Another Life: A high old time – the drugs also known as Christmas spices

A conifer tang from the tree in the corner, and the sweet lure of chocolate and tangerines are among the comforting aromas of Christmas, with bracing hints of wood smoke, perhaps, for those of us with stoves. Gone without regret is the somnolent fragrance of the after-dinner cigar – succeeded now, if one is unlucky, by incense from the wrong choice of candle.

The best Christmas smells of all can be those of nature’s kitchen spices: cloves, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, allspice, nutmeg, cardamom, cumin, coriander and the rest. One might think, browsing the recipes in the Sunday glossies, that these staples of culinary history were being edged out by new and exotic substances available only online, or in the immigrant delis of our cities.

Inquire more closely, however, and they can lose much of their mystery. The baharat of Arabia, for example, blends all the spices listed above. "Aleppo pepper" is just another crushed chilli powder (but much the best, by many accounts). Lost in the rubble of Aleppo's ancient souks, it survives through Syrian merchants who have fled to Turkey and Armenia.

A first, youthful encounter with chilli was at a restaurant in Amman, in Jordan, where, chewing upon a small green pepper (I thought all the hot ones were red), I wept helplessly, with gentle Arab smiles all around.

More lately, some old man’s medication having quite robbed me of taste, I invited our city-dwelling daughter to bring me, for Christmas, a hamper of exotic pastes and relishes. For her a good deli is already an Aladdin’s cave.

Some jars have lasted forever, needing only a touch from the tip of a knife to set a meal ablaze. My taste now restored, these still lurk at the back of the fridge. But a need remains to grind extra black pepper on almost everything on my plate. (This despite the cook’s protest: “I put plenty in!”) This has led me to explore the psychoactive effects of spices – even, conceivably, addiction. Many of them give us a lift – some, used too liberally, a toxic flight into the ether, followed by nausea or worse.

The role of spices in history has been extraordinary, profits from the their trade building palaces, if not whole merchant cities, from Venice to Amsterdam. Spices such as black pepper and cloves (the flower buds of a tropical tree) did help to mask the taint of meat that was off in the centuries before refrigeration.

But along with the bactericidal properties of piperine, pepper’s active ingredient, came psychic effects that promoted a huge consumption.

"When Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, celebrated his wedding in 1468, he had 380 pounds of pepper served to the guests." The example comes from an absorbing study, The Spice Trade and Its Importance for European Expansion, by a German university food chemist, Udo Pollmer. (You can download it here.)

Much of the spice back then, as he explains, was the "long pepper" from India, Piper longum, much hotter than the Piper nigrum of today's black peppercorns. As in many of the chillies spicing Christmas leftovers, the pain of "hotness" releases opiates in the body's nervous system – endorphins that improve and elevate the mood.

“People who are used to eating hotly spiced foods,” says Pollmer, “need the endorphin ‘kick’ – indeed, they are sometimes addicted to it.”

Abuse of spices by young people seeking legal highs is a clinical reality – notoriously, nutmeg binges that have ended up in A&E. A few other spices, too, are rich in aromatic myristicin, a molecular precursor of the drug MMDA, which is similar to ecstasy, but in normal culinary sprinkles the risk of “mood disorder” is nil.

Indeed, the psychoactive properties of spices are being turned to good account. Turmeric (the root of Cucurma longa, a plant in the ginger family) has earned research for possible benefit in Alzheimer's disease. As "Indian saffron" it has been the cheaper way of turning rice dishes a glorious golden colour, but the real plant, too, apparently, has matched some drugs in relieving depression.

My drawing is of the autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale, the very rare – and toxic – Irish wild flower now found only in the Nore and Barrow river valleys. Almost the sole source of saffron, Crocus sativus, with many more purple petals, is Iran, where its crimson stigmas, called threads, are painstakingly gathered by hand. It needs the threads from 180 flowers to yield one gram of saffron, selling at perhaps €30 – but, as the world's most expensive spice, a little goes a long way.

Could you grow the saffron crocus here? An intriguing website (saffronbulbsireland.com) offers corms for planting from a crocus farm in Co Waterford. Here, it seems, a million or so saffron bulbs planted two years ago have already multiplied to more than seven million, along with stigmas plucked for saffron on stronger knees than mine. Another website, greensaffron.com, belongs to an award-winning family business in Co Cork importing spices from its Indian homeland.

Merry Christmas!

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks