SpiceLines

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.

“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.

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.

There are a handful of seductive food shops and restaurants in Cambridge which we’d love to have within walking distance of our own neighborhood: Formaggio Kitchen, of course, for its fascinating array of artisan cheeses and super-knowledgeable staff; Christina’s Spices, where we always discover tantalizing new seasonings from far corners of the globe (current passions include Tasmanian pepper and smoked Mexican black salt); and then there’s Oleana.

Praised for its innovative Arab-rooted Mediterranean cuisine, Oleana regularly makes Boston Top 10 Restaurant lists. In 2005 chef Ana Sortun was named Best Chef Northeast by the James Beard Foundation. But Oleana still feels more like a lively neighborhood bistro than a showcase for a star chef—and therein lies its magic. Pierced metal lanterns, wide planked wooden floors, stylish copper-rimmed tables, and walls the color of thick cream create a modern exotic vibe, which perfectly suits a menu inspired by cuisines of Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East. Just a few weeks ago, we sampled the vegetarian tasting menu: It began with a sweet-tart carrot puree with Egyptian spices, segued to lentils braised in white wine with fried fiddleheads and tangy romesco sauce, and finished with a flourish of rich ricotta dumplings, meaty porcini mushrooms and braised spring lettuces. Well, actually it finished with a tiny square of intensely rich dark chocolate marquise sprinkled with fleur de sel. It was great.

Some of these recipes can be found in Sortun’s new cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. But when we talked with her by phone last week, she said her goal was never just to write an Oleana cookbook. “I really want to teach people how to be more comfortable with spices,” she said. “People are scared of or overwhelmed by spices. They don’t know what to do with them. So I’ve tried to introduce a different way of thinking about spices. I want to show people how to use them in a lighter Mediterranean way--to enrich foods without having to add fat.”

Sortun hasn’t organized her cookbook in the conventional “meat, fish, vegetables” manner. In the introduction, she writes: “People ask me so many questions about spices and herbs—their usage alone and in combination. What can I do with coriander? What spices go well with lamb? What can I do with all the mint in my garden?”

In answer, she has grouped spices and herbs, some familiar, some not, into families that complement each other. Each chapter focuses on one cluster—say, cumin, coriander and cardamom, or mint, organo and za’atar (a summer savory-like herb)--with recipes that highlight innovative ways to use each spice, either on its own or in combination. This was not an easy sell. “People usually don’t say, ‘I feel like having cumin tonight,’” she laughed.

Chef Ana Sortun in the kitchen at Oleana on a busy night.

We asked the chef why cumin and coriander are so often combined—and why she added cardamom to the mix. “Cumin is a warm, earthy, brown spice,“ she explained. “Coriander is bright with citrus notes. Cardamom is extremely fragrant and pepper-like. Each is wonderful, but when you blend them, they balance each other out.” You can follow this line of thought in recipes like Chickpea Crepes scented with cumin, Seared Salmon with Egyptian Garlic and Coriander Sauce, and Arabic Coffee Pot de Crème, a riff on the custom of pouring coffee over cardamom pods stuffed in the spout of the pot.

An embarrassing confession: Just as we were reading Spice, a bag of carrots well past their prime surfaced from the depths of the refrigerator. The very first recipe in the book is for Carrot Puree and Egyptian Spice Mix with Nuts and Olive Oil, so we pulled out the paring knife and started peeling. An hour later, an extraordinary transformation had occurred. The carrots were simmered till tender, coarsely mashed with olive oil, white wine vinegar and spoonfuls of harissa, a peppery Middle Eastern condiment, then seasoned with cumin and ginger. We served the puree with pieces of torn baguette, olive oil for dipping and dukkah, a complex Egyptian spice and nut blend, which includes coriander and cumin, as well as almonds, sesame seeds and coconut. The levels of flavor in this seemingly simple dish were astonishing: It was by turns sweet, tart, peppery, earthy, nutty. One of Oleana’s most popular prêt-a-manger dishes, for us it made a delicious light supper with a green salad and a glass of wine.

Some of Sortun’s combinations, like vanilla, saffron and ginger, are frankly surprising. “Again, it’s a matter of balance,” she said. “Saffron is a warm, earthy, brown, almost dirty spice. Vanilla is sweet and aromatic; ginger is spicy and peppery. In Moroccan cooking they often use combinations like this. They love that sweet-savory-spicy thing. Typically you find this in broths or in dishes like bisteeya. At Oleana we do a sweet potato bisteeya with saffon and ginger."

The way Sortun uses spices owes much to her exploration of traditional Turkish cuisine, as well as that of countries like Greece, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. “What sets the eastern Mediterranean apart is the very light and subtle use of spice,” she explained. “It is very sophisticated because of the influence of the Ottoman Empire which was really decadent. The food can be very complicated, but it is not as heavily spiced as in Indian cooking. Ottoman chefs left their stamp on dishes like borek, kofte or ground meat kabobs, the bulgur-based kibbehs, raviolis with yoghurt and many other vegetable dishes. You see different variations running throughout the Mediterranean.”

One of the pleasures of Spice is reading about Sortun’s adventures as she travels around the Mediterranean in the company of great cooks. We meet people like Ayfer Unsal, a journalist and author of Turkish cookbooks, who organizes a stunning feast in the town of Gaziantep. All the women bring their specialties, such as kofte or kibbe, “some with lamb, others with potato and pumpkin, salads dressed with sweet-tart pomegranate molasses, fresh and intriguing vegetables spiked with the spice and herb combinations that are now staples” in her kitchen. She takes us to her favorite restaurants, such as Cupia in Athens where chefs char eggplant over a wood fire, then mix the creamy flesh with a garlicky mayonnaise and toasted pine nuts. Back home, Sortun crossed that dish with a Turkish preparation known as Sultan’s Delight to create her own version, Smoky Eggplant Puree with Pine Nuts and Urfa Pepper.

“Travel is far and away the biggest influence on me,” she told us. “When I went to Turkey for the first time I had genies and magic carpets in mind. When I got there it changed everything I ever thought about the country and food.” In fact, the Seattle-born chef seems to have spent much of her life exploring kitchens on the other side of the globe. After working in restaurants from age 14, she attended La Varenne in Paris. cooked in Italy, Spain and the south of France, then returned to Boston where she became chef at Casablanca in Harvard Square. During that time she took that first eye-opening trip to Turkey and since then, has returned two to three times year to the countries which have inspired her. “I’m a big believer in knowing the rules before you break them,” she said. “I have go back again and again before I can get creative.”

Some of the herb and spice mixtures in her cookbook will be unfamiliar to readers—Sortun gives recipes for Moroccan Ras Al Hanout, Egyptian Dukkah, and Jordanian Za’atar, among others—but to make it really easy, she has also created a signature spice collection that can be purchased with the cookbook through Oleana. There is one stack of five blends, and another of hard-to-find single spices such as Aleppo and urfa chilies, sumac and rigani, a fragrant Greek oregano grown on the slopes of Mount Olympus.

Now, you have no excuse for not making Crispy Chicken with Lemon and Za’atar or any of the other more than 100 recipes in this intriguing book.

Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean can be purchased on the web at www.ecookbooks.com. To buy the cookbook and spice stacks, contact Oleana, 134 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, MA 02139. Telephone: 617-661-0505. Web: www.oleanarestaurant.com.

Life is full of unexpected twists.

When he was a 19-year-old film student at the San Francisco Art Insitute, James Oseland was waiting for a bus one rainy afternoon when he ran into Tanya Alwi, a fellow classmate. Over coffee he learned that she lived in Jakarta. Her father, Des Alwi, was a “descendant of an aristocratic Muslim family of nutmeg and pearl traders from Banda…” and a celebrated freedom fighter against the Dutch in the 1940's. After a probing conversation, she invited him to visit her family during summer vacation.

A few weeks later, the California boy who had grown up in a suburban tract house watching The Brady Bunch and eating frozen potpies found himself on a plane to Indonesia. Shortly after his arrival, Tanya took him to meet Bebe Huwei, a film star-turned-psychic: Drawing mystical circles on a piece of paper, Huwei told him that his life had changed for good: “You came here for three months, but you will stay for one year. Then you will keep coming back for the rest of your life….A revolution has begun inside of you. You must accept it.”

With this stroke of fate, Oseland conceived an all-consuming passion for the people and the cuisines of the legendary tropical islands that have lured spice hunters for two millenia. An award winning food writer and cooking teacher, he is currently executive editor of Saveur and author of an enthralling new cookbook, Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. It is a beguiling tale of two decades of travel through these fabled, turbulent lands and of the extraordinary cooks who opened their kitchens and their hearts to him.

My own copy is already spattered with flecks of the Malaysian sambal belcan, a fiery chili, lime and toasted shrimp paste that Oseland recommends serving with dishes like Pan-Seared Tamarind Tuna. I found it good enough to eat with just about everything, from a grilled pork tenderloin from our local farmers market to grocery store roast chicken. In all, the book offers 100 recipes which will likely bring tears of joy to anyone who has ever been seduced by the vibrant, flavorful foods of the region. In 25 trips over two decades, Oseland has foraged in wet markets, waded through rice paddies, learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia, hung out in the kitchens of countless superb cooks learning to make dishes like Black Pepper Crab (go here for another version of this Singapore favorite) and Javanese Chicken Curry with cinnamon and lemon grass--and then relentlessly worked on the recipes until his taste memory tells him that he’s got it right.

The intelligence behind Oseland's passion for the region lends authenticity not only to the recipes, but also to the advice he tenders to cooks who are new to the ingredients and techniques used in this part of the world. If, for instance, you know nothing about kecap manis, the Indonesian sweet soy sauce, Oseland is your man. I’ve spent hours in Asian markets. bewildered by shelves of unfamiliar jars and bottles, trying to pick the "right" one. Now I know to look for Cap Bango brand (with a picture of pelican on the label) because it has no preservatives and “delivers a richer, more complex taste with hints of smoke and honey.” (Kecap manis, by the way, combined with hoisin, soy and rice vinegar, makes a delectable marinade for spareribs.) His pages on unfamiliar seasonings, such as fresh turmeric root, galangal and shrimp paste are worth the price of the book—as are his sections on making curries and spice pastes, the merits of food processors vs. mortars and pestles, and eating with Allah's silverware (the fingers of your right hand).

But I really fell for this book because of Oseland’s serendiptious encounters with fantastic cooks. In West Sumatra, a seatmate on a bus ominously loads a pistol. then insists that author spend the night at his home. Oseland awakes at 4 AM to the fragrance of stir fried garlic: Breakfast by candlelight is a feast of lemon grass fried chicken, a sweet-and-sour pickle, and garlic-laden fried rice topped with fried egg, cucumber and shrimp chips, made by Siti, the mother of his new friend. On the northeast coast of Malaysia, a Chinese woman, closing her tea shop for the night, whips up a divine herbal rice salad, fragrant with finely chopped basil, mint and lemongrass. A wild ride through Eastern Sumatra with Gatot, a vegetable vendor, leads to the Achson, the "Soto King," who sells the world's best spicy chicken soup from a pushcart. Are these encounters random, or, as the soothsayer implied, ordained by fate?

Who knows? Oseland’s first foray into Indonesian cuisine sets the tone for the book: Recovering from a bout of dengue fever, he wanders into the Alwis’ kitchen looking for lime juice. There he finds Inam, the family cook, crushing red chiles in a mortar, making bumbu bumbu, a flavoring paste for green beans in coconut milk. He begins to spend long hours in the kitchen with Inam, watching her make Indonesian fried chicken one day, gado gado (Javanese chopped vegetable salad with peanut sauce) the next, and always writing down the recipes. “You’re strange,” she tells him, “but it’s good for a man to learn to cook.”

Yes, indeed.

For more on James Oseland, see www.jamesoseland.com. Cradle of Flavor, Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006) may be ordered from www.amazon.com.

“Could you PLEASE, PLEASE send me your bread-pudding recipe from your original book—my husband gave it to me years ago with a wonderful message comparing our marriage as a mixture of ‘spices.’”—Elaine Acosta, in an email to Paul Prudhomme, from “Comforting Food: Recapturing Recipes Katrina Took Away,” by Rick Brooks, The Wall Street Journal, August 26-27, 2006, p. A1.

Ian Hemphill's herb and spice "encyclopedia" lays out guidelines
for creating vibrant spice blends.

Like spouses in a good marriage, spices complement each other when they are properly combined. A sprinkle of hot, freshly ground black pepper perks up a blend of sweet spices—like cinnamon, allspice and vanilla—which might be otherwise be cloying. Tangy spices like sumac, with its bright acidic edge, give zest to the earthy flavors of the Middle Eastern mixture za’atar. And then there are mildly aromatic spices like coriander and fennel that pull diverse tastes together—acting as mediators, of a sort, to create a harmonious marriage of flavors.

In his superb reference book, The Spice and Herb Bible, Sydney-based spice merchant Ian Hemphill offers some useful rules for blending spices. The book embodies all that Hemphill has learned about his métier during a lifetime in the business: As a boy, he worked in his parents’ herb nursery, then ran a spice company in Singapore before returning to Australia to set up his own outfit, dubbed Herbie’s after a childhood nickname. The firm’s wide-ranging catalogue of 300 spices, herbs and flavorings--which includes tantalizing items like Australian wattle seed, brown cardamom from Bhutan and Egyptian rose petals—can be seen at www.herbies.com.au. The book devotes detailed chapters to nearly 100 herbs and spices: where they come from, how to use them (with recipes), how to buy and store them--and how to combine them.

Hemphill writes, “The art of making a good spice blend is to bring a range of different kinds of tastes and textures together so they create an ideal balance that tantalizes the taste buds.” As a starting point, he divides spices into five basic flavor categories and suggests relative quantities to use when creating a blend:

Sweet (2 teaspoons): allspice, aniseed, cassia, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla;

Pungent (1/2 teaspoon): ajowan, asafetida, bush tomato, calamus, caraway, cardamom, celery seed, cloves, cumin, dill seed, fenugreek seed, galangal, ginger, juniper, licorice, mace, nigella, orris root, star anise wattleseed, zedoary;

Tangy (1 teaspoon): amchur, barberry, black lime, caper, kokam, pomegranate, sumac, tamarind;

Hot (1/2 teaspoon): chilli, horseradish, mustard, pepper;

Amagamating (5 teaspoons): coriander seed, fennel seed, paprika, poppy seed, sesame seed, turmeric.

A few more ideas:

1. Consider the intensity of flavor and aroma of individual spices within each category and adjust accordingly when mixing. As Hemphill points out, “although pepper and chilli are both hot spices, the relative differences in their flavour and heat strength makes some variation in quantity appropriate.”
2. When measuring spices for blends, measure by weight or by volume, but do not mix the two methods.
3. Allow spice mixtures to mellow for 24 hours before using them, so that the ingredients can balance out.

And a final tip: Consider the suggested proportions a starting point. Your own taste buds will guide you to the right combination. In spice blending as in all cooking—and even in marriage--you must know the rules before you can bend them.

Herbie's Spice Blend for Steak
(from The Spice and Herb Bible by Ian Hemphill)

Hemphill created this spice blend for sprinkling on steak before grilling. It includes spices from all the flavor categories--sweet, pungent, sour, hot and amalgamating—in the recommended proportions, although he has slightly increased the quantity of black pepper for a spicier touch.

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon amchur powder (see note)
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground chilli (see note)
5 teaspoons ground sweet paprika

Method:

Combine all the ingredients and mix well. Allow the blend to mellow overnight before using. Rub on steaks or other meat 20-30 minutes before grilling.

Note: Amchur powder comes from the dried unripe fruit of the mango tree. It not only adds a pleasantly tangy note to the spice mix, but also serves as a meat tenderizer. It can be found in Indian food markets or ordered from www.herbies.com.au and as "amchoor powder" from www.kalustyans.com.

As for the chilli, you can experiment with any pure ground chili pepper. See Penzey’s website for mild ancho peppers (3,000 Scoville units), Turkish Aleppo peppers (10,000 units) or smoky chipotles (15,000 units).

In September 2006, the 2nd edition of The Herb and Spice Bible by Ian Hemphill will be available from www.amazon.com.

The second edition of spice merchant Ian Hempill's book
offers over 100 recipes for an expanded range of spices
and herbs, including some that are unique to Australia.

A few days ago when I was making pickled crabapples, I found myself ransacking the kitchen pantry for a jar of cloves. Eventually I found them tucked behind the Gujarati fennel, still sweetly pungent and very lively though I hadn’t actually used them for almost a year. When measuring out a tablespoon for the brine, I began thinking about this curious nail-shaped spice. Cloves are a staple in kitchens the world over, but what are they exactly?

Well, if you happened to be chatting with Ian Hemphill, an amiable and authoritative Australian spice merchant, he would likely tell you that cloves are the unopened flower buds of a tropical tree—Eugenia caryophyllata, to be specific—that, planted in groves, forms a “magical aromatic canopy." And that said tree is so sensitive that the buds must be gently plucked by hand lest it suffer a shock to its nervous system and go on strike. And that the immature buds, picked when they are just turning pink, look a lot like “the unopened eyes of baby marsupials.”

That last phrase spells the delightful difference between Hemphill’s Spice and Herb Bible and almost every other reference book on the subject. (The only exception I can think of is Waverly Root’s very witty Food.) This serious, but not too scholarly volume is the kind of book you might want to curl up with when plotting your next spicy repast. Let's say you’d like to know where cloves are grown (Zanzibar and Madagascar), how to ask for them in Italian (garofano) or how to use them in cooking (curries, tagines, pickles, and stewed fruits): This is the place to go. The word “clove,” Hemphill tells us, comes from the Latin clavus, meaning “nail”—that’s what they look like—and that in ancient China, courtiers chewed cloves to sweeten their breath before speaking to the Emperor.

The brand new second edition of The Spice and Herb Bible has improved on an already great book. Close-up color photos—especially helpful if you’re investigating an off-the beaten-track ingredient such as grains of paradise or sweet cicely—now accompany chapters on more than 100 herbs and spices. Each entry ends with an imaginative, but not too complicated recipe devised by Hemphill’s daughter Kate—among them, Smoky Clove-Scented Beef in which skewered spiced beef is cooked over rice perfumed with cloves and cardamom. There are tantalizing entries on Australian spices and herbs, such as lemon myrtle and Tasmanian pepperberries, which will be available through Hemphill’s California rep, Uplink International, starting in November 2006.

Ian Hemphill, author of The Spice
and Herb Bible

Hemphill comes by his expertise naturally. As a boy, he worked in his parents’ herb nursery, Somerset Cottage. After a stint in Singapore at the helm of an international spice company, he returned to Australia where he opened his own retail business in a Sydney suburb. Today Herbie’s (the name comes from a boyhood nickname) offers the largest selection of herbs and spices in the Southern Hemisphere. (A personal note: I have had a sporadic email correspondence with Ian for several years and have always found him to be generous with his far superior knowledge and extraordinarily good-natured, especially when I have peppered him with tedious and repetitive questions.)

The Herb and Spice Bible: Second Edition is divided into three parts. The World of Spices tackles topics such as buying and storing spices (freeze fresh chopped herbs in ice cubes until you need them), a list of spices used in major cuisines, and a few tips on the tricky business of matching wines with spices. One suggestion: pair hot spicy foods with low alcohol wines from New Zealand, Germany or Alsace. Why? High alcohol wines can make aggressively seasoned food taste unpleasant.

The middle section, Spice Notes, covers over 100 spices and herbs with recipes. The last part is devoted to the art of combining spices. The best new addition here is an herb and spice pyramid--a useful jumping off point for anyone who wants to make their own blends. At the top of the pyramid are Hot Spices--chili, horseradish, mustard and pepper—which should make up no more than 3 percent of the mix. At the bottom are amalgamating herbs and spices such as parsley, coriander and sesame seed, which should comprise about 57 percent. Creative cooks will tinker with Hemphill’s recommendations, but the chart gives a base from which to start.

There are 39 recipes for Hemphill’s own blends including an Aussie Bush Pepper Mix and a sumptuous version of Dukkah, the Egyptian spice blend, made with hazelnuts and pistachios as well as the usual sesame seeds, coriander, cumin, salt and black pepper.

These are the same blends sold by Herbie’s Spices. As Ian told me in a recent email, “We’ve revealed all our secrets in the book.”

The Spice and Herb Bible: Second Edition by Ian Hemphill (Robert Rose, 2006) may be ordered from www.amazon.com.

To order Herbie’s spices, go to www.herbies.com.au. After November 1, U.S. customers can order directly from www.herbiesspicesusa.com or by calling Uplink International at 1.800.896.3070.

There is a moment in Climbing the Mango Trees that perfectly captures the tensions underlying Madhur Jaffrey’s near-idyllic childhood In India. Shibbudada, her charismatic and capricious uncle, arranges a treat for Jaffrey and her siblings: a visit from the khomcha wallah—the hot-and-savory-chaat- or snack-seller—at Saturday tea. The children are beside themselves with delight. “This was akin to telling a Western child that he could have a whole candy shop for an entire afternoon,” she explains.

The khomcha wallah did not prepare sweets, however. His specialty was dahi baras: irresistible fried split pea patties which he drizzled with yogurt and showered with salt and spices: black pepper-cumin-dried mango for mild tastes, yellow and red blends with various chilies for hot. The piece de resistance, it seems, was sweet-and-sour tamarind chutney: “A wooden spoon would disappear into the depths of a brown sauce as thick as melted chocolate. It would emerge only to drop a dark, satiny swirl over our dahi baras. As we ate them, the dahi baras would melt in our mouths with the minimum of resistance, the hot spices would bring tears to our eyes, the yogurt would cool us down, and the tamarind would perk up our taste buds as nothing else would. This to us was heaven.”

Just as we are vicariously enjoying these delicacies, Jaffrey reminds us that the khomcha wallah’s visit was a divisive weapon in an ugly, long-running family drama: As his father’s favorite son, Shibbudada kept the whole clan on its toes by mercurially shifting his favors from one member to another, always ignoring his own children, the products of a loveless arranged marriage to a homely woman. “We would watch our three cousins, jumping around in general glee with the rest of us, but every now and then they would throw a quick glance at their father, their large dark eyes begging for another kind of crumb. Perhaps a hug, a touch of the hand. They never got it…”

Climbing the Mango Trees is filled with wondrous, sometimes painful recollections of growing up in a large, prosperous Delhi family. The book covers the first 19 years of Jaffrey’s life, up to the point when she leaves India for drama school in London. Eventually she would become an actress, notably starring in Merchant Ivory films such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Heat and Dust (1982), but she really hit her stride when she began to write about the foods of her beloved India. Jaffrey’s 13 cookbooks include An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1975), Taste of the Far East (1993), voted Best International Cookbook and Book of the Year by the James Beard Foundation, and most recently, From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail (2003).

Not bad for a girl who didn’t know how to cook when she left home and who had failed a domestic sciences exam when unexpectedly asked to prepare a dish using Indian spices. Born in 1933, Jaffrey, whose first name means “sweet as honey,” spent her childhood shuttling between two family residences, one belonging to her parents in the Delhi suburb of Kanpur and the other in a riverside compound with sprawling gardens ruled over by her autocratic grandfather. Although the family was happiest in their Kanpur home—which featured a salmon-hued dining room decorated with gold plaster rosettes—it is quite clear that many of her most joyous moments were spent in the company of her extended family.

The title of the book is drawn from an early episode, undoubtedly a pivotal one for a food-writer-to-be: One hot day, while the grownups napped “in rooms cooled with wetted, sweet-smelling vetiver curtains,” Jaffrey and her cousins climbed up into the branches of mango trees, “armed with a ground mixture of salt, pepper, red chilies, and roasted cumin. The older children, on the higher branches, peeled and sliced the mangoes with penknives and passed the slices down to the smaller fry on the lower branches. We would dip the slices into our spice mixture and eat, our tingling mouths telling us we had ceased to be babies.”

Jaffrey’s taste-memory is prodigious. She can conjure up the flavor of the “snack of wealth,” describing it as “a heavenly froth, tasting a bit of ,,, bamboo, a bit of terracotta, a bit sweet and a bit nutty...” as easily as she can the spicy potatoes, “earthy, gingery, and hot,” served at her grandfather’s funeral feast. Thirty-two of her family recipes may be found at the end of the book, including a version of the khomcha-wallah’s split pea fritters, and a sublime duck curry with coriander and cardamom.

Her culinary memories make for delicious reading, but I found myself even more eagerly following the tumultuous saga of this family whose fortunes rose in the 17th century when they became scribes to Muslim rulers of India. Moments of sheer bliss—summer holidays in Simla, for instance, when the whole family picnicked in the cool foothills of the Himalayas, eating juicy mangos chilled in icy streams—are interspersed with her struggles at school and her dawning awareness of the deep pools of bitterness within the family.

Jaffrey is a good writer and she keeps her story going with a novelist’s flair. The portraits of her parents are vividly drawn. There is her rather sophisticated, well-educated father, an Anglophile condemned in life to run ghee and candy factories, who was happiest when designing elaborate illuminations for Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Her mother, from a poor Delhi family, had not gone to high school, but excelled in all domestic arts, teaching her daughters to maintain perfect skin by washing their faces in fresh raw cows’ milk and cooking exquisite curries. A section devoted to her Kashmiri shawls and her canny negotiations with the shawl-wallahs who purveyed them, will incite lust in the heart of anyone who loves textiles.

If there is a villain of the story, it is the spellbinding uncle Shibbudada, whose power games created so much misery and whose misguided attentions to her sister Kamal resulted in a tragic medical misdiagnosis. Yet during the riots that convulsed Delhi during Partition, this same uncle sallied forth day after day in his two-tone Chevy, in order to ferry Muslim friends to planes and trains headed for Pakistan. Far from being a memoir that settles scores, Climbing the Mango Trees is in the end a candid tale of a big, mostly loving family, troubles and all.

As the story deepens, Jaffrey herself emerges, slowly changing from a timid, undisciplined girl caught up the swirl of a large family into a young woman who blossoms when she discovers that she can write and act. Now, one imagines, she is a rather formidable person. Pity the young Hollywood actress who casually addressed her as M, a pet name permitted only to intimates. “I had to let her know, as gently as possible, that only those who had known me for at least forty years or were members of my family could address me that way,” Jaffrey says. Gently? I would not like to have been on the receiving end of that reprimand.

Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is available through www.amazon.com.