Journey to Spice Island
Posted By Sika on July 16, 2008
Zanzibar, besides being one of those exotic places of which you’re never quite sure of the location*, was known as the original Spice Island when the true source of the spices was still being kept secret. Anything named Spice Island is meant to evoke the fiery exoticism of Zanzibar. Zanzibar has been the center of the spice trade for centuries, and so of course we decided to go on a spice tour while we were there.
Sarah, Denise, Carol, and David seemed to find it a bit amusing when I pulled out my diary and began taking notes. Even more so as they helped me collect bits and bobs of the spices and leaves and stick them in my journal until it smelled warm and flavourful.
Barbara Kingsolver has a new book out in which she talks about how so many people (including me) don’t know what their food looks like while it is still in the ground. I was definitely surprised by the form some of the spices took. I wondered more at how anyone ever thought to eat some of these things. Who looked at the bulbous outcroppings of an orchidea plant and said, “Hey, I’d bet these’ll be really good if we dry them, pull out the seeds, and cook with them!”?**
So, just to share the wonder, although not the scents (as much as I’d like to develop scratch’n’sniff photos.):
There are three types of coconut trees grown in Tanzania. King, Hybrid, and some other kind I don’t remember. Kings are good for their milk, but not so good for their meat. I-can’t-remember coconuts are good for their meat and not so good for their milk. Hybrids are good for both.
Elephant apples are used as hair gel, apparently. I’m not exactly clear as to when and how, but that’s its use.
Soursop is known in Costa Rica as guanábana and is my favorite flavour of ice cream and milkshakes there. The only problem is they’re too big for me to have bought and eaten any while we were in Tanzania.
Curry leaves smell like curry. Proper curry is made of several different spices including cumin, chili, garlic, turmeric, and a bunch of other stuff. Curry leaves don’t taste like particularly much and aren’t used in curry , but they do smell like curry, so they are sometimes used as a garnish for proper curry dishes.
Jackfruit can grow to be up to 50kg each. Often on the side of the road in Malawi, we see jackfruit that are 3 or 4 feet tall. There are many black seeds surrounded by white flesh. The flesh immediately around the seeds is sweet, edible, and very very sticky, leaving a tacky residue on anything it touches. Outside of that is more fibrous white stuff that doesn’t taste like much and is nearly impossible to chew.
Somebody on the tour confused jackfruit with durian, and so our guide gave us a run down on durian, saying that the “fruit smells like hell, but tastes like heaven,” and it gives you “very stinky burps” but if you eat cucumber your breath will turn to normal.
I don’t know how I thought henna was made, but I didn’t realize it was tree leaves that are then dried and powdered.
The starfruit weren’t quite ripe, and so were overly bitter, but I still love their translucent shininess.
The neem tree is not the same thing as the quinine plant, but the leaves and bark can be made into a tea which if ½c is taken twice a day for a week, will treat malaria or skin fungus. The oil can be used as an insecticide and the leaves can be used to brush the teeth. It doesn’t taste particularly good, so you might want to wait a while after brushing with neem before kissing anyone.
Lemongrass can be used as a tea just because it tastes good. It can also be used as a mosquito repellant. The oil can be used for massage and pain relief. Lemongrass is also used in cooking and baking, although I’m not sure if you use the leaves themselves or make a tea out of it first and then substitute the liquid into the recipe.
I had never seen the plant parts of ginger and turmeric before. The turmeric root, when cut open, is bright yellow and stains your fingers for hours. Or until you take a dip in the Indian Ocean. I’m not sure whether or not other oceans work for getting turmeric off your hands.
I’m pretty sure everybody knows that ginger is good for the stomach, and also it’s super yummy. Turmeric must be grown in the shade and after the root is harvested it is dried and pounded to powder. For bronchitis, you can make a tea out of 1 tsp turmeric powder, 1 tsp ginger powder and 1 tbl honey and take it twice a day for two weeks.
Harvesting cloves can be a little tricky since it takes 7 years to the first harvest and they must be picked by hand and then dried in the sun until black. Once they start producing a crop, though, the trees live at least 100 years. Cloves can be used for the teeth: people have been gnawing on cloves to soothe toothaches for centuries. Clove massage oil is good for muscle aches. Half a cup of clove tea can be drunk to treat diarrhea.
Cardamom is an orchid relative, which must also be grown in the shade. The pods are sweet when eaten fresh, and then get stronger in flavour and have more of a bite when the seeds are harvested from the dried pods. It’s supposed to be very nummy when flavouring coffee.
Cinnamon bark must be peeled carefully to keep from killing the tree. Cinnamon sticks come from the small branches of the tree, and therefore are naturally irregular. Cinnamon sticks that are regular in size are machine milled.
The nutmeg tree takes 8 years to first harvest. Nutmeg is really cool because there are three parts to it. The fruit itself can apparently be made into a nice marmalade, although I haven’t tasted the fruit, so I’m not sure what it would taste like. When you cut open the fruit, there’s a brown pit surrounded by threads of red stuff. The red is the spice mace (not the spray in the eyes mace). The pit is the nutmeg we all know and love. Nutmeg is 30% oil and 30% carbohydrate. Our guide told us that nutmeg is supposed to “make you horny” (he said this matter-of-factly, in much the same tone as he told us how to make tea to treat diarrhea) and later a Tanzanian woman on the tour with us told us that Zanzibari women eat it like a drug because it makes them “mmm hmmm.”
Pepper is a vaguely parasitical vine that grows up other plants. Green peppercorns are fresh, unripe pepper preserved in vinegar; white peppercorns are soaked in water for one day; black peppercorns are dried for 5 days, and red peppercorns are the ripe fruit from the plant.
Vanilla is another vaguely parasitical vine, this one in the orchid family (orchids are good at this spice thing, yeah?). When the beans are yellow, they are put in hot water for a few minutes a day for a couple of days and then are allowed to ferment until they turn blackish brown like the pods we know.
Merimbe is a local, more sour relative of the starfruit. It’s used to make achar.
Rambutan is similar to but different from lychee. It is sweeter and finer flavoured than the lychee itself. People often sell rambutan as lychee and vice versa.
After the tour, we took a look at the Persian Baths, which the Sultan of Zanzibar built these baths for his wife. She insisted because she wanted a bath she didn’t have to share with his other wives and concubines. He was from Oman and she was from Iran, hence the name. In a Kiswahili accent, though, the name sounds like “Passion Bath” which sounds a whole lot more fun. We had an amazing lunch including greens cooked in coconut milk and rice pilau (which is my favorite dish right now) and then got to taste test a bunch of fruit, including oranges that are actually orange, which was awfully exciting, ‘cause in Malawi, oranges are green.
*Just to be clear, it’s in Tanzania, just off the coast of Dar Es Salaam in the Indian Ocean.
*I know, I know, probably someone sometime tasted one and said, “Hey, it’s not poisonous. Yay, food!” And worked out the rest later.
very fun entry! i went to a spice garden in sri lanka that wasn’t quite so extensive.