54 - When Pineapples Were Status Symbols

Oh Amy, my little one, I ask myself a million questions every day. When will you give me your first smile? How much sleep do you need? How can I help you and your big brother to get along? At the HSE's MyChild.ie and in the free MyChild books, you'll find the answers you need from doctors, midwives, public health nurses, dietitians and lots of other experts. MyChild.ie, expert advice for every step of pregnancy, baby and toddler health. From the HSE. 'Twas Christmas in Dublin, and Puss was in Boots where he found better-than-half-priced fragrance star gifts, including long-come La Vie Abelle Rose extraordinaire Eau de Parfum 50ml was 120 euro, now only 56 euro. Don't miss out, shop in-store or online, gift happily ever after. Boots. Selected stores while stocks last to offer ends 24th of December. Pineapples are the perfect summertime snack. Juicy and delicious. But when you close your eyes, they instantly transport you to a tropical beach on some Caribbean island. But for the majority of history, they were considered the ultimate delicacy by European nobility who just couldn't get enough of them. From snack to status symbol, the pineapple has graced many a king and queen's palace courts. While outside of them, they took on a rather mythical quality akin to some sort of precious jewel. Today, we'll track the pineapple's voyage across the seas and into the history books as it became synonymous with the very peak of royal deregure. These are the bizarre but true stories from history that in some way involve food. I'm Nick Charlie Key and this is the Fantastic History of Food. Once again, I wanted to say a huge thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon. You helped me out so much in getting this show made. And today, I want to send a special shout out to my new supporter who joined since the last episode, Sarah Thompson. Sarah, thank you so much for joining up and supporting the show. If you would like to support the show in the same way as Sarah has, it costs just $2 a month and when you sign up, you'll have your name mentioned in an episode just like you've heard today. But please, as always, this is absolutely pressure free because more than anything, I love the fact that you just listen to the show, you get some enjoyment out of it and that is the basic reason why I keep making this show. And as always, back to the episode. There is no nobler fruit in the universe. These were the words spoken by Jean de Larray when writing about the pineapple. He was not alone in his love for the tropical fruit and, in fact, was borderline nonchalant about it when compared to how a man named Charles Lamb once described it. "Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lover's kisses, she bighteth me." But how and why had these men become so enamoured by the spiky specimen? Well, as with so many stories from this time in history, this one finds its inception with one of Christopher Columbus's voyages back from the Americas. The pineapple itself is a fruit originally native to southern Brazil and Paraguay, where they would grow wild along the banks of the Piranha Paraguay River. From there, it spread throughout South America as it was slowly domesticated by local people groups. There is archaeological evidence of pineapples having been cultivated as early as 1200 BC in Peru and 200 BC in Mexico, where it was farmed by both the Mayans and the Aztecs. By the late 1400s, just in time for Columbus's arrival, the cultivation of pineapples had spread so widely that they had become a staple foodstuff in the Mesoamerican diet. So it was no surprise then that as Columbus fell in love with the fruit, he decided he just had to bring some back to Spain with him. This was his second voyage to be exact and somewhere deep in his ship's cargo hold amongst our aforementioned tomatoes from the werewolf episode, tobacco, pumpkins, parrots and an entire menagerie of tropical animals, sat a small crate of pineapples. And due to his lack of experience with the fruit and how to handle it, they unfortunately did not last very long on board. When they arrived in port and were unloading their cargo, they found just a rotten sticky mess where once the crate of pineapples had sat. But in a fortuitous twist of fate, just one singular pineapple remained intact and could therefore be presented to King Ferdinand of Spain as the sole survivor of its tropical brethren. And it was immediately a smash hit with the king. His son's tutor, Peter Martyr, even recorded the king's reaction to tasting it due to his overwhelming excitement about the fruit. The most invincible King Ferdinand relates that he has eaten yet another fruit brought from those countries. It is like a pine nut in form and colour, covered with scales and firmer than a melon. But its flavour excels all other fruits. It was not just delicious to eat, but it was beautiful to look at too. King Ferdinand's envoy to Panama wrote of it, "It is the most beautiful of any fruits I have seen. I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other fruit of so exquisite and lovely an appearance." In our modern world, amidst year-round produce availability and sugar being crammed into every possible foodstuff, it is sometimes easy to forget that at this time in Renaissance Europe, cane sugar especially was an incredibly expensive commodity reserved for the wealthy. Eating sweet things in general was a luxury, and at the time fruit was highly seasonal. They were no commonly eaten sweet foods, so when the pineapple came along, it must have been like fireworks going off in their brains as the sugary sweetness exploded their dopamine receptors. It is no surprise then that it was held in such high esteem, and would only further be elevated in time to come. There is an interesting facet of the pineapple arrival in Europe when it did, as told by Fran Bowman in her book The Pineapple. It coincided with the explosion of the written word being spread more broadly throughout the general populations. In the mid-15th century alone, more than 130 million books flooded into Europe as anyone with a story to tell began to write their experiences down. And this included religious texts, and the Bible became more widely accessible than at any other time in history. And it soon became apparent that pineapples were not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, or any ancient European texts for that matter either, and so they had no pre-existing stigmas attached to them like so many other fruits did. The obvious one being the apple, with its connection to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Another interesting one being the Greek myth of Persephone, and how eating just a handful of pomegranate seeds at the wrong time condemned her to a life in the underworld alongside Hades. But the pineapple was brand new to the public consciousness and therefore could be molded into whatever narrative those in power chose for it. It was first named the King of Fruits by the French priest Father du Tertre, and in the centuries that followed, it became almost synonymous with royalty. And no small part, thanks to how its spiky leaves on top resembled a king's crown. Almost all of the pineapples that were brought to Europe were reserved for consumption by the members of various royal families, and because of this, they became somewhat mythologised in popular culture. Very few people had ever even seen a pineapple with their own eyes, let alone ever had the opportunity to taste one. And this association with royalty would become a problem for the fruit when in 1642 Oliver Cromwell began his civil war with the monarchy, ultimately leading to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. To Cromwell, pineapples represented everything he despised about the royals, who lived according to him, in insufferable luxury. But it would be a short-lived exile for the tropical delight until, in 1660, Charles II was thrust upon the throne. Even as the merry monarch, he did away with Cromwell's staunch puritanical ways and ushered in dining halls once again laden with glistening meats, wobbling jellies and intricate dessert sculptures to be enjoyed by all in his court. And he lent hard into this persona, milking this opportunity for all it was worth. He named the fruit the King Pine, and in 1668, when a French ambassador came to mediate a debate about Saint Kitts, an island in the Caribbean, Charles had one of his naval ships bring him a pineapple from one of their own Caribbean colonies on Bobbados. Once it arrived, he had it perched atop a towering pyramid of fruit, brought into the meeting room once the dinner had been finished. And now this was a not-so-subtle show of force to the French ambassador to let him know that the English were the dominant power in the region. A sort of ambassadorial version of the playground taunt of "We've got pineapples, you don't". This was a master stroke from the King, and as words spread of this power play, he found himself becoming even more and more attached to the pineapple as a status symbol. He even had a painting of himself commissioned, where he is standing in front of his enormous palace being handed a pineapple by one of his gardeners who is kneeling before him. This was a fanciful concept that he would use for publicity purposes as there was no way his gardener could ever really do that, because at the time, pineapples could still not be grown in Europe's more northerly climates. Europe at this point was a hotbed for political jockeying, and as England continued to expand their colonies, it was the Dutch who were actually hot on their heels. For years, England flaunted the pineapple as proof of their global reach and superiority, but were caught wholly off-guard in 1682. It was at this point that the Dutch built the very first greenhouse, with a cloth merchant by the name of Peter de la Corte, discovering a breakthrough in the pineapple growing process, allowing them to produce their very own homegrown crops. English nobility was sent into a frenzy upon learning about this, and their jealousy threatened to bubble over into conflict until a former English princess married William of Orange, making this Dutch monarch the de facto king of England. By the middle of the 17th century, Britons had figured out how to grow their own pineapples as well, which triggered a country-wide pineapple craze. It became a status symbol for the upper classes to have their own custom-built greenhouses to cultivate their own pineapples. This was no small endeavour, as these so-called "pinaries" needed 24-hour care and an almost never-ending supply of coal to keep the greenhouses at the pineapple's preferred tropical temperatures. Even then, the plants took 3-4 years to bloom with their first fruit, and then each plant only produced one pineapple per season. So as you can see, the vast expense of cultivating these fruits then meant that once you had one, it became considered wasteful to simply eat it. No, pineapples had moved to being simply high-status ornaments to be flaunted by those wealthy enough to own one. Upper-class women would walk along the high street simply carrying a pineapple, the way modern women might carry an expensive designer bag. They would be passed around from one woman to another until the pineapple began to rot. Even then, as the maids would fetch and deliver these pineapples between their ladies, they had to find ingenious ways to conceal them as if they were seen on the streets with a pineapple, they were the high risk that some opportunistic thief may attack them and steal the precious fruit. Some enterprising businessman even opened a pineapple rental boutique, where, for those who didn't quite have enough money to own their own pineapple, you could simply rent one for the evening if you were attending a swanky function. They became so synonymous with everything good and beautiful that a popular phrase even entered common language, whereby when someone was describing something as being either incredibly valuable or precious, they would say that it was "a pineapple of the finest flavour". It was even included in the Georgian era play called The Rivals, where one character compliments another by saying that "he is the very pineapple of politeness". But as globalization took root and steamships allowed more and more people to travel long distances in relative comfort, such delicacies as pineapples began to lose their mythical reputation as being reserved solely for adventurers and nobility. The final nail in the upper class' pineapple hoarding coffin came in the early 1900s, when James Dole launched his mass pineapple plantations in Hawaii, meaning that for the first time in history, pineapple prices became affordable enough that almost anyone could purchase their very own fruit. Nowadays, it's not at all shocking to see supermarket shelves packed full of whole pineapples or diced up slices in the refrigerated sections. They are so readily available anywhere you shop all year round that it's almost impossible to fathom how at one point, they were the very pinnacle of high society luxury. So the next time you're at your local supermarket, why not pick up this most noble of all fruits and hold it aloft as you walk back to your car, imagining that you too are a Renaissance era royal. Well, you'll certainly get the same sorts of stairs from past as by as they once did, but this time for a very different reason. This show is made entirely by me, Nick Charley Key, with our theme music having been made by the enigma that is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to support this show, the simplest way to do that is over on our Patreon account. There's just one option, so for just two bucks a month, you'll help me keep producing this show, and in return, you'll get your name forever etched onto our supporters' wall of fame over on our website, no, and then maybe listen up for your name in an upcoming episode. So until next time, bon appetit. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.