Christina Nichol - Essential Spices and Herbs: Discover Them, Understand Them, Enjoy Them

U nderstanding the magical world of spices is a little like unlocking a door to the power of your senses. This chapter will help familiarize you with the aromas, colors, and flavor characteristics of spices and herbs, providing you with sufficient confidence to begin transforming drab dishes into evocative works of flavor artall without recipes. Well illuminate the distinctions between spices and herbs, explain how to design and fortify a spice rack that caters to your cooking needs, and help you solve the riddles of the mysterious flavors of regional cuisines. Youll learn tips on how to best store your spices and herbs, and even how to grow your own herbs at home.

Currently, many chefs use the words spices and herbs interchangeably when discussing flavoring agents for food, but historically, these terms have referred to different parts of the plant. To make the best use of them in your kitchen, its helpful to understand the precise distinction. Both spices and herbs are derived from plants. When a plant is used purely for medicinal purposes, the entire plant is called an herb. In the culinary context, however, herbs refers solely to the leafy portion of the plant, either dried or fresh, while spices indicates the seeds, berries, twigs, roots, bark, or flower of the plant (usually dried). Some plants are considered to be both spices and herbs, such as an oregano leaf and oregano seed. The flavor of an oregano leaf, however, is quite distinct from that of its seed, which will break down or bloom in flavor according to how you cook it.

A spice is usually the more pungent, concentrated, and flavorful form of the plant, and is derived from a plants root, seed, bark, flower, or fruit. Turmeric and ginger, for example, are root spices, while cumin, mustard, and nutmeg are seeds. The inner layer of bark from the cassia tree in Indonesia provides most of the world with cinnamon, and saffron comes from the flower of the saffron crocus, originally grown in India and Greece.

During the Middle Ages in Europe, a cargo of spices from Indonesia (referred to as the Spice Islands at the time), was literally worth its weight in gold, ounce for ounce. Among the upper classes, spices like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper were all in vogue. They were highly cherished for two reasons: they helped preserve food, and they could camouflage the flavor of slightly rotting food. In the sweltering climate of India, cooks had already been using pepper to prevent food from spoiling, since the second century BCE. The antimicrobial oils originally produced by a plant to prevent animals and other organisms from eating it are what gives a spice its characteristic aroma. Since our tongue is only capable of tasting a limited variety of flavorssweet, salty, sour, and bitterspices add more complex fragrances. In a sense, spices might be considered perfume for food.