How To Spice Up Your Life In The Kitchen
Spices – Defining Your Culture
Go to My Spice Sage. com for everything you need to know about spices!
We all use spices, some more than others. If you are a good ol’ meat and potatoes cook, salt and pepper are your basics. Perhaps you venture as to use cinnamon, chili powder, and paprika? You know your way around the kitchen. You know that spices can make or break a dish.
Coconut Quinoa Pudding - click for the recipe!
Even if you are, in fact, that simpler kinda cook and spices are an enigma to you, you should probably get to know My Spice Sage, an online site that has every possible spice and explains everything about them from tastes, aromas, uses and what goes with each type of cuisine. Their blog gives you all kinds of great recipes and suggestions on how to enhance your culinary base.
Cocoa powder, vanilla beans and cinnamon are spices, too... click for the recipe!
Mini Spice History
As you recall, the Spice Trade is what drove commerce, world exploration and political balance for centuries. Trading in the much coveted spices such as black pepper, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and turmeric were quite often used as currency.
Here is a fact you might not know. Nutmeg and mace are responsible for New Yorkers today speaking English and not Dutch.
Piment D'Espelette found in the Basque Region of France... click for more
You see…. New Amsterdam was settled by the Dutch in the early 1600 s. However, the English, who had settled most of the surrounding area wanted this port as their own. The two countries were in a violent war over control of the seas and trade routes and to partially settle their disputes, the Treaty of Breda was enacted about 1667. New Amsterdam became New York in a trade for the strategic island of Run, one of the Spice Islands in the Banda Islands in Indonesia which produced great spices, the majority of which were nutmeg and mace. For more on this riveting history, take a look at Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, a book well worth the read.
Nathaniel's Nutmeg tells the bitter conflict between the two super powers of the 17th century - The English and the Dutch
When you shop for spices, reach for them while you are cooking or are ready to try a new recipe or cooking style, remember there is a rich history in those spices you are shaking. It might just enrich your dining experience!
For more on My Spice Sage:
@MySpiceSage 0n Twitter
MySpiceSage.com On Facebook
