Spices and spice books
August 27, 2014 by SusieLearning to use spices better has been a lifelong ambition for me – and many other cooks, no doubt. I always used to have a sort of anxious feeling about the spice cabinet – what’s in there? how old is it? is it still any good? am I ever really going to use it? On bad days, the neglected and confused state of the spice cabinet seemed like a pretty good metaphor for middle age.
Last year, with Herculean effort, I re-organized my spices into magnetic canisters stuck to the side of my fridge. Now I can see and use them easily (although some, like the pink peppercorns and the cubeb, seem destined to remain untouched for years on end). I use more of them – more frequently – and I just like the way they look.
But I still feel my spice education has only just begun. Every so often, a book comes along that promises further tutelage. This year, there are two – Spice Odyssey and World Spice at Home. Spice Odyssey‘s like previous spice books I’ve seen: nicely designed, with recipes that stretch familiar dishes in eccentrically spiced directions (almond, cinnamon, and cranberry wontons?!) World Spice at Home emphasizes spice mixes – dukkahs, baharats, masalas, five-spice, and the rest. It’s smartly organized and I have a good feeling about it, but ask me in a month how it fared in the kitchen.
The problem is that spice books are sort of unclassifiable in terms of use. (In fact, they usually end up in the “Unclassifiable” section of my regional cookbooks shelf…along with “American.”) If I want to use fenugreek and caraway, I’ll look them up here at Eat Your Books. Then I tend to choose a recipe probably more based on whether it’s by an author I can trust than any other factor, which means I’m unlikely to discover great new recipes from unknown sources. But I’m working on being more open-minded.
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