Browse Items (23 total)

The term “lac” originates from Hindi and Sanskrit words, respectively lakh and laksha, which mean “hundred thousand,” referring to the large quantity of insects needed to produce enough lac material. Used as early as around 1200 BCE in India, lac…

Gum arabic has mainly been acquired from a species of the acacia tree in Sudan and Senegal. It has been used in food and medicine since the Middle Ages in Europe. After the fifteenth century, European seafarers discovered a copious source of gum…

Fenugreek is native to Southern Europe and Asia. In classical times, it was well known in Europe for the medicinal properties of its seeds. Evidence also shows that fenugreek was used for culinary purposes in ancient Egypt.

Dragon’s blood, obtained from the species Dracaena draco, Dracaena cinnabari, and likely Daemonorops draco from the island of Sokotra, was available in Europe since at least the first century CE. Later, with the expansion of European voyages, the…

While known and cultivated in Mexico and the Peruvian Andes, cochineal first entered Europe when Spain brought it in 1523. It spread quickly, a colorant more potent than any of the other Old World red dyes.

Clove is native to the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia. It was in use in China as early as the third century BCE, and has been used in India since ancient times. Between the second and eighth centuries CE, it was spread from Egypt throughout the…

Despite the Europeans’ awareness of the civet cat in the early fifteenth century, it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that civet would increasingly acquire its fame and come to be imported into Europe with the expansion of…

Cinnamon is believed to have originated from the region of Arabia, more specifically Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka. In 1460, it was recorded by John Russell in his Book of Nurture after the British brought it from the Middle East. In 1505, it was…

In the early modern period, sugar production was mainly focused on cane sugar collected from the stalks of tall grasses in the genus Saccharum. During the late medieval period, large-scale sugar production developed in the Mediterranean, especially…