Drogues, dolços i tabac [Drugs, sweets and tobacco]- La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
- Albert Garcia Espuche (direction)
- Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
- Barcelona, 2010
- 240 pages
Drogues, dolços i tabac (2010) is another example of the central thesis of the Barcelona 1700 collection as a whole. The volumes in this series conform a veritable arsenal of documentation that allows us to assert, using first-hand sources, that the Barcelona of the second half of the 17th century was far from decadent; quite the opposite –it was a first-order European trading hub. This assertion can now be made thanks to a compelling body of documentation, and it is explained in detail by the texts of Albert Garcia Espuche, Maria dels Àngels Pérez Samper, Sergio Solbes Ferri, Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero and Núria Miró i Alaix. As in preceding volumes, this one documents the dynamism of the city before 1714, this time through grocery shops.
Adroguer (grocer) is a word with an inevitable touch of exoticism and fantasy, with a special ring for anyone above the age of fifty who had the opportunity to experience the kind of shops that appear to have been driven to extinction by the modern supermarkets. From the end of the 16th century, grocers, pastry-makers, confectioners, wine and spirit importers and sellers of tobacco (in tobacconists or “estancs” [controlled stores], because it was a much-coveted royal monopoly, which is well documented) fuelled a popular Barcelona that remained with us, it seems, until only yesterday. The book demonstrates that Barcelona’s fame as a “shop-keeping” and craftsman’s city is well founded.
Since days of old, Barcelona has been used to living well, and the documentation furnished in the volume proves that, particularly in the second half of the 17th century, the level of consumption was very high and much more equitable than has often been believed. If ancient societies quarrelled over salt, then the wealth and growth of modern cities on the other hand can be measured by the increase in their consumption of sugar and tobacco. But if historians are interested in grocers and groceries it is because they are also a decisive economic phenomenon. The mental universe of groceries is not limited to the tight confines of the city, it is ubiquitous. By definition, the material sold by grocers to their customers is global. A grocer in the Baroque period and the Age of Enlightenment was a trader who dealt with the American colonies and countries with fantastic-sounding names. A city like Barcelona, which consumed Peruvian bark, lignum vitae and xina, products that reached the city from across the Mediterranean and the seven seas, was well integrated in the major trading routes and was a major consumer. This is why grocery articles eventually became known as “colonial” products. A city with a large number of grocers and where food of a certain level of luxury and distinction is eaten has to be well connected to the rest of the world.
Tobacco and spirits should not be regarded as mere commercial products; from the standpoint of what is now termed “sociological imagination”, the trading and consumption of these goods constitute, first and foremost, the symptom of a network of highly complex social relationships in which Barcelona held a significant position. From the second half of the 17th century onwards, and very broadly speaking, it appears that all over Europe increasingly wider layers of urban society managed to switch from a purely subsistence-based economy to one driven by a certain level of lavish consumption. In the course of the 18th century, new consumers began to appear among the petite bourgeoisie, who some two generations before had been known as “craftsmen” (a concept which, by the way, should be duly refined one day in terms of its complex relationship with those who since the end of the 19th century must be regarded as “middle classes”). One trait of these craft-workers was how they began to consume products which might be regarded as luxury articles, such as chocolate, tobacco and coffee, thitherto reserved for aristocrats and idle clergy. It might be true that for the modest Catalan petit bourgeois a cup of drinking chocolate was a luxury to be partaken of only on special occasions (a birthday or wedding), because the pastry-making world conjures up the sophistication and complexity of social relationships. Both in the past and today, any city worth its salt must have good pastry shops and even better cafés.
Pastry and confectionery products in the 17th century gradually became consumer items, initially more typical of the higher classes (King Charles II of Spain had a French pastry cook, warranting great respect in his Catalan subjects), although they eventually spread to a broader audience. Garcia Espuche documents that before 1663 some 560 different articles were on sale in Barcelona’s groceries, while the figure rose to over 800 after this date. However, it is obvious that the chief novelty in the 17th and 18th centuries was tobacco, sold in very different forms and with an increasingly greater demand. Long gone were the days when one of Columbus’s companions, Rodrigo de Jerez, had been incarcerated by the Inquisition in Barcelona for smoking in public “because only the devil could give a man the power to expel smoke through the mouth”. The whole affair is said to have cost poor Rodrigo ten years in jail!
The excavation work carried out at the Barcelona of El Born has yielded a major amount of household articles, many of which are beautifully made and were imported from all over the Mediterranean area and Northern European countries. It has also uncovered a huge number of kaolin pipes (almost 8,000 fragments from local workshops and from England, Holland and different Mediterranean and Balkan ports), which demonstrate how widespread the habit –or should we say the vice?– of smoking was among highly different social classes. A very interesting article by Núria Miró i Alaix, “L’èxit dels nous productes d’adrogueria: xocolata, te, cafè i tabac” (The success of new grocery products: chocolate, tea, coffee and tobacco), full of outstanding photographs, documents the fine porcelain of the period: drinking chocolate cups and “bowls”, imported wall tiles from Genoa, pottery from Umbria, Chinaware and Syrian imitations. We know that Barcelona imported almost 70,000 pipes from Holland between 1667 and 1675, and that its refined society was greatly concerned about pastry-making, hence a pottery industry flourished in the city: jars, pitchers, pots, pans, draining boards and a broad range of household articles were extensively consumed, and there was even a burgeoning home fashion industry in the city. The article “Adroguers i adrogueries, tot un univers d’objectes” (Grocers and groceries, a whole universe of objects), by Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero, also accompanied by some very interesting photographs, offers readers a broad and very significant overview of the findings from El Born which we are sure will spark great curiosity when they are eventually exhibited.
Maria dels Àngels Pérez Samper contributes an interesting article on “La confitura en els receptaris” (Confectionery in Recipe Books), which, while it might appear to be a minor topic, speaks volumes of the standard of living in the Barcelona of El Born, as well as the period’s feminine sensitivity. The fact that the inhabitants of Barcelona had a sweet tooth is no novelty; they still do. The recipes copied in her text (“how to make cherry cups”, “how to make quince jam”, “how to make marzipan”, etc.) are the living proof of the everyday existence of countless nameless women who, it should be said, knew how to read and write and felt obliged to pass on their wisdom to their daughters and granddaughters. What is more, readers can try their own hand at making the recipes proposed by Professor Pérez Samper, because, as I am told, jam and preserve making techniques have barely changed in three centuries…
But perhaps the most significant article is the one penned by Sergio Solbes Ferri, titled “Una cita con el monopolio del tabaco en España” (An appointment with the tobacco monopoly in Spain), which traces the development of the estanco general de tabaco (general tobacconist’s), an economic mainstay for the absolutist State, engendered in Castile in 1636 but which slowly but surely took root all over Spain. In Catalonia, the definitive tobacconist’s arrived with the Nova Planta decrees, although the story of tobacco tax long pre-dates it, because the Council of One Hundred had levied the tax as early as 1655 to redress the city’s financial difficulties, which, by the way, sparked an extraordinary uproar. Significantly, the tobacco monopoly led smokers in Barcelona, who had had more than fifty varieties to choose from before the War of the Spanish Succession, to have to make do with the output of the factory in Seville, which gave rise to smuggling. There is nothing new under the sun.