Tag Archives: Spices of Peace

Terri on Herbes de Province

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Terri leads us through complicated flavors!

What’s the first rule of herbes de Provence?

–There’s no such thing as a traditional blend of herbes de Provence.

What’s the second rule of herbes de Provence?

–There’s no such thing as a traditional blend of herbes de Provence.

Herbes de Provence, as a marketed thing, did not exist until the 1970s, and we can thank Julia Child for turning it into a collective noun. Prior to her recipe instruction to add said noun to a chicken sauté, les grand-mères Provençales (Provencal grandmothers, yo) would simply add…herbs. Grown locally. In the proportions they found most pleasing for their palates. The French spice company Ducros (now a part of a giant spice company that shall remain nameless) packaged a medley of herbs for export et voila! Nearly fifty years have passed and we’re still buying it.

Located in the southeastern corner of France, bordering Italy, the southern Alps, and the Mediterranean Sea, Provence is known for food that is not fussy. Provencal cuisine coaxes tons of flavor out of simple ingredients, and the cooks there know how to apply local herbs to their best advantage. Want to sass up your asparagus? Roast it with olive oil and some herbes de Provence and suddenly, your dish is full of Mediterranean vigor. In no particular order, herbes de Provence may consist of thyme, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, basil, chervil, tarragon, lovage, savory, sage, bay leaf and fennel. It may include dried orange rind. Blends packaged for US consumption usually include lavender, but those packaged for consumption elsewhere do not. It seems Americans so closely associate Provence with their lavender fields that we’re not happy without a spike of it in the blend. At least, that’s the official line; I suspect it’s got more to do with offloading agricultural overstock, but that’s my inner cynic speaking. At least the end results are yummy.

Why do we love spice blends? Why do tremendous amounts of spice cabinets contain things like herbes de Provence or Italian seasoning or Chinese five-spice powder? That’s easy. Because…they do a lot of the work for the home cook, and provide a modicum of insight into cultural cuisine for a relatively small cost. We may not know what to do with a whole star anise, but we can experience it in five-spice powder. We may not have a bottle of chervil, lovage, and savory sitting in the spice rack (or growing in the local fields), but we can buy some herbes de Provence and partake in the aromatic flavors that are ubiquitous to the sunny Mediterranean way of life. You may not be in France but with some herbes and the right olive oil, you can imagine what it’s like there thanks to your potatoes.

Because the herb medley is so fluid, it’s impossible to nail down the overall health benefits. If nothing else, many of the herbs listed above—which may or may not be in a blend—have antioxidant properties, so that’s something you can count on. And who isn’t happier, and consequently less stressed out, when they eat food that’s been made delicious by use of a delicious spice blend? Boom, there you have it. Herbes de Provence relieve anxiety. You heard