Pineapples are the perfect summertime snack, juicy and delicious, and 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 dere ago. These are
the bizarre but true stories from history and in some way involved 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
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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 Lay 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 biteth me. But how and why
had these men become so enamored by this spiky specimen? While 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, not the pineapple itself is a
fruit originally native to southern Brazil and Paraguay, where they would grow wild along
the banks of the parah on a 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 twelve hundred BC in Peru
and two hundred BC in Mexico, where it was farmed by both the Mayans
and the Aztecs. By the late fourteen hundreds, just in time for Columbus's
arrival, the cultivation of pineapples had spread so widely that they had become a
staple food stuff in the meso American 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. Now, this was his second
voyage to be exact, and somewhere deep in his ship's cargo hold, amongst
our aforementioned tomatoes from the were Wolf episode, tobacco, pumpkins, parrots and
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 Marta, 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 color, covered
with scales, and firmer than a melon, but its flavor 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 food stuff, 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. Tasting sweet things in general was a luxury, and at the time
fruit was highly seasonal. There 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's 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 Pine,
it coincided with the explosion of the written word being spread more broadly throughout the
general populations. In the mid fifteenth century alone, more than one hundred and
thirty 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 seed 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 Dutertre, and in the
centuries that followed it became almost synonymous with royalty, in 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 mythologized 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 sixteen forty two Oliver Cromwell began
his civil war with the monarchy, ultimately leading to the execution of King Charles
the First in sixteen forty nine. To Cromwell, pineapples represented everything he despised
about the royals, who lived, according to him, in insufferable luxury.
There'd be a short lived exile for the tropical delight until in sixteen sixty Charles
the Second was thrust upon the throne. Known 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 leant hard into this persona, milking this
opportunity for all It was worth. He named the fruit the King pine And
in sixteen sixty eight, when a French ambassador came to mediate a debit about
Saint KITT's, an island in the Caribbean, Charles had one of his naval
ships bring him a pineapple from one of their own Caribbean colonies on Barbados.
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 a dominant power in the region, a sort of ambassadorial
version of the playground Torento, we've got pineapples, you don't now. This
was a master's 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. Now, this was a fanciful concept that
he would use for publicity purposes, as there was no way his gardener could
ever rarely 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 sixteen eighty two. It was at this that the Dutch built the very
first greenhouse, with a cloth merchant by the name of Peter de la Court,
discovering a breakthrough in the pineapple growing process, allowing them to produce their
very own home grown crops. Now 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 seventeenth 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. And this was no small
endeavor, as these so called pineries needed twenty four hour care at an almost
never ending supply of coal to keep the greenhouses at the pineapples preferred tropical temperatures.
Even then, the plants took three to four 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, there was 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. Now 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 flavor. 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 knell in the upper classes pineapple hoard in coffin came
in the early nineteen hundreds, 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 shells 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. You'll certainly get the same sorts of stairs from passers by
as they once did, but this time for a very different reason. This
show is made entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music
having been made by the Enigma that is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd
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get your name forever etched onto our supporter's Wall of Fame over on our website
and then maybe listen out for your name in an upcoming episode. So,
until next time, bon apetite,