PASS THE PANDOWDY PLEAST CHEWING ON HISTORY WITH FAMOUS FIGURES AND THEIR FAVORITE FOODS ABIGAIL EWING ZALZ ILLUSTRATED BY ERIC ZAZ CRED CA
to market with Marco Would you travel thousands of miles from home for pepper Merchants and explorers like Marco Polo ca 1254-1324 did Hard to believe Imagine a meal with no spices for seasoning and you’ll understand how important flavor is And what we consider commonplace today was once exotic expensive difficult to attain and desirable The European foods that Marco Polo and his neighbors ate often combined tangy and sweet flavors and more closely resembled Indian cooking than modern European food The city of Venice Italy where he lived dominated the spice trade in Europe during his lifetime with ships arriving at the busy harbor carrying spices from Asia People valued spices for both their flavor and health benefits especially pepper ginger cloves saffron and nutmeg Pepper was the most popular spice It was sometimes used as currency and was believed to cure a range ailments from heart disease to eye infections of Feeling tired or sluggish You might be given spicy food for more energy Would you like sugar on your hamburger Cooks once considered sugar to be a spice and sometimes sprinkled it along with nutmeg and cloves on fish vegetables meat and other savory dishes all for the expanding tastebuds of Marco Polo’s world
The places I’ve been Perhaps if I hadn’t been thrown into prison during a military conflict you never would have heard of me During my imprisonment I described my 23-year visit to East Asia to another prisoner He enjoyed hearing of my exotic adventures and after we left prison I published a book describ-ing the people and places I had seen When I was 17 I left the thriving city of Venice with my father and uncle who were merchants and sailed east along the Mediterranean Sea We continued overland through Afghanistan and crossed the Gobi Desert until we reached China I worked for Kublai Khan the Mongol ruler for 17 years before returning home My book The Travels of Marco Polo inspired later explorers including Christopher Columbus to travel
