Sugar and Spice Makes These Cakes Nice

New York-based cake makers prove that spiced cakes aren’t just for the holidays.

During a trip to Lisbon last year, I sat at the bank of the Tagus River and watched as sailboats casually drifted to and fro, as if they weren’t afloat on what was once a stage for one of history’s most pivotal events. 527 years ago, almost to the day, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama set sail from that very river to find the source of the medieval world’s most precious commodity, a spice called pepper. His voyage East launched the Age of Discovery, also, an era of violent conquest and colonization. A drawing and redrawing of the global map that has shaped everything about the world as we know it today.

Go forth and conquer, I guess.

Because history favors tidy and often heroic storylines, da Gama’s journey was sold to me as the genesis of the modern, civilized world. Civilized being a coded word for good, of course, as opposed to the “barbaric” natives in “exotic” lands who lived without God and grace. Da Gama sailed around the coast of Africa and to the Indian subcontinent, just to feed a European appetite for pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and, most of all, power.

As it turns out, spice was the spice of life. 

A marble inlaid map of Portuguese conquests from the banks of the Tagus River.

To be vague and sweeping, you and I are here, which is wherever we are, because of pepper. Manhattan is what it is because of nutmeg. You get paid a salary, derived from the Latin word salarium or “salt money,” because salt was once so precious, it was used as currency. There are so many ways that spice has shaped our lives today. Which makes its descent into ordinariness so wild to think about. That pepper grinder on my counter, even though it’s filled with Zanzibari peppercorns from Burlap & Barrel, is just so…banal. It’s hard to imagine a world where its contents could pay ransoms or, theoretically, ward off death.

Around the time of da Gama and Columbus (whose legendary blunder of running into the Americas was just another pepper-quest), wealthy people were putting spices in everything to show off their status. But these imported treasures were likely too expensive for everyone else, so they were reserved for special occasions, which in Europe meant Christmas. And that’s largely still how spice and baking are associated in the U.S. today — cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and allspice are dead ringers for the holiday season, which I wrote about for TASTE a few years ago.

That piece also presented the idea that bakers today are adapting holiday spice baking with their own cultural twists. A Christmas cookie recipe from Cantonese American cookbook writer Kristina Cho was reinterpreted as a five-spice cookie, for example. But here’s my new thesis, the thing I’ve been building up to: for a collection of bakers in New York, adding spice to a cake has become a form of self-discovery and expression, a re-appraisal of the value and deliciousness of spices in baking for any occasion, and an invitation to all cake lovers to enjoy a slice of their rich, world-building histories and loving personal memories.