Spice Mélange

Eastern Mediterranean to India

Ajwain is thought to have arisen in the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Egypt, and spread to India by way of the Near East. No firm date for that journey survives.

Bombay, India, and Germany

Before 1914 the bulk of India's ajwain seed went to Germany, over 90 percent of exports in 1911 to 1912, nearly all shipped from Bombay. German stills turned it into thymol.

United States

Thymol, the compound behind ajwain's thyme-like bite, was used in the United States in the 1910s to treat hookworm. A kitchen seed had become a dose.

Bangalore, India

With wartime exports to Germany stopped, chemists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore ran semi-commercial trials distilling thymol from ajwain, in charges of up to 1,500 pounds of seed.

Rajasthan and Gujarat, India

India grew 27,920 tonnes of ajwain on 37,810 hectares in 2019 to 2020, and sells it to the Gulf, Southeast Asia and the United States.

India, Afghanistan and Ethiopia

Cooks fry ajwain in ghee for parathas and naans. In Afghanistan it is sprinkled over bread and biscuits, and in Ethiopia it is called netch azmud, white cumin. One seed, many breads.

Egypt

The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text from about 1550 BCE, names a plant scholars read as anise, used against stomach and dental complaints.

Rome

Pliny the Elder named Crete and Egypt as the sources of the best anise and listed it among remedies for snakebite and much else.

Frankish Empire

Charlemagne ordered anise planted on the imperial farms. A Mediterranean seed went north on an emperor's word.

London, England

In 1305 Edward I listed anise among the drugs to be taxed when carried across London Bridge. The seed paid its way into the city.

London, England

The royal wardrobe of Edward IV was perfumed with anise in 1480. A king's linen smelled faintly of licorice.

Egypt, India, China and Turkey

Egypt, India, China and Turkey supply most of the anise Europe imports, with Syria close behind. Much of it goes into spirits and herbal remedies.

Central Mexico

The Aztecs added annatto to cacao drinks to turn them red, tying the drink to blood. One anthropologist argues the word chocolate first meant a cacao drink made with annatto in Guatemala.

Mexico

Annatto pigment served as red ink for Mexican manuscript painting in the 16th century. Spanish and Portuguese colonizers carried the seeds home.

Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean

Over the 16th and 17th centuries annatto spread to Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Hawaii and southeastern North America. In the Philippines it took root for its dye.

Netherlands

A Dutch household dictionary of 1743, the Huishoudelyk Woordboek, gives the earliest known record of annatto coloring cheese. English Gloucester had been colored since the 16th century.

Peru and Brazil

Peru exports the most annatto seed and Brazil grows the most. It reddens recado rojo for cochinita pibil and dyes cheddar orange. The color in the cheese is a borrowed sunset.

Swiss lake villages

Archaeologists have found caraway seeds at the prehistoric lake dwellings of Switzerland, proof of its long life in Europe. Small seeds outlasted the houses.

Roman Empire

The Greek physician Dioscorides recommended caraway oil as a tonic for pale girls.

England

The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, mentions caraway.

London, England

In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Justice Shallow offers a last year's pippin with a dish of caraways. The seed was more popular in England then than it is now.

Finland

By the mid-2010s Finland supplied around 30 percent of the world's caraway crop. A seed of the long northern summer.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

A floral collar from Tutankhamun's embalming cache holds olive and persea leaves, nightshade berries and what may be celery. Even the museum that keeps it adds a question mark.

Greece

In Homer's Odyssey, soft meadows of violets and celery bloom in the garden of the nymph Calypso.

Selinus, Sicily

Selinus, a Greek colony named for the wild celery, selinon, that grew there, struck silver coins with a celery leaf on both faces. A city signed its money with a marsh plant.

Isthmus of Corinth, Greece

The poet Pindar praised an athlete who won "the crown of wild Dorian celery in the Isthmian glade." Later Greeks tied the same plant to funerals and the dead.

Rome

Celery fruits and leaves turn up often as flavorings in the Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius. The Romans valued celery more for the pot than for the gods.

Punjab, India

Celery came to India from France around 1940 as a seed crop. Punjab now grows about 90 percent of India's celery seed, much of it exported to American and European markets.

Nahal Hemar Cave, Judean Desert

Fifteen dried coriander fruits turned up in a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B layer of Nahal Hemar Cave. They are among the oldest coriander finds anywhere.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

About half a liter of coriander seed lay in Tutankhamun's tomb. Coriander does not grow wild in Egypt, so someone grew it on purpose.

Pylos, Greece

Linear B tablets from the palace at Pylos record coriander grown for making perfume. The cook's seed also scented the palace.

Ancient Israel

The Torah describes manna as tasting like coriander seed, a sign the spice was already familiar. Bread from heaven was measured against a kitchen jar.

Roman Britain

The Romans brought coriander to Britain, using it with vinegar and cumin to preserve meat. Centuries later, farms in Essex grew it for gin distillers.

United States

A 2012 genetic study linked a variant near smell receptor genes, including OR6A2, to disliking cilantro, the leaf of the same plant. Part of the soap some people taste may be in their genes.

India and Russia

India is the largest supplier of coriander seed. In 2025 Russia ranked second, exporting about 48,000 tonnes, much of it grown in Crimea.

Babylonia, Mesopotamia

The Yale culinary tablets, written in Babylonia around 1750 BCE, hold some of the oldest known recipes, and cumin is in them. Its name may reach back to Sumerian gamun.

Thebes, Egypt

A basket full of cumin seeds was found in the Theban tomb of Kha, a royal architect of the 14th century BCE. He took his seasoning with him.

Kalhu (Nimrud), Assyria

Palace inscriptions record cumin set out as a table condiment at a royal feast of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II in the 9th century BCE.

England

In 13th-century England cumin was valuable enough that rents were often paid in it, and Henry III's household bought it twenty pounds at a time.

New Mexico

Spanish settlers had brought cumin to New Mexico by about 1600. In the 19th century Anglo-American settlers met its pairing with chiles, and Tex-Mex cooking grew from that meeting.

India

India grows about 70 percent of the world's cumin and eats nearly two-thirds of the global crop. The rest of the world shares what is left.

Switzerland

The earliest confirmed evidence of dill cultivation comes from late Neolithic settlements on Swiss lake shores.

Thebes, Egypt

Dill was found in the tomb of the pharaoh Amenhotep II, dating to around 1400 BCE. Some twigs outlasted the dynasty.

Samos, Greece

Dill turns up in the Greek city of Samos around the 7th century BCE, and the philosopher Theophrastus later wrote of it.

Judea

The Gospel of Matthew scolds the Pharisees for tithing dill, mint and cumin while neglecting justice, and the Talmud requires tithes on its seeds, leaves and stems. Even a small seed was counted.

New England and Canada

Puritans and Quakers gave their children dill seeds to chew during long church meetings, since dill was thought to quiet hunger. The seeds became known as meeting seeds.

Egypt and Eastern Europe

Most imported dill now comes from Egypt, other Mediterranean countries or Eastern Europe. The seed is rich in carvone, the same compound that flavors caraway.

Mycenaean Greece

Fennel appears on a Mycenaean tablet of the 13th century BCE, in a list of spices. Someone was already keeping count.

Marathon, Greece

Marathon, where Athenians met the Persians in 490 BCE, takes its name from the Greek word for fennel, which grew thick on the plain. A famous battle was fought in a fennel field.

Frankish Empire

Charlemagne ordered fennel grown on all imperial farms and in monastery gardens, so that its remedies would be close at hand.

Anglo-Saxon England

The Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, preserved in the Lacnunga manuscript, names fennel among nine healing plants and calls on the god Woden. Medicine and magic shared one page.

Gujarat, India

India is the world's largest producer, consumer and exporter of seed spices, and Gujarat alone grows more than 90 percent of India's fennel.

Tell Halal, Iraq

Charred fenugreek seeds recovered at Tell Halal in Iraq have been carbon dated to about 4000 BCE, among the oldest traces of the plant in human hands.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Desiccated fenugreek seeds were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. A boy king went into the dark with a handful of something bitter and golden.

Italy

Cato the Elder lists fenugreek with clover and vetch as crops grown to feed cattle. The Latin name, faenum Graecum, means Greek hay, and the Romans meant it.

Frankish Empire

Charlemagne's Capitulare de villis, a decree for the royal estates, lists the plants their gardens must grow. Fenugreek comes third, after the lily and the rose.

New York City and North Bergen, New Jersey

From 2005 a maple syrup smell drifted over New York now and then. In 2009 Mayor Michael Bloomberg traced it to a New Jersey plant processing fenugreek seeds, which share the aroma compound sotolone with syrup.

Rajasthan, India

India is a major producer of fenugreek, called methi, and over 80 percent of its crop comes from Rajasthan. A desert state grows the seed that smells of hay and syrup.

Tell Hammam et-Turkman, northern Syria

Archaeobotanists found Prunus mahaleb kernels at Tell Hammam et-Turkman, an Early Bronze Age site, and judged they probably served as flavoring. Someone was already cracking cherry stones for what lay inside.

Sumer, Mesopotamia

Early Sumerian writings mention a ḫalub tree, a durable fruit-bearing hardwood whose seeds and leaves were known as medicine. Scholars consider mahaleb a likely candidate, not a certain one.

Seville, al-Andalus

Ibn al-Awwam of Seville, in his book on agriculture, described how to cultivate mahaleb and how to prepare its seeds. Andalusia knew the little cherry too.

Italy

The word mahaleb first appears in Latin in 1317, in the medical encyclopedia of Matthaeus Silvaticus. The botanist Carolus Clusius fixed the spelling in 1593.

Syria and the former Ottoman lands

Mahleb is still used mostly in lands that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and Syria is the main exporting country.

Greece and the Middle East

Greek bakers count mahleb with mastic and cardamom as their holy trinity of spices. Old cookbooks warned that sellers cut the powder with flour, so buy whole seeds and grind them.

Jerf el Ahmar, Syria

Archaeologists found ground seeds of the mustard genus Sinapis in a seed cake dated to between 9224 and 8753 BCE. Mustard was in the bread before anyone built a city.

Rome

Romans mixed unfermented grape juice, the must, with ground mustard seed to make mustum ardens, burning must. The condiment's name still carries the grape.

Dijon, France

Jean Naigeon of Dijon replaced the usual vinegar with verjuice, the sour juice of unripe grapes, giving Dijon mustard its modern form.

France

A French decree made "Dijon mustard" a generic term with no geographic protection, so it can be made anywhere. A city's name became a method.

Saskatchewan, Canada, and France

Drought cut the harvest in Canada, the world's largest exporter of mustard seed, and French shoppers faced empty mustard shelves for months in 2022. The heat of Dijon had been growing on the prairie.

Anatolia, Turkey

Nigella seeds were found in a Hittite flask in Turkey dating from the second millennium BCE.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Nigella seeds were among the goods placed in the tomb of Tutankhamun. A boy king was buried with the seed that still tops bread.

Judah

The Book of Isaiah says this seed is beaten out with a stick, not crushed under a cart wheel. Farmers in the region still thresh it the same way.

Arabia

A hadith records the Prophet Muhammad urging the use of the black seed, saying it holds a cure for every disease except death. Belief kept the seed in both pantry and medicine chest.

Persia

Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, completed around 1025, described nigella as a treatment for difficult breathing.

South Asia and the Middle East

Sold as kalonji or black cumin, nigella goes into panch phoron, the Bengali five-spice mix, onto naan, and into majdouleh, a braided string cheese of the Middle East.

Pulau Ai, Banda Islands

The earliest evidence of nutmeg use is residue on pottery shards from Pulau Ai in Indonesia's Banda Islands, about 3,500 years old.

India to Constantinople

By the 6th century CE nutmeg had reached India, then traveled west to Constantinople. Arab traders later kept the Banda source a secret from Europeans.

Banda Islands

In early 1512 the first Europeans reached Banda under António de Abreu and spent a month buying nutmeg, mace and cloves. In Europe, spices could sell for about 300 times their Banda price.

Banda Islands

Chasing a nutmeg monopoly, the Dutch East India Company under Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered Banda in 1621. A population of about 15,000 fell to roughly 1,000.

Breda, Netherlands

On 31 July 1667 the Treaty of Breda let the Dutch keep Run, a nutmeg island, while the English kept New Netherland, Manhattan included. A nutmeg island on one side of the table, Manhattan on the other.

Banda Neira

In 1810 a British squadron captured the Banda Islands and carried off hundreds of nutmeg seedlings to Ceylon and other colonies. Banda's monopoly was over.

Grenada

In 1843 nutmeg reached Grenada aboard a merchant ship sailing from the East Indies to England. The island came to be known as the Island of Spice.

Grenada

Grenada's flag, adopted in 1974, carries a split-open nutmeg fruit. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan badly damaged the island's nutmeg trees.

World trade tables

World trade tables lump nutmeg and mace in with cardamom, which is why Guatemala, a cardamom giant, seems to top the nutmeg rankings. Guatemala grows cardamom, not nutmeg.

Western Mediterranean

The earliest opium poppy finds in Europe come from the western Mediterranean, where the plant's wild ancestor grew, dated to about 5700 to 5300 BCE. Central and northern Europe follow a few centuries later.

Greece

Homer's Iliad already knows the poppy as a cultivated plant. The ancients prized its seeds above all for their oil, which went into their cooking.

Northern India

Ground poppy seed is a common thickener in the Mughal style of northern Indian cooking, and a cream-white kind serves for pale sauces. The seed disappears and leaves its body behind.

Czech Republic

The Czech Republic led the world in poppy seed production in 2018, with about 28,574 tonnes, ahead of Turkey and Spain.

Czech Republic

Czech bakers grind poppy seed, cook it with milk, sugar and a little cinnamon, and pack the thick paste into koláče and buchty buns.

Singapore, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia

Singapore bars poppy seed sales over their morphine traces, and Taiwan and Saudi Arabia ban them too. A breakfast bagel can still trip an opiate drug test.

Indian subcontinent

Charred sesame from the Indian subcontinent, dated to about 3500 to 3050 BCE, shows the plant was domesticated there at least 5,500 years ago. The seed is small; the memory is long.

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia traded with the Indus by 2000 BCE. Sumerian ilu and Akkadian ellu, words for sesame oil, may echo Dravidian names, a hint that the Indus sold its oil west.

Egypt

The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll of about 1550 BCE, lists sesame, which the Egyptians called sesemt, among its drugs.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Baskets of sesame were laid in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The boy king was sent off with something to press.

Colonial North America

Enslaved West Africans brought sesame to the American colonies in the 17th century. Their name for it, benne, kept in Gullah speech, entered written English in 1769.

India, Myanmar and Sudan

The world grew about 6.7 million tonnes of sesame in 2024. India, Myanmar and Sudan led, together about a third of the harvest.

Jamaica

Before Europeans arrived, the Arawak people of Jamaica crushed the dried unripe berries of the native pimento tree to season smoked meat. Smoke and berry were already old friends.

Caribbean

On Columbus's second voyage, the physician Diego Álvarez Chanca recorded the spice. The Spanish took the berries for peppercorns and called them pimienta, which became pimento in English.

Jamaica

England took Jamaica from Spain in 1655, and English traders came to call the berry allspice for its mix of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. A spice named after every other spice.

Jamaica

Victorian demand for walking canes and umbrella handles cut from the fragrant wood nearly wiped out young trees. Jamaica banned the export of allspice saplings in 1882.

Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

The tree still grows from southern Mexico through Central America and the Caribbean. Its berries season Jamaican jerk at home, and sausages, pickles, cakes and puddings far away.

India

Black pepper is native to India's Malabar Coast, and Indian cooking has used it since at least 2000 BCE. The English word travels back through Latin piper and Greek to Sanskrit.

Egypt

When Ramesses II died in 1213 BCE, the embalmers stuffed black peppercorns into his nostrils. A king went into the dark with pepper for breath.

Myos Hormos, Egypt, to India

The geographer Strabo reported about 120 ships a year sailing from the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos to India. Ports such as Muziris sent the spices on toward Rome.

Rome

Pliny the Elder priced pepper by the pound: long pepper 15 denarii, white 7, black 4. He grumbled that India drained the empire of 50 million sesterces a year.

Rome

In 408 the Visigoth king Alaric lifted his siege of Rome for 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver and 3,000 pounds of pepper.

Calicut, India

In 1498 Vasco da Gama became the first to reach India by sailing around Africa. The pepper coast had a sea road at last.

Salem, Massachusetts

In 1797 the Salem ship Rajah came home from Sumatra with pepper that earned a 700 percent profit. Between 1799 and 1846, 179 ships sailed between Salem and Sumatra.

St. George's, Bermuda

Since 1816 a Masonic lodge in Bermuda has paid rent of one peppercorn a year for the Old State House. It reaches the governor on a velvet cushion.

Vietnam

Vietnam is now the world's largest pepper exporter. In 2022 it expected to ship 220,000 tonnes, about 55 percent of world output.

Southwestern Ecuador

Chili starch grains from archaeological sites show people cooking with chilies about 6,100 years ago, the oldest evidence in a Smithsonian-led study.

Central-east Mexico

A 2014 study found that the common chili, Capsicum annuum, was domesticated in a region running from southern Puebla and northern Oaxaca to southeastern Veracruz.

Caribbean and Spain

The physician Diego Álvarez Chanca, sailing on Columbus's second voyage, brought chilies to Spain. The crew called them pimientos, because their bite resembled black pepper.

Goa, Sri Lanka and Malacca

Portuguese traders carried chilies to Africa and Asia, reaching Goa, Sri Lanka and Malacca within decades of Columbus. Fire travels fast once it finds a road.

Hungary

The first Hungarian dictionary entry for paprika peppers called them Török-bors, Turkish pepper, a trace of their arrival during Ottoman rule.

United States

Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist at Parke-Davis, devised a test that used human tasters to rate chili heat. It became the Scoville scale.

Szeged, Hungary

Albert Szent-Györgyi found the local paprika rich in vitamin C and extracted over three pounds of it in a week. He won the 1937 Nobel Prize.

Fort Mill, South Carolina

Guinness World Records named Ed Currie's Pepper X the world's hottest pepper, averaging 2.69 million Scoville units after a decade of breeding.

China

In the Tang dynasty cubeb reached China from Srivijaya, the Sumatran trading kingdom. Physicians gave it to restore the appetite.

Arab world

The One Thousand and One Nights, whose core took shape around the 9th century, prescribes cubeb as a remedy for infertility. The word cubeb comes from Arabic kababa.

Arab world

Around the 10th century cubeb moved from the medicine chest into Arabic cooking.

Portugal

Around 1640 the king of Portugal banned the sale of cubeb to protect the black pepper trade. Bitter and costly, it slipped out of European kitchens.

England and United States

From the 1880s cubeb was smoked in cigarettes for asthma, and Marshall's Prepared Cubeb Cigarettes were popular in the early 1900s. Medicinal trade almost stopped after 1940.

Java, Indonesia

Most cubeb still comes from Java and the nearby islands. It turns up in Indonesian cooking, Moroccan and Tunisian ras el hanout, and several gins.

Europe

One account dates the first known written mention of the seeds to 1214. They came from West Africa, a long way from any garden of Eden.

Europe

Before the sea route to India opened, grains of paradise became a popular stand-in for black pepper. The coast of present-day Liberia came to be called the Grain Coast.

Lisbon, Portugal

King Afonso V gave the Lisbon merchant Fernão Gomes a monopoly on trade in the Gulf of Guinea, melegueta included, for 100,000 reais a year and a duty to explore more coast.

Europe

A hippocras recipe from 1631 calls for grains of paradise with cardamom and ginger. The spice was a standard in the spiced wine, beside cinnamon, clove and long pepper.

Great Britain

Under George III, Parliament forbade grains of paradise in alcoholic drinks, and imports to Britain collapsed. Paradise was struck off the brewer's list.

Ghana and Nigeria

Ghana and Nigeria grow most of the crop. The seeds flavor craft beers, gins, Norwegian akvavit and the Tunisian blend gâlat dagga.

West Africa to Europe

In the Middle Ages the dried fruit was shipped to Europe and sold as a pepper. Arabic speakers called it fulful as-Sudan, pepper of the Sudan.

Europe

Once black pepper arrived from India by sea on a regular basis in the 16th century, grains of Selim mostly vanished from European kitchens.

Europe

In Europe the pods came back only as a wartime surrogate for pepper, last seen in the years after World War II and into the 1960s.

Senegal

Called djar in Wolof, the pods are roasted with coffee beans and ground for café Touba, poured at ceremonies and at the Grand Magal of Touba. Nestlé now sells a spiced rival.

Ghana, Togo and Nigeria

Ghana and Togo grow it as a crop. In eastern Nigeria the pods go into soups made for new mothers, and the seeds into the mixture aju mbaise.

Egypt

Berries of Juniperus phoenicea and Juniperus oxycedrus have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs at several sites. The dead were sent off with a pocketful of forest.

Rome

Romans used juniper berries as a cheap homegrown stand-in for the costly black and long pepper shipped from India.

Southwestern Germany

Juniper remains at Migration Period and early Merovingian sites suggest it flavored beer or other drinks as early as the 3rd to 6th centuries.

Flanders

Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme described adding juniper to a spirit distilled from wine, the first Dutch writing on the subject. An Antwerp physician gave a genever recipe in 1522.

England

After William of Orange came in 1688, gin swept England. By 1743 the English drank 2.2 gallons a head each year, and Hogarth drew Gin Lane in 1751.

Southern Europe

The best berries come from southern Europe. Cooks crush them into sauerkraut and choucroute and over venison. A small dark berry still carries the smell of the hillside.

Greece

Long pepper reached Greece by the 6th or 5th century BCE. Hippocrates wrote of it as a medicine, not a seasoning.

Greece

Greeks borrowed the Sanskrit name pippali as peperi, and Latin made it piper. Nearly every European word for pepper descends from this one spice. A whole family of names grew from one catkin.

Rome

Under the Roman Empire long pepper sold for about three times the price of black pepper. Romans prized its heat with a sweet edge. The dearest pepper was the long one.

Europe

Medieval cooks used long pepper in spice mixes like strong powder. Round black pepper began to compete from the 12th century and had pushed it aside by the 14th.

Europe

Once chili peppers arrived from the Americas, they could be grown close to Europe, and long pepper's popularity faded away.

India, Ethiopia and Indonesia

Long pepper lives on in Indian pickles, Ethiopian berbere and Indonesian cooking, and it is the main spice in nihari. The old Roman luxury now waits in a jar of achar.

Cerro Baúl, southern Peru

On a mountaintop above 8,000 feet, the Wari ran a brewery with more than 20 vats. Heaps of spent Schinus molle seeds show they made a spicy chicha from the berries.

Andes, Peru

The Inca rubbed the sweet outer fruit off molle berries to make drinks, syrup and gruel. They also used oil from the leaves to help preserve and embalm their dead.

Mission San Luis Rey, Oceanside, California

Molle seed from Peru, carried north by a sailor, was planted by the padres at Mission San Luis Rey. The tree spread until Californians called it their own pepper tree.

Florida, United States

The Brazilian pepper, Schinus terebinthifolia, came to Florida as an ornamental by 1891 at the latest. It has spread fast since about 1940 and is now an invasive pest.

Réunion and France

Nouvelle cuisine made pink peppercorns fashionable. Most of the supply reaching America came through France from Réunion, near Madagascar, often freeze-dried.

United States

The FDA blocked imports from France, citing reactions like swollen eyelids and headaches, since the plant is a cousin of poison ivy. France protested, the ban was later lifted, and the fashion cooled.

Espírito Santo, Brazil

Much of Brazil's pink pepper is gathered around Linhares and São Mateus in Espírito Santo and processed in São Mateus. People with tree nut allergies should still take care.

Haxiu, western Sichuan, China

Zanthoxylum seeds turn up in Neolithic layers at the Haxiu site in western Sichuan. Scholars count this the earliest clear use of the numbing spice.

Zhou China

An Old Chinese poem titled The Pepper Plant, preserved in the Book of Songs, is the oldest known written mention of Zanthoxylum in any language. The spice was sung before it was written down.

Weiyang Palace, Chang'an (Xi'an), China

The empress lived in the Jiaofang Hall, the pepper chamber, its walls treated with crushed Sichuan pepper for fragrance. The plant's heavy clusters of fruit stood for many children.

Hanyuan, Sichuan, China

From the Tang dynasty's Yuanhe period, pepper from Hanyuan was sent to the imperial court as tribute. People there still call it tribute pepper.

China

American chili peppers reached East Asia in the 17th century and began to supplement, and in places replace, Sichuan pepper. Today the two share the pan in mala, numbing and hot.

United States

The United States lifted its ban on Sichuan pepper imports in 2005, imposed over fears of citrus canker, but required heat treatment that dulls the oils. A 2016 USDA report found the feared link unfounded.

Qingxi, Hanyuan County, Sichuan

Growers in Qingxi still raise tribute pepper, but harvests are shrinking under a changing climate, better-paying fruit crops and hard hand labor. Fakes crowd the market.

India

The Sanskrit medical compendium attributed to Suśruta, shaped over many centuries, names sthulaila, large ela, the plant now identified as black cardamom.

Persia

The physician al-Majūsī, who died in 994, was the earliest writer known to separate small cardamom from large in Arabic medicine. Two pods, two names.

Ghazni, Afghanistan

The scholar al-Bīrūnī described the large kind. "Its seeds are black, looking like coriander seeds," he wrote, in a pod divided into three cells.

Nepal

Large cardamom was brought into Nepal from India in 1865. Commercial planting began in Ilam district in 1953.

Sikkim, India

Sikkim was the world's largest producer of large cardamom until 2003 to 2004. Its yields have fallen since, and Nepal has taken the lead.

Sikkim, India

Sikkim Large Cardamom received a Geographical Indication tag on March 23, 2015, for years the state's only such tag.

Eastern Nepal

Nepal now grows about 68 percent of the world's large cardamom, mostly in eastern hill districts such as Ilam and Taplejung, and sends nearly all its exports to India. The smoke travels south.

Mycenae, Greece

The word ka-da-mi-ja appears on Linear B spice tablets from the House of the Sphinxes at Mycenae. It is the earliest known record of cardamom.

Kerala, India

In the 4th century BCE, cardamom from southern India was already being traded with the Greeks.

Alexandria, Egypt

By 126 CE cardamom was on the list of goods taxed on import in Roman Alexandria, a sign of what it was worth.

Denmark

The cookbook Libellus de Arte Coquinaria holds the earliest Scandinavian mention of cardamom, in recipes close to Moorish ones.

Travancore, India

In the 18th century the kingdom of Travancore held a cardamom monopoly. All of it had to be sold to the state depot at Alleppey, which gave Alleppey Green cardamom its name.

Cobán, Guatemala

In 1914 the German coffee planter Oscar Majus Kloeffer planted cardamom seeds from Kerala on his estate. Guatemala's industry grew from those seeds.

Guatemala

Guatemala overtook India as the world's largest cardamom producer. Most is grown by Q'eqchi' Maya smallholders in Alta Verapaz. Seeds from Kerala, hands in Alta Verapaz.

Sweden and Norway

Swedes eat about 18 times more cardamom per person than the global median, and Norwegians nearly 30 times more. Much of it goes into buns and glögg.

Terqa, Syria

Around 1720 BCE a house burned down at Terqa in Syria. Cloves were found inside, thousands of kilometers from the Maluku Islands where they grew.

Han dynasty China

A Han dynasty etiquette book from around 200 BCE required ministers to suck cloves, sweetening their breath, before they addressed the emperor.

Britain

In 15th-century Britain a pound of cloves cost a skilled artisan about five days' wages.

Spain

On 6 September 1522 the Victoria, last ship of Magellan's expedition, came home to Spain with only 18 men aboard and about 26 tons of cloves and cinnamon.

Ambon, Maluku

In 1625, to protect its clove monopoly, the Dutch East India Company sent a punitive expedition around Ambon. It burned villages and ringbarked an estimated 65,000 clove trees.

Mauritius

In 1770 the Frenchman Pierre Poivre smuggled clove seedlings out of the Maluku Islands to Mauritius. The Dutch hold on the spice was broken.

Zanzibar

In the first half of the 19th century Omani sultans brought cloves to Zanzibar. It became the world's leading producer, worked largely by enslaved people.

Kudus, Java

Around 1880 Haji Djamhari of Kudus began smoking cigarettes mixed with cloves. Their name, kretek, imitates the crackle of cloves burning.

Indonesia

Indonesia now supplies about 75 percent of the world's cloves. Zanzibar's share has fallen to about 7 percent.

Akrotiri, Santorini

Bronze Age frescoes at Akrotiri on Santorini, likely painted in the 16th or 17th century BCE, show people gathering saffron crocus. Someone thought the picking worth painting.

Assyria

The saffron crocus appears in a 7th-century BCE Assyrian botanical reference, compiled under King Ashurbanipal.

Europe

When the Black Death swept Europe from 1347 to 1350, demand for saffron soared.

Neu-Falkenstein, Switzerland

In 1374 a nobleman's men robbed merchants of a large saffron shipment. Forces from Basel and Bern laid siege to his castle, in what became known as the Saffron War.

Nuremberg, Germany

Nuremberg punished saffron fraud severely. In the 15th century one trader caught adulterating saffron was buried alive along with his fake product.

Walden, England

Saffron crocus grew so widely around the Essex market town of Walden that by the 1540s it was known as Saffron Walden. The crop faded by the late 1700s. The name stayed.

Pennsylvania

German Schwenkfelder immigrants carried saffron corms to America in a trunk. By 1730 the Pennsylvania Dutch were growing it widely.

Iran

Iran grows around 90 percent of the world's saffron. One kilogram takes about 150,000 crocus flowers, and premium saffron often tops 5,000 US dollars a kilogram. Count the flowers before you count the price.

Guangxi, China

Records from the Song dynasty describe star anise growing widely in Guangxi, where it was valued as a seasoning. Guangxi still grows most of China's crop.

Off Bakau, Indonesia

Star anise was recovered from ceramic jars on the Bakau shipwreck, dated between 1320 and 1430 CE. It likely came from southern China. The stars kept their shape under the sea for six centuries.

Ming China

A Ming dynasty materia medica of 1505 described the fruit as the size of a copper coin, with eight prongs and a seed inside each, much used in medicine.

London, England

By the late 16th century star anise had reached England. One account credits Thomas Cavendish, who returned to London in 1588 from a voyage around the world with stars from the Philippines. Other accounts date it differently.

United States

In 2003 the US Food and Drug Administration warned against star anise teas after at least forty people, fifteen of them infants, fell ill. It noted that toxic Japanese star anise resembles the true spice.

Basel, Switzerland

In the mid-2000s Roche bought up to 90 percent of the world's star anise for shikimic acid, the starting point of the flu drug Tamiflu. Since 2012 it has relied on engineered bacteria instead.

Lang Son, Vietnam, and Guangxi, China

Vietnam's Lang Son province gives about 30,000 hectares to star anise, its second crop after rice. Most of that harvest is sold to China, the largest exporter. The stars end up in pho and five-spice powder.

Veracruz, Mexico

The Totonac people were among the first to domesticate vanilla, growing it on farms since at least 1185.

Central Mexico

The Aztecs invaded Totonac lands and took a liking to vanilla pods. They mixed them with cacao in a drink called xocolatl.

Spain

After the conquest of the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés is credited with bringing both vanilla and chocolate to Europe.

Philadelphia, United States

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson sent to France for 50 vanilla pods, noting they were much used in ice cream. His handwritten recipe survives at the Library of Congress.

Sainte-Suzanne, Réunion

Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, invented a fast way to pollinate vanilla by hand, with a thin stick and a gesture of the thumb. Nearly all vanilla is still pollinated this way.

Holzminden, Germany

The chemists Wilhelm Haarmann and Ferdinand Tiemann first synthesized vanillin from coniferin, a compound in conifer sap. They opened a vanillin factory the next year.

Sainte-Suzanne, Réunion

Albius was freed when France abolished slavery in 1848. He died poor and unrecognized, even as Réunion's vanilla output climbed to about 60 tonnes a year.

Madagascar

A cyclone struck Madagascar, which grows roughly three quarters of the world's vanilla. Prices reached about $600 a kilogram, more than silver.

Ancient Israel

The Book of Exodus gives a recipe for holy anointing oil with 500 shekels of cassia, as much as the myrrh and twice the cinnamon. Which bark the ancient word meant is not certain.

Egypt

Herodotus reports that Egyptian embalmers filled the emptied belly with pure ground myrrh, cassia and other spices, though never frankincense. The dead were packed like a spice chest.

Mediterranean

Cassia was the first cinnamon species to reach Europe, arriving at least by the time of Alexander the Great, carried west from its home in southern China.

Rome

Pliny the Elder dismissed the old tales of cinnamon birds and guarded spice groves, saying they were invented to raise the price. A good story was also a markup.

Germany

Health concerns rose in Germany when cassia-flavored cookies exceeded limits for coumarin, a compound cassia carries in far greater amounts than Ceylon cinnamon.

China and Vietnam

Commercial cassia now comes from China and Vietnam. In Chinese kitchens it anchors five-spice powder and red braising, simmered beside star anise.

Egypt

As early as 2000 BCE a cinnamon-like spice reached Egypt and was used in embalming. It may have been a related species, not true cinnamon.

Ancient Israel

The Book of Exodus names sweet cinnamon, 250 shekels of it, among the principal spices in the holy anointing oil.

Rome

Pliny the Elder recorded that a Roman pound of cinnamon could cost up to 1,500 denarii, about fifty months of a laborer's wages. Fifty months of work for a pound of bark.

Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

In 1505 Portuguese ships under Lourenço de Almeida reached Ceylon by chance. Portugal soon reached for the island's valuable cinnamon.

Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

Dutch traders set up a post in Ceylon in 1638. By 1640 they had taken over cinnamon production, and by 1658 they had expelled the last Portuguese.

Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

The British seized Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796. Empires came and went; the bark stayed. Sri Lanka still produces 80 to 90 percent of the world's true cinnamon.

Worldwide

In 2023 the world produced about 238,000 tonnes of cinnamon. China led with 39 percent, mostly the cassia type found on many supermarket shelves.

Abbasid Caliphate

The Arab geographer Ibn Khurdadbih listed galangal among the goods of the far East, beside musk, aloeswood and camphor. The name likely began in Chinese as Gaoliang ginger.

Bingen, Rhineland

Hildegard, abbess of Bingen, who died in 1179, wrote of galangal under the name galgan and set out its medicinal virtues. A root from the far side of Asia had reached a Rhineland convent.

France

The expense journal of King John of France for 1359 to 1360 records three purchases of galangal. A century later, physicians counted it among the necessary stock of an apothecary's shop.

England

The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, seasons lampreys with powdered ginger, galyngale, cinnamon and cloves.

Hainan, China

Southern China exported hundreds of thousands of pounds of the root, yet Europe had long confused its source. Specimens gathered on Hainan in January 1870 finally fixed the true plant as Alpinia officinarum.

Thailand and Indonesia

Greater galangal now flavors Thai tom yum and tom kha gai and Indonesian soto and opor. In Poland galangal still flavors Żołądkowa Gorzka vodka, a last trace of the old European taste.

Maritime Southeast Asia

The oldest evidence of ginger domestication comes from Austronesian peoples about 5,000 years ago. They carried it by canoe across the Indo-Pacific.

Farmana, Haryana, India

Starch grains of ginger and turmeric recovered from a Harappan cooking pot show both were being cooked more than 4,000 years ago.

China

The Analects record that Confucius was never without ginger when he ate.

Roman Empire

Trade carried ginger to the Mediterranean, and the writers Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder both described it.

Chinese sea routes

The traveling monk Faxian recorded ginger grown in pots aboard Chinese ships. A garden, going to sea.

England

In 14th-century England a pound of ginger could cost as much as a whole sheep. It was a luxury for the wealthy.

Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

With encouragement from the Spanish Crown, ginger came from Asia to the Caribbean and became the leading export of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, until sugar overtook it.

England

Elizabeth I kept a royal gingerbread maker. At one banquet, gingerbread figures were made to stand for foreign dignitaries and courtiers.

India

In 2023 India grew about 2.2 million tonnes of ginger, roughly 45 percent of the world's supply. Nigeria and China came next.

Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Licorice root is widely reported among the goods buried with Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt in the 14th century BCE. Sweetness went with him into the dark.

Han dynasty China

The Shennong Bencaojing, compiled in the Eastern Han dynasty, lists licorice root among its 120 upper drugs, the ones judged harmless. Chinese doctors still call it gancao, sweet herb.

Pontefract, Yorkshire

From 1614 Pontefract pressed licorice juice into small round lozenges for coughs and stomach complaints, stamped to show they came from the town. The stamp became the brand.

Pontefract, Yorkshire

The apothecary George Dunhill is credited with adding sugar to licorice extract in 1760, turning a medicine into a sweet.

Pontefract, Yorkshire

In 1966 the last licorice roots were lifted at Pontefract, ending more than three centuries of growing there. The factories stayed, the fields did not.

Turkey, Greece, Iran and Iraq

Most licorice root now comes from Turkey, Greece, Iran and Iraq. Besides sweets, the extract flavors tobacco, drinks and medicines.

Taiwan to the Pacific

Austronesian voyagers carried turmeric across the Pacific for food, dye and ritual. It traveled as far as Hawaii and Easter Island.

Farmana, Haryana, India

Turmeric starch from a Harappan cooking pot is among the earliest direct evidence of the spice in a kitchen.

Megiddo, Canaan (modern Israel)

Turmeric was found in the tomb of a merchant at Megiddo, a sign of long-distance trade far from where it grew.

Nineveh, Assyria

Turmeric appears in Assyrian cuneiform medical texts from the library of King Ashurbanipal.

China

Around 1280 Marco Polo described a plant with the smell and color of true saffron that was not saffron. Medieval Europeans called turmeric Indian saffron.

Bangladesh

In the 1980s, after floods left crops dull, some processors began adding lead chromate, an industrial yellow pigment, to make turmeric look brighter.

Washington, D.C.

In 1997 India persuaded the US Patent Office to revoke a 1995 patent on using turmeric to heal wounds. It was a landmark case for traditional knowledge.

Bangladesh

In 2019 a Stanford-led study identified lead-laced turmeric as a likely source of elevated blood lead in Bangladeshi pregnant women.

Bangladesh

After public warnings and enforcement, market turmeric samples with detectable lead fell from 47 percent in 2019 to zero. The yellow came back honest.

Ashkelon, Levant coast

Early evidence of people using bay laurel comes from Ashkelon, on the coast of modern Israel, dated to the 7th century BCE. The tree itself is a survivor of laurel forests that once covered much of the Mediterranean.

Delphi, Greece

From 582 BCE the Pythian Games at Delphi became crown games. Winners got no money, only a wreath of bay laurel, sacred to Apollo, cut in the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly. Glory, it turned out, was a leaf.

Rome

Roman sources say Emperor Tiberius put on a laurel wreath during thunderstorms, trusting the tree to turn lightning away. An emperor sheltered under a leaf.

Capitoline Hill, Rome

On 8 April 1341 Petrarch was crowned with laurel on the Capitoline Hill, the second poet laureate since antiquity. The word laureate still carries the leaf.

Turkey

Turkey is the world's largest producer and exporter of bay leaves. The tree is also grown in the southern United States, Central America, the Middle East and Asia.

Kanchipuram, Tamil country

A Sangam-era Tamil poem, the Perumpanatruppadai, promises travellers pomegranate cooked in warm butter with fresh curry leaves and black pepper. The recipe survived because a poet thought it worth singing.

Karnataka, India

Kannada texts of the 16th century describe an unfried brinjal bhaji with coconut shreds, curry leaves and cardamom, finished with citrus juice and a little camphor.

Sweden

Carl Linnaeus published the species in 1767 and named it koenigii for the botanist Johann Gerhard König. A leaf every Tamil cook knew got a German name in a Swedish book.

Fiji

Indian migrants carried curry leaf seeds abroad. One family's grandfather brought seeds from India to Fiji in the early 1900s, and his grandson carried them on to Los Angeles in 1980.

Los Angeles, California

Curry leaf trees can host the insect that spreads citrus greening, so the United States quarantines them. In March 2012 inspectors ordered a California grower to destroy all 5,000 of his trees.

India

In the Indian subcontinent the tree is a fixture in almost every household. Commercial plantations grow it in India, Australia and on Spain's Costa del Sol.

Ambon, Maluku Islands

The earliest known record is a drawing made for the naturalist Rumphius of a limau purut tree grown on Ambon. His Herbarium Amboinense, published in 1741, notes such limes used for washing and shampooing.

Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

A record from Ceylon in 1868 mentions the fruit used against leeches. Later surveys found its chief use was washing the head and treating the feet to kill land leeches.

India and Ceylon

Emanuel Bonavia's 1888 book on the citrus of India and Ceylon gives the earliest known use of the old English name, noting that Europeans called it the Caffre lime.

California, United States

A 2011 petition to the USDA found only one certified organic California grower, harvesting about 50 pounds of leaves a year. Quarantines against the Asian citrus psyllid keep the trees scarce.

United Kingdom

In June 2021 Waitrose said it would relabel its lime leaves as makrut, because the old name had historically been a racial slur in South Africa. Makrut is the Thai name. A leaf got its own name back.

Indian subcontinent

Mango trees have been cultivated in India for some 4,000 to 6,000 years, which makes the mango one of the oldest tended fruits in the world.

India

The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who traveled through India in the 7th century, appears to have been the first to bring the mango to the notice of people outside India.

Hindustan, Mughal India

Babur, the first Mughal emperor, wrote in his memoirs that mangoes were usually picked unripe, and that unripe they made excellent condiments. The green fruit was already a seasoning.

Nandurbar, Maharashtra, India

On 30 March 2024 Nandurbar Amchur won India's GI tag. Tribal growers make it from a local wild mango, gaauti aam, peeled, sliced, sun-dried and pounded, as they have for generations.

India

Amchur sours food without adding moisture, tenderizes meat in marinades, and is a main part of chaat masala. A dry powder does the work of a wet fruit.

Tell es-Sultan (Jericho), West Bank

Carbonized pomegranate skin found at Tell es-Sultan dates to about 3300 BCE, early Bronze Age evidence that people were keeping the fruit.

