Spice: A Cook's Companion

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Rather he has created a very personal collection of “ forty-odd spices and a similar number of spice blends” to share.

The Cooks Companion | Harvey Jones The Cooks Companion | Harvey Jones

I love Mark’s note in his Introduction that “ the brilliance of spices [is that] they are – like music, painting and poetry – almost entirely unnecessary and yet utterly essential.The recipes build on bringing your spices alive – whether that’s creating blends to easily enhance your food when short of time on a weekday evening, or in infusing and blooming spices to bring out the very best of these treasured ingredients. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. Mark points out that the book is “ high on ideas, blends and recipes” but low on “ the historic movement of spices around the world, the wars fought and what might or might not have been rammed up Rameses II’s nose before he was laid to rest” – it’s turns of phrases like this one that always delight me in Mark’s writing – heavy on accurate and useful information, yet light and often humorous in touch.

Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones

For us, the mashed potatoes (also flavoured with paprika) didn’t work well with the chicken, and we felt that a contrasting flavour, or plain mash with plenty of butter, would work better.Only four spices in the book were wholly new to me – anardana (pomegranate seeds used as a spice rather than as a fruit), Ethiopian passion berries, mahleb (a type of cherry), and verbena berries. Not all recipes have photos, but many do and these are all taken by Mark; some show the finished dish in its cooking pot or pickle jar, the rest show food or drink served in homely crockery on pleasingly plain surfaces. Caraway seeds are used in both the pastry and the tart filling, alongside mustard and fresh parsley, but it’s in the pastry that the spice really shines. Bigger Things is full of dishes that are suitable for a main meal (from breakfast through to dinner) and offers recipes like Chipotle eggs in purgatory, Za’atar fruit fattoush, Chorizo and Merguez sausages, Spicy Scotch eggs, Paradise cauliflower soup, Yuki Gomi’s Spicy ramen, Bourride (a French fish soup), Mouclade (lightly curried mussels also from France), Li Ling Wang’s Mapo tofu, Bún riêu (a Vietnamese noodle soup), Lara Lee’s Sambal goreng tempe, Domi-yangnyeom-gui (a Korean fried fish dish), Blackened fish (southern US-style), Maunika Gowardhan’s Punjabi chicken curry, Nanjing salted duck, Doro wat (an Ethiopian spiced stew), Annie Grey’s 18th century English chicken curry, Juniper-brined roast chicken, Babi guling (a Balinese roast pork dish), Barbecue ribs, Zuza Zak’s Bigos (a Polish winter stew), and Pastilla (a North African filo pastry pie).