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.