Iranian plateau

Pomegranates were domesticated on the Iranian plateau about 5,000 years ago and spread across Asia and Africa. The spice still carries its Persian name, anar, pomegranate, and dana, seed.

Uluburun, off southern Turkey

The Uluburun ship, wrecked off the Turkish coast in the Late Bronze Age, carried pomegranates among its cargo. Even then the fruit was worth a sea voyage.

Baghdad

A 10th-century Baghdad recipe for sibagh, a dipping sauce, calls for pomegranate seeds with raisins, pepper and cumin.

Himalayas, India and Pakistan

Seeds of daru, a wild Himalayan pomegranate, are counted the best anardana for Indian and Pakistani cooking. The fruit too sour to eat makes the finest spice.

Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

Alexander's soldiers found asafoetida beyond the Hindu Kush in 328 or 327 BCE and took it for silphium, the prized resin of Cyrene. They used it to help digest raw horse meat.

Roman Empire

Dioscorides recorded the Persian resin as a stand-in for true silphium, weaker in power and with a nastier smell. The real thing was disappearing, and the substitute stayed.

Western Chalukya court, southern India

The 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia Manasollasa gives a recipe for fish seasoned with asafoetida, cardamom, salt and pepper.

Goa, India

The Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta reported that all the Hindus who could afford it bought asafoetida for their food, and that rich Brahmins and vegetarians ate a great deal.

Calcutta (Kolkata), India

Afghan merchants, the Kabuliwalas, sold hing door to door in 19th-century Calcutta. Their trade inspired the founding of Laljee Godhoo and Co., still a familiar Indian brand.

Lahaul valley, Himachal Pradesh

India imports about 1,200 tonnes of raw asafoetida a year from Iran, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. In 2020 scientists began India's first cultivation at Kwaring village in the cold desert of Lahaul.

Arabian trade routes

Limes are native to the region running from India to Southeast Asia. Arab traders are believed to have carried them west to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in the 10th century.

Batinah coast, Oman

In 1971 Oman's lime exports were worth 333,300 rials, nearly triple the value of its dates. Limes had become the country's most valuable export after oil.

Batinah coast, Oman

Witches' broom disease appeared in the Batinah's lime groves in the late 1970s. By 1986 some orchards were completely destroyed and farmers were planting bananas instead.

Oman and the Gulf

Black limes are made by blanching fresh limes in salt water and drying them until rock hard, traditionally on banana-leaf mats in the sun. They keep for years.

Iran, Iraq and the Gulf

Persian cooks put dried limes in stews and soups. In Iraq, where they are called noomi Basra, they go into nearly every dish and into tea. Gulf cooks pair them with fish.

India

The Charaka Samhita, a founding text of Ayurveda, lists a fruit called vrikshamla, the tree sour, a name Ayurvedic practitioners now give to kokum.

India

The Bhavaprakasha places vrikshamla among the chaturamla and panchamla, Ayurveda's sets of four and five sour fruits, and calls it sour and heating. Sourness had its own shelf.

France

The French botanist Aubert du Petit-Thouars described the tree in 1806 as Brindonia indica. Jacques Denys Choisy moved it to the genus Garcinia in 1823.

Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, India

On 31 March 2016 Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri Kokum, from Maharashtra's Konkan coast, became the first kokum from India to earn a GI tag.

Konkan, Goa and coastal Karnataka

Konkani, Goan and Maharashtrian cooks use kokum in place of tamarind in coconut curries and fish, and in solkadhi, made with coconut milk. Its seeds give kokum butter for chocolate and cosmetics.

Rome

In classical Rome, before the lemon was introduced, cooks used sumac's acid fruit to make food sour. The berry did the lemon's job first.

Rome

Pliny the Elder wrote that the tree called rhus had no Latin name though it was used in many ways, including by curriers to treat leather.

Sicily

Arab cultivators brought sumac to Sicily between the 9th and 11th centuries, turning a wild eastern shrub into a crop. The name comes from Arabic summaq, dark red.

Baghdad

Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's 10th-century Baghdad cookbook gave a whole section to summaqiyyat, dishes soured with sumac. The family of dishes later travelled to Syria, al-Andalus and Europe.

Palermo, Sicily

In the 1800s Sicilian sumac, sold to tanners and dyers, ranked second only to wheat among the island's exports. In 1899 the Florio family founded a company to ship it abroad. Synthetic tannins later ended the trade.

Gaziantep, Turkey

Much sumac now comes from around Gaziantep in Turkey, salt-cured and crushed. It goes into za'atar and onto kebabs, rice and salads, a sour red dust where lemons once were rare.

India

Sanskrit texts dated to between about 1200 and 200 BCE mention the tamarind tree. An African tree had already become an Indian one.

Persia

Ibn Sina recorded tamarind in his Canon of Medicine as tamar hindi, the Indian date, and used it as a laxative and for fever. English still says his word.

Mexico and Central America

Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought tamarind to Mexico and Central America in the 16th century, where it became a staple of the cooking. The Indian date crossed a second ocean.

Goa, India

In Goa in 1563 the Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta gave tamarind an admiring chapter of its own in his Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, praising it as a digestive and purgative.

Worcester, England

Lea and Perrins first sold Worcestershire sauce commercially in 1837. Tamarind extract is listed among its ingredients, a southern sourness in an English bottle.

India

India grows the most tamarind in the world. Its orchards were producing about 250,000 tonnes a year by the late 20th century.

Poiana Slatinei, Lunca, Romania

Archaeologists have found early Neolithic salt making at Poiana Slatinei in Romania, dated to roughly 6000 BCE. It is among the oldest known anywhere.

Zhongba, central China

At Zhongba in central China, people boiled brine in large vats with pointed bottoms from about 2000 BCE. The work went on for nearly two thousand years.

Hallstatt, Austria

Prehistoric miners dug salt at Hallstatt from the 8th to the 5th century BCE. The salt kept what they left behind: cloth, wood, leather. Salt keeps what it touches. The mine is still worked today.

Han dynasty China

In 119 BCE Emperor Wu of Han made salt and iron state monopolies. In the late Tang dynasty, salt alone brought in more than half the government's yearly revenue.

France

In 1341 King Philip VI made the gabelle, the salt tax, permanent. Adults were forced to buy salt every week. The hated tax lasted, with interruptions, until 1945.

Taghaza, Sahara

In 1352 Ibn Battuta came to the Saharan mine of Taghaza, where houses were built of salt slabs and roofed with camel skins. On the road to Mali's capital, salt rose fourfold in value.

Sabarmati to Dandi, India

Gandhi and 78 followers walked 387 km against Britain's salt tax and monopoly. On 6 April 1930 he lifted salty mud at Dandi. Over 60,000 people were later arrested.

China

In January 2017 China's centuries-old salt monopoly finally loosened. Producers could sell straight to the people who use it, though prices stayed under watch.

New Guinea

Papuan farmers in New Guinea selectively bred the sugarcane Saccharum officinarum from a wild native relative.

India

Nearchus, an admiral of Alexander the Great, learned of sugarcane during the campaign in India and recorded it for Greek readers.

India

People in India learned to turn cane juice into granulated crystals called khanda, easy to store and to trade. Our word sugar comes from Sanskrit śarkarā.

Tyre and Venice

Crusaders brought sugar back to Europe, and Venice set up cane production near Tyre. By the 15th century Venice was Europe's chief refining center.

