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Chapter 11
Certain Ripe Plants
Travellers in the army of the Great Pilgrimage made a startling discovery during their march to Antioch from Byzantium. Starving like a Biblical host in the desert, they stumbled across stands of tall grass.
What they found was to bring about a profound cultural revolution throughout Europe.
The men, women and children of the nobles' army had just fought their first great battle of the war, at Dorylaeum. Battered but uplifted by their victory against the Turks under Kilij Arslan, they marched from the epicentre of Turkey south east towards the coast. From the point of view of the Christians, this barren plateau was a desert, an uninhabitable land without water.1
Beset by hunger and thirst, they were reduced to eating thorn bushes which they picked from the earth and rubbed in their hands. Many horses died, so that even the knights had to walk. Some used oxen as battle steeds, while goats, sheep and dogs were used to carry baggage.
Almost miraculously, they stumbled on a manna in the desert: sugar cane. In the cultivated pockets were found "certain ripe plants like reeds which were called canna mellis (sugar canes) a name composed of two words, canna (cane) and mel (miel, honey). I believe that this is the reason why what is skillfully extracted from these plants is called wild honey. We devoured them ravenously because of their sweet taste...."2
The wonder of the new food also impressed Albert of Aachen, who called the canes little honeyed reeds which produced a wholesome sap called sukkar. The cane, he said, was produced each year through extremely hard work by the natives. After they harvested the ripe crop, they crushed it in little mortars, putting the filtered sap into their receptacles until it curdles and hardens so that it looked like snow or white salt. Pieces were shaved off the lumps and mixed with bread and water as a relish which seemed sweeter to those who tasted it than honey. The use of sugar was adopted almost immediately, according to Albert, who says that the people, who were famished, were greatly refreshed by these "little honey-flavoured reeds" during the sieges of Albara, Maarra and Acre.3
Nowhere is the change in European domestic life demonstrated more clearly than in the revolution in eating habits wrought by the humble sugar cane.
It was to play a part in altering the basic elements comprising social relationships.
Of course, sugar cane was already known to the Norman conquerors of Sicily, but, like so many products of the east, it was not familiar to the wider European population until the breaking down of the barriers between East and West that was a direct result of the Crusade.
Sugar is itself an ancient part of cooking. It was known in India in the second millenium B.C., where Europeans made their first encounter with its properties. In 327 B.C., a commander of Alexander the Great, Nearchus, reported during the invasion of India a reed which yielded honey without the help of bees. Four hundred years later, Christian monks were cultivating cane in the Euphrates region, and during the eighth century, the conquering Arabs were introducing it throughout the Mediterranean.
It seems to have remained an unknown quantity throughout the cold north, however, until the pilgrims of 1097 literally stumbled across it. Until then, the northerners had relied on sweetening from honey - also fermented into a drink called mead, and the natural properties of fruits. These processes continued throughout the middle ages, but were supplanted eventually by the magical grain, sugar from the cane.
After the conquest of Outremer, sugar cane was grown and refined in the Jordan valley near Tyre and Acre for export to Europe. Other major exporting regions were Syria, Rhodes, Cyprus, Candia, Alexandria and Sicily.
Eventually, Venice was to monopolise the distribution of this manna from the desert throughout the north.
Before sugar and other foodstuffs from the East reached the north, the menu of even the greatest noble was by modern standards dull and colourless. The Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne was overweight through the pleasures of the table - but those delights were confined mainly to roast meats. There is little mention of tasty sweetmeats. Similarly, a menu for an Anglo Saxon feast might typically consists of grilled trout, carp in nettle broth, game stew with barley and herbs, small bird and bacon stew with walnuts and hazelnuts and - the only desserts - summer fruit, honey and hazelnut crumble, and steamed carrot and barley pudding. The sweetening in the latter is provided by the fruit and the honey.3
Throughout the medieval period, local produce still provided the overwhelming bulk of basic food items, even for the rich and powerful. The basic ingredients of the marriage
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