For someone who has a cinnamon bark from Hong Kong mounted in a glass-fronted box in her living room, it doesn’t come as a surprise that food and travel writer and author Marryam H Reshii calls herself a “spice fanatic”. Her latest book, The Flavour of Spice, is a compilation of stories about the origin of spices and how they have evolved in Indian cuisine.
Reshii’s journey into exploring the world of spices began when a publisher approached her with the idea a few years ago.
“I visited Khan Market in Delhi with the publisher to learn about the spices and realised that I could easily write the book, but when I actually started making notes, I developed cold feet,” she says, “There’s so much about the spices that’s not known. Ask your grocer where the cumin comes from and he wouldn’t have an answer. Even our school text books don’t teach us where spices are grown in the country; we focus only on grains and pulses.”
While researching for the book, Reshii treated spices as an agricultural produce, visiting farms to learn about how they’re grown and then tracing their journey to our tables, and also which tables, since the usage of spices varies across India. Case in point: Turmeric, which isn’t used much by Lucknowi Muslims, while it’s an essential element in Kashmiri Muslim cooking. Then there’s also the journey that spices make, for example, saffron which is is grown in Kashmir but not popularly used in Kashmiri cuisine.
Stories about spices transcending culinary use make for an interesting read, turmeric and saffron being the most common ones, since both are considered auspicious for their colour. Turmeric is an essential part of many rituals and celebrations. Saffron is used to ritually bathe the 58-foot idol of Bahubali near Bengaluru. Among the Muslim community in Kashmir, the taweez is written in saffron mixed with water. “During one of my trips to Paris, I met an art gallery owner who was wearing this beautiful shawl that came from Meghalaya. The surprising part was that it was dyed in turmeric,” Reshii says.
We ask about her favourite spices and she answers in a dreamy voice, “Cinnamon because it can perk up any dish, from cake and biscuits to mutton and even bhakarwadi , and hing just makes me go weak in the knees.”
Mention black cardamom and some not so appetising memories come up, “I used to visit Sher-e-Punjab in Goa with my parents and the owner would tell us that nobody in Goa knew about the spice till he introduced them to it. They would initially think that there was a cockroach in the food,” says Reshii, “Now when I get black cardamom in my food, I have to focus on not making that connection.”
In her book, Reshii breaks some myths too, and the biggest one of all is associated with cinnamon. What we get in India as cinnamon is not cinnamon at all, it’s cassia bark, a twin of cinnamon which has an undertone of heat. The original cinnamon, grown only in Sri Lanka, is sweeter and the bark curls inwards. “It looks so different that when I was getting a few 36-inch-long barks from Sri Lanka for my chef friends, I had to fight my way through the airport security check. They wouldn’t believe that it was cinnamon I was carrying, a spice they use every day in their kitchens,” says Reshii.
The incident is both funny and worrisome at the same time. “There’s zero awareness about the produce,” she adds. “I just hope that people engage in spices a bit more and not just in terms of cooking. Take a minute to look at spices, photograph them like they photograph a well-plated meal and try to see how the same spice from two different shops is so vastly different,” quips Reshii.
