FACTORALY - E122 SPICE

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Today, we take spice for granted. There's a whole area of the supermarket dedicated to it. But it hasn't always been that way. Spice was almost priceless only a few hundred years ago and the search for it cost untold lives. This episode delves deep into the spice rack and comes out smelling wonderful! As always, go to the show notes on the blog at factoraly.com for lots more smelly facts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hi, Simon, how are you doing? I'm all right, thank you, good sir. How are you? I'm pretty damned well, thank you very much. Excellent to hear. What's going on? Oh, not a lot, you know, just sitting here in my little cubicle, thought I might. Record an episode of factorily, you know.

Factorily, you say. I do say, yes. Factorily. The ever popular weekly podcast starring me, Simon Wells. Yes, that's right. And you, Bruce Fielding, because I know you don't like saying that bit. Okay, just to make you happy, Simon, and me, Bruce Fielding. Seameless.

And what we do here is we empty our brains of all the excess useless knowledge and trivia and random facts that are rationales. traveling around in there and fill up yours yeah thank you for your service so every week we take a subject this week our random subject chooser chose spices yes it did now i thought i knew enough about spices but apparently i didn't no i've learned an awful lot this week actually so you know regardless of whether or not you folk at home learn anything bruce and i have attained new knowledge from this yes absolutely So let's start with a definition, or at the very least, a disambiguation.

So is this one of the things which is like fruit and nuts and things? Yeah, it's the whole droops and legumes all over again. Go on then. Tell me about spice. So spices are not herbs. Okay. And herbs are not spices, which is good, there's nice and clear. Yes, yes. Generally one's brown and one's green. Right, yeah, that's a really good differentiation.

I came up with that as well. Essentially, the basic difference is that by and large, herbs come from the leaves of plants, whereas spices come from the fruits, the roots, the bark, the flowers of plants. Okay. And therefore, as you say, most herbs are green because they're leafy, and most spices are sort of yellowy, orangey, reddy brown, because they're more barky and rooty and so on.

okay that makes sense generally yeah there are exceptions of course there are there always are the word spice this was the very first thing i learned in in doing all of this um the word spice comes from the old french word espis which comes from the old latin word species oh so spice is related to species the word kind of split and ended up meaning two different things but essentially the the original word species, which means a type or a variety or a kind of something, in Latin, that started to become used to refer to types and varieties of goods and wares. And somehow or other, via French, that kind of slipped into referring to the goods and wares themselves, and specifically it became used to refer to spices. Subsequently, that word, the French espiece, is also

connected to especial and therefore especially and special. It's of a particular variety or kind. It's a special whatever it is. Wow. Isn't that great? Brilliant. That's wonderful. That's the first thing I learned this week. Okay. And now I know it too. There we go. We can go home now. We're done. So what have you got? Bruce, what have you found out about spices? How long have we had them? Where did they come from? Do you know, I didn't look into that at all. I, I imagine. I, I imagine it's something that was used very early on, probably by Neanderthals or something. It's kind of, I don't think it's sort of like a Roman, Greco, Egyptian type thing. I think it's very old.

All of those people did use them, certainly. But it's old. Apparently, the oldest evidence of using a spice that they've found is from 4,000 BC. Wow. Around the Denmark and Germany area. They've sort of found shards of pottery that have the residue of garlic mustard seeds inside. Okay. And I imagine that the earliest uses of spices was probably not for food flavouring.

It was probably for medicine. Do you know what? It's a funny thing. Some of them were used for one. Some were used for the other. Some were used for both. They seem to have sort of developed around the same time. So the spice trade kind of developed throughout India.

and the Middle East, by 2000 BC, it's ancient. And at that point, they were being used for both, for food, flavouring, and for medicinal purposes. I think over the years, you know, the culinary element has vastly overtaken from the medicinal element. Yes, yeah. Although people still do use spices for medicines. Yeah, they do.

I saw one website that boldly claimed there is absolutely no scientific proof whatsoever that any spices have any kind of medicinal properties at all? That's because you're not allowed to claim anything. I used to work for a certain company which made vitamins and minerals and things in gold jars, which you might have seen in your chemist. So I was doing the advertising for them. Right.

And that was really hard because you couldn't claim anything. You couldn't say that it cured anything or helped anything. In some situations, it has been noted that. has a positive effect on or something like that. So the fact that people have been using garlic for centuries to treat sore throats or putting clothes in your mouth to treat toothache or whatever, that's not good enough. We're not doctors. No.

And this isn't medicine. But turmeric is very, apparently, I take turmeric pills. It's very good. It's a very good anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and it may help protect against. So you've got to use the may. and help it may help protect against cancer and immune diseases right then you've got ginger ginger seems to be good for everything and that's been used for years and years and it's to treat all sorts of stuff including including nausea and things like that it's got all sorts of beneficial

compounds and metabolites in it um cinnamon uh it's got um cinemaldehyde which i quite like it sounds like formaldehyde it does doesn't it yes which uh with basically there's there's antioxidant anti-microbial properties in cinnamon, that's cummins got, it's good for disease. I know clothes are very good for toothache. If you have a toothache, you can boil of clothes and that sort of thing.

It's also really good against infectious diseases, bacteria, fungi. Wow. Which is, I mean, all of these things have been attributed with all sorts of stuff. I mentioned the Middle Eastern spice trade there. Yes. You know, they were trading these things throughout the East for millennia upon millennia.

And, you know, before Europe ever sort of got involved with the whole thing. Yes. We were a little bit late to the party. But by the Middle Ages, Europe was, you know, absolutely enthralled with all of these exotic eastern spices, you know, adding flavor and punch to your everyday foods. Yeah. And between the 8th and the 15th centuries, quite a large period of time, apparently Venice had, the monopoly on the spice trade with the Middle East. Pretty much all spice that came in and house of Europe went through Venice.

And there are some ridiculous figures. You know, they were sort of importing a thousand tons of peppercorns into Europe per year via Venice. And this trade kind of was partly responsible for making Venice what it is. You know, it sort of got a lot of its riches from the spice trade. Well, you know this sort of theory about salary and Roman centurions being paid by salt. They weren't paid in salt, but they were paid in peppercorns. Were they really? Yeah.

Oh. Because peppercorns were actually a currency. Huh. So you may have heard in the news lately of peppercorn rent. Oh, yes. Where the rent for a property is like one peppercorn. Yeah. So it's actually a real thing that the peppercorn rent was like you paid one peppercorn.

Although you could actually buy a property. an entire house with cinnamon or nutmeg. Did you? Yes. Oh, that's brilliant. It's weird, isn't it? You sort of, as you say, you've got a spice rack that's full of all sorts of interesting things.

Yes. And we just take them for granted. They're there. You can buy them at your local supermarket. It would be a strange thing to have food that didn't have spice in it, really. Yes. But, you know, you look back only a handful of hundreds of years. Something like vanilla.

You know, we use the word vanilla now to describe something black. and neutral and flavorless. Vanilla was an absolute luxury during the Middle Ages. When you couldn't get hold of a beaver. Yes, exactly. Sierra episode of beavers. You know, pepper, you just mentioned pepper. It's such a basic thing, you know,

it is the most widely sold and distributed spice in the world, apparently. Yes. But, you know, there was a time when that was exotic and exciting and unusual. rich people would have would have like pepper parties pepper parties really yeah that's great oh look I've got this new batch of black peppercorns in yeah yeah obviously to show off their wealth yeah yeah the thing I like about this is like before the sea trade most of this was brought overland yes of course so you had to go through like some

fairly hostile countries to get to the far east to get this stuff and it was a long, long journey with, you know, and you're more than likely to get killed by bandits or various people on the way. Because you're carrying a really valuable item. Yes, absolutely. It's like being mugged for your nutmeg. I hate it when that happens. It happens all the time here in Canada.

So the powers that be, they wanted to find a different way, which didn't go over land. And they had these huge vast navies, and they were getting really, really good at building. ships and they sort of thought well maybe there's another way to to where the spices originate rather than going across all these dangerous hazardous territories yes and the two really big powers at the time were the Spanish and the Portuguese I mean obviously apart from the English apart from ours yes yeah if you think of all the

exploration in the world at that time it's all to do with spice yeah Columbus was looking for a way to the spice he wasn't looking for the Caribbean he thought he could whip round and get and get to the spice island it's all about the the quickest trade routes and things wasn't it yes same thing with megellan he wasn't just going around the world for fun he was actually looking for spice and vasco da gama same thing and all the all these really famous explorers were just out for the spice so let's just talk about one of them Magellan he was Portuguese but he was actually sailing for the Spanish okay which is a bit naughty he but he basically went to the Portuguese

king and said I want to do this and the Portuguese king said you know Vasca da Gama's got a good idea as well and he went okay I'll go to the king of Spain instead so he did he started off and he he thought well if the world is round then I could go either way I could go east or west and still get to the spice islands which is fair enough so he sort of started off around the globe so he thought he'd go west rather than go sort of round Africa which Vasquezana or went around Africa, but Magellan went around South America. After struggling across the Atlantic, he made his way around the South of America and suddenly found himself in this beautiful calm sea, this lovely relaxing ocean

that was not anything like the Atlantic. And thought, oh, this is so peaceful. This is an ocean of peace. We should maybe call this the peace ocean, the Pacific Ocean. So the Pacific is called because Magellan thought it was peaceful. Brilliant. He also thought it wasn't that big. Ah, which explains why most of his crew died of scurvy and malnutrition trying to get across it. Right. But he, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't a great trip. But he did, he did get there eventually. He had, I think he had five ships when he started and they basically all fell by the wayside and some of his crew were killed. Oh, crucky. His crew died of scurvy and God knows what. He did get to the Spice Islands, but he was then

killed by natives. But one ship did make it back. And that ship was loaded with 26 tons of spices. Okay. And deducting the cost of the lost ships and everything else on the trip. And it took three years. You still came back with 26 tons of spices, which made a profit on sale of 500 gold ducats, which is about five million pounds in today's money. Oh my goodness. Wow. Even despite all those losses. Yes. If you write everything else off, he still made five five well he didn't but his expedition made yes he's sponsor the king the king the king was five million pounds wow so yeah very very precious and very much worth risking life and limb and ship for yes and that was in 1497 right okay and the spice islands are actually called the maluku

or the maluccas they're in indonesia the big things from there were sort of nutmeg and mace and canoves as well yeah interestingly nutmeg and come from the same tree. Do they indeed? Yes. Huh. They're different bits of the same tree. So one of them you put in your apple pie

and the other one you squirt in the face of intruders. You mentioned Christopher Columbus. Yes. I've always struggled with the fact that pepper is not related to peppers and vice versa. Right. But peppers get their name from pepper, The second thing I discovered during this research So apparently on one of his voyages

When Christopher Columbus went to the Americas And brought back various bits and bobs He brought back these things that we now know as peppers They had different native names Including Chili's and various other things And Europeans had never seen these things before And he ate them and said Do you know what, that tastes a bit like pepper, the spice

And so the name stuck So peppers are called peppers because they taste a little bit like pepper, which they clearly don't, but still. But I never knew that. And that has troubled me for the vast majority of my life. Why is pepper called pepper when it's not related to pepper? And now you have Christopher Columbus to blame for it.

Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Very good. One of the spices I looked into, purely from an interesting etymological point of view, is saffron. Oh yes, crocuses Crocuses, right So in all of this stuff I keep on

I keep on looking at all these different spices It's really hard to know What they originally look like Where they come from Because they're just ground up powder Yes You know Not quite the same with ginger

But yes No ginger you can understand Because we sort of We can sometimes eat that In a more whole form But you know Cinnamon it's made from the bark of a tree Ground up

Yeah And that just feels really really weird to know that because it's a powder and you sprinkle it in your baking and that's it, you know. Yes. But yes, saffron comes from the stigma of a particular variety of crocus, the sort of orangy-ready spindly thing that is in the centre of the crocus. Right, yes. You have to hand-harvest these things.

You have to hand-pick out the stigma and crush it to produce saffron. It's labour-intensive. You have to grow an awful lot of these flowers to make it work. roughly 150 crocuses produce just one gram of saffron. And therefore... That's why it's so expensive. Yep. Saffron is apparently the most expensive spice in the world, even to this day.

It always has been and always will be. Just ridiculous the expensive because it's so labour intensive. And, you know me, I like knowing where names and words and things come from. And one of my favourite ever etymological facts is about the town of Croydon. Oh, right. Which is not the most salubrious place, one has to say. Used to be an airport there. Did there?

The first London airport was in Croydon. Which isn't in London. But Croydon gets its name from an old Saxon word, well, two words. Croch denieu. Okay. Croc de Niu eventually became Croydon. And that means the valley of crocuses. So when it became apparent that getting your saffron from abroad,

via all these treacherous hazardous routes is blumen expensive we started producing the stuff ourselves crocuses grow quite well in this country and therefore various places around England started growing their own crocuses to produce saffron one of them was Croydon another one was a place

just on the Essex border called saffron Walden well wasn't it called Walden and then they called saffron Walden as a marketing exactly that so it was always called Walden which I think was an old an old English name for Forest Valley or something like that and then around the

1600s as you say it was a publicity stunt they wanted to get themselves on the map and they thought well we we grow a lot of crocuses for producing saffron we'll stick that in our name it became saffron Walden but I just find that charming that Croydon owes its name to the production of a spice

yes I think that's beautiful we talked about medicine and spices. There are a couple of things called spice that aren't actually spices. Okay, such as. Well, there's one which is a synthetic cannabinoid called zombie.

Oh, yes. The street name for it is spice. Oh, you're so down, Bruce. Oh, yeah, me. I'm making a thing with my hand, which you can't see on the podcast. And the other sort of spice is, have you heard of a chap called Frank Herbert?

I don't know that I have. Okay, he wrote a nice. novel called Dune, which is still the best-selling science fiction book of all time. Well, the series is, I mean, the first book and then the series. And then there's a TV series made quite recently. And a video game as well, I believe. There's all sorts of things. But one of the elements that he talks about is a thing called Melange, which is referred to as The Spice. And this is a fictional psychedelic drug that's actually central to the whole plot of Dune. Because it's a really rare, it's like we were just talking about Magellan and Vasatigama in Columbus, people would travel to

try and find the source of this. And the actual source of this was a planet called Arachis, which is sort of guarded by sandworms. It's a great thing. But in that novel, Spice, it's basically essential for space travel. Oh, really? It's sort of a form of precognition and you have to take large doses of the drug and it's very addictive. And if you, you if you basically go cold turkey you die right so i mean that that's a that's a that's a spice that you don't really want to get hooked on it's a whole different type of spice it's a whole different sort of spice wow talking of a whole different sort of spice should we talk about mel Melanie emma jerry and victoria i thought you were going to go there

just had a feeling bruce and his tangents You know I love a tangent. Yeah, you do. You do. So, shall we talk about the Spice Girls? Yes, go on, then. Why not? So they are a phenomenon.

Yeah. One of the best selling, all female groups in the world still. And they just became a total sensation. They were all sort of put together. Some of them had very interesting sort of backstories where they started in entertainment. For example, Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham, once appeared on a BBC TV show called BodyMat. actors dressed as a sperm. Of course she did.

She was only 12 at the time. Okay, well, that can be forgiven then. But they just basically dressed her up as a sperm in the TV show. She also, when she sang, she admitted freely that she often sang with her microphone turned off. Really? Yeah. Emma Bunting was also an actor. She was in EastEnders.

She played a mugger. Did she? In EastEnders, yeah, when she was younger. Wow. Jerry, obviously, married to a Formula One ex-Fournobus. Right. Jerry Horner now, and was Jerry Halliwell. When she got married, she actually sang Warnaby at her wedding.

Did she? Yeah. Brilliant. Before they redeveloped St. Pancras Hotel, Wannaby was shot in what was then the faded, ruiny sort of bits of the St. Pancras Hotel. And I actually went on the guided tour of that hotel before they. they rejuvenated it right and they sort of pointed out the staircase that the spice girls did want to be oh that's wonderful it's very cool I think they

still they still have that staircase in the new hotel but it doesn't look the same as in the in the video huh I didn't realize that other things about spice girls you remember in Spice World they had a spice bus I do so that's that's still on display in the Isle of White of all places yeah I know it's fine and oh the spice girls were originally called Touch. Oh, were they really? Yeah, and they changed their name to Spice Girls at the last minute. Gosh, and they didn't name themselves, did they? There was a writer for Top of the Pops magazine was writing an article about this new girl band phenomenon. Yes. And they just gave them

these nicknames, scary, sporty, baby posh and ginger spice. Yes. You know, just as a throwaway little thing, sort of referring to their character or their appearance or whatever. Yes. And they totally ran with it you know they they completely adopted these personas to the point that the majority of people couldn't even tell you what their real names were anymore they were just those nicknames exactly uh and and those nicknames are used by all sorts of people for all sorts of things so millie bobby brown has named her chickens um scary sporty baby ginger and that's great as has chapel rhone okay it's bizarre isn't that strange that is weird yeah apparently that dress was a black dress that she was given and she

sewed a union jack teatow on the front of it oh really yeah so before before she had the full-on union flag um dress yeah it was a black dress with the teetail that's great onto the front of it wow one of the most iconic pieces of fashion design of the 1990s yes based on a teetowel yeah that's great The last little thing I wanted to have a look at is it's Christmas time and naturally that means consuming vast quantities of mould wine. Oh, and mould cider. And mould cider.

And now mould rum, apparently, that's a thing. Ooh. Didn't even know that. Well, spiced rum, obviously spices. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I love mild wine. I'm genuinely, genuinely disappointed every single year that it's not available all year round. I think it's gorgeous.

And again, it's one of those things you just sort of take granted. I never really poke around and see what's in it. I assume there's some cinnamon and some other things. Yes. And I had a quick look at some of the more popular recipes and then, you know, looking at each of the spices involved.

And like I said before, it's odd to think where these spices actually come from in their natural form because you just see them as ground up powder don't you? Yes. But mild wine usually contains cinnamon, so already discussed that is the inner bark of the cinnamon

tree. But they usually use a whole stick, don't they? Yes, they do. So you peel the inner bark of this tree, which is found in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. You peel long strips of this inner bark, you leave it to dry, and it naturally curls up into what

they call cinnamon quills, or the rest of us call cinnamon sticks. And you just plop that in your mould wine, and it soaks up the flavour. It contains nutmeg, which you've already mentioned, is sort of a seed within a fruit that's, again, allowed to dry and then ground up. They sometimes contain cloves, which you've mentioned.

Claves are little flower buds from a particular unpronounceable Latin plant. They grow in little clusters of buds on the end of little stalks. You pick them, you dry them. That's what a clove is. It sometimes contains star anise, which is a star-shaped fruit allowed to dry. You plop the entire star into a drink or a vat or whatever it is to add flavour to it. And this was interesting for me because I've always assumed that Star Anise and Anise are the same thing and that that's when you get anise seed, the seed of the anise. They taste similar, they have the same word. They're completely and utterly unrelated, Bruce.

And that really hurts my brain. What? Yep. So Star Anise, like I mentioned, star-shaped fruit from one plant. Anise, a completely different unrelated plant. the anise plant looks a little bit like cow parsley or Queen Anne's Lace. Okay. You know, the white frothy stuff that you sort of see in the hedgerows.

And that's the stuff that tastes like licorice. Right. So this is the weird thing. They both taste like licorice or aniseed or whatever because they both contain something called anathol. Liquorish contains anathol, fennel contains anathol, anise contains anathol, star anise contains anathol. So all of those things taste roughly similar to each other.

And this kind of explains a difficulty I remember having as a kid is sort of telling the difference between licorish and aniseed balls that they taste very, very similar to each other, especially those licorice all sorts that have the little blue bobbly bits on them. I've always thought smelt more of aniseed than they do of licorice. But all of those plants, all of those spices, contain anathol, and that's why they all taste, smell roughly similar. But totally unrelated.

That was the other major thing I learnt. That's a good thing to learn It's not bad is it No That's a very good thing to learn Yeah I don't suppose there are any records for spices are there Yeah there are records for the most expensive

The most difficult to find The largest quantity, etc But that's all a bit humdrum The interesting things I found Were the largest spice painting Which is to say Sorry Yeah

Which is to say someone who paint using spice instead of paint. You know, things like, you know, saffron was used as a dye for a long period of time. Anandam Hari Goshala from Tamil in India paints with spice, just ground up spice mixed with water.

His paintings must smell amazing. Mustn't they just? And this painting was just under 150 square meters. it's a picture of a variety of cow. Sorry, 150 square meters. Just under 150 square meters. It's big. I mean, that's huge.

It is huge. And, yeah, like you say, I really do hope that when you go and look at this painting, you can smell all of the spices because what a wonderful addition to a painting that would be. In a similar vein, I found the largest spice pot mosaic. Okay.

Someone in Chengdu in China in 2017 made a mosaic using lots of glass pots filled with spices of different colours and they made a mosaic out of it it's a picture of a baby panda and this thing is not quite as big as the other one 64 square metres so still you know rather large

there must be something in spice that makes people want to do like sort of extra large paintings yeah and then just for your benefit because I had a sneaky suspicion you were going to go that way the record for the largest collection of spice girls memorabilia belongs to Elizabeth West of Manchester and she owns 5,000 Spice Girl-related items from

dolls to key rings to CDs, etc. Goodness. So there you go. Those are my spicy records. Fantastic. Well, this has been amazing. I have learned a lot this week. Yes. Well, if you found this enlightening,

there are some things we'd like you to do please. Oh, yes, there are. We'd like to leave us a five-star review. A five-star anise review. Oh, yes. That's a good idea. One of those with a note saying why you thought this was a spicy episode.

And if you want to hear more like this, you can always subscribe on your podcast there to factorily. And then you'll get one of these every week. Lucky old you. What a great way to start your Thursday. And if you happen to have any nerdy friends who like this sort of trivial whimsy, then please tell them about factorily so that they can come and join in the fun. So thank you very much for coming along and having a listen. Absolutely. And please come again next time for another fun-filled factual episode of

Factorily. Bye-bye. Ovo.