Grazette - Spice Trip

CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to our boys, Mateo and Sam; may they see and experience the world as we have, in all its vibrant colour and flavour.

I love to cook with spices and wanted to know more about my favourite ones. I embarked on this mad Spice Trip adventure with Emma to get to the very heart of the six spices I consider the most important: cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, chillies and cumin. These are the bedrocks of the spice cupboard, and form the basis of hundreds of recipes from all over the world.

Spices add something so brilliant to food that cooking with them feels naughty, almost like cheating. A scattering of chilli flakes, scratch of nutmeg or a pinch of cumin, can transform the most ordinary ingredients into exciting, vibrant, extraordinary dishes. Most of us have these six spices in our cupboards or in our kitchen and yet we know so little about them.

The most exciting thing about this trip for me was to learn how to cook with each spice from the worlds greatest experts the people who grow, process, sell and cook with them every day. Its been amazing to see the beautiful places that everyday spices like black pepper come from. We use pepper so much we barely think of it as a spice and never give any thought to its history or journey. To think that spices come from some of the most beautiful places on earth is pretty inspiring. At the very least this book should make you stop and take another look at what you are sprinkling on your food, persuade you to throw away the pre-ground, stale old spices lingering in your cupboard and to appreciate spices for the beautiful, delicious, exotic magic seeds that they are.

I found each spice to be truly representative of where they come from. Grenadian people are proud, strong and sexy, like nutmeg; Mexicans, wild, joyous and noisy like chillies; Turkish people calm, proud and exotic like cumin you get the picture. I honestly wont be able to smell a spice without remembering the extraordinary people we met on our spice trip. It really adds another dimension to food when you can remember the people and imagine the places where the things you eat come from. Its all part of respecting what you eat and enjoying it more fully. Its something I always try to do in my cooking, to communicate a sense of time and place, a connection to where food comes from and a nod to the people who grow and cook it.

The food I love most is simple, fast and homely. Its the food I cook at home and the food I cook in my restaurant, Dock Kitchen. Im not too interested in things that take hours to prepare, I prefer proper food cooked in peoples homes, the food of the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of this world. Food cooked with love, for people you love. So we have jammed this book with recipes that are exciting and easy to make, most of them taking less than 20 minutes to prepare and not much longer to cook so theyre ideal for everyday cooking. If you find yourself getting lost, refer to our Cooks notes at the end of the book and they should point you in the right direction.

We chose these recipes to highlight each of the six spices and the different techniques and diverse ways they are used around the world, from British oxtail stew flavoured with mulled wine, to traditional Mexican street food, Caribbean rubs and Indian curries. I reckon if you cook a few recipes from each chapter youll end up with a pretty comprehensive understanding of each spice and be confident enough to really start messing around with them on your own. Cooking with spices isnt about making complex spice blends or carefully weighing out and measuring precise quantities, its about bashing stuff up and throwing it in to transform everyday ingredients into really exciting stuff.

Ive also been the guinea pig for several of Emmas spice therapies, aphrodisiacs, perfumes and face packs and I have to admit, theyre worth trying. You can sense the power in spices when you chew a clove and your whole mouth goes numb or remember that some of our most powerful drugs come from spices think of the poppy seeds used to make morphine or the safrole in cinnamon used to make MDMA. Its all good fun and Im sure some of Emmas tricks will end up as standard therapies in my home and also many of the homes of people who give them a try.

So please dont think that this is a book just to read in bed or put on your coffee table. We wrote it for people to cook from, and thats what we want you to do. No ingredient is too tricky to find and none of the recipes take very long and they all taste great! So theres really no excuse not to put a bit of spice into your life.

COOKING WITH SPICES ISNT ABOUT MAKING COMPLEX SPICE BLENDS OR CAREFULLY WEIGHING OUT AND MEASURING PRECISE QUANTITIES, ITS ABOUT BASHING STUFF UP AND THROWING IT IN TO TRANSFORM EVERYDAY INGREDIENTS INTO REALLY EXCITING STUFF

Once prized, marvelled at and treasured, spices were revered not just for their exotic colours, heady aromas and the fabulous flavours they imparted to food, but also for their healing properties, and its high time they reclaimed their rightful spotlight. Cumin, cloves, chillies, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace weve chosen the heavyweights of the spice world to feature in this book. We all know them, some of us love them, and the rest of us will hopefully love them after sharing in our spice trip.

After cooking in restaurant kitchens for years, I went on to develop spiced recipes, therapies and spice blends at The Spicery in Bath. I have always had a real passion for spices and I have enjoyed learning just how much more there is to them than meets the eye. Im incredibly interested in their holistic value and in getting to the bottom of how to use them effectively: how to store them; cook with them and heal with them; not to mention a wealth of other unexpected and wacky uses Ive discovered during our epic adventure. Weve explored bustling markets in Istanbul, braved the bugs and beasties in rural Africa and experienced the wonderment of Hindu ceremonies. And weve come back brimming with inspiration and experiences to share straight from the heart of the islands where spices grow and the people who know them best.

Learning about spices as weve travelled from country to country has been like putting together a jigsaw of world history exciting doesnt even come close. My favourite anecdote is about how the island of New Amsterdam was sold by the Dutch in exchange for a key nutmeg-growing island. Having acquired New Amsterdam, the British changed its name to New York and the rest is history! We also discovered that Columbus might not have discovered America if he werent searching for a faster route to the spice islands. The trade of spices played a huge part in building the world as we know it today and it has been mind-blowing realising just how phenomenally important spices have been throughout history, and sometimes deeply moving finding out how and why.

The why must lie in the seemingly magical power of spices to heal, warm, and ignite our senses. They open the door to a world of natural therapies (and were all shifting in this direction, away from harsh chemicals), being incredibly beneficial to health. Used by the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and mentioned in the Bible and ancient Arabic texts, it appears that throughout history they were the key to good health, longevity, love and life, and I was determined to find out more about all these wondrous properties and unravel the folklore surrounding them. It turns out that much of spice folklore seems to be based entirely around the magic of spices and, before the dawn of science, the properties of spices just werent fully understood, even with modern technology, we still have so much more to learn about them