Spices

I recently had the pleasure of home-made chai tea: Tea with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and fennel seeds. It was delicious, but it was also the first time I'd used cinnamon sticks, and it was pretty obvious it was...tree bark. That got me reading about other spices, and some interesting facts:

• A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark, or vegetative substance primarily used for flavouring, colouring or preserving food.  (Herbs are the leaves.)
• The spice trade was always lucrative, and made many port cities (such as Venice and Alexandria) exceedingly rich.  In the 15th century, the Europeans sought to circumvent the normal land routes, driving the trans-global sailings (and incidentally, the discovery of the New World).
• The Maluku (or "Spice") islands in Indonesia originally accounted for all nutmeg and clove trees in the world.  In Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth their weight in gold.
• So valuable was nutmeg during the 16th century, the Dutch traded their interest in the New World with one of the Spice Islands from the British, to gain a monopoly on nutmeg trees. (The British promptly renamed "New Amsterdam" to "New York.")
• In the 17th century, The French and British both smuggled nutmeg seeds from the Spice Islands to their colonies in Mauritius and Granada and started successful plantations, bringing prices down significantly.
  
• Like most nut tress, the nutmeg fruit consists of a casing (or "rind") which encloses the nutmeg seed.  In addition, the seed has a reddish lave covering, which is mace. (See photo.)
• Cloves are the dried flower buds of an evergreen tree.
  
• Apiaceae is a group of aromatic plants with hollow stems, and includes anise, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander/cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, hemlock, parsley, and parsnip.
• In the UK, coriander refers to the leaves or seeds of Coriandrum sativum. Cilantro is the Spanish word for coriander. However, the US has confused the two, and refers to the leaves as cilantro and the seeds as coriander.  The plant is native to the Near East and southern Europe.
• The ancient Greeks kept ground cumin at the dining table, much like pepper is today
• Caraway "seeds" are actually its fruit.
• Licorice (UK "liquorice")  is the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra plant, which is a legume (related to beans and peas). In the US, only "black licorice" is made from licorice extract; red licorice isn't licorice at all.
• Cinnamon is obtained from the inner bark of several trees. "True cinnamon" is native to Sri Lanka; however, the more common cinnamon is from the cassia tree, also known as "Chinese cinnamon."  Cinnamon bark is one of the few spices that can be consumed directly.
• Allspice is the dried unripe berries of Pimenta dioica, . The English thought it combined the flavour of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
• Chocolate is produced from the fermented seed of the cacao tree, native to Mexico, and has been cultivated since 1100 BC. (Unfortunately the Aztecs didn't know about sugar.)  Today Western Africa produces almost two-thirds of the world's cocoa, with the Ivory Coast growing almost half of it.
• In the 19th century, John Cadbury developed an emulsification process to make solid chocolate, creating the modern chocolate bar.
• Vanilla is derived from an orchid, primarily from Mexica, which the Aztecs also cultivated.
• Saffron is a spice derived from the flower of Crocus sativus. Each crocus bears up to four flowers, and each flower has three stigmas, which are then dried. Today, Iran accounts for 90% of the world production of saffron. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world.
• Coffee is made from the roasted seeds of the Coffea plant. Coffee's energizing effect was probably first discovered in Ethiopia, but coffee cultivation first took place in southern Arabia.  The first evidence of coffee drinking in the 15th century.
• Fenugreek seeds are often used in Indian food, but also for flavoring artificial maple syrup.