SpiceLines

At exactly 7:23 Christmas morning, I murdered the dwarf. His misshapen body was splayed across St. Peter’s glittering mosaic floor, and when I put my knee into his chest and pressed down hard, his breastbone cracked--just like a chicken’s when you’re smashing it with the heel of your hand before rubbing it with garlic and black pepper paste and tossing it on the grill. But as the cartilage snapped, his red-rimmed eyes glared into mine with malevolent glee. He leered , pulling thick lips back from stained yellow teeth, and the nostrils of his broad nose flared. A drop of blood trickled down the side of this mouth. And then, quite horribly, he giggled.

Because, you see, he wasn’t dead. Oh, the priest was dead all right. His black-robed figure was sprawled across the steps in front of the altar, a limp white hand turned palm up to the heavens. Just as I sprinted up the aisle,the dwarf had slipped a thin knife between his ribs, as easily as if he were slicing Kobe beef. It was too late for the priest. Now the hideous creature under my knee would not die. His chest had caved in, but he was still snickering mirthlessly, mocking my frantic attempts to crush him.

So I put my hands around his thick neck and squeezed. His larynx cracked, his face turned red and still he laughed. I squeezed harder. His glare became more malevolent as his face began to swell and take on the purplish hue of the plums I had baked into a tart just the day before. Somewhere a disembodied choir began to sing. The last thought that went through my head was, “I’m killing my husband…”

Then I awoke. It was 7:23 AM. But it was not Christmas and I was not in Rome. There was no dwarf. I was alone…and that was the problem.

A good recipe for days when you are agitated, especially if you crave food with lots of taste and flavor, but can’t handle anything complicated.

Serves 4, or 2 rather hungry people

Ingredients:

2 whole chicken breasts with skin and bones, about 1-3/4 pounds each

Garlic, finely chopped
Rosemary, finely chopped
Tellicherry peppercorns, coarsely ground
Sea salt
Olive oil

1 lemon

Method:

1. Place a whole chicken breast, skin side up, on a heavy chopping block. Press down on the breastbone, full force, until it cracks and the breast lies flat. If it won’t crack, pound it with the heel of your hand. Eventually it will give way and you will have released some of your frustration. Repeat with the second breast.

2. Mix as much—or as little—garlic, rosemary, pepper and sea salt as you like in a small bowl. Add enough olive oil to make a fairly liquid paste. Gently (for now you are feeling calmer) loosen the skin and
put half the garlic and pepper mixture between the skin and the flesh. Rub the rest of the mixture on the underside of the breasts and over the skin so that they are well-coated with flavorings. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the chicken. Set aside.

3. Prepare a fire on one side of your grill using plenty of hardwood charcoal—oak, hickory or mesquite. When the flames are low, but the coals are still red hot, place the chicken breasts bone side down on the side of the grill away from the coals. Cover and cook for about 15 minutes. Turn the chicken skin side down, cover, and cook for another 15 minutes. Turn again, cover, and cook for a final 12 to 15 minutes.

4. Remove the chicken and let it rest for a few minutes, covered with aluminum foil. Before serving, you may wish to cut the breasts in half with kitchen shears. The chicken will be succulent, golden brown, and irresistibly redolent of garlic and rosemary with the occasional explosion of black pepper. Serve it with a salad of radicchio, endive and hearts of palm in a white balsamic vinaigrette.

The Atlas Pepper Mill set us to dreaming of a summer evening in Nauplion, a hilly town of whitewashed houses across the bay from Argos, and plates of peppery octopus swallowed with shots of ice-cold ouzo. By day, we catalogued dusty shards from an archaeological dig, by night, we sampled retsina and eavesdropped on village gossip at a string of cafes on the harbor. The scandal that summer was the 30-year-old spinster who fled to Athens to marry her unapproved true love.

The Atlas is Greece's gift to frustrated pepperlovers who've searched in vain for the perfect grinder. Made in Crete, it is based on a coffee mill created in the early 1900's for Greek soldiers to use in the field. It is available in various sizes and finishes, but our favorite is the 9-inch 404 model, which retails for about $65. It resembles a handsome copper tower topped with a sturdy brass handle for grinding; bands of embossed grape clusters encircle the body of the mill.

The Atlas 404 passes five important tests. First, it is beautiful in an exotic sort of way, able to move from kitchen to table without ruining the view. Second, it holds a good half cup of Tellicherry peppercorns, enough for a week in our kitchen. Third, it is not too hard to fill: Unscrew the handle, remove the cap and pour in the peppercorns, preferably through wide funnel. Fourth, the grind is easily adjustable by loosening or tightening a screw on the bottom. Inside, a heavy steel mechanism with hand-cut burrs efficiently pulverizes the pepper. Fifth, it produces a shower of fiery coarsely ground Tellicherry nuggets, great on everthing from smoked salmon to Claire's Smashed Chicken.

But the Atlas is not for you if you like a lightweight mill. At one pound five ounces, it has real heft and feels solid in the hand. Nor is it for you if you skittishly prefer your pepper finely ground.

In that case, we must ask: Do you even like pepper?

Go to www.peppermillimports.com, or find it at Dean & Deluca, www.deananddeluca.com (click Kitchenware, then Tools for Spices).

Like cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, we love Thai curries with “an unholy passion.” Curry pastes—those pungent blends of shallots, garlic, lemon grass, galangal and of course red or green chiles—are so addictive when mixed with coconut milk and lime leaves that the addition of shrimp or pork or chicken seems almost an afterthought.

Culinary scholars may bicker over curry’s exact origins, but all agree that India was its birthplace. As Jaffrey notes in From Curries to Kebabs, the subcontinent’s wondrous blends of spices and cooking techniques gave rise to delicious new dishes, as Indian emigrants adapted foods of their homeland to new ingredients found in countries around the globe.

On February 16th, Jaffrey will join other culinary mavens at Asia Society in New York for a panel discussion, “Currying Favor: A History of Indian Food in America.” She will be joined by Tabla chef, Floyd Cardoz, Union Square Hospitality Group president Danny Meyer, cookbook author Julie Sahni, Bombay Times food critic, Rashmi Uday Singh and others as they explore the popularity of Indian food in America, the variety of regional cuisines available here, and the latest trends in Indian food. Mimi Sheraton will moderate.

For details, contact: Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue, New York City. Telephone: 212.288.6400. Web: www.asiasociety.org.

We’d trade places with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid any day.

For three decades this Toronto-based couple has backpacked around the world, notebooks and cameras in hand, searching out the most delectable and authentic food. They photograph it, write about it, then come home and test recipes in their urban kitchen, eventually producing ravishingly illustrated books filled with beguiling tales of their latest journey and adventurous recipes. Somehow they’ve managed to take their two sons on their travels, escaping the stultifying trap of regular school.

In their latest book, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, Alford and Duguid leisurely wend their way through the Great Indian Subcontinent. This is a journey they’ve taken many times before (they met on a hotel rooftop in Tibet, not the subcontinent but close) and they write with passion and authority about the cooking of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Luckily, the book doesn’t even try to offer a comprehensive view of the cuisines of these regions. Rather, it is an intimate diary of the places they’ve visited, the people they’ve encountered and the great food they’ve eaten.

