Spices, sugar, coffee and noodles followed ships, caravans and empires. These are the foods that crossed oceans and changed what the world eats.
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Marco Polo came home to Venice in 1295. Sicilian mills were exporting dried pasta by 1154, and the tale of his sailor named Spaghetti comes from a 1929 American trade journal.
Ketchup was a fish brine before it was a tomato sauce. How a Hokkien word reached a London slang dictionary by 1699, and why the Cantonese tomato theory fails.
Pumpkin spice is the seasoning for a pumpkin pie, not a flavor made from one. Its paper trail runs from a 1796 Hartford cookbook to 1930s spice tins to a 2003 latte.
Black pepper began on India's Malabar Coast and crossed the sea to Egypt, Rome and Venice. Here is what the records say about its trade, its prices and the voyages it inspired.
Cacao was in use in Ecuador about 5,300 years ago. The chocolate bar is only from the 1840s on, and several tidy stories about Cortes and Aztec feasts do not hold up.
Egypt was importing cinnamon by about 2000 BC, Rome paid fortunes for it, and the Portuguese, Dutch and British took turns controlling the island that grew it.
Coffee grew wild in Ethiopia, but the first drinkers we can document were Sufis in fifteenth-century Yemen. The goatherd Kaldi is a late legend, and the rest of the story is bans, coffeehouses and plantations.
Asian rice was first grown in China's Yangtze basin, and a second species came from the Niger delta. Here is how both reached Carolina, Italy and the age of miracle rice.
Sugarcane began as a Pacific island grass, became crystals in India and a plantation crop in the Americas from 1493. Millions of enslaved Africans paid for Europe's cheap sugar.
Tea began as a Chinese medicine and became a daily drink, then a cargo that tied together silver, opium, war and revolution. Here is what the records show and which stories are legend.
Vanilla began with the Totonac of Veracruz and became a global crop in 1841, when a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion found a way to pollinate the orchid by hand.
A Tamil word, an eighteenth-century spice blend and the ships of the British Empire carried curry from India to Glasgow, Tokyo, Durban and Trinidad, changing at every stop.
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