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Using recipes as our maps, we are embarking on a culinary journey that weaves through history and halfway around the world, following the ancient trails of maritime trade known as the spice routes.

Our voyage starts in the Indonesian spice islands for nutmeg and cloves, taking us to China for ginger, Sri Lanka for cinnamon and India for cardamom and black pepper, via the Middle East and northeast Africa to Europe, where we find cumin, coriander (cilantro) and saffron. Each ancient port is linked by the ribbon of spice and with it have travelled ingredients and cooking techniques that have been assimilated, adapted, refined and reinvented over and over. We will be exploring how centuries of spice trade and cultural diffusion have changed the world’s cuisine.

The spice routes led to an early and enduring mingling of Asia and Europe, East and West. It knitted together a shared history.

Focus is often placed on only a short period, for the Age of Discovery and rampaging colonial conquest from the fifteenth century AD onwards tend to fire the historical imagination. Yet the peaceful trade and the gentle spread of ideas and knowledge that took place over many millennia prior make a quieter and equally compelling story.

Spice trade sprang from desire.

Seafaring was a historically dangerous endeavor, yet throughout antiquity people have been enticed into unknown waters by the allure of the exotic, and the prices such rarities could fetch. Across thousands of years, trading links from Indonesia fanned out through Asia and met with those spreading from the Middle East. Spices travelled from one end of the earth to the other. They came to hold great value, used in food, religion and medicine, and so the Indian Ocean was coursed by Chinese, Malayan, Pharaonic, Phoenician, Graeco-Roman, Arab, Jewish, Indian and European merchant seafarers all united by a common temptation.

The vast network of sea routes that developed linking East and West makes up part of the trade system, along with the land-based Silk Road. Sometimes it is referred to as the Maritime Silk Road. Fogged with romance and cliché, this concept is a European conceit and comes with an assumption of the primacy of its own region as consumer. In reality, there has never been a simple passage leading from the steamy spice forests of Asia to kitchens in the West. Instead, we see an ever-changing web of trade with flow in all directions, some spices traveling great distances and some hardly traveling at all but finding a home in local cuisines.

A few made their journey exclusively overland—musk, cassia, and licorice trekked with camel caravans across Central Asia—but these are the exception. As the most sought-after spices grew on impenetrable forest islands, the trade was largely conducted by sea. This lent the routes to frequent realignment, and journeys that initially skipped along the skirts of Asia, interspersed with occasional land passages, gradually edged away from the shores as maritime technology improved.

That these grand spice routes existed at all can’t be traced through archaeological evidence. Their legacy lingers on in a less tangible form, in the sharing and blending of ideas. With every ship that set sail packed with valuable cargo, fresh knowledge was carried over the seas to the next port.

One of the ways this is most evident is in the food cultures that have developed in concert with each other throughout history.