5 hours ago
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Above my cooker, tucked in around the extractor housing, is my spice cupboard. It’s obviously not the optimum storage facility, but it’s perfectly located for access while cooking. It’s also complete chaos. Heavy-bottomed jars are stacked up one atop the other in misshapen walls, invariably hiding the one you’re looking for. There are bags of dried, friable leaves and tubs of sticky-rimmed pastes. Some I use a lot. Others were bought for just one recipe, possibly written by a lovely chap called Yotam, and haven’t been touched since. Here is asafoetida, and fennel pollen. There’s sumac and sansho peppercorns, and tamarind paste looking like a biodegradable stunt double for crude oil.
My relationship with this cupboard has long been sharply divided. On the one hand, I despair that I can’t be an organised cook; one of those fragrant, well-groomed types who has an alphabetised spice carousel, and can find exactly what they need with a fingertip’s casual spin. On the other hand, it has given me comfort. I must be a proper cook, for look at this cluttered spice cupboard of mine, which smells thickly of culinary ambition. No, I may not use sansho peppercorns and tamarind paste on a daily basis. But I could, you know. If I wanted to.
Then for Christmas I was given something that forced change upon me: a stainless steel, glass-lidded Indian spice tin, or masala dabba, containing seven pots. I had seen their virtues extolled before, without wanting to get involved. But now, staring at this gift, a truth dawned upon me. I might own 593 different herbs and spices. But aside from salt and black pepper, forever in reach on the work surface, how many did I use regularly? Here was an unforced opportunity for a January declutter. And so, acting on instinct, I started making choices.
Garlic powder went in first. I’m probably meant to regard my love for it as a dirty secret, but I don’t. Garlic powder isn’t a replacement for fresh. It is its own fierce flavour, and for rubs there really is nothing better. Next up, sweet smoked paprika, the deep colour of a sunset’s last gasp, and vital for earthiness. Of course there are chilli flakes; so much better than the thumping heat of chilli powder. They have a toastiness I adore. Obviously, there must be a dried herb and it must be oregano, the vanilla ice-cream of dried herbs; the one you really wanted to use when the recipe weirdly insisted on marjoram.
The next is filled with one of those all-purpose mixes for throwing over, well, everything: roast chickens, roast potatoes, a close friend. I favour Caribbean Everyday Seasoning Mix by Dunn’s River, which contains many of the other things in my tin, plus fabulously elegant additions such as sugar and MSG. Into the middle pot goes star anise, because I use it in Asian broths and because it will look pretty through the glass lid.
The final pot is filled with ground cumin. It is cookery’s equivalent of a pin in a map and saying “you are here”. It is strident and pigheaded in all the right ways. And now you are shouting: what about ground coriander? What about turmeric? Well, what about them? This is my masala dabba, not yours. Get your own. Because what you put in a spice pot is extremely personal. It’s defined by things like heritage and good taste, or the lack of it. And anyway, I’ve still got all of those for spicing emergencies. But now I can actually find the ones I use. It’s amazing. I feel like a grown-up. Almost.
