Paul Freedman, a historian of food, wrote that medieval Europeans were passionate about spices because of the “prestige and versatility of spices, their social and religious overtones, and their mysterious yet attractive origins. Versatility is especially significant because… spices were not used for just cooking. They were regarded as drugs and as disease preventatives in a society so often visited by ghastly epidemics… [T]hey were not only medicinal but luxurious and beautiful.”
