Colonizing Condiments: Culinary Experimentation and the Politics of Disgust in Early Modern Britain

In seventeenth-century Britain, two authors engaged in a furious debate over colonization, nutrition, and geopolitics. Their great cause for conflict? flavored sauces and pastes. John Floyer, a university-trained physician, celebrated that people in Britain were "invent[ing] new Sauces and Pickles . . . [such] as Mangoes, Olives, Capers, Chatchops, and an Indian liquor." 1 As Floyer argued, these foods were not only tasty, but could also make people healthier: spicy, sour, or bitter sauces and pickles could, as Floyer explained, "help our digestions," and allow early modern European people to process their food more safely and efficiently. In opposition, Thomas Tryon, idiosyncratic religious independent, advocate of temperance, vegetable-based diets, and frugal living, denigrated condiments as symbols of excess, foreignness, and self-indulgent luxury. He exclaimed, "what Tongue or Pen can express the hazards, the horrors, the miseries, that People expose themselves to in Tempests at Sea, and to what purpose. . .to bring Pepper to strew over our Cucumbers, [and] Mangoes for our Mutton." This kind of trade, Tryon warned, encouraged Britons to "spend their Means, ruine their Healths, shorten their Lives, be mad, quarrel, [and] kill one another [for] these foreign Need-nots." 2 For people like Tryon, condiments were not only disgusting; they were also dangerous, putting the lives of mariners and merchants, and the souls of consumers, at grave risk.