How did the Spice Project start?
Well, it didn't originally start as a spice project. It started as a project based on the diary of
the voyage of Vasco da Gama. There was no internet to find lovely information so the
children had to rely on books and encyclopaedias and their history text book where it simply
said: 'Vasco da Gama did this, this and this.' So what I asked the children to do was to imagine
they were Vasco da Gama and write a kind of diary of what happened on his voyage up the East coast of Africa, what
happened when he got to Mozambique, what happened when he got to Mombasa, Malindi, etc., etc. And that was how it
started and then it simply morphed into the Spice Project because the spices became part of the history of the trade as did
the dhows. When we got the computers the children were able to get pictures of the dhows and download them. Then we
made it a bit more interesting as everybody has spices in their house to cook with, so I thought it would provide practical opportunities where they could smell and taste them and have a go at finding recipes, making them and seeing what
it tasted like. Of course a lot of the children came from homes where there is a great deal
of spice in their cooking anyway.
How did the parents get involved?
Gradually the parents got more interested in it and it simply became a sort of thing: 'Oh my God, it's the Spice project this
year.' I remember my neighbour Lucy Simmons-Wood, with her daughter, was doing the spice project. At the end they celebrated with a pasta party!
Which spices were the most popular?
The spice that gave rise to the most writing was cinammon, followed by pepper. The ones that always
amused were nutmeg and mace because they were basically the same thing, from the same tree and
the children always came up with the same story of how the Dutch said to the people in the Spice
Islands: 'Cut down all those nutmeg trees, we need mace,' and of course they all chuckled madly because you can't have one without the other. They were all very interested in learning that the Banda Islands were out there and they could make
things with the spices.
Any memorable projects?
There were so many. Ella Norman did a superb one, a kind of game like monopoly;
but it was a spice monopoly; she called it 'spiceopoly.' Others came up with Top
Trumps as spice cards. Others were very inventive; Nina Allan's included dhows
on the box; Anna Nora had a great one and Julia too.
Luke Evans was probably the best one I had ever, ever seen. It was a space man
who communicated the spice trade directly from space.