Dipping into the book, we felt as if we too had skipped school to travel alongside the authors. In Ladakh, north of the Himalaya, we shared tart dried apricots and tea with a goatskin-clad Dard woman at a monastery festival. In the desert of western Gujarat, we salivated hungrily as Sona Bai and her 12-year-old daughter made a simple potato curry, fragrant with chiles, turmeric, black mustard seeds, cumin and coriander, and baked flatbread on a clay griddle. And in Udaipur, we spent days with Sangana Bai creating a tandoor oven, kneading and mixing heavy clay, straw and manure, building up thin layers that must dry overnight, until the four-foot-tall, barrel-shaped oven was finished. This episode, by the way, perfectly describes the gaping difference between Alford’s and Duguid’s style of travel and our own.

On their journey, they’re “continually amazed at just how good common everyday food is.” This is the mantra behind the more than two hundred traditional recipes in the book. Among our favorites are Coconut Chutney, spiked with tamarind, ginger and green cayenne chiles, Chile Shrimp Stir Fry from Goa, subtly flavored with cinnamon, clove and cardamom, and the lovely Bengali Fish in Broth. In the later, chunks of cod are tossed with turmeric and salt, then stir-fried in mustard oil and cooked in a fragrant broth with tomato, zucchini and eggplant. It was a perfect one-dish Saturday night supper.

Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, Artisan, 2005.

To read more about the award-winning authors and their four previous books, go to their website, www.hotsoursaltysweet.com.

Last Saturday afternoon, perusing the ingredients for Classic Bengali Fish in Broth from Mangoes and Curry Leaves, we came to a dead halt. Did we have nigella seeds for the Bengali Five Spice Mixture which would scent the liquid in which turmeric-dusted cod was to be cooked? Afraid not.

But then, rummaging in the dark corners of the pantry, we found a dusty jar of darkish seeds which looked suspiciously like,,,nigella. It was very, very old, but the seeds still had hints of the slightly bitter, peppery flavor that characterizes the spice. (Luckily we had violated the cardinal rule of spice storage: Toss after a year.)

Nigella has been around since the days of the Romans; the ebony seeds get their name from the Latin nigellus or niger, which means black. They are vaguely triangular or tear-drop shaped (hence the misnomer “black cumin”) and, when rubbed, smell a bit like oregano. They have a slight oniony taste, which has led to another alias: "black onion seeds." This is also a misnomer, since they are not related to the onion family, but are the seeds of the blue-or white flowered nigella sativa, commonly known as “love-in-a-mist.’

Nigella is a key ingredient of panch phoron (“panch” means “five” and “phoron” means “spice” or “flavor”), an Indian spice mixture which also includes fennel, fenugreek, cumin and black mustard. (Alford and Duguid’s recipe calls for a tablespoon of each spice, mixed and stored in a jar.) It is also used in Turkish and Ethiopian cooking.

The Arabs have a proverb: “In the black seed is the medicine for every disease save death.” Herbal guru Jim Duke, author of the CRC Handbook of Medicinal Spices, notes that aromatic nigella seeds have strong anti-microbial properties; the essential oil alone contains “four antioxidants that scavenge free radicals." In the Middle East, the spice is incorporated in treatments for an staggering array of ailments, from eczema and head lice to asthma and cardiovascular disease. Oh, yes, and nigella also repels moths.

For more information or to buy nigella, go to www.theepicentre.com, You can also find it at www.chefshop.com and www.deananddeluca.com.

(Naturally, the other Nigella—Lawson, that is—has recipes using nigella seeds, including Stir-Braised Savoy Cabbage (Nigella Bites) and Nigellan Flatbread (How To Be a Domestic Goddess). For a list, go to www.nigella.com.)

The pale oak floors felt cool and smooth beneath my bare feet as I crept downstairs. The house was silent. But as I passed the gilded pier mirror, my heart leapt. There was an unfamiliar woman, puffy-eyed, spikes of red hair sticking up wildly, one pearl earning dangling askew. Green silk pajamas wet, not with blood, but with sweat and maybe a few tears. There had been a fight all right, but my wounds were psychic. I had not a scratch, not a bruise. The murderous dwarf was nowhere in sight. Just the latest bourbon-induced figment since Marco had …what exactly? Vanished? Disappeared? Left with no forwarding address?

I walked into the kitchen. The early morning sun streamed through the windows. The walls and cabinets were dazzlingly white. They nearly vibrated in the light. I shivered. It was cold and I was chilled right to the bone. I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that I had actually murdered someone. I could still feel the glare of those malevolent red eyes as I… The dwarf seemed so real, so…fleshy….

I clicked the heat on. A moment later there was a distant whoosh and warm air flooded into the room. My head ached. Suddenly I was craving tea. No, not just tea. A cup of chai, spicy, hot and sweet. I turned on the flame under the kettle. Then I went to the pantry and flipped on the overhead light.

The pantry is the one place that truly belongs to me. Every other room in this perfect house is cool and severe, but in this narrow space, with its floor to ceiling shelves built to my design, there is a rich disorder which makes me smile. To Marco it was it was a mess, but, in fact, each item has its place. That’s why, standing in the doorway, I knew instantly that something was askew.

I scanned the shelves. On the left, jars of rice: basmati, of course, but also arborio, bomba, jasmine and red rice from Bhutan. Boxes of pasta, some made in a monastery overlooking the Adriatic, including, I couldn’t help but notice, strozzapreti, those cunning little rolls with a twist at one end known as “strangle the priest”. Precious oils from Huilerie LeBlanc in Paris: walnut, pine nut, olive, almond. Vinegars: white balsamic, 60-year old-balsamic, red wine, Spanish sherry and homemade pineapple vinegar from Oaxaca. Jars of mustard, bottles of fish and soy sauces, cans of coconut milk and tomato paste.

In the center, Mexican plates hand-painted with fruit and birds, their glaze so full of lead that I dare not eat even a piece of toast off them. Red and black lacquer trays, a Victorian silver teapot, a pale bamboo ladle for a Japanese tea ceremony, cobalt tea glasses from Morocco, a neat row of boxes holding all 90 issues of Saveur.

To the right—well, that’s where the trouble was.

Editor's note: Claire's journal entries will be posted weekly, usually on Wednesday--if she lives up to her part of the bargain. The first entry, Claire's Dream, was posted on February 1, 2006.

Shivering in her chilly kitchen, Claire naturally thought of a restorative cup of chai. The spices in the tea are warming--the perfect antidote to a bad dream. She likes it very strong, with just a little milk and unrefined sugar. If your own tastes are more insipid—sorry, I meant to say restrained—feel free to adjust the ingredients to your pleasure. Just be sure to use a black tea that can stand up to all the spice. Claire likes the Mangalam Estate Assam, a malty flavored brew with distinctive golden buds mixed with black leaves, from www.inpursuitoftea.com.

To make 3 or 4 cups of tea

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
12 green cardamom pods
6 cloves
1 3-inch stick of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
1-inch piece of fresh ginger
4 cups water
1/2 cup of milk
2 tablespoons demerara sugar
4 generous teaspoons black tea

Method:

1. Place the black pepper, coriander seeds, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon and fennel seeds in a mortar and crush lightly with the pestle. Add the ginger and smash it. Combine the spices, water, milk and sugar in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat, cover and steep for 10-12 minutes.

2. Add the black tea and return to a boil. Turn off the heat, cover and steep for 5 minutes more. Strain into another pot. Taste. If you like, add more milk or sugar. Reheat as necessary.

3. Inhale the scent of the spices. Drink deeply. Relax. Things aren’t as bad as they seem--yet.

Stepping into Christina’s Spices, we nearly tripped over a dolly stacked with five-pound bags of black peppercorns destined for East Coast Grill right next door. Now we know where Chris Schlesinger buys the sizzle for the Wood Grilled 1 Pound Cracked Black Pepper Crusted Strip Steak and other scorchers.

Go straight to the gargantuan wooden table in the center of this pumpkin-hued shop and try not to overload your basket. The table is divided into small compartments filled with tempting jars and bags of exotic seasonings. We picked up fragrant deep golden mace, smoked black Mexican salt, and rare Tasmanian pepper. Small placards clue chefs into off-the-beaten path herbs and spices. Tasmanian pepper, for instance, “has almost the same gustative characteristics as Szechuan pepper…both bitter and acidic flavors…” In all there are nearly 250 spices and seasonings, including a superb selection of dried chiles.

Both Christina’s Spices and the popular Christina’s ice cream shop next door are owned by Raymond Ford, a genial Brit who studied at Cambridge in England, then came to Boston to teach social theory at a local college. He threw academia over in 1993, when he bought Christina’s Ice Cream from the original owner. The spice and specialty food shop was a lucky after thought. Most of his trade is to restaurants, so the turnover is fast and spices stay fresh.

Christina’s doesn’t have a website, so you’ll have to visit. Get your sugar fix at the ice cream shop, especially if deeply caramelized Burnt Sugar is on the menu.

Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream, Spice and Specialty Foods, 1255 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. Telephone: 617/ 492-7021. Fax: 617/576-0922.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, La Physiologie du Gout, 1825.

This was it for us, a dish far better than the discovery of a new star. Twelve years ago in Singapore, the vibrant flavors of cilantro root, birds-eye chiles and kaffir lime rind mixed with freshly pressed coconut milk awakened every one of our10,000-plus taste buds. And it can be made in 30 minutes or less.

The Thai curry was the high point of a day spent with K. Karuna, a vivacious cooking teacher, local TV personality and cookbook author. That morning, Karuna, a fifth-generation Singaporean of Indian descent, took us to one of the island’s famed wet markets, where we reveled in the sight of giant red snapper heads and bamboo baskets seething with brown Sri Lankan crabs. Like shopping fools, we scooped up every type of packaged curry paste we could find, plus fragrant kaffir lime leaves, milk squeezed from freshly grated coconut, and plump green Thai eggplants. Back in her outdoor kitchen, Karuna showed us how to make the curry in an earthenware wok over a gas flame.

Karuna made her green curry with chicken—the recipe also allows for pork, lamb or beef—but we often use shrimp. Like Karuna, we also use ready-made curry paste, usually the Mae Ploy brand, but we boost its flavor with fresh chopped herbs. Of course, homemade green curry paste is much better--we include a recipe from the Periplus series of books on Asian cookery—but that would take another 10 or 15 minutes.

To see more about K. Karuna, go to www.kkaruna.com.

Quick Green Curry

(adapted from K. Karuna)

For 4 people

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon Thai green curry paste, or to taste (see note)
7 ounces unsweetened coconut milk
1-1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon sugar, or to taste
1 tablespoon coriander leaves, very finely chopped
1 tablespoon green scallion tops, very finely chopped
1 tablespoon lemongrass, finely sliced (use only the tender inner core at the base of the stem)
2 lime leaves (see note)

1 purple oriental eggplant, cut into thin rounds (optional)
1 pound chicken, pork, lamb or beef cut into strips
or 1 pound shrimp, shelled and deveined
1 tablespoon coriander leaves, chopped
1 small lime (optional)
Salt

Method:

1. In a large saucepan, stir the curry paste into the canned coconut milk and water. The paste is quite spicy, so the first time, mix it into the coconut milk by the teaspoonful, tasting as you go. Do the same as you add the sugar. ( We usually add just one teaspoon.) Add the chopped coriander leaves, scallions, lemon grass, lime leaves, eggplant if desired, and chicken, pork, lamb or beef. Bring to a gentle simmer and cover. Cook for 20 to thirty minutes, until the meat is done and the gravy has thickened. If you prefer a thicker gravy, remove the cover midway through the cooking.

2. If you are using shrimp, combine coconut milk, water, green curry paste, sugar, chopped herbs, lime leaves, and eggplant (if using), and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes until the mixture has thickened. Add the shrimp at the end, and cook just until they turn pink.

3. Taste and correct seasonings. You may wish to add a little salt or a drop of lime juice. Sprinkle with coriander leaves and serve with white rice.

Note: Kaffir lime leaves are often available frozen in Asian markets. Mae Ploy green curry paste is also sold at Asian markets. The Thai Kitchen brand can be found at Whole Foods and some supermarkets.

Thai Green Curry Paste (Nam Prik Gaeng Kheow Wan)

(from The Food of Thailand, Periplus World Cookbooks)

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
15 green bird’s-eye chilies
3 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
1 teaspoon finely chopped galangal
1 tablespoon finely sliced lemon grass
1/2 teaspoon finely chopped kaffir lime rind
1 teaspoon finely chopped cilantro root
5 black peppercorns
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon shrimp paste

Method:

Dry fry the coriander and cumin seeds in a wok over low heat for about 5 minutes, then grind into a powder. Put the rest of the ingredients, except the shrimp paste, into a blender and blend to mix well. Add the spice seed mixture and shrimp paste, and blend to obtain 1/2 cup of fine-textured paste.

Unless you’ve been sleeping, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that winespeak has become the lingua franca of the chocolate world. That is, there’s a lot of chatter about terroir—single-origin, estate-grown, varietal--and even more talk that involves words like “leather” and “smoke” and “tannin.” Sound familiar?

We’ve just come from a tasting conducted by 3Cups, an upscale coffee, tea and chocolate café in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Owner Lex Alexander wants to lure the local crowd, one chocohead at a time, away from supermarket bars by tempting them with the likes of Michel Cluziel’s silky Grand Lait (45 percent cocoa) and Valrhona’s bittersweet Palmira Fino Criollo (70 percent cocoa). “I want everyone to slow down and develop the ability to taste,” he told the mostly older female crowd at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Somehow two half-empty plates of ambrosial morsels came to rest on the chair beside us. It was all we could do to keep from absentmindedly devouring all of it—exactly what Mr. Alexander was telling us we should not do.

For Chloe Doutre-Roussel, the talk about percentages and terroir has struck needless fear into the hearts of some chocodependents. In “The Sweet Tooth Fairy” (The New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2006, pp. 75-76), the former agronomist turned chocolate buyer and taster for Fortnum and Mason told writer Christine Muhlke, “Some say that people who like milk chocolate are not real connoisseurs, or that percentage is crucial to the quality or even the origin of the beans…When you buy wine, do you select the bottle according to the percentage of alcohol?”

That said, Doutre-Roussel, born in Mexico and educated in France, where she worked for Pierre Herme, is passionate about teaching Americans to enjoy fine chocolate from small artisanal producers. She advises novices to let a piece of chocolate dissolve slowly on the tongue, then pay attention to the flavors that develop. (Mr. Alexander also suggests exhaling through the nose after swallowing “for optimal sensual pleasure.”) Among her favorites are Valrhona Manjari, Pralus Madagascar and Steve De Vries Costa Rican Trinitario—all sold in a limited edition “Journey into Chocolate” kit from Fortnum and Mason.

Back in Chapel Hill, we couldn’t help but notice that a distinguished gentleman seated near us was happily savoring a Hersey bar. A little smile played around his lips and his eyes were half-closed in blissful communion with the “food of the gods.” Don’t get us wrong: We love Valrhona and all those artisanal bars, but he got the real point: Don’t worry about the percentages, just enjoy the chocolate.

For more about 3Cups, go to www.3cups.net/blog/. Chloe Doutre-Roussel’s book, The Chocolate Connoisseur, is available from www.amazon.com. Her website is www.chloechocolat.com.

To the right were the spices.

They are not what you might expect. Certainly not the dusty bottles of grey pepper and brownish thyme that sit forlornly on the shelves at your local supermarket, nor the musty mystery spices with yellowing labels that lie moldering in the back of your kitchen cabinet.

No, my spices are the stuff of dreams. They are alive with flavor. And they have powers that supermarket kings can’t even begin to imagine. Smokey pasilla chiles make Oaxacan mole sing. Whole nutmegs, so delicious grated on buttery potatoes, are narcotic when eaten to excess. Anise-like fennel seeds, chewed after a meal, sweeten the breath.

Open a jar and inhale. One breath will conjure up a spice trail that spans continents and centuries. Fragrant brown curls of bark cast invisible lines into the past, reeling in ancient Ceylonese kingdoms forested with wild cinnamon trees and Portuguese invaders who shipped 110,000 kilos a year back to Lisbon. Here are sealed pots of pungent black peppercorns, buried for a millennium under desert sands covering a long-vanished Egyptian port (only to be dug up by a team of Delaware archaeologists who lacked the curiosity or courage to crunch even one between their teeth). There is that one-armed reprobate, Pierre Poivre, smuggling slips of nutmeg and clove from the Moluccas to Ile de France—today’s Mauritius—sticking a French finger in the eye of the Dutch monopoly. Spices spin tales of blood and intrigue, brutish war and the greed that makes for odd bedfellows, and there is nothing nice about them except for their intoxicating taste and smell.

Sometimes I come into the pantry and start opening jars, sniffing what’s inside, getting weak-kneed with pleasure. There are 58 jars, stacked four deep on three shelves, so that’s a whole afternoon of guilty fun. The jars are different sizes, some small and squat, some tall and slope-shouldered. But they are all blue, all old and all have dull grey zinc tops. I spent two years collecting them, rummaging through every stinking, mildewed junk shop within a forty-mile radius. A very few are pale blue, hand blown with air bubbles trapped for eternity – or until they break. Others are frankly turquoise and have a seam running around the sides—that means they are newer and came out of mold. All of them give me enormous delight.

But I digress.

I began to pull out the jars I would need for chai. Black extra-bold (trade lingo for super-sized) peppercorns from India, Moroccan coriander seeds, fresh green cardamom pods, papery quills of true cinnamon from Sri Lanka. And Assam tea, black, from India…

And there it was, the little thing that had been biting at me ever since I stepped into the pantry. There was a hole, something out of place, not in any place at all. The engraved silver tea caddy with the faded mauve velvet lining was gone.

The tears that I’d been holding back for days burst forth. And then the phone on the wall rang, so loudly and unexpectedly that I dropped the jar in my hand. Shards of blue glass shattered across the pale floor and hundreds of round black peppercorns rolled underfoot. As I turned to the phone, my eye caught a small scroll of white paper amongst the debris. I bent to pick it up.

Editor's note: Claire's journal entries are posted weekly, usually on Wednesdays. Her previous entry, "Claire Finds Trouble in the Pantry," was posted on February 8, 2006.

Editor's note: To see this recipe and others using black pepper, please visit SpiceLines newsletter, Vol. 1 No. 1, "Black Pepper: King of Spice," at www.globalprovince.com/spicelines/index9-05.htm.

Saying that Singaporeans are food-obsessed is like saying the humans breathe air to live. A recent count turned up 3,725 restaurants and 17,070 hawker stalls in this island nation of 4 million. That’s one place to eat for every 200 people. The website www.makantime.com perfectly conveys the unbridled passion Singaporeans bring to food. “Makan” is Malay for “eat” and the site offers enthusiastic raves and pans of places where one can sample fish head curry and all the other exotic dishes that make dining out in S’pore such a thrilling adventure.

For those of us who live elsewhere, Thian, the site’s creator, now residing in Amsterdam, has posted his mother’s “top secret” recipes for his childhood favorites, among them Black Pepper Crab. Peppercorns play an unabashedly starring role in this dish which is practically a national institution. It begins with large, meaty crabs which are stirfried twice, once on their own, then in an incendiary spice paste which features spoonfuls of coarsely ground black pepper, ginger, garlic, soy and oyster sauces. The pepper-crusted shells are fiery hot; in contrast, the meat inside is succulent and sweet. As makantime correspondents like to say, “Shiok!” (“Delicious!”)

To serve 4

Ingredients

2 live Dungeness crabs, 1-1/2 to 2 pounds each
1/2 cup canola oil
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons garlic chopped fine
2 tablespoons ginger, chopped fine
1 tablespoon Serrano or jalapeno chile, chopped fine
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
1/4 cup oyster sauce
1/4 cup black pepper, coarsely ground (or to taste) (see note)

Method:

1. Take the easy way out and have your fishmonger kill and clean the crabs, cut them into quarters and crack the claws.
2. In a large wok, preferably cast iron, heat the oil over a high flame until very hot, but not smoking. Stirfry the crab pieces in two batches, 4 to 5 minutes each, until they turn bright red. Remove from the wok and set aside.
3. Lower the heat to medium high and add the butter to the wok. As soon as it begins to sizzle, add the rest of the ingredients. Stirfry briefly. Then return the crab to the wok and stirfry for 4 to 5 minutes more. Make sure that the crab is well-coated with the peppercorn mixture.
4. Remove from the wok and serve at once with ice cold beer and a stack of napkins.

Note: We recommend using Penzey’s Special Extra Bold Indian Black Peppercorns. The berries are left on the vine to ripen even longer than top tier Tellicherry peppercorns and are plucked when they begin to turn pink. As a result, the flavor is more complex and unusually robust, with a surprisingly mellow burn. (In industry terms, “special” means best flavor and “extra bold” refers to extra-large size; only 10 pounds out of each ton make the grade.) To order, go to: www.penzeys.com.

“Let me tell you about chilies.
“The dry chili, lanka, is the most potent of spices. In its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger.
“The chili sings in the voice of the hawk circling sun-bleached hills where nothing grows. I lanka was born of Agni, god of fire. I dripped from his fingertip to bring taste to this bland earth.”

--from The Mistress of Spices, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 1997.

Whenever we discover a novelist who writes as well about food as she does about an earthquake or the slow erosion of a marriage, we feel twice blessed. And when there’s a vein of magical realism, in which spices and talking snakes whisper incantations to a sorceress who’s landed on a gritty street in Berkeley, California, we’re truly hooked.

Food runs through the works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni like a gleaming thread. It’s the metaphoric link between out-of-place characters living in America and their real or imagined pasts in India. Often it is “the thinnest strand of a spider web” that pulls discordant families together. In Queen of Dreams, a father wins over his antagonistic daughter when he makes traditional Indian snacks that will save her chai shop from ruin; in Vine of Desire, a woman who never cooks stuffs her Bay Area refrigerator with spaghetti, tuna casserole and potato salad to welcome her long lost friend from India.

We interviewed Divakaruni when she was still at work on her most recent novel, Queen of Dreams. When she came dashing into her hotel, a little late from a book signing, we were struck first by her rippling waist-length hair, and then by her luminous eyes and melodious voice. She is author of four novels, two collections of short stories, two children’s books and has written for both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. A long time resident of Northern California, she and her family currently live in Texas where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston

Naturally, we talked about food and spices.

Q. You were just 19 when you left India to come to America to continue your study of English. What was the biggest point of culture shock?

A. India is such a family-oriented country. I had always lived with my family or with my extended family. The concept that so many people in America live alone, and actually choose to leave their families to live alone, was very different. It was at once exciting and lonesome. In India it is still very common to live at home. If you were offered a job in another city, and say you had two job offers in two cities, you would probably choose the city closer to your family.

Q. Was food a way to stay connected?

A. Oh, yes! In the beginning I was so homesick. I was living in the dorm in Ohio [Wright State University in Dayton] and you couldn’t get Indian food there. Really you couldn’t get any ethnic food. My mother would send packages of whole spices to me. I would open them and smell the red peppers. It was wonderful. You could get little jars of spices in the big grocery stores, but you wondered how long they had been waiting on the shelf for someone to buy them. So they weren’t very fresh and none of the uncommon spices were available.

Q. For an immigrant, is food is a link to home?

A. That kind of emotional connection is a big part of immigrant cultures and it’s a part of many of my novels. You miss your food because it is associated with love and family and home. When everything is changing around you, there’s a sort of stability in the food that is familiar to you.

Q. Did you know how to cook?

A. I knew just a little from being with my mother. A few months before I left Calcutta, I started writing recipes down in a little notebook. I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of the ingredients or the equipment in the dorm, so I asked my mother, “What can I cook with one pot and a stirring utensil and whole spices?” So she gave me some very simple recipes that I still make today.

Q. What do you still make?

A. Stir fried green beans. It’s very simple. You heat vegetable oil, add a whole red chili and a spoonful of cumin. When it sputters, add onions, turmeric and the green beans, which you have cut. Add salt and a little black pepper. People who like a lot of black pepper add the whole spice to the oil. Stir fry, then turn the heat low and let the beans simmer until they are cooked.

Q. What kind of oil do you use when you make the beans?

A. In Bengal mustard oil is very popular. It has a very strong flavor, but it is not as healthy, so now I use canola oil.

Q. Why is food is such an important part of your novels and stories?

A. It is because there is so much emotionally imbued in the foods that we choose to prepare. When I was living in India, I didn’t think too much about the meaning of food. It wasn’t until I came here that I began to reflect on it. For so many women, it is the way they show love, exert control, and practice art. In traditional Indian households, the women serve everyone else first and then they sit down to eat when everyone has finished. It’s regarded as a sign of virtue. I’m very ambivalent about that.

Q. I love the story in which the divorced mother reconciles with her teenage son by making him some almond milk.

A. Yes, almond milk. She has spent her life cooking traditional Indian meals, and then her husband leaves and she stops cooking. Her son resents it. In the end she comes back to some middle position. She will make him some almond milk. Talk about comfort food. When children are little and they are upset at night, it’s a calming drink. Good for both of them.

Q. Where did the spice world come from in The Mistress of Spices?

A. There are old folk tales about islands where women with magical powers live, and every now and then one of them will leave these very beautiful islands and come to our very ordinary world to help people. And there are legends about spice islands, where, if you can only find them, you will have everything you desire. So different strands were woven together to make the story. And there are old stories about talking snakes.

Q. The spices in that book were used more for healing than for cooking.

A. Yes. In India we follow Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine. I use Ayurvedic remedies at home. In the old stories you hear of these spices, but they are lost. An ancient story in, say, the Mahabharata will mention a particular spice or spice mixture or remedy with special magical powers, but as far as we know, they no longer exist, if they ever did.

Q. Is there a spice you cannot live without?

A. I’m quite fond of all the peppers, red and black. Then mustard seed and cumin which are often used in combination.

I really love mustard paste. You take black mustard seed and grind it with mustard oil. It makes a really thick creamy paste. You cook fish in it. It is typical of Bengal. My family knows how much I love it, so they always make it for me when I go back. It is quite pungent and you can add a little red pepper to make it more so. It makes a spicy, creamy, thick gravy.

Q. Do you cook now?

A. I cook all the time. Two things my husband and my boys love are rice pilau and chicken curry.

Q. What’s your curry like?

A. I fry grated onion, ginger and garlic, add turmeric, red chili and garam masala, let cook slowly, add beaten yoghurt at the end and it’s done. It makes a really spicy creamy sauce that my family loves.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I’ve just finished The Conch Bearer, which is novel for young adults. It’s about a 12-year-old boy who goes on a search for a magical object and what happens when he finds it. My son leaned over my shoulder and read while I wrote. He’s very excited about it.

Q. Are you writing anything for adults?

A. Oh, yes! My next novel for adults is also magical. It’s about a dream interpreter. I’m in a magical period.

Editor’s note: The Conch Bearer was published in 2003 and Queen of Dreams in 2004. To see more, go to www.chitradivakaruni.com.

It was overcast this morning, with what the weather service likes to call
“wintery mix”—in our case the occasional rain drop interspersed with an ice crystal or two. In Hanoi it was also cloudy with passing rain showers, but the temperature was a spring-like 18 degrees Celsius. Still we could almost imagine ourselves there because, like practically everyone in Hanoi, we were breakfasting on a bowl of pho.

Pho is the breakfast of choice for Hanoi champions. Served at street stalls in the old town, it is an aromatic beef soup simmered with charred onion and ginger, then with cinnamon and star anise. The resulting broth is fragrant with the sweet scent of the commingled spices and the dusky undertones of nuoc mam, or fish sauce. Served with rice noodles and slices of raw and cooked beef, topped with chopped onion, cilantro, mint, green chilies and lashings of sriracha and hoisin sauce, it is the kind of breakfast that fortifies even the most most sleep-deprived citizens for a day of work.

Everyone who makes pho does it a little differently. Our recipe comes from Ha Guthrie, former owner of Kim Son restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. One afternoon, Ha invited us into the kitchen to show us how to make gio thu, a Hanoi-style black pepper and pork “pate” eaten during New Year’s celebrations. While we were chopping pigs’ ears and scallions, a vat of broth for pho was gently simmering on the back burner, perfuming the kitchen with the most irresistible aromas of licorice and cinnamon. A few weeks later, she gave us the recipe by phone, then stopped by to rescue us as we bumbled erratically through our notes. This is the perfected version.

Ha Guthrie’s Pho: Beef Soup with Cinnamon and Star Anise

Ingredients for soup:

4 pounds beef bones
1 package oxtails (about 8 pieces)
1 whole medium onion, unpeeled
1 3-inch piece of fresh ginger, unpeeled
1 cup cilantro stems, bottom 4 inches
1 4-inch piece of daikon, unpeeled and in one chunk
2-1/2 pounds chuck roast, in one piece
10 whole star anise
1 cinnamon stick, 5 inches
2 tablespoons nuoc mam, or Vietnamese fish sauce (see note)
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
16 ounces rice stick noodles (see note)
1-1/2 pounds eye round roast, thinly sliced

Ingredients for garnish:

1/2 onion, thinly sliced
3 scallions, green part only, sliced
cilantro tops, finely chopped
1 small bunch basil
1 small bunch mint
1-1/2 cups bean sprouts
1 or 2 fresh jalapenos, thinly sliced
hoisin sauce
sriracha sauce (see note)
limes, cut in half, 1 per person

Method:

1. Place beef bones in a large stock pot with cold water to cover and soak for 2 or more hours. Drain, cover with fresh cold water and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and drain. Rinse off bones. Clean the pot and return the bones to the pot. Cover with 20 cups of cold water and bring to a boil. Add the oxtails and return to a boil. Skim the impurities from the surface and simmer over medium-low heat, partly covered, for 3 hours.

2. While the stock is simmering, char the onion in the flame of the gas burner. Char the ginger and cut in half.

3. After the beef bones and oxtails have simmered for 3 to 4 hours, add the charred onion, ginger, cilantro stems, daikon and chuck roast to the pot. Simmer for one hour. Remove from the heat and strain into another pot. Reserve the chuck roast.

4. One hour before serving: Return the stock to a simmer and add the star anise and cinnamon to the pot. Place the noodles in another large pot, cover with plenty of water, bring to a boil and cook until soft. Drain and set aside.

5. Thirty minutes before serving: Add the fish sauce, salt and sugar to the simmering stock.

6. While the stock is simmering, thinly slice the chuck roast and set aside. Thinly slice the raw eye round and set aside. Prepare a plate of garnishes for each person: sliced onion and green tops of scallions, a few stems of basil and mint, bean sprouts, slices of jalapeno, a half lime, a mound of rice noodles, and several slices of chuck roast.

7. To serve, place a few slices of raw eye round in each bowl and top with the hot stock. The stock will partly cook the eye round, but it should remain medium rare. Serve each person with a plate of garnishes and dishes of hoisin and sriracha sauce.

Note: Nuoc mam, sriracha sauce (made of fiery red chilies) and rice stick noodles can be found at Asian markets. Nam pla, or Thai fish sauce, may be substituted for nuoc mam.

Editor's note: For more on pho, see "Good morning, Vietnam" by Alex Renton for The Observer, Sunday, May 16, 2004.

Two global trends in chocolate: Some days it seems that all the buzz is about artisanal, single origin, estate grown chocolate. It’s a trend that requires the consumer to appreciate subtle nuances of flavor: the difference, say, between cacao grown in Venezuela and Ghana, between varieties of beans--trinitario, forestario or criollo—and even, at its most focused, between cacao grown on different plantations. You could call it reductio ad—our Latin fails us here—but let’s call it a move towards the simplest, most exquisite expression of the individual cacao bean—none of which would be possible, of course, without the invisible, but all-important hand of the chocolatier.

The other trend takes off in the opposite direction: spicing up chocolate with a giddy merry-go-round of flavors. This is hardly new, of course—hazelnuts, Grand Marnier and mint are staples of the trade. What is new is the range of edgy flavors and the quality of the chocolate. In Los Angeles, for example, L’Artisan du Chocolat combines good dark chocolate with tomato, basil and fennel, while in San Francisco, Michel Reicchiuti offers a stellar line of dipped chocolate ganache infused with pink peppercorn and star anise. Lavender is a favorite flavoring, as are curry, wasabi and chili peppers. Somewhere in the world there’s a place for Junior Mints, but not here.

Flavored chocolate was familiar stuff to the ancient Aztecs. In The True History of Chocolate, Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe write that in pre-Conquest Mexico, there was not one form of chocolate, but many. It was drunk cold, sugarless and with a froth achieved by pouring from one cup to another. But it was rarely quaffed plain. They cite Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, who, in his 12-volume General History of New Spain (written after the Conquest of 1521), described the varied chocolate drinks served to the Aztec ruler:

“Then by himself, in his house, his chocolate was served: green cacao-pods, honeyed chocolate, flowered chocolate, flavored with green vanilla, bright red chocolate, huitztecolli-flower chocolate, black chocolate, white chocolate.”

The most treasured chocolate flavoring among the Aztecs was the “thick, ear-shaped petal of the flower of Cymbopetalum penduliflorum,” also known as hueinacaztli, which was said to taste like black peppercorns with “a hint of resinous bitterness”. There were other flowery flavorings, but also high on the list were the many types of chilies grown in Mexico, dried and ground to a fine powder and then mixed with cacao. As the Coes observe, “given the extraordinary array of chillis grown in Mexico, [the drink] could be anywhere from mildly pungent to extremely hot.”

Not long ago on a bitterly cold, windy day, we ducked into Vosges Chocolat in New York’s SoHo where we recovered our bodily heat with a spicy draught of Aztec Elixir, a very rich, smooth, dark chocolate flavored with ancho and chipotle chilies, Mexican vanilla and a trace of cinnamon. Served in a tall, narrow glass, it was undoubtedly more elegant than the Moctezuma’s rustic drink, but we probably shared the same warm afterglow. Vosges also has a bittersweet Oaxaca Bar, which marries Tanzanian cacao (75 percent) with guajillo and pasilla chilies—neatly bridging both trends in the current world of chocolate. Go to www.vosges.com.

For more on chocolate in the New World, see The True History of Chocolate, Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, Thames & Hudson, 1996.

“Here. Drink this. Now.”

I took the proffered glass and smiled.

I was in Lala’s kitchen, and even before I took a sip of her fiery Tequila Maria, the world was looking rosier.

Lala is my closest friend. For seven years we were inseparable, doing all the things that 8- to 13-year-old co-conspirators do when they are bent on taking the world by storm: sneaking Bacardi and Coke in the woods behind her grandmother’s swimming pool, hiding out in the school lavatory putting on frosted pink lipstick and black eyeliner, teasing the baby alligators in the Menger Hotel lobby. Then the world fell in, I moved away, and we didn’t see each other for 22 years.

I was in New York when I met Marco and came to this small southern college town. And who is the first person I meet at the first party I go to? Lala, of course. There she was, standing under the porch light, plumper, with crinkly laugh lines and shorter hair, but still with that tawny skin and the gold-flecked eyes she inherited from her Canary Island forbears. I’ve got red hair, violet eyes and a complexion that on a good day you could call creamy. We make quite a pair.

“OK, let’s think.” Lala sat down with a legal pad, a black Pilot Precise extra-fine-point roller pen, and a look of concentration. This is how she writes her new age “step” books. You know, Inside Out: 7 Steps to Self-Transformation or Hidden Treasure: 10 Steps to Finding the Buddha in Your Marriage. Naturally they are all best sellers.

“OK, let’s do,” I said. I took a sip of the Tequila Maria and leaned back in the creaky kitchen chair. The alcohol hit me like a velvet hammer. I was feeling warm and a little fuzzy. Lala’s kitchen is cluttered with books, paintings and pre-Columbian artifacts. Most of them are fakes, of course, but it’s a comfortable lair. I’ve always thought her house was more like an explorer’s than our own sleek glass-walled domicile.

“So he’s been gone how long?”

“Well, six days counting today.” I could see her writing a big “6".

“Did you have a fight?”

“We never fight. Sometimes I wish we did. No, I woke up on Tuesday and he just wasn’t there.”

I thought back to Monday night. We had made love for the first time in weeks and Marco's eyes had glittered strangely in the fire light. His hands had been urgent, even rough, as they moved across my breasts and between my legs. I shivered a little, remembering.

Lala was writing “WHY?” with a big question mark. “Hasn’t he been trying to get back to South America?”

“Well, yeah, but expedition money’s dried up.” I sat up. “Look, he missed my birthday. He’s never done that before. Last year when he was in Peru—“

She interrupted, “Are you sure he even knew it was your birthday? Sometimes he’s so, you know, absent-minded.” Lala casually twirled a strand of her hair. Now she was getting to the heart of the matter: Marco's neglectful behaviour. Still I felt like I had to defend him.

“You mean like when he’s getting ready to take off? He’s not really absent-minded. He’s just already out there in the jungle.”

I scooped up some guacamole. The kitchen smelled of fried tortillas and garlic. Lala is a great believer in the curative power of comfort food. As am I. For us, that’s Tex-Mex: guacamole, mashed with garlic, salt and lime, homemade tortilla chips and tomato salsa with a lot of onion, cilantro and Serrano peppers. If you’re doing the full cure, you also have to have chicken tacos, Mexican restaurant rice and frijoles refritos, but we were doing the short version.

I continued. “He’s thinking about his gear, how many days between villages, where there’s drinkable water, how he’s going to carry the specimen boxes. He’s already gone, mentally. This time, he was just…gone.”

There was a rustling across the room. I turned. Lala’s husband, Jack, had been sprawled half-asleep on the couch in the bay window. Now he was stirring. Jack is short, pear-shaped and his clothes are always rumpled. He looks like a cute aging teddy bear--until he smiles. Then you realize he has the razor grin of a hungry barracuda sneaking up on a school of plump little shrimp. Jack is the divorce lawyer you go to when you want to gut your spouse.

“Claire. What about money? Have you checked your bank accounts?” he asked impatiently.

“Um, no.”

“For Chrissake. What’s wrong with you? You’re not a fool. Did you look in the closets? Did he take his clothes? What about about his car—is it there or is it not?

“The Carrera’s gone. I can’t tell about the clothes.” My eyes began to sting.

“Stop it, Jack,” Lala said sharply.

“Look, there’s something else weird. My silver tea caddy is gone.

Lala pursed her lips. That means she’s thinking. “Is that even connected? Why would he take it?”

“Well I don’t know. After we got together, he spent a lot of time trying to figure out the writing on it, but he never got anywhere. Maybe someone else took it. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Hmmm. A missing tea box. A missing husband.” She arched one eyebrow and looked at me appraisingly. “The question is, which one do you want back?”

Editor's Note: SpiceTales is posted weekly, usually on Wednesday. The last installment, "SpiceTales: A Clue in the Peppercorns?" was posted on February 15, 2006.

“One of the singular characteristics of garlic is that it makes you wait.”

Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament, 1992

This afternoon, we pulled some garlic. It was ripped so untimely from the cool soil that we could nearly hear it shriek. It certainly wasn’t ready to come up: Though its green shoots were vigorous, the clove from which they sprang was immature, just a little fuller and fatter than when it was planted a few months ago. It hadn’t become a bulb, but already its smell was sharp and strong.

There are six types of garlic and many varieties, some of which have multiple aliases. Last fall, on a cool November afternoon, after clearing away the brown stems of the wine-dark Arabian Nights dahlias, we planted four of them in the herb garden:

Music, a popular, intensely flavored porcelain hardneck, good for baking;

Inchilium Red, an artichoke-type softneck which produces large bulbs with 12 to 20 mild-tasting cloves, recommended for salsa;

Morado Gigante, a Chilean turban-type with deep burgundy “wrappers”and a smooth flavor;

Guatemalan Purple Stripe, a nutty-tasting hardneck from the village of Aguacatan near Hueheutenango, a god-forsaken dusty Guatemalan outpost we actually visited many years ago.

As Stanley Crawford writes in his cult classic, A Garlic Testament, it takes seven to nine months for garlic to mature: “It follows that you ought not to grow garlic unless you are willing to let it make you as patient as it needs for its purposes….It has no other way but the long wash of time to extract the sulfur compounds from the soil and to distill them into its distinctive potion…”

The Music shoots that we pulled are the very earliest form of “green garlic”—immature garlic that hasn’t yet begun to form cloves. We could have sliced and stir fried them with baby bok choy, or mixed them into scrambled eggs, but we decided to be kind.

The little bulblet was tucked back into the soil, to sleep, perchance to dream of bigger things.

Editor’s note: Our seed garlic came from Cornerstone Garlic Farm outside of Greensboro, North Carolina. Natalie Foster and her husband Steve have a website with excellent photos and descriptions of the garlic they grow. Go to www.localharvest.org/listing.jsp?id=6792.

To read what may be the most poetic farming book ever written, see Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm, University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Crawford is a novelist whose other books include Petroleum Man and Gascoyne.

When you bite down on a clove of raw garlic, a pleasurable hell breaks loose. First there’s the pungent scent that sears your nostrils, then your tongue catches fire, and if it’s a really hot clove, tears spring to your eyes. This is just the allium sativum's way of fending off squirrels, rats and other pests—that is, all of us who are addicted to the taste and smell of the “stinking rose.”

According to a study at the University of California at San Francisco and Lund University in Sweden, the simple act of crushing a clove starts a complex chemical reaction that fires up our pain neurons. In the August 23, 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“Pungent Products from garlic activate the sensory ion channel TRPA1”), scientists found that eating garlic releases thiosulfinate allicin, a sulfurous compound that opens a specific cellular ion channel. Once the gates have been breached, other ions pile on, sending pain messages to the spinal cord and the brain as they inflame mucus membranes in the mouth and nose. Other fiery foods—wasabi, mustard and chilies—use similar channels to excite pain receptors.

Why do we like the sting of garlic and other spicy foods? In On Food and Cooking (2nd edition), Harold McGee suggests that the experience may be akin to the exhilaration of riding a rollercoaster or plunging into Lake Michigan in January. Eating salsa made with raw garlic may send danger signals to the brain, but since we know it won’t really hurt us, we “can savor the vertigo, shock and pain for their own sakes.” Endorphins kick in, creating a pleasurable glow as the pain fades.

And according to a 2005 Scripps Research Institute study published in Current Biology ("The Pungency of Garlic: Activation of TRPA1 and TRPV1 in Response to Allicin"),food may even taste better when the mouth is irritated by garlic’s sulfurous compounds. One of the study’s authors, associate professor Ardem Patapoutian, told National Geographic News that “…the activation of…pain neurons causes hypersensitivity in the mouth, so that other sensory/taste stimuli are enjoyed at more intense levels.” That means, when you eat salsa with, say, a beef fajita, the garlic inflames the mouth, heightening the flavor of the grilled meat, ripe tomatoes and, indeed, all the other ingredients.

Here’s a classic salsa recipe for Pico de Gallo (literally “rooster’s beak”). Serve it with homemade tortilla chips, or on top of scrambled eggs, or with any grilled meat, chicken or fish--or just eat it by the spoonful.

Pico de Gallo (Tomato, Cilantro and Garlic Salsa)

Makes about 3 cups

Ingredients:

1 pound plum or other ripe tomatoes, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped, or to taste
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
1 small bunch cilantro, leaves finely chopped
1 or more Serrano chilies, seeds removed and finely chopped
1 tablespoon canola oil
Salt to taste
Lime juice to taste

Method:

Combine the tomatoes, garlic, onion, cilantro, Serrano chilies and canola oil in a large bowl. Add salt and lime juice to taste. Allow the flavors to mingle for at least 30 minutes before serving. Taste the salsa once more before bringing it to the table, adding more of any ingredients if desired.

Editor’s Note: To read the original articles cited in this post, go to the websites for The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Current Biology. See also Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Scribner, 2004.

Gernot Katzer is a 38-year-old Austrian chemist who took a break from research in theoretical thermochemistry to wander through Asia with camera and pen in hand, indulging a consuming passion for spices and exotic cuisines. His quirky, amazingly encyclopedic website often lures us away from our own quotidian tasks. After all where else can you learn about zedoary and mahaleb cherry with one click?

Spice Pages covers 118 spices and herbs, from the rare to the familiar. You can look up asafetida (a pungent herb with a mildly rotten smell used in Indian cookery) as easily as you can nutmeg or thyme. And when you do, you get an exhaustive rundown of topics from etymology and chemical constituents to recipes, history, and culinary uses.

Take saffron, for instance. Color photographs of saffron crocus in bloom show bright red threads or stigmata dangling from the veined purple blossoms. It is these threads which are harvested, and Katzer tells us that it takes 150,000 of the lovely flowers to make one kilo of dried saffron. You may never need to know how to say saffron in Finnish (sahrami) or Hungarian (fuszersafrany), but Katzer thoughtfully provides a list of "synonyms" in 65 languages. Then there are passages on sensory quality (“reminiscent to idioform but much more pleasant”) and chemical constituents (the brilliant yellow-orange hue is caused by caretenoid pigments).

Had enough? If not, follow intriguing links to recipes for paella and chicken biryani, as well as to La Musee du Safran in Boynes, France and to Ancient Cultic Associations of Saffron Crocus, a curious website which details myths about the spice. A section on the use of saffron in Middle Eastern and Indian cookery includes paeans to saffron ice cream and saffron lassi. But if you’ve just bought some Kashmiri saffron, reputedly the world’s finest, chances are it’s from another place, maybe Iran, since so little is still grown in that troubled valley.

To see Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages, go to
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/index.html.

What is curry exactly? This is one of those prickly issues that foodies love to debate, even as we are stuffing our mouths with, say, the most delectable fish curry from Goa, practically wallowing in the irresistible flavors of fresh coconut, sour tamarind and fiery kashmiri chilies.

In A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, K. T. Achaya defines “curry” as an “Indo-Anglian” construct “which has come to symbolize Indian food for the westerner.” Derived from kari, the Tamil word for black pepper, it originally described any spicy dish that accompanied South Indian food, then came to embrace “a liquid broth, a thicker stewed preparation, or even a spiced dry dish.” Achaya dryly adds that one Eliza Fay served curry and rice “as a matter of course” at her Calcutta table in 1780, “as did thousands of other colonials living everywhere in India.”

The mystery of curry is more fully revealed in Lizzie Collingham’s new book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. This densely written history of Indian cuisine invites the reader down so many intriguing byways that one sometimes loses sight of the main idea: that the evolution of Indian cuisine was spurred by hordes of invaders—the Mughals who originated in Central Asia, then the Portuguese and the British—who fused their own culinary traditions with those of the Subcontinent, producing entirely new dishes such as, yes, curry.

As Collingham explains, Indians would never have called their own food curry. “The idea of curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture….[Indian] servants would have served the British with dishes that they called, for example, rogan josh, dopiaza or quarama. But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.”

The English got the word “curry”, she says, from the Portuguese who had arrived in India in 1498 with Vasco da Gama. They used the terms “caril” or “carree” to describe broths “made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts…and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger…besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments [that they]…poured in good quantity upon…boyl’d Rice.” The Portuguese had in turn drawn these words from three South Indian languages: karil in Kannadan and Malayalam, and kari in Tamil, both meaning spices as well as sautéed vegetables and meat. The British generically applied the word curry to “any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy in any part of India.”

Collingham traces in gruesome detail the devolution of curry from a spicy pan-Indian dish with many regional variations into a noxious all-purpose turmeric-heavy powder manufactured in England for returning civil servants who pined for the lost pleasures of the Anglo-Indian table. Fortunately, in both England and America we are enjoying a surge in restaurants serving regional Indian cooking, so we can taste the real (but still evolving) thing.

See K.T. Achaya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Oxford University Press, 1998, and Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Oxford University Press, 2006, both at www.amazon.com.