Unluckily for Malacca, just as the Portuguese were appearing on the horizon, its leadership fell into the hands of a dissolute sultan, Mahmud Shah, from whom the Europeans plucked the city like a plump avocado. The rules of the game would soon change for the Muslims and other Asians engaged in the ancient trade of the Indian Ocean, and not for the better. In one of history’s most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.
