero being just a few important examples. For Kermode, these banquets represent “the voluptuous attractions of the sense which . . . the soul must resist.”34 Thus according to Latham and Kermode, Prospero as magus orchestrates the food scene as a way to tempt and temper the appetites of the Neapolitans, using a device well known to the Elizabethan stage. But why this scene should figure in the uniquely

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colonial setting of the play, even as reports of the Starving Time circulated in England, still remains unclear in both readings. Denise Gigante’s essay on “Good Food, Good Taste, and the Gastronome,” which also reads Prospero in relation to Comus, might help provide further clarification in this regard. Gigante sets up a parallel between the feast that Comus offers the Lady and the one that Prospero places before the shipwrecked mariners, reading both figures as “Magian-artists, stand-ins for the playwrights, both of whom are concerned with the ethical and aesthetic implications of conjuring airy nothings for the delectation of an audience.”35 Although her argument focuses primarily on Comus, whom she reads as “the world’s first restaurateur,” named after the Ancient Greek god of cookery, in tracing his antecedents to Prospero, she offers a valuable insight into Shakespeare’s magus as well.36 Like Comus, Prospero ventures into the realm of chicanery, conjuring up food through supernatural means. She notes how his culinary images suffuse the play, especially in his many references to delicacies like “dainties,” “subtleties,” and “trifle.”37 Viewed as such, his vanishing banquet is a means to underscore the circulation and flow of foodstuffs on the island, as he performs the feat of other Elizabethan magicians with his tempting feast. While scholars have given much thought to his role as magus and proxy dramatist, his role as a culinary artist avant le lettre has rarely been contemplated. Yet his mastery of the land, which has most often led to readings that situate him as a colonizer figure, comes as much from his ability to conjure up food as it does from his ability to command the storm. If we take a closer look at the scene, we notice how Prospero stands invisible above, while manipulating the action at several levels, orchestrating the meal from a distance. We begin with stage directions that describe the banquet being brought upon the stage. The “strange shapes” that Gonzalo mistakes for natives of the island invite the King and the other castaways to partake of the meal. All the men respond with incredulity, Antonio, in particular, noting the skepticism with which such reports would be treated as “fools at home condemn ’em” for being untrue (3.3.26–27). Sebastian is the first to try and consume the viands, “for we have stomachs” (3.3.40), and Alonso agrees he “will stand to and feed” (3.3.49).38 But as they approach the table, stage directions tell us that thunder and lightning follow, Ariel descends like a harpy and claps its wings, and the banquet vanishes. Prospero’s retribution follows in the words of Ariel, who chastises the castaways that the “surfeited sea / Hath caused to belch up” for their avarice and foul deeds against the former Duke of Milan (3.3.55–56). Prospero thus simultaneously works to manipulate the plot, conjure up the feast, and control the appetites of the castaways. He is magus, proxy dramatist, and culinary artist all at once. Not

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only is he able to control the elements and manipulate the food supplies of the island, he is also able to control the narratives surrounding the events of the island. Herein lies his strength as protocolonizer. The only character to question his master narrative is, of course, Caliban. His name, an anagram of cannibal, has elicited much scholarly interest. In Virginia Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s introduction to the Arden edition of the play, they note that myths from the New World and sub-Saharan Africa about natives consuming human flesh were topical when Shakespeare wrote the play. “In America, the association of anthropophagism with the Carib Indians provided the etymological source for ‘cannibal,’ a term that in the sixteenth century gradually replaced the classical ‘anthropophagi.’”39 But the origins of Caliban’s name cannot be traced with any certainly to the supposedly anthropophagous native inhabitants of these regions, and questions about Shakespeare’s authorial intentions in this regard remain inferential, according to the editors. The play, as such, makes no reference to his eating human flesh. But I find it particularly interesting that it does make references to his eating. When Prospero, having controlled the narrative for the better part of act 1 in recounting to Miranda and Ariel their prehistory, arrives to command Caliban, the slave responds by wresting the narrative back from his master. What follows are some of the most poignant lines of the play, in which Caliban claims ownership of the isle by Sycorax, his mother, but not before declaring, “I must eat my dinner” (1.2.333). The lines are oddly prosaic. They convey a petulant insistence on his needs before Prospero’s. They grant the savage a sense of his own appetites and hungers in the face of Prospero’s and the other shipwrecked mariners’. Importantly, they make no reference to cannibal eating. They mention “dinner,” which is at once domestic and incongruous in the mouth of the so-called savage. They are also assertive and defiant, in the declaration “I must.” But nothing comes of this assertion. As with his failed rebellion later in the play, Caliban eventually submits to Prospero’s will in this scene too, testifying to the power of Prospero’s magic. But not before disrupting his narrative and insisting on his own version of events. By contrast, the shipwrecked mariners have little power to resist Prospero, who remains an invisible force for the better part of their adventures on the island. While the privation they endure in The Tempest is not recounted in as much detail as the reports from Jamestown, the device of disappearing foods both sets up its hunger topos and manages it in interesting ways. It locates the power to regulate such appetites in the figure of Prospero, who controls not only the island, but the very plot of the play. His magic achieves for the play what was impossible for the colonists stranded in Jamestown. It

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allows for a general mastery of the colonial narrative, which had gone awry in the case of the Virginia Council. Its absence in The Sea Voyage, a play that is otherwise so heavily indebted to Shakespeare’s plot, poses an interesting set of problems for the stranded islanders to resolve themselves. Without a magus, a master narrator, or a culinary artist, food lies at the heart of the play’s crisis. It becomes central to multiple subplots regarding the distribution of resources, the balance of trade, and the mercantile imperatives that guide overseas ventures. In its dramatization of these plots, The Sea Voyage appears to emerge from and engage with a very particular set of economic debates in the 1620s concerning English overseas trade and its renegotiation of the terms of worth, valuation, and exchange in the domestic realm. Fletcher and Massinger’s play sheds the fascination with possible utopias in “brave new worlds” in order to take up a more abstract vision of a colonial economy, grounded in an idea of global trade and circulation rather than the conquest of lands. If the occasional courtier dreams of “new lands and lordships in new countries,” his imagery is quickly rendered redundant by the barren island’s peoples and materials that necessitate a different model of mercantile intervention (1.1.117). In this sense, the geographical and geopolitical terrains that The Sea Voyage charts are quite unlike the ones in The Tempest.40 First printed in the 1647 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s works, it was not until the 1679 Folio that The Sea Voyage received a title page of its own, on which it was listed as “A Comedy.” Subsequent discussions of the play refer to it as an island romance, both in relation to its Shakespearean source as well as in relation to Fletcher’s earlier play, The Island Princess. Yet, as the title of Lesser’s essay on the play appositely suggests, its generic categorization is a complex matter, with its plot simultaneously “Tragical-ComicalPastoral-Colonial.” Largely pastoral in its origins, Lesser notes that it is in the 1620s that tragicomedy shifts away from the homely and familiar environs of the English countryside to the more exotic sites of England’s new trading outposts and colonies in the Levant, the East Indies, and the New World. For Lesser, as for Valerie Forman, such a shift is indicative of the inevitable trajectory of the tragicomic plot that moves both thematically and structurally from loss to resolution and redemption: unlike comedy, “the story told, then is not just ‘all’s well that ends well,’ but all becomes better than it was before.”41 Such logic accounts both for the European presence in these trading outposts and islands as well as the desired outcome of investments therein—to make all “better than it was before.” No doubt, the wretched gallants of The Sea Voyage are at first unlikely candidates for creating such an outcome, their initial plight recalling a more tragic aspect of earlier

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settlement. Yet the plot is able to effect such a transformation and redemption, turning gallants into venturers and the island’s dormant materials into a kind of circulating currency. For this, they need to create more effective models of consumption. The hunger topos and the cannibal crisis become ways to recall and resolve the problems that plagued earlier English overseas ventures like the Jamestown settlement. These are invoked as cautionary tales for other mercantile English overseas expeditions, like those in the East Indies. It is only in the movement toward such a resolution that the island’s crisis is averted and “all becomes better than it was before.” Despite its resolution, the play’s celebration of England’s overseas venturing is much more muted than other accounts from the period. In fact, Anthony Parr, the play’s most recent editor, has argued that Fletcher and Massinger betray a distinct “antipathy to the entire [colonial] enterprise—a feeling that was, incidentally, widespread in London’s mercantile community when he wrote the play.”42 Likewise, Gordon McMullan has read the play as a stringent critique of venturing, a dystopian vision of New World conquest gone horribly wrong.43 At first glance, this would certainly seem to be the case. The play begins with a group of displaced European gallants, stranded on a “barren” and “wretched” island (1.3.24, 1.3.122, and 5.2.123.) They long for the familiar markers of the civilized world—“our blessed homes,” “our kindreds,” “our families”—but the island offers none (1.3.34–35). While abundant in gold, it has neither food nor water, and the shipwrecked voyagers are driven to starvation and near cannibalism. They become, as it were, the natives of an island that is visibly lacking any original inhabitants of its own. Their hardships obviously recall those of Percy, Smith, and other English planters in Virginia, who similarly struggled with starvation and acculturation in seemingly hostile climes. And yet, as I will show, the play is decidedly not a critique of early modern colonialism. Rather, it endorses a mercantile imperative that was markedly absent in early discourses of New World conquest, but that Fletcher and Massinger saw as fundamental to the colonial enterprise. Food and hunger become central issues in its performance of the colonial enterprise. Initially, it is the questions surrounding gold on the barren island that become the locus of the play’s mercantilist discourse. When the shipwrecked crew members first come upon the gold, they are jubilant. Their enthusiasm is reminiscent of a naïve Columbus-like determination to discover gold in the “uninhabited” islands of the New World. “His very prayer had become: ‘Our Lord in his goodness guide me that I may find this gold.’”44 Tzvetan Todorov remarks of the Spanish explorer’s obsession. Nearly every entry in Columbus’s journal and letters returned to the chimerical treasure.

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“I was attentive and worked hard to know if there was any gold,” he notes on October 13, 1492, the very day following his discovery. Two days later he is impatient again: “I do not wish to delay but to discover and to go to many islands to find gold.” His very route is determined by it—“I decided to go to the southwest to search for gold and precious stones”—and he wanders from island to island in his quest for it.45 Such is the folly of European gallants in The Sea Voyage as well. Sebastian, an older Portuguese venturer stranded on the island, warns them of its dangers. “This gold was the overthrow of my happiness” (1.3.175), he tells Albert, the captain commanding the French fleet. For if the island is plentiful in “this damned enticing” substance (1.3.221), it is spare in every other respect, providing little sustenance to its inhabitants. When Albert inquires after meat, Sebastian offers an elaborate, if somewhat verbose, expatiation on the nature of hunger and lack on an island that appears to have been abandoned by nature itself: Nor meat nor quiet; No summer here to promise anything, Nor autumn to make full the reaper’s hands. The earth, obdurate to the tears of heaven, Lets nothing shoot but poisoned weeds. No rivers, nor no pleasant groves; no beasts. All that were made for man’s use fly this desert; No airy fowl dares make his flight over it, It is so ominous . . . . . . Sometimes we find a fulsome sea-root And that’s a delicate! A rat sometimes, And that we hunt like princes in their pleasure. And when we take a toad, we make a banquet. (1.3.134–47)

As in the Starving Time, nature itself has abandoned the castaways on an island that knows no seasonal cycles. Nothing can be coaxed out of the obdurate earth, so that the castaways, like Gates and his crew, are reduced to eating roots and rats. But where even the rat or the toad can provide fleshy sustenance, the “goodly quarries” of gold are too “hard to gnaw” (3.1.16–18). Yet, with the notable exception of Albert and Tibalt, all the French gallants are gulled by its brilliance. As they fall to fighting over it, Sebastian and his companion escape with the French vessel, leaving the entire crew without

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any means for fleeing the island. In what follows, we witness a series of bizarre episodes in which the intrinsic worthlessness of the glittering metal is cruelly brought home to the gallants. In the absence of food, the gold is utterly useless. Significantly, it is not so much the traditional moral injunctions against lucre that propel the plot forward. Instead, it is the simple lack of use value associated with the hard, inedible substance that plagues the castaways. Thus it is that the gallants are reduced to consuming spoonfuls of mud and rotten trunks of trees. They long for the surgeon’s “old suppository” (3.1.38) and “cooling glister” (3.1.43) left behind on the vessel, for even those would make more “dainty dishes” (3.1.39) than the adamantine metal. In essence, it is consumption—or more importantly, the lack thereof— that appears to be the source of the island’s biggest crisis. In detailing this crisis, Fletcher and Massinger allude to a crisis closer home, one that mercantilists like Thomas Mun had outlined in several treatises only a year before the play was performed. An excess of bullion chasing far too few goods would only spell doom for the English isle. Privateering by itself, for the sake of gold and glory, would achieve little. Rather, the begetting of goods by way of gold was the only means of enhancing the nation’s treasure. As Mun had put it, “Money is the price of wares, and wares the proper use of money.”46 In turn, wares were procured through trade, not through the idle accumulation of gold and coin. The play’s hunger topos and cannibal crisis emerge from this particular set of economic debates, sparked by the East India trade, which was repeatedly accused of depleting coin in its search for commodity. In particular, the East India Company’s steady export of bullion (for which the company had obtained an exception to the law prohibiting the same) and its import of foreign commodities had sparked a series of heated debates about the implications of long-distance trade for England’s national wealth. The company’s adoption of what K. N. Chaudhuri has called a “triangular trade” meant that it exported bullion in order to import pepper, spices, calico, and indigos from the East Indies, all of which were sold in European countries and the Middle East in exchange for more bullion, which in turn formed the basis for further investment in Asian enterprises.47 The fact that there was no vent for English commodities in Asian markets, the simultaneous consumption of East Indian wares in England, and the belief that such a trade had drained the economy of its reserves resulted in a vehement attack on the company, most frequently voiced in the pamphleteering wars of the 1620s and most frequently countered in the writings of company officials like Mun. The “clamorous complaints” against this trade, as Mun had put it, all dwelt on the apparent loss of precious metals: “The gold, silver, and Coyne

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of Christendome, and particularly of this Kingdome, is exhausted, to buy unnecessary wares.”48 What was achieved through the export of bullion and the import of foreign wares? How could this trade bring about gain if it meant that England’s precious metal was sent out of England? How could loss possibly be profitable? As Valerie Forman explains, “While ‘investment’ seems an entirely natural concept today in our stock-owning culture, it was a concept that needed to be theorized and debated in the early modern period.”49 This process of debate and theorization in the 1620s constitutes one of the earliest discussions of England’s economic and foreign policies,50 and it is likely to have been current when Fletcher and Massinger conceived the colonial setting for their island romance. The economic abstractions at the center of early seventeenth-century debates are rendered actual in the dilemmas posed by locating the gold and the women on their unnamed island: the precious metal on the island has no more use value if it lies in heaps on the land than do the women on the neighboring island, who lie in desperate need of intercourse; both, it would seem, must circulate within a larger economy of exchange. Although it would be erroneous to think of The Sea Voyage as a simplistic piece of propaganda for company apologists like Mun, the seemingly abstract and unfathomable aspects of global intercourse, balance of trade, exchange value, and use value that emerged in the context of the East India trade are tested through the crises of consumption in Fletcher and Massinger’s island romance. Thus it is that Tibalt mocks his countrymen’s fetishization of coin over commodity, of substance over sustenance. As Franville, the play’s vainglorious gallant, complains about being “hungry,” “hurt,” and “weary” (1.3.238), Tibalt taunts him with the gold: Here’s a pestle of a portigue, sir; ’Tis excellent meat with sour sauce. And here’s two chains—suppose ’em sausages. Then there wants mustard; but the fearful surgeon Will supply ye presently. (1.3.239–43)

The “portigue,” as Parr’s gloss to this speech suggests, was a Portuguese coin, worth around three to five sovereigns. But the “pestle of portigue” in Tibalt’s speech simultaneously alludes to a “hunk of gold” and “a pestle of pork” or a “gammon.”51 Through this merciless play on words, Tibalt drives home an important point about the absolute meaninglessness of gold and coin when they cannot be converted into food and commodity. His scatological suggestion that the surgeon’s bowel movements, active as a result of

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fear, will supply a fitting substitute for mustard only serves to underscore the degenerate plight of a people driven to starvation through their flawed understanding of value and consumption. But the ultimate degeneration of the gallants is to be seen in their act of near cannibalism. No longer able to contain their appetites, they close in on Aminta, the noble French virgin, who was both abducted and rescued by Albert in the play’s prehistory and thus remains stranded on the island with the French crew. As Albert goes in search of food, they seize the opportunity to feed on her flesh, citing the authority of travelogues for their “barbarous” act (3.1.136): Morillat: I have read stories— Lamure: Of such restoring meats: we have examples, Thousand examples and allowed for excellent. Women that have eat their children, men their slaves; Nay, their brothers. But these are nothing: Husbands devoured their wives (they are their chattels), And of a schoolmaster that in a time of famine Powdered up all his scholars. Morillat: She’s young and tidy: In my conscience she’ll eat delicately, Just like young pork a little lean. Your opinion, surgeon. Surgeon: I think she may Be good meat. Buyt look, we shall want salt. Franville: Tush, she needs no powdering. Surgeon: I grant ye; But to suck out the humourous parts, by all means Let’s kill her in a chase, she’ll eat the sweeter. Lamure: Let’s kill her any way, and kill her quickly That we might be at our meat. (3.1.93–109) The “stories” and “thousand examples” that Lamure invokes here clearly hark back to reports from Jamestown, but in addition to the horrors of the “powdered wife” episode, they conjure up scenarios in which women ate their children, men ate their slaves, and schoolmasters ate their students. The specific reference to husbands who devoured their wives, with the bizarre parenthetical remark about wives as their chattel, adds yet another proprietorial perspective to the macabre tale of Collines, already in circulation.

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Here too we sense incredulity among the gallants about the scenario they are about to reenact, so that they feel compelled to invoke precedence, hearsay, and rumors. In a strange reworking of the threats that typically attach themselves to an unaccompanied virgin, we find the gallants literally lusting after her flesh. As with the case of “powdered wife,” they move from despair to depravity, contemplating the modes in which Aminta might best be consumed. Morillat regards her as a food substitute, a close approximation to pork, which, like her, is “a little lean” (3.1.102). The surgeon, like Collines, grants that she will make “good meat,” but rues the absence of salt, to which Franville reassuringly responds that “she needs no powdering” (3.1.104–5). Things get decidedly more gruesome as they begin contemplating her as a delicacy. The surgeon wonders if they should partake of her while she sleeps, cut her throat, or kill her in a chase. As they consider quartering her, so every man can have his share, the similarities with the hapless wife of the Jamestown accounts become more pronounced. But in the spirit of its genre, the play seems to work with the black humor that Smith’s account hints at, rather than dwelling on the horrors of Percy’s account. Aminta, who has been asleep through this interlude, wakes up with a sense that their conversation has merely been a bad dream. She begs them for some food, and they cryptically promise that they will indeed end her misery shortly. Aminta: For heaven’s sake, gentlemen, Give me some food to save my life. If ye have any aught to spare, A little to relive me. I may bless ye, For weak and wretched, ready to perish Even now I die. Morillat: You’ll save a labour then. You bred these miseries, and you shall pay for’t. We have no meat, more where to have we know not; Nor how to pull ourselves from these afflictions. We are starved took famished, all our hopes deluded. Yet ere we die thus, we’ll have one dainty meal. Aminta: Shall I be with ye, gentlemen? Lamure: Yes, marry shall ye! In our bellies, lady. (3.1.115–26) The humor, of course, draws from the fact that Aminta believes she will be joining them for “one dainty meal,” without realizing she is that dainty meal. It is only when they confess their plan to “eat your ladyship” and squabble

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over which man will consume her “hinder parts” that she comes to realize her impending fate (3.1.128, 133). If Aminta is saved from this group of European cannibals, it is only because Tibalt is able to convince them that she has a different kind of use value. “Spare the woman to beget more food on” (3.1.155), Tibalt suggests, albeit mockingly. It is thus her generative power that will save them from further degeneration. Indeed the dual themes of generation and degeneration, as Jean Feerick has cogently argued, inform The Sea Voyage as a whole. As the play progresses, we are taken to a neighboring island, where it is a group of Amazonian women who gradually degenerate, not because they lack food, but because they lack the means to generate. Crocale, easily the lustiest of them all, explains their plight: “[we] have among ourselves a commonwealth / Which in ourselves begun, with us must end” (2.2.17–18). It is a different kind of starvation that they endure, and they often speak of feeding their appetites with the help of their imagination. In doing so, they mark themselves as distinctly “pagan”: Hippolita: For my part, I confess it. I was not made For this single life, nor do I love hunting so But that I had rather be the chase myself ! Crocale: . . . I am of that mind too, wench. And though I have ta’en an oath, not alone To detest but never to think of man, Every hour something tells me I am forsworn. For I confess, imagination helps me sometimes, And that’s all is left for us to feed on; We might starve else! For if I have any pleasure In this life but when I sleep, I am a pagan. Then, from the courtier to the country clown, I have strange visions. (2.2.33–46) Left on the island without men, the Portuguese women have taken on the rites and customs of the island’s original Amazons, now dead, the play seems to suggest, through the natural destiny awaiting an all-female society. While there is only an implicit allusion to their homoerotic practices (Roselia, the Amazon queen compels them to find happiness in the “cold chaste / Embraces of each other” [3.1.21–22]), it is their autoerotic practices that the play dwells upon extensively. Feeding off themselves—for their own imagination is all that is “left for us to feed on”—they are, in a manner of speaking, as cannibalistic as the men on the neighboring island.

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Their pressing need to be “entranced” is voiced by Crocale, who conjures up an image of herself as lying awake at nights, awaiting intercourse: Crocale: The last night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . As I lay in my cabin, betwixt sleeping and waking— Hippolita: Upon your back? Crocale: How should a young maid lie, fool, When she would be entranced? Hippolita: We are instructed. Forward, I prithee. (2.2.49–54) Crocale goes on to narrate yet another nocturnal fantasy, “a pretty dream,” in which she can feel the touch of a youth, who with “trembling hands” (3.2.63) unrobes her. Like the unruly gallants on the barren island, the women on the fertile island are also defined by their appetites. In crucial ways, their island is as barren as the neighboring one. Both are endowed with “treasures” that lie dormant and unused, driving those who possess them to desperate and uncivilized measures. The resolution, no doubt, is close at hand. Trade between the islands is likely to solve both sets of problems and sate the all-consuming appetites of both parties. The gallants, now realizing that the gold is valuable only insofar as it has purchasing power, gladly tender it as currency in exchange for food and possibly sex from the Amazons. In turn, the Amazon queen, who has thus far curbed the other women from sharing their wares with men, informs the men that their “wants shall be supplied” (3.1.258). Both gold and woman are just about to be put to their appropriate use when the contingencies of the plot momentarily intervene, delaying the pleasures of consumption. The nature of the tragicomic romance demands that this bargain be couched in the structures of marriage. Thus it is that the scene of copulation is averted, but only until the gender imbalances that have resulted from island life are inverted and restored. For if scarcity has emboldened the women, starvation has enfeebled the men in the play. Tibalt informs the Amazons, “We are unprofitable, and our ploughs are broken. / There is no hope of harvest this year, ladies” (4.3.36–37), obviously alluding to his own and his compatriots’ impotent state. Elsewhere, Morillat speaks of how their hunger has rendered him feminine. “My belly’s / Grown together like an empty satchel” (3.1.13–14) he complains in a moment of irrepressible hunger, configuring his stomach as a kind of vacant

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womb. In Albert, the signs of hunger as a feminine trait are more explicitly spelled out. As Aminta tends to his open, gaping wounds, he worries about their reversal of roles: Albert: Do not add To my afflictions by your tender pities. Sure we have changed sexes: you bear calamity With a fortitude would become a man; I like a weak girl suffer. (2.1.5–9) Aminta, while continuing to nurse him, does little to allay these anxieties, almost reinforcing them in a speech that constructs Albert as ridden with orifices—orifices that only she can fill with the liquids of her body: Aminta: O, but your wounds How fearfully they gape! And every one To me is a sepulchre. If I loved truly— Wise men affirm that true love can do wonders— This bated in my warm tears would soon be cured And leave no orifice behind. Pray give me leave To play the surgeon and bind ’em up; (2.1.9–15) She then binds his wounds with her hair, and while Albert is glad to be tied by these “fetters” (2.1.20), we sense anxiety about the inversion of the penetrative logic that ought to govern their intercourse. Only a few scenes later, this gesture will be replicated by the Amazons, who will tie the French gallants in their own fetters and “bind ’em fast” (2.1.20) in their own “bonds” (3.1.398). Breaking out of these fetters entails the taming of Amazons and the reassertion of masculine authority. In turn, the regaining of masculine authority entails a transformation from feckless gallant to shrewd merchant adventurer. Thus when Albert speaks of discovering continents and conquering them for his virgin queen, it is with apparent nostalgia and the knowledge that this would be feasible only in a delirious dream induced by Aminta’s hunger: And when that sleep Deceives your hunger with imagined food,

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Think you have sent me for discovery Of some most fortunate continent, yet unknown, Which you are to be queen of. (2.1.89–93)

For now, it is food rather than land that Albert must discover. In doing so, he must abandon the guise of conquistador, negotiate with the pseudoAmazons (here standing in for the island’s natives), and shrewdly proffer the sexual services of his men in exchange for their food. The process leaves us with a tragicomic hero who appears less and less like the ideal of temperance and husbandry that an earlier generation of writers like Edmund Spenser envisioned as central to England’s colonial presence abroad. What we have instead is a pirate turned pragmatic negotiator, in love with the abducted Aminta but not unaware of the advantages of a sexual union with the Amazonian Clarinda, expediently wary of the gold on the island but ready to tender it for food from the Amazons. In situating him as such, I slightly diverge from Feerick who argues that Albert’s “temperance marks him as a man worthy of his plantation, worthy, that is, of the plantation that the play’s end celebrates as ‘[home].’”52 Albert is not intemperate like Franville or Lamure, both of whom are governed entirely by the excesses of their appetite, but the barren island resists plantation logic, requiring neither husbandry nor temperance of him. The problems of the island arise from the absence of intercourse, and it is the generative powers of the island’s men and women that will be called upon rather than their temperate natures. That Albert and Tibalt are among the few who can “‘rise’ to this challenge,” to use Feerick’s phrase, makes them more likely heroes than the other debilitated men on the island; more so than the fact of their temperance.53 Indeed, much of the humor in the scene of almost-copulation derives from the fact that most of the gallants lack the sexual prowess needed for the occasion and long for the “abilities of [their] ’pothecaries” (3.1.214), who would furnish them with “eringoes” (3.1.212), “potatoes” (3.1.213), and “cantharides” (3.1.213)—presumably the necessary aphrodisiacs to ease this peculiar case of performance anxiety. Tibalt is unusual in this regard, requiring neither “juleps, / Nor gujacum, prunellos, camphire pills, / Nor gourd water” (3.1.323–25). The least likely to be associated with generative powers—“For though I like the sport, I do not love / To father children” (3.1.305–6)—Tibalt is nevertheless up for the task of intercourse. While older than the other gallants, he appears to rectify the errors of others in his generation and the next,

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guiding Albert in his conduct on the island. Together, they herald a new kind of masculinity and a new kind of merchant adventurer, transformed through the play’s own version of the Starving Time. Taken together, it would seem as we move from Percy to Smith to Gates to the stage, the hunger topos and English cannibal scenes become more and more metaphoric. Each account, whether establishing veracity or dispelling hearsay, works to create a myth around the events of the Starving Time, so that they become, in Arens’s terms, part of the “man-eating myth.” Ironically, this is as true of the accounts that claim to be grounded in fact as it is of accounts that are clearly grounded in fictitious retellings of the events. In this sense, they follow a different trajectory from the pre-Colombian accounts of cannibalism that are reported as fact, after the fact. Rather, they work from fact to create myths. Like Prospero, they aim to wrest narrative control of events and work them into magical fictions and tales of disappearing foods. The discovery of Jane complicates this narrative fiction, no doubt. If nothing else, her bones are proof of the fact that acts of consumption during the early colonial period were fraught with anxiety. In a sense, she confirms what we have been seeing throughout this work in the many tales of anthropophagous consumption I have examined in this project. Her story is a final testament to the violent histories that undergird colonial consumption. She leads me to end this project with the very questions I asked when I began it. In what sense is the history of colonialism a history of eating another? How do we rewrite the story of colonialism through the story of such appetites? How do we piece together the stories of those consumed—Indian boys, black Indian queens, Othellos, and Sambos—when, unlike Jane, they leave behind no literal and material traces of their consumption?

Coda Global Foods

In the preceding pages, we have encountered as many different articulations of taste as we have different foodstuffs and foodscapes. We tasted sweetness as often as bitterness, we felt disgust as often as pleasure, we sensed fear as often as desire. The taste of difference was all of these at once, articulated in the affective and social life of food. This life was shaped in many different culinary contact zones along the way, in spaces like the kitchen and the closet, as often as in islands and foreign courts. Its stories were told in a range of foods and feasts—hell broths, sugar subtleties, raw entrails, and powdered wives—with receipts and other food genres in which their modes of preparation and consumption were documented. These stories revealed an interesting cast of characters—nameless Indian boys and Indian queens, caffeinated Moors and candied slaves, “Sambo” and “Jane”—all of whom, in some way or another, were consumed in the course of this culinary and colonial history. Then there were the consuming mouths—housewives, planters, travelers, consumers—variously unruly, appetitive, deprived, decadent. Their collective acts of eating have shaped the stories and histories we read in this work. As we near the end of Tasting Difference, it is worth contemplating the afterlives of these early taste acts. In what sense is food the space of cultural encounters in today’s global present? Not long after Francis Fukuyama’s premature celebration about the end of history, in which the template of 163

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Western liberal democracy would spread across the globe, not long after the pronouncements of the rise of a global prosperity powered by capitalism, not long after the hopes for the realization of a global cosmopolitan culture enabled by the Internet, all things global and, indeed, globalization itself, for all its purported inevitability, seem suspect. Fundamentalist movements across the world, most noticeably ISIS, political narrowing of horizons like Brexit, the move toward closed borders and backlash against migrants in the United States, and the rise of politicians with a strong nativist streak, all seem to signal a skepticism toward the global, particularly in its economic, political, and social aspects. The one exception to this in the realm of culture is food: if there is one zone of experience or one existential domain of practice in which the cultural encounter with the other is, for the most part, welcomed and embraced, it seems to be food. Indeed, notwithstanding the occasional kerfuffle regarding cultural appropriation of the cuisine of non-Western communities and some controversies, such as those about the origins and provenance of hummus, the foods of others generally have not been rejected, even as the others themselves seem to have been literally or symbolically cast aside or threatened with expulsion.1 Brexit has not turned the British off chicken tikka masala, and Trump’s anti-Mexican diatribe of “bad hombres” does not seem to have diminished American appetites for Mexican food or its hybrid fast-food progeny TexMex.2 This is somewhat different from the vocal Republican demand in the United States, in 2003, to rename French fries as Freedom Fries in the aftermath of 9/11, when the French refused to join the so-called “coalition of the willing” to attack Iraq, in contravention of international law.3 Even in India, where the ascendancy of the Hindu Right has led to the demonization, harassment, and lynching of Muslims by self-styled gau rakshaks or cow vigilantes on accusations of possessing or eating beef, the irony is that Mughlai food, or the food of the Mughals, continues to be extremely popular.4 North Indian in origin, dishes like butter chicken with their north India Punjabi roots—Punjab being the site of three major religious traditions and a syncretic social and religious culture—have in fact become pan-national foods. Thus in India or Dubai, as much as in Europe or the United States, a global food culture appears to be thriving, characterized by quite similar traits—the standardization, itself, perhaps a feature of globalization. Chief among these traits are innovation and experimentation, inspired in no mean measure by the molecular gastronomy of chefs like Ferran Adrià of elBulli and others; a use of locally grown ingredients, many of which, though, may originally be of foreign provenance; a turn to tradition in terms of ingredients and culinary practices, such as the use of offal in the nose-to-tail eating

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of Fergus Henderson, that are resurrected and reimagined through the most current practices. In San Francisco, where I live, food trucks offering everything from Polish to Vietnamese, Cajun to Indian, Mexican to Nouveau American can be found in the gentrified parts of the Mission District and along the waterfront paths of the Presidio. In Mumbai, my home away from home, along with traditional Maharashtrian and South Indian cuisine, Italian, Spanish, and Burmese cuisine are readily available. Across the globe, vegan and gluten-free fare has also become more accessible, rooted in a mix of factors including ideological commitment, status signaling, health concerns, or just plain faddishness. And all of this, of course, has proceeded and continues to proceed in tandem with the absolute profusion of media interest in food over the last twenty years. Chefs have now become media celebrities, cooking has become a spectator sport with shows like Iron Chef and Top Chef, and food porn, as it is called, is everywhere, in magazines like Lucky Peach, websites and YouTube channels dedicated to cooking, and the countless photos that ordinary users share on Instagram, Twitter, and the like. The boom in media shows and media content related to food is deeply linked with, and reflects, the spread of capitalism. Transnational media systems of production, the circulation of data, information, and content on these, and their reception in diverse contexts are related to the cultivation of global tastes that embody both standardization and sameness as well as the desire for difference. Appadurai’s seminal essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” identifies five configurations of transnational flows or scapes: ethnoscapes, movements of people, marked by particular identities, across borders; ideoscapes, the spread of powerful ideological themes, like democracy and terror, across borders; technoscapes, complex apparatuses of technological production situated in different locations; mediascapes, or transnational flows of media images and discourses; and finanscapes, the scaffolding of international finance that allows vast sums of money to cross national borders in the twinkling of an eye.5 These scapes sometimes work in conjunction with each other and sometimes are in conflict with one another. We can consider the phenomenon of global food and what food symbolizes in the present as cutting across three of these scapes: ethnoscapes, that is, food associated with others like migrants, diasporic groups, and ethnic others; mediascapes, that is, the vast amount of media content on food mentioned earlier; and ideoscapes, discourses of ethnic food, health food, organic food, and the like. Indirectly, in light of the connection between global food and global capitalism noted above, a connection with finanscapes can also be suggested.

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Against this briefly etched schematic of the broader political economy in which discourses of food intersect with discourses of cultural difference, we can ask the following questions: How do these contemporary developments in food culture provide the space for new forms of cultural encounter? How do they resonate with food as a contact zone in the early modern period? What interesting congruence and confluence might we imagine in the past and the present configuration and consumption of food? If capital brings everything within the ambit of consumption and if commodification is the inevitable correlate of capitalism, then in the era of late capitalism or global capitalism food becomes another form of the commodified identity of others along with their music, fashion, and rituals. Food becomes a visible, public act of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, being brought within the framework of commodification and consumption—in the economic as well as literal physical sense—the domestication of foreign food (often marked as ethnic) is also a way to manage and domesticate the threat and danger of difference or to perhaps deal with the exciting danger of difference. In shows like Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation, which I briefly touched upon in my penultimate chapter, part of the challenge is eating a dangerously spicy food. Perhaps we can broadly think of the indigenization of foods and local adaptation along these lines too, as culinary challenges to take on and incorporate the abject. Finally, disgust has now been reframed in two ways. One, from the foreign body as the locus of disgust because of the unknown food it consumes, it has moved to the obese and unhealthy body that consumes foods that are alien and unknown by virtue of being excessively processed, chemically saturated, or genetically modified (what Michael Pollan has called “food-like” substances).6 Second, the rhetoric and discourse of the politics of veganism and vegetarianism, in India but also elsewhere, invoke revulsion and disgust at the consumption of either specific meats like beef or meat itself. As part of this discourse, some substances or meat are deemed taboo and alien to the human body or to the bodies of believers and hence worthy of disgust. They defile one in that consuming them causes one to lose either one’s identity as a member of a community or humanity itself. In addition to long-standing religious taboos, disgust related to food in the age of globalization takes on a global dimension appositely. A kind of food—processed, junk, unhealthy, meat—is what generates disgust rather than the food associated with an ethnicity. The questions of what it means to “eat well” in these changing contexts will be different from the ones that preoccupied the early moderns, even as the preoccupation with tasting difference underlies both.

Notes

Introduction

1. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48. 2. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). 3. Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.124. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Hereafter cited in text. 4. Many examples come to mind here. In early modern studies, Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) is one of the most seminal projects to take on the appearance of difference. In postcolonial studies, more broadly, influenced by Saidian paradigms, studies of difference have frequently turned to clothing. The veil, in particular, has been studied from different disciplinary perspectives as a marker of otherness. Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), is among the most well-known arguments on the preoccupation with clothing as a civilizational marker. 5. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Heritage Press, 1949), 1. 6. Niraj Chokshi, “‘Taco Trucks on Every Corner’: Trump Supporter’s AntiImmigration Warning,” New York Times, September 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com. 7. Ibid. 8. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999), 21. 9. Alan Yu, “How Just 8 Flavors Have Defined American Cuisine,” National Public Radio, December 6, 2016, http://www.npr.org. 10. Ibid. 11. “Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech,” The Guardian, April 19, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com. 12. Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (London: Vintage Books, 2006), 236. 13. Ibid. 14. Bee Wilson, “Who Killed the Great British Curry House,” The Guardian, January 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com.

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15. Collingham, Curry, 236. 16. “Cast of Goodness Gracious Me ‘Going out for an English,’” YouTube, March 30, 2008, https://www.youtube.com. 17. Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 7. 18. I am grateful to Jyotsna Singh for sharing a draft of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing. 19. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1995), 5. 20. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 21. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 29. 22. Jack Goody, “The Recipe, the Prescription, and the Experiment,” in Counihan and Van Esterik, Food and Culture, 84. 23. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 199. 24. Ibid. 25. Hannah Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, or Rich Cabinet: Stored with Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (London, 1675), 17; Hannah Wolley, A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (London 1674), 54, 47, 18. 26. Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, 66. 27. Anonymous, The Queens Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrugery, Preserving, and Candying (London, 1662), 91. 28. Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, 19. 29. Elizabeth Grey, Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets (London, 1653). 30. Benjamin Breen, “Why Did Seventeenth-Century Europeans Eat Mummies?,” Res Obscura (blog), December 5, 2015, http://resobscura.blogspot.com. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. I am deeply indebted to Jennifer Park for her suggestions on this discussion of mummy. 34. Samuel Purchas, Urreta’s History of Ethiopia, in Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1617), 849. 35. Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3. 36. Philip Schwyzer, “Mummy Is Become Merchandise: Literature and the Anglo-Egyptian Mummy Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 71. 37. Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, 95. 38. Grey, Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets, 149–50. 39. See Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (New York: Routledge, 2016), 286. 40. John Webster, The White Devil (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998), 1.1.15–18. 41. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 8.

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42. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 43. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7. 44. Ibid. 45. See Valérie Loichot’s The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 46. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 280. 47. Timothie Bright, A Treatise: wherein is declared the sufficiencie of English medicines, for cure of all diseases, cured with medicine (London, 1580), 8. 48. For a more detailed discussion of humoral frameworks and race in the Renaissance, see Jean Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 49. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 50. Ibid., 3–4. 51. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9. 52. John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 53. Ibid., 96. 54. Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6. 55. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 6. 56. Ibid. 57. Michael Schoenfeldt, “Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 244. 58. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 114. 59. Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1. 60. David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 98. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 81. 64. Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture, 101. 65. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 5. 66. Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 2. 67. Ibid. 68. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 156. 69. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 123.

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70. Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xii. 71. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance. Joan Fitzpatrick, ed., Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). 72. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. 73. Wall, Staging Domesticity and Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 74. Despite this focus on individual food commodities in the first three chapters, Tasting Difference departs from the format of popular commodity histories in crucial ways. In most of these, it is the story of heroic procurement that we hear— an aggrandizing narrative of discovery and conquest, one that avoids any engagement with indigenous labor and colonial histories. It is a story that revels in the geographical distances and historical odds that had to be surmounted (usually by the West) in order to facilitate everyday, seemingly mundane acts of consumption. Scholars like Bruce Robbins have extensively documented this trend in commodity histories, observing the rhetorical flourish in titles such as Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance or The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug. In a telling reversal of historical fact, it is Europe that is always “conquered” or “penetrated” or “dominated” by seemingly innocuous commodities like chocolate or tea or pepper. See Bruce Robbins, “Commodity Histories,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 456. 75. Loichot’s The Tropics Bite Back. 76. Kim F. Hall, “‘Extravagant Viciousness’: Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon,” in Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, ed. Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 94. 77. Jonathan Burton, “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, ed. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 26–27. 78. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) 32–33. 79. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 80. Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” 49. 1. Spices

1. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1995), 4–6. 2. Although the East India Company was not officially granted a royal charter until 1600, English ventures to the Indies had been underway as early as the 1580s. In 1581 a group of businessmen of the City of London received letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I establishing the Company of Merchants of the Levant, a forerunner of the Honourable East India Company, which sought to establish direct commercial links with the East effectively ending the monopoly over the spice trade at that time enjoyed by Spain and Portugal. See K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India

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Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (New York: August Kelley, 1965) for a detailed history of the company’s early years. 3. The word “receipt,” which the OED describes as “a formula or prescription” or “a statement of ingredients” is used interchangeably with “recipes” in early modern cookbooks and domestic guides. As the OED indicates, “receipt” could also be used to describe “the formula or description of a remedy for a disease.” In fact, a number of spices were prescribed as ingredients in home remedies for different kinds of ailments and medical disorders. 4. Both terms recur in the cookbooks and domestic manuals of the seventeenth century. The idea that a book of receipts was disclosing well-guarded feminine secrets is apparent in such titles as The Queens Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving and Candying (1662) and The Ladies Delight (1672). Likewise the frequent use of the word “cabinet” or “closet” in titles such as The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities and The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet presents the recipe book as a private object now available for public consumption. For a detailed discussion about the multiple associations of the early modern closet, see Alan Stewart’s essay, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations, no. 50 (1995): 76–100. 5. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 3. I am indebted to Freedman’s text for much of the information in this paragraph, in particular see 1–3. 6. Timothie Bright, A Treatise: wherein is declared the sufficiencie of English medicines, for cure of all diseases, cured with medicine (London, 1580), 8. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Ibid., 13–14. 9. Ibid., 19. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. I am specifically quoting Thomas Tryon, whose treatise I look at in greater detail later in this chapter. Thomas Tryon, The Good Housewife Made a Doctor (London, 1692). 12. In a handy glossary that accompanies Mary Anne Canton and Joan Thirsk’s Fooles and Fricassees, a “simple” is described as “a medicinal preparation composed or concocted of only one ingredient, especially of one herb or plant; also, a plant or herb employed for medicinal purposes.” See Mary Anne Canton and Joan Thirsk, eds., Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare’s England (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 126. 13. Kim F. Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 170. 14. Ibid. 15. Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 5. The English Housewife first appeared as a part of a gentlemen’s recreational guide called Countrey Contentments, which was devoted to a discussion of pastimes like riding, hunting, hawking, bowling, tennis, etc. For a detailed account of Markham’s life and literary career, see Best’s introduction.

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16. Ibid., 5–7. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Ibid., 8. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 7. 21. Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 34–35. 22. Markham, The English Housewife, 8. 23. Ibid., 25. 24. Ibid., 58. 25. Ibid., 20, 31. 26. Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces,” 182. 27. For a detailed account of Tryon’s literary career, see Virginia Smith, “Tryon, Thomas (1634–1703),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www. oxforddnb.com. 28. Tryon, The good housewife made a doctor, 104. 29. Ibid., 103. 30. Ibid., 103–4. 31. Kim F. Hall, “‘Extravagant Viciousness’: Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon,” in Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, ed. Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 96. 32. Ibid., 98. 33. Tryon, The good housewife made a doctor, 102–3. 34. Canton and Thirsk, Fooles and Fricassees, 109. 35. See excerpt from The Ladies Dispensatory in Jean Miller, Francie Owens, and Rachel Doggett, eds., The Housewife’s Rich Cabinet: Remedies, Recipes, & Helpful Hints (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1997), 94–95. 36. Hannah Wolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (London, 1675). It is possible that this recipe was specifically aimed at women who might want to induce an abortion by “bringing on the terms.” Miller, Owens, and Doggett have noted that abortion recipes were “surprisingly common” in these domestic manuals but were never identified as such. See The Housewife’s Rich Cabinet, 88. 37. Wolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 70. 38. Ibid., 143. 39. Ibid., 175, 199, 22. 40. Ibid., 164. 41. I am drawing here on a discussion of the housewife’s chores from Wendy Wall’s chapter on “Familiarity and Pleasure in the English Household Guide, 1500–1700,” in Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19–20. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142. 42. Wall, Staging Domesticity, 5. 43. Ibid., 7.

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44. Wall argues that even early modern women of high rank attended to these domestic chores. She cites the example of Lady Margaret Hoby, whose diary indicates that she was frequently “busie about some Huswiffrie” (Staging Domesticity, 21). This “Huswiffrie” included “distilling aqua vitae, pulling hemp, preserving quinces, overseeing candle-making, making sweetmeats, gardening, dying fabrics, mending linens, keeping accounts, dressing meat, performing surgery, designing buildings, and administering purgatives” (21). Likewise, Wall notes, the records of Lady Ann Clifford, Maria Thynne, and Elinor Fettiplace suggest that ladies of high station were involved in household tasks that ranged from preparing plague waters to fattening chickens to whipping up pancakes. 45. Hannah Wolley, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, A guide to the female sex containing directions of behaviour, in all places, companies, relations, and conditions, from their childhood down to old age (London, 1673), 165. 46. Ibid. 47. John Considine, “Wolley, Hannah (b. 1622?, d. in or after 1674),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com. Considine claims that Wolley was one of the earliest Englishwomen to make an income (albeit an uncertain one) through her writing. For a detailed account of Wolley’s career as a writer, see ibid. 48. Hannah Wolley, The Queen-like Closet, or Rich Cabinet: Stored with Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (London, 1675). 49. Marjorie Swann, “The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 449–73. 50. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Hereafter cited in text. 51. Swann, “The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature,” 455. 52. While there is no direct evidence to suggest that Shakespeare had read contemporary accounts of the English travelers to India, it is likely that he was familiar with the voyages of figures like Ralph Fitch, among the earliest Englishmen in India. Fitch left for India in 1583 on a vessel called the Tyger, returning to England in 1591. Several critics have argued that Shakespeare makes a reference to this voyage in act 1.3 of Macbeth, in the line “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, Master o’ the Tyger.” Other references to England’s early ventures in the Indies abound in the Shakespearean corpus, suggesting that the dramatist was familiar with Richard Hakluyt’s accounts of English and European adventures in the East. For a summary of Shakespearean references to India, see R. C. Prasad’s Early English Travellers in India: A Study of the Travel Literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Periods with Particular Reference to India (Patna: Motilal Banarasi Dass, 1965). 53. Margo Hendricks, “‘Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 37–60. Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 242. 54. Raman, Framing “India,” 244. 55. Louis Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations, no. 2 (1983): 72.

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56. Ibid., 71. 57. See Wall, Staging Domesticity, 110. 58. Hendricks, “‘Obscured by dreams,’” 55. 59. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 142. 60. Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue (London, 1622), B1v. Subsequent citations are in text. 61. Holly Dugan suggests that this practice dates back to the staging of medieval English mummings, pageants, and play cycles: “The godly scent of heaven or paradise in key scenes of Corpus Christi cycles . . . often included assignments to the spicers and grocers guilds, revealing the ways in which scent participated in enacting the divine splendor through more earthly industries” (232). Holly Dugan, “Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 229–52. 62. Ania Loomba. “Introduction to the The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue,” in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1714. 63. Ibid., 1715. 64. Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 171. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 172. 67. Ibid., 177. 68. I have drawn much of this information from David M. Bergeron’s description of the Lord Mayor’s Show in English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), as well as Burton’s discussion in Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 69. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 3. 70. Burton, Traffic and Turning, 169. 71. This practice was fairly commonplace in Jacobean era pageants. See Burton, Traffic and Turning, 169–76. Burton notes that guild charges frequently included fruits, sugar, and spices that were cast into the crowd, 170. 72. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 87. 73. Ibid., 88. 74. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 114. 75. Baron Heath, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London (London, 1869). 76. Jean Bellamy, “The Worshipful Company of Grocers,” TimeTravel-Britain. com, 2006, http://www.timetravel-britain.com. 2. Sugar

1. Audie Cornish, “Artist Kara Walker Draws Us into Bitter History with Something Sweet,” National Public Radio, May 16, 2014, http://www.npr.org. 2. Kara Walker, A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, May 10–July 6, 2014, Brooklyn, Domino Sugar Factory.

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3. See “subtlety, n.,” OED Online, December 2016, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com. 4. Cornish, “Artist Kara Walker Draws Us into Bitter History.” 5. Valérie Loichot, “Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” Southern Spaces, July 8, 2014, https://southernspaces.org. 6. “Creative Time Presents Kara Walker’s A Subtlety,” Creative Time, http:// creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/. 7. Ibid. 8. Loichot, “Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar.” 9. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 8, 1. 10. Cornish, “Artist Kara Walker Draws Us into Bitter History.” 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Amy Pitt, “Domino Sugar Refinery Site Looks Like a Candy-Colored Ziggurat,” Curbed New York, February 3, 2017, http://ny.curbed.com. 14. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), 155. 15. See Miriam Jacobson’s discussion of Meres in Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 55. 16. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28. 17. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 155. 18. Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 112. 19. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 90. 20. Ibid., 90–91. 21. Lynette Hunter, “‘Sweet Secrets’ from Occasional Recipe to Specialized Books: The Growth of a Genre,” in Banquetting Stuffe: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet, ed. C. Anne Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 40. 22. For a more detailed discussion of the early modern closet as a space where the erotic and the sacred mingle, see Richard M. Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 23. Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations, no. 50 (1995): 77. 24. Ibid. 25. Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 24. 26. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 33. 27. See Jeffrey Masten, “‘Sweet Persuasion,’ the Taste of Letters, and Male Friendship,” in Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 69–105. 28. John Partridge’s Treasurie of Commodius Conceits and Hidden Secrets (London, 1591), n.p.

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29. Ibid., 6. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Ibid., chaps. 7, 8. 32. Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories (London 1602). 33. Ibid., A3v. 34. See Nicholas Eastaugh’s Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments (Amsterdam: Buttleworth-Heinemann, 2008), 137. 35. Kim F. Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168. 36. Plat, Delightes for Ladies, A3v–A3r. 37. Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” 28. 38. Elizabeth Spiller, “Introductory Note,” in Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirugery in the Works of W. M. and Queen Henrietta Maria, and of Mary Tillinghast, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), xvi. 39. Plat, Delightes for Ladies, Recipe 10. 40. Ibid., Recipe 12. 41. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 93. 42. Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery (London, 1660). 43. Ibid. 44. Hannah Wolley, The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet: Stored with Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (London, 1670), title page. 45. Ibid., 378–79. 46. Hannah Wolley, A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (London, 1674), A6. 47. Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet, 2, 5. 48. Ibid., 7. 49. Ibid., 64, 79, 86. 50. Ibid., 75. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 12–13. The unicorn appears in a previous edition, but is curiously missing in this later edition. 53. Ibid., 75. 54. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Islands of Barbados, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 58. Hereafter cited in text. 55. Thomas Tryon, The good housewife made a doctor, or, Health’s choice and sure friend: being a plain way of nature’s own prescribing to prevent [and] cure most diseases incident to men, women, and children, by diet and kitchin-physick only (London, 1680), 104. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 106. 58. See Virginia Smith, “Tryon, Thomas (1634–1703),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.

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59. See ibid. 60. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 64. 61. Ibid., quoting Tryon, 67. 62. Daniel Carey, “The Metaphysics of Travel: Sugar, Slavery, and Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Seuils et Traverses 2 (2002): 130. 63. Thomas Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentleman Planters of the East and West Indies (London, 1684), 77. Hereafter cited in text. 64. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Hereafter cited in text. 65. Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24. 66. Laura Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” in Early Women Writers: 1600–1720, ed. Anita Pacheco (London: Routledge, 1998), 206. 67. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 76. 68. Cynthia Richards, “Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 648. 69. Ibid. 70. Behn, Oroonoko, 61–62. 71. Valerie Forman, “Early Modern ‘Neoliberalisms’: England and the English Caribbean,” Modern Language Quarterly 72, no. 3 (September 2011): 358. 72. Susan B. Iwanisziw, “Behn’s Novel Investment in Oroonoko: Kingship, Slavery, and Tobacco in English Colonialism,” South Atlantic Review 63, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 75. 73. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48. 3. Coffee

1. “Macbeth Recipes,” Pinterest, http://www.pinterest.com/jtoothman52/mac beth-recipes/. 2. “Shakespeare King Lear Old Ale,” Rate Beer, http://www.ratebeer.com. 3. “Coriolanus,” Adagio Teas, http://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/blend. html?blend=64841. 4. “Othello” Adagio Teas, http://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/blend.html? blend=57171. 5. “Bean to Bar Chocolate,” Ghost Lite Coffee, http://ghostlightcoffee.com/ menu/bean-to-bar-chocolates-special-treats/ (this product is no longer available). 6. I am grateful to my former graduate student Nancy Moss for locating this information from the barista at Café Venetia. 7. “Othellolagkage—Othello Layered Cake,” My Danish Kitchen, http://my danishkitchen.com. 8. Kim F. Hall, Othello: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2007), 30. 9. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999), 21.

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10. Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretative Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 2. 11. Douglas M. Lanier, “Marketing Shakespeare,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 501. 12. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Hereafter cited in text. 13. These references are from Ned Ward, The London Spy (London, 1703), The City-Wifes Petition against Coffee (London, 1700), A Satyr against Coffee (London, 1674), respectively. 14. A Broadside against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk, in The Touchstone or, Trial of Tobocco (London, 1672), 58–60. 15. Kasey Evans, Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 184. 16. Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 91. 17. Ibid. 18. Christopher Pye, “‘To Throw our eyes out for brave Othello’: Shakespeare and Aesthetic Ideology,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 434. 19. Ibid. 20. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115. 21. Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender,’” 92. 22. Peter Womack, “The Writing of Travel,” in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 2 vols., ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 1:528. 23. Pye, “‘To Throw our eyes out for brave Othello,’” 433. 24. Ibid., 432. 25. Ibid., 435. 26. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 238. 27. Ibid. 28. Ben Saunders, “Iago’s Clyster: Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 148. 29. Michael Schoenfeldt, “Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 244. 30. Ibid. 31. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London 1640), 185–86. 32. Saunders, “Iago’s Clyster,” 153. 33. Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man, 186. 34. See The Norton Shakespeare, 428 n2. 35. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 71.

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36. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27. 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Saunders, “Iago’s Clyster,” 157. 39. R. S. Edgecombe, “Othello: Some Proposed Emendations and an Explication,” Cahiers Elisabethains 74 (2008): 40. 40. Ibid. 41. Thomas Tryon, The good housewife made a doctor, or, Health’s choice and sure friend: being a plain way of nature’s own prescribing to prevent [and] cure most diseases incident to men, women, and children, by diet and kitchin-physick only (London, 1680), 102. 42. Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 78. 43. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 19. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (New York: The Tea & Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1976). 46. For a detailed analysis of the image, see Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 41. 47. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 115. 48. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115. 49. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, 116. 50. Matar, Islam in Britain, 115. 51. Ibid., 116. 52. Quoted in Matar, Islam in Britain, 113. 53. Matar, Islam in Britain, 113. 54. A Cup of Coffee: Or, Coffee in its Colours (London, 1663). 55. Ibid. 56. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 38–39. 57. Matar, Islam in Britain, 111–12. 58. “As Slaves they submit to the Customes even of Turky and India,” wrote M.P., the otherwise unidentifiable author of A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London, 1661), 1. 59. Ibid., 2. 60. Qtd. in Matar, Islam in Britain, 112. 61. John Crouch, The Maidens Complain against Coffee. Or the Cofee-House Discovered (London, 1663), 8. 62. A Broadside against Coffee, 58. 63. Ibid., 59. 64. Ibid. 65. Evans, Colonial Virtue, 184. 66. A Broadside against Coffee, 59. 67. Evans, Colonial Virtue, 185. 68. A Broadside against Coffee, 59–60. 69. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

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70. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 4. Bizarre Foods

1. See Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Travel Channel, http://www.travel channel.com/shows/bizarre-foods. 2. See chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion. 3. See chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion. 4. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 6. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3–4. 7. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 8. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. 9. Ibid. 10. Showkat Shafi, “In Pictures: The ‘Rat Eaters’ of India,” Al Jazeera, May 1, 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com. 11. Jacqueline Trescott, “A Place of Honor for Slaves’ Survival Food,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003, http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-25-et-tre scott25-story.html. 12. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 335. 13. Ibid. 14. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 87. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 92. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll, eds., Disgust in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4. 20. A section of Blount’s essay is excerpted in Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 79–84. All subsequent page numbers are cited in text. 21. Ibid., 76. 22. Ibid., 77. 23. Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Trauailes, into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honorourable (London: Humphrey Lownes for Mathew Lownes, 1606). 24. Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, accessed on YouTube TV, https:// tv.youtube.com/browse/bizarre-foods-UCW5NcsMqPa6CccApTsIUn9w. 25. The term is used by J. M. Coetzee in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 15. 26. See Nicholas Withington’s travelogue in Major R. Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1967), 60. 27. Christopher Fryke, A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made into the East-Indies (London, 1700), 211–12.

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28. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 29. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 78. 30. Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 135. 31. Coetzee, White Writing, 16. 32. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 135. 33. Quoted in Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, 135–36. 34. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 71. 35. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 2. 36. Coetzee, White Writing, 13. 37. Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999), 1. 38. With the exception of Fryke, all the travelers to the Cape cited here are from excerpts printed in Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck. Page numbers are cited in text. 39. Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 198. 40. George Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 82n34. 41. Ibid., 42. 42. For an influential essay on the figure of the Hottentot Venus, see Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference,” ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., special issue, Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 204–42. 43. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 86. 44. For an excellent discussion of this etching and other visual depictions of the Hottentots, see Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 84–86. 45. I have drawn much of this information from Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 91. 46. Quoted in Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 92. 47. Ibid. 48. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. 49. Coetzee, White Writing, 2. 50. See Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 16–20. 51. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 109. 52. A section of Sandys’s essay is excerpted in Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 23–24. 53. See Daniel Vitkus’s essay “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 35–52. 54. See Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 25. 55. Ibid. 56. Quoted in Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk,” 47. 57. William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 311.

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58. See R. C. Prasad, Early English Travellers in India: A Study of the Travel Literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Periods with Particular Reference to India (Patna: Motilal Banarsi Dass, 1965), 301. 59. A section of Montagu’s essay is excerpted in Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 97–109; quotation on 104. 60. Ibid. 61. Jonathan Gil Harris, “Part V: The Siddha Vaidya of Madras,” Hindustan Times, December 10, 2011, http://www.hindustantimes.com. 62. Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India, 1653–1708, trans. William Irvine, 4 vols. (London: Government of India, 1907), 1:62–63. 63. Eschenbaum and Correll, Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, 4. 64. Manucci, Storia do Mogor, 2:39. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 2:40–41. 67. Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 204. 68. Quoted in William Ian Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1. 69. William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990), 4. 70. Ibid., 76. 71. Ibid., 76–77. 72. Ibid., 77. 73. See Ania Loomba, “Of Gifts, Ambassadors and Copy-Cats: Diplomacy, Exchange, and Difference in Early Modern India,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, ed. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 41–77. 74. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 67. 75. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 205. 76. Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 152. 77. Ibid., 212. 5. Cannibal Foods

1. Joseph Stromberg, “Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism,” Smithsonian.com, April 30, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com. 2. Ibid. 3. Martha McCartney, “The Starving Time,” Encyclopedia Virginia, https:// www.encyclopediavirginia.org. 4. For a detailed discussion of the resonances of the term, see Frances Dolan’s True Relations: Reading Evidence and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 5. Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 248. 6. William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 9. 7. Ibid., 9–10, 18.

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8. Peter Hulme, “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8. 9. William Arens, “Rethinking Anthropophagy,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41. 10. Ibid. Arens is here citing from his earlier argument in The Man-Eating Myth. 11. Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 17. 12. Ibid. 13. Claude Rawson, “Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question,” Social Research 66, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 168. 14. Ibid., 169. 15. Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Rachel B. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 ( January 2011): 49. 19. All quotations are from George Percy, “‘This starveing Tyme’; an excerpt from ‘A Trewe Relacyon of the procedeings and ocurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia,’” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org. 20. Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, 263. 21. All quotations are from John Smith, “‘Of such a dish as powdered wife’; an excerpt from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624),” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org. 22. Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, 263. 23. All quotations are from “A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, With a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise. Published by advise and direction of the Councell of Virginia. London, Printed for William Barret, and are to be sold at the blacke Beare in Pauls Church-yard. 1610,” Virtual Jamestown, http://www.virtualjamestown.org. 24. See my discussion of Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts in the introduction. 25. See Crystal Bartolovich’s essay, “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204. 26. For a detailed comparison of the two plays, see Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 27. See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage: Plays and Playwrights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:413. 28. Ibid., 414. 29. Zachary Lesser, “Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy,” ELH 74, no. 4 (2007): 895. 30. Roland Greene, “Island Logic,” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 138–45.

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31. Ibid., 140. 32. Ibid. 33. Jacqueline E. M. Latham, “The Magic Banquet in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 215. 34. Quoted in Latham, “The Magic Banquet in The Tempest,” 215. 35. Denise Gigante, “Good Food, Good Taste, and the Gastronome,” in Food and Literature, ed. Gitanjali G. Shahani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 101. 36. Ibid., 100. 37. Ibid., 101. 38. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Hereafter cited in text. 39. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000), 31. 40. All quotations for The Sea Voyage are from Anthony Parr, ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Act, scene, and line numbers cited in text. 41. Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6. 42. Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, 24. 43. See McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher, 197–256. 44. In Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper, 1997), 8. 45. Ibid. 46. Thomas Mun, A discourse of trade, from England unto the East-Indies answering to diverse objections which are usually made against the same. By T.M. (London, 1621), 25. 47. K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early JointStock Company, 1600–1640 (New York: August Kelley, 1965), 8. 48. Mun, A discourse of trade, 3, 5. 49. Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions, 3–4. 50. For a more detailed discussion of the historical implications of this debate, see Lesser, “Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial,” 886; and Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions, 4. 51. Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, 155. 52. Jean Feerick, “‘Divided in Soyle’: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 46. 53. Ibid., 47. Coda

1. Jenny Percival, “Lebanon to Sue Israel for Marketing Hummus as Its Own,” The Guardian, October 7, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com. 2. Carolina Moreno, “Here’s Why Trump’s ‘Bad Hombres’ Comment Was So Offensive,” Huffpost, October 20, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com. 3. Alexander Silver, “French Fries to ‘Freedom’ Fries,” Time, March 28, 2011, http://time.com.

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4. On the rise of cow vigilantism, see Barkha Dutt’s “Rise of Gau Rakshaks: Don’t Hide Behind Euphemisms, This Is Murder,” Hindustan Times, July 16, 2017, http:// www.hindustantimes.com. 5. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 1–24. 6. Michael Pollan, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” http://michael pollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/.

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Index

abortion recipes, 172n36 Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, The (Wolley), 37, 38 Africanus, Leo, 84, 86, 112 Ahmed, Sara, 110–11 Ahmet I, Sultan, 126–27 Albala, Ken, 19, 22 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 165 Appelbaum, Robert, 22, 137, 141, 144 Arens, William, 137–38, 139, 162 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14–15 banquets, 60, 66–67, 148–49 Barbados, 69–71, 72 Barry, Madame du, 95–96 Barthes, Roland, 8, 57–58, 66 Beaulieu, Augustin de, 122 Behn, Aphra, 58–59, 76–79 Berlu, John Jacob, 10 Best, Thomas, 122 Bizarre Foods, 114, 166 bizarre foods, 107–15 defined, 107 and disgust in travelogues on Cape of Good Hope, 115–26, 132 and disgust in travelogues on Mughal and Ottoman empires, 126–34 See also disgust blackamoor, 94–97 black Indian queen, in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 46–51 blackness of coffee, 101 as cosmetic practice, 49–50 of Othello, 87, 90 of Sambo in Tryon’s Friendly Advice, 74 Blount, Henry, 112–13 Blurton, Heather, 139 body, governing, 92 Bourdain, Anthony, 114, 166 Brazil, travelogue on, 125–26 Bright, Timothie, 15, 31–32

Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme, 2 Broadside against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk, The, 82–83, 94, 101–3 Brown, Laura, 76 Bulwer, John, 49–50 Burton, Jonathan, 23, 47, 48 Butler, Judith, 111 cabinet, 39–40, 62, 68. See also closet cannibalism among Hottentots, 121, 122 among Jamestown settlers, 135–36, 140, 141–47 and anxiety of encounter, 138–39 communion and, 19 depictions of, 136–37 etymology of, 138 literary representation of, 139 skepticism in scholarship on, 137–38, 140 sugar and implicit, 20, 57, 70–71, 73–74, 75–76 in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage, 147–62 Canton, Mary Anne, 171n12 Cape of Good Hope, travelogue on, 115–26, 132 Carey, Daniel, 72–73 castration, 120 Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses, A (Anonymous), 100 Chaudhuri, K. N., 154 Clark, Steve, 119 clichés, about food, 109 closet, 39, 61–63, 171n4. See also cabinet Coetzee, J. M., 116, 118, 125 coffee associations between Jews and, 97–99 associations between Turks and, 97, 100 The Broadside against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk, 82–83, 94, 101–3

197

198

INDEX

coffee (continued) A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses, 100 and consumability of Othello, 82–84 A Cup of Coffee, 99 in European social life, 94–97 The Maidens Complain against Coffee, 100–101 Othello and anti-coffee propaganda, 94 and Protestant ethic, 100 trajectory of, 6 tropes of conversion in narrative of, 94–106 coffeehouses A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses, 100 Habermas on, in Great Britain, 24–25, 62 Jews as supervisors of, 99 names of, 97 Collines, 142, 146–47, 156, 157 Collingham, Lizzie, 4 colonial economy, 151–56, 159, 161 colonialism cannibal, 146 scholarship on, 23 See also Jamestown; spices; sugar Columbus, Christopher, 152–53 commerce and colonial economy, 151–56, 159, 161 in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 46–51 in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 40–46 communion, 19 Company of Grocers, 46, 51 Company of Merchants of the Levant, 170n2 Considine, John, 173n47 consumption conspicuous, 60 excess and indiscriminate, 92–93 contact zone culinary, 13–24, 107–8 disgust as, 111 food as object of disgust in, 118 contempt-disgust, 117, 118, 127, 130 Cook, Robin, 4 cookbooks, 37–40, 58, 60–61, 64, 171nn3–4. See also receipt(s) Copjec, Joan, 138 Cornish, Audie, 54 cosmetics, 37, 49–50, 65, 66, 68–69 Countrey Contentments, 171n15 Cowan, Brian, 97

Creuse, Auguste de, 95–96 Cup of Coffee, A (Anonymous), 99 curry houses, postwar rise of, 4 Darwin, Charles, 117, 132 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 133 de Houtman, Cornelis, 119 de Lery, Jean, 125–26 Delightes for Ladies (Plat), 64–67 Derrida, Jacques, 17–18, 19, 80, 85–86 digestion as act of self-fashioning, 88 in A Cup of Coffee, 99–100 language of, in Othello, 88–92, 99–100 and negotiation of boundaries, 17 “Discourse of the Cape” (Fryke), 115–19, 126, 132 discrimination, stomach as site of ethical, 17, 88 disgust contempt-disgust, 117, 118, 127, 130 etymology of, 111–12, 130 and inherently disgusting objects, 110–11 as performance, 111, 112 reframing of, 166 in travelogues on Cape of Good Hope, 115–26, 132 in travelogues on Mughal and Ottoman empires, 126–34 of travelogue subjects, 132 as “ugliest of ‘ugly feelings’ ”, 110 dishes, sugar paste formed into, 63–64 Doggett, Rachel, 172n36 domestic manuals, 39, 40, 50, 58, 171n4, 172n36 Domino Sugar Factory, 52, 55–56 Douglas, Mary, 118 Downton, Nicholas, 121–22 Dryden, John, 147 Dufour, Sylvestre, 97, 98f Dugan, Holly, 174n61 dupiyazah, 128 Durer, Albert, 69, 70 dye, invocation of, in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 49–50 East India Company, 154–55, 170n2 East Indies, 25–26, 29, 34–36, 39, 42, 51, 170n2, 173n52 eating right, 19–20 “eating well,” 17–19 English Housewife, The (Markham), 33–35, 36–37, 171n15

INDEX ethical discrimination, stomach as site of, 17, 88 Evans, Kasey, 83, 104 excrement and disgust in Cape of Good Hope travelogues, 108, 117–18, 120 and food and waste trope in A Cup of Coffee, 99–100 and language of appetite in Othello, 90–91, 92 Reynolds on, 88, 89 fairy literature, 40–41 Feerick, Jean, 158, 161 finanscapes, 165 Fitch, Ralph, 173n52 Fitzpatrick, Joan, 22 Fletcher, John. See Sea Voyage, The (Fletcher and Massinger) Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 16 food Barthes on gathering information about, 8 clichés about, 109 identity as constituted and knowable through foodways, 2 as means of rendering difference more manageable, 3–4 media interest in, 165 as other, 16–17 in present global context, 163–66 See also bizarre foods; coffee; disgust; spices; sugar Forman, Valerie, 78, 151, 155 Freedman, Paul, 30 Friendly Advice to Gentleman Planters of the East and West Indies (Tryon), 71–76 Fryke, Christopher, 115–19, 126 Fuller, Thomas, 12 Fumerton, Patricia, 60 Gates, Thomas, 144–46 Generall Historie of Virginia, The (Smith), 143–44, 146 Gentlewomans Companion, The (Wolley), 38–39 Genussmittel, 1, 94 geohumoralism, 16 Gigante, Denise, 20–21, 149 Gillies, John, 91 globalization, 163–65 gold, and colonial economy, 152–56, 159 Goldstein, David, 19

199

Good House-wife Made a Doctor, The (Tryon), 35–37, 71 Goodness Gracious Me, 4–5 Goody, Jack, 9 Great Britain coffeehouses in, 24–25, 62 consumption of Indian food in, 4–5 Greenblatt, Stephen, 87, 125, 126 Greene, Roland, 147–48 Grey, Lady Elizabeth, 10, 12 Habermas, Jürgen, 24, 62 Hakluyt, Richard, 173n52 Hall, Kim, 23, 32, 33, 34, 35, 49, 81 Hall, Stuart, 1, 79 Hancock, John, 101 harangue, 75–76, 78 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 129 Hendricks, Margo, 42, 45 Herbert, Thomas, 123, 124f Herman, Rachel B., 140 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (de Lery), 125–26 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 173n44 home, as empirical space and conceptual frame, 24–25 honey imagery, 56 hooks, bell, 3, 70, 81 Hottentots, 115–25, 132 Hulme, Peter, 137–38 hunger depictions of, 136–37 hunger topos in Virginia Council accounts of Jamestown cannibalism, 141–47 taste of, 136, 140 Hunter, Lynette, 60 Husain, Mir Jamal-uddin, 133 identity, as constituted and knowable through foodways, 2 ideoscapes, 165 immigration food and acceptance of, 3–4 Hall’s food metaphor for, 1 and 2016 U.S. presidential election, 3 India global food culture in, 164 invoked in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 40–46 Indian boy, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 31, 42–46 Indian queen, in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 46–51

200

INDEX

indigestion, racial, 54, 57, 58–59, 70–72 Iwanisziw, Susan B., 79 Jahangir, Emperor, 132–33 Jamestown cannibalism in, 135–36, 140 and cannibalism in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage, 147–62 hunger topos and cannibal scenes in Virginia Council accounts of, 141–47 jealousy, and language of appetite in Othello, 90 Jews, associations between coffee and, 97–99 Jonson, Ben, 47 Jourdain, John, 120–21 Kamps, Ivo, 108 Kant, Immanuel, 110 Kermode, Frank, 148 Kilgour, Maggie, 16, 17, 20 King, Henry, 113 Kolb, Peter, 123–25 Korda, Natasha, 33–34 Kristeva, Julia, 91, 117–18 Lanier, Douglas, 81 Latham, Jacqueline E. M., 148 Lesser, Zachary, 147, 151 Ligon, Richard, 69–71 Lohman, Sarah, 3–4 Loichot, Valérie, 23, 53 Longe, Sarah, 37 Loomba, Ania, 47, 51, 126 Lord Mayor’s Show, 48. See also Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, The (Middleton) Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare), 59–60 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 8–10 madhu, 59 Maidens Complain against Coffee, The, 100–101 Mandeville, John, 84, 86 Man-Eating Myth, The (Arens), 137–38 Mannur, Anita, 5 Manucci, Niccolao, 129–31 Markham, Gervase, 33–35, 36–37, 171n15 masculinity, and language of appetite in Othello, 90 Masque of Blackness ( Jonson), 47 Massinger, Philip. See Sea Voyage, The (Fletcher and Massinger) Masten, Jeffrey, 62 Matar, Nabil, 97, 99, 100

May, Robert, 67 mayoral pageants, 46–51 McMullan, Gordon, 152 mediascapes, 165 medical receipts, seventeenth-century, 10–12 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 74 Meres, Francis, 56 Middleton, Thomas, 46–51, 144 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 21, 40–46 Miller, Jean, 172n36 Milton, John, 20–21 Mintz, Sidney, 56, 59, 60 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 128–29 Montrose, Louis, 43–44 Moor’s Last Sigh, The (Rushdie), 29 Mughals, 129–34, 164 mummies/mumia, 10–12, 13 Mun, Thomas, 154–55 Munday, Anthony, 47 Musahars, 109–10 Ngai, Sianne, 108, 110 Noble, Louise, 11, 19 No Reservation, 166 nutritional guides, 19 Oroonoko (Behn), 58–59, 76–79 Othello (Shakespeare) Africanus’s travel history in, 112 characters in gastronomic framework of, 88–94 consumability of, 82–88 “devouring discourse” of, 21, 84, 87, 88–94 foods related to, 80–81 in popular culture, 81–82 tropes of conversion in, 94–106 violence in Tryon’s Friendly Advice and, 73 other/otherness anxieties about incorporation of, 97–101 commodification of, 81 as edible, 12–13, 76, 91, 105 food and acceptance of, 3–4, 16–17 ingesting/consumption of, 17, 19–20, 81, 86, 91, 94–95, 105 Ottoman Empire, 126–29 Owens, Francie, 172n36 Owsley, Douglas, 135–36 paan, 129–30 Paradise Lost (Milton), 20–21

INDEX Parker, Patricia, 84, 85 Parr, Anthony, 152 Partridge, John, 61, 63–64 Parts Unknown, 114 Paster, Gail, 16, 45 Pechter, Edward, 81 pepper, 29, 34, 37–38 Pepys, Samuel, 147 Percy, George, 141–44, 146 performativity, disgust and, 111, 112 Plat, Hugh, 64–67 Pleji, Herman, 141 poison, foreign foods as, 93–94, 109 Pollan, Michael, 166 polluting objects, 91, 117–18, 132 Pompadour, Madame de, 95 Pratt, Mary Louise, 13, 108, 109, 116 Probyn, Elspeth, 109, 110 Protestant ethic, coffee and, 100 Pryse, Hugh, 142–43 public sphere, birth of, 25 Purchas, Samuel, 10–11, 120 Pye, Christopher, 85, 86–87 Queen-Like Closet, The (Wolley), 12, 39–40, 61, 68–69 queer theory, 61 Rabelais, François, 14–15 racial indigestion, 54, 57, 58–59, 70–72 Raman, Shankar, 42, 43 Rawson, Claude, 138–39 Receipt Book (Longe), 37 receipt(s) cookbooks, 37–40, 58, 60–61, 64, 171nn3–4 defined, 9, 171n3 to induce abortion, 172n36 recipe closet, 61–63, 171n4 scholarship on, collections, 22 seventeenth-century medical, 10–12 sugar in, 58, 60–61, 63–69 of witches in Macbeth, 8–10 women’s collections of, 37–40, 171n4 Reynolds, Edward, 88, 89, 100 Richards, Cynthia, 77 Roe, Sir Thomas, 132–34 Ross, Alexander, 100 Roy, Parama, 14 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 29 Said, Edward, 105, 133 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 138 Sanderson, George, 11–12

201

Sandiford, Keith A., 76 Sandys, George, 126–27 Saunders, Ben, 88–89 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 94–95, 100 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 17, 88, 89 Sea Voyage, The (Fletcher and Massinger), 136–37, 147, 151–62 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 61 sexuality and generation in The Island Voyage, 158–61 of Hottentots, 120 of Mughals, 128 of Ottomans, 127 Shakespeare, William brand names inspired by, 81–82 familiarity with English voyagers, 173n52 food and appetite in corpus of, 21–22 Love’s Labours Lost, 59–60 Macbeth, 8–10 Merchant of Venice, 74 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 21, 40–46 The Tempest, 145, 147, 148–51 See also Othello (Shakespeare) “simple,” 32, 39, 44, 171n12 Singh, Jyotsna, 5, 108, 119 slavery and implicit cannibalism, 20, 57, 70–71, 73–74, 75–76 invoked in Walker’s A Subtlety, 52–56, 57 sugar and, 69–79 Smith, John, 143–44, 146 Smithsonian National Museum, 135–36 spices allure and popularity of, 30 gendering of, 32–33 in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 46–51 in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, 29 in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 40–46 as threat to English bodies, 31–32, 35–36 trajectory of, 6 used as medicine, 31–32, 34, 37, 38, 50 women and incorporation of, into English cuisine, 33–40 Spiller, Elizabeth, 66 Spurgeon, Caroline, 21 Starving Time, 28, 136–41, 144, 146–47, 162. See also cannibalism Steinmetz, George, 120, 122 Stewart, Alan, 61 Storia do Mogor (Manucci), 129–30

202

INDEX

Strachey, William, 145 Stuart, Tristram, 72 Subtlety, A (Walker), 52–56, 57 sugar affective life of, 56 and banquets, 60, 66–67 Barthes on consumption of, 57–58 and Behn’s Oroonoko, 76–79 darker associations with, 57 in English rituals of consumption, 58 fashioned into shapes, 63–68 gendering of, 32 imagery in written usage and everyday talk, 56 and implicit cannibalism, 20 and Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 69–71 as luxury, 59–60 in receipts, 60–61, 63–69 and recipe closet, 61–63 and slavery, 69–79 and sweetness, 56–57, 58–59 and Tryon’s Friendly Advice to Gentleman Planters of the East and West Indies, 71–76 used as medicine, 68–69 and Walker’s A Subtlety, 52–56 Sugar Baby (Walker), 52–54, 56, 57 Supplement to the Queen-like Closet, A (Wolley), 68 Sutton, John, 16 Swann, Marjorie, 40–41 sweet, etymology of, 59 sweetness, 56–57, 58–59, 70–79 taste changing principles of, 21–22 as gustatory category, 20–21 of hunger, 136, 140 Tastes of Paradise (Schivelbusch), 94–95 technoscapes, 165 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 145, 147, 148–51 Terry, Edward, 122–23, 128 Thirsk, Joan, 171n12 Thompson, Nato, 53–54 Tierra del Fuego, 132 tobacco, 77, 79, 101, 102f, 116 Todorov, Tzvetan, 152–53 Tomkins, Silvan, 116, 117 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 13, 17, 54, 70–71, 105 torture, 76–79

Traitez nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate: ouvrage également necessaire aux medecins, & à tous ceux qui aiment leur santé (Dufour), 97, 98f travelogues and disgust, 111–12 disgust in, on Cape of Good Hope, 115–26, 132 disgust in, on Mughal and Ottoman empires, 126–34 as genre, 113–14 impact of, 112–13 scholarship on, 108–9 Treasurie of Commodius Conceits and Hidden Secrets (Partridge), 61, 63–64 Trewe Relacyon of the procedeings and ocurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia, A (Percy), 141–44, 146 “Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery, to be used in Festival Times” (May), 67 Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, The (Middleton), 46–51, 144 Triumphs of Re-United Britannia, The (Munday), 47 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Ligon), 69–71 True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, A (Gates), 144–46 Trump, Donald, 3, 164 Tryon, Thomas, 19–20, 34–37, 71–76, 93–94, 108 Tupinamba, 125–26 Turks, associations between coffee and, 97, 100 Two broad-sides against tobacco (Hancock), 101, 102f ugly feelings, 108, 110, 111, 126–34 Ukers, William H., 95 Van Loo, Carl, 95 Van Purmerendt, Cornelis Claesz, 121 Vaughan, Alden T., 150 Vaughan, Virginia, 150 vegetarianism, 72, 166 violence, 71–73, 76–79 Virginia Company, 136, 144. See also Jamestown Vitkus, Daniel, 94, 127 Voyage into the Levant (Blount), 112–13 Walker, Kara, 52–56, 57 Wall, Wendy, 10, 22, 38, 61, 173n44

INDEX wealth, banquets as display of, 60 Webster, John, 12 White Devil, The (Webster), 12 Withington, Nicholas, 122 Wolley, Hannah The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 37, 38 The Gentlewomans Companion, 38–39 as professional writer, 173n47 The Queen-Like Closet, 12, 39–40, 61, 68–69 receipts for sugar work, 67–69 A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet, 68 Womack, Peter, 86 women closet and participation of, in public spheres, 62–63 and gendering of spices, 32–33 Hottentot, 122–23 household tasks of, 173n44 and incorporation of spices into English cuisine, 33–40 involvement in public sphere, 25 in The Island Voyage, 156–61 and literary representations of Indian merchandise, 40–46

203

in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue, 46–51 Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, 64–67 receipt collections of, 37–40, 171n4 and sexual pleasure in Ottoman court, 127 and sugar production, 75 as sweetness in Behn’s Oroonoko, 76–79 travelogues written by, 128–29 Wolley’s A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet, 68 Wolley’s The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 37, 38 Wolley’s The Gentlewomans Companion, 38–39 Wolley’s The Queen-Like Closet, 12, 39–40, 61, 68–69 wonder, 125–26 Wood, Anthony à, 99 world, as empirical space and conceptual frame, 24–25 Zamore, 95–96 Zimmern, Andrew, 107, 114, 166