Hispaniola

Christopher Columbus carried sugarcane to Hispaniola on his second voyage. The first harvest there came in 1501.

Barbados

Sugar production began in Barbados, worked by enslaved Africans who endured lifelong abuse. The Barbados plantation model then spread across the Americas.

Great Britain

William Fox's pamphlet urged Britons to refuse slave-grown West India sugar. More than 200,000 copies circulated, fueling a consumer boycott.

Silesia and France

The first beet sugar factory opened in Cunern, Silesia, in 1801. In 1813 Napoleon banned sugar imports and ordered 32,000 hectares planted with beets.

Worldwide

World sugar production reached 186 million tonnes. Brazil and India together grow more than 60 percent of the world's sugarcane.

Greece

The name oregano comes through Latin from Greek origanon, which some scholars read as mountain and joy. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it probably a loanword from Africa. The joy is disputed.

Greece

The physician Hippocrates used oregano as an antiseptic and for the chest. Greeks also set it into marriage ceremonies for joy and funeral rites for peace.

Europe

Medieval Europeans took oregano for rheumatism, toothache, indigestion and cough. The kitchen herb sat in the medicine chest first.

United States

American soldiers returning from the European theater of World War II brought home a taste for the pizza herb, which had probably been eaten in southern Italy for centuries.

Turkey, Morocco and Albania

Turkey, Morocco and Albania lead world oregano exports. Mexican oregano, Lippia graveolens, is a different plant grown in Mexico, Central America and the southwestern United States, and it shares only the name.

Egypt

Ancient Egyptians used common thyme in embalming, though sources give no firm date. The herb went with the dead before it went into soups.

Greece

The Greeks used thyme in bathing and burned it as incense in their temples. They took it as a sign of courage.

Roman Empire

The first recorded evidence of thyme as medicine dates to the first century CE, in Dioscorides' De materia medica and Pliny's Natural History.

Europe and North America

By the 19th century dental practice used components of thyme oil against oral infections and inflammation. Britannica still lists perfumes and dentifrices among the herb's uses beyond the kitchen.

India, Turkey and Peru

India, Turkey and Peru are the leading suppliers of thyme to world markets. Because the plant grows so low, much of the crop is picked by hand before it is dried.

Roman Empire

Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides both wrote of rosemary, and Dioscorides' De materia medica became one of the most influential herbal books in history. Greeks and Romans held the plant sacred.

China

Rosemary was naturalized in China as early as 220 CE, during the late Han dynasty. A Mediterranean shrub was already growing in Chinese soil.

Westminster, England

Joan of Hainault sent rosemary cuttings to her daughter, Queen Philippa of England, to be planted at Westminster Palace. Sources date the gift to 1338 or 1342. A mother posted a shrub across the sea.

England

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia says, "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember." By then the herb already stood beside burials and promises.

Worldwide

In 2017, on molecular evidence, rosemary was reclassified into the genus Salvia, reviving a proposal from 1835. The herb on the roast potatoes is, strictly, a sage.

Greece

Theophrastus, the Greek botanist, knew sage under the name elelisphakon. Dioscorides later recommended it as a diuretic and a herb for wounds.

Rome

Pliny the Elder recorded sage as a diuretic, a local anesthetic and a styptic. The Romans called it the holy herb and used it in religious rites.

Lake Constance region

In his poem Hortulus, the Benedictine abbot Walafrid Strabo ranked sage first among the herbs of his monastery garden and called it rich in virtue. The garden began with sage.

Salerno, Italy

A medieval health poem tied to the school of Salerno asks, Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto, why should a man die who has sage in his garden. The name salvia comes from salvere, to save.

Paris, France

Le Menagier de Paris, a household guide written in 1393, recommends sage soup and sage sauce. Sage was already a kitchen herb in the city, not only a medicine.

Turkey, Russia and southeastern Europe

Turkey, Russia and southeastern Europe are the principal sage producers. Sage and onion stuffing is the traditional partner of roast poultry at British Christmas and American Thanksgiving tables.

Egypt

Ancient Egyptians decorated mummies with wreaths of marjoram, according to a University of California, Davis, food geography page. It gives no date. A sweet herb kept company with the dead.

Greece and Rome

Hippocrates used marjoram as an antiseptic. Greeks and Romans took it as a symbol of happiness, and the Romans called it the herb of happiness.

Roman Empire

Pedanius Dioscorides described marjoram in De materia medica. Romans also believed the herb could lengthen life.

British Isles

Marjoram may have spread to the British Isles during the Middle Ages, far north of its native Mediterranean and Levantine range. A warm-country herb learned the cold.

United States

Marjoram came into wide use in the United States only after World War II. A herb as old as Cyprus is, in American kitchens, a postwar arrival.

Greece

The ancient Greeks rubbed mint on their arms, believing it would make them stronger.

Europe

One of mint's first known uses in Europe was as a room deodorizer. It was strewn across floors, and each step released more of the scent.

Hertfordshire, England

John Ray published the discovery of peppermint in Hertfordshire in 1696. Peppermint, a hybrid, is a late arrival among the mints.

London, England

Peppermint was added to the London Pharmacopoeia in 1721. In 1753 Carl Linnaeus gave it the name Mentha piperita in his Species Plantarum.

Oregon and Washington, United States

As of 2020 Oregon and Washington produced most American peppermint. The leaves are processed for essential oil that goes into chewing gum and toothpaste.

Sweden

Carl Linnaeus described Artemisia dracunculus in his Species Plantarum in 1753. Dracunculus means little dragon, a name thought to come from the plant's coiled roots.

Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan

Tarragon flavors tarkhuna, a carbonated soft drink that originated in Georgia, and similar drinks in Armenia, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The plant is still called dragon in Swedish and Dutch.

France

Britannica calls tarragon, estragon in French, an essential ingredient of béarnaise, the famous French sauce. Its taste is bittersweet and fragrant, a cousin to wormwood.

China

The earliest written mention is in the Supplementary Records of Renowned Physicians, a Chinese medical text of about 500 CE, which lists the plant as su and describes some of its uses.

Korean Peninsula

Perilla was introduced to the Korean peninsula before the Unified Silla era, and after that it was widely cultivated. Its leaves are still a daily herb and vegetable in Korean cooking.

Japan

Shiso is said to have been introduced to Japan around the 8th to 9th century. Wikipedia notes that an old Japanese name, inue, meaning false perilla, is no longer used.

England and the United States

Red shiso reached English gardeners around 1855 under the name Perilla nankinensis. It came to the United States later, perhaps in the 1860s.

Toyohashi, Japan

Green shiso was not grown industrially until the 1960s. Production began around 1962 at Toyohashi and ran year round by about 1970. An old leaf was given a modern schedule.

South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia

Lemongrass is native to South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia, where it has local names such as sereh in Indonesia, serai in Malaysia and tanglad in the Philippines.

India and Sri Lanka

Indian and Sri Lankan traditional medicine used lemongrass, and in India it also went into perfumes. One grass served as both remedy and scent.

Madagascar, South America and Central America

After World War I lemongrass cultivation spread to Madagascar, South America and Central America. It is now naturalized across the tropics and subtropics, but it cannot take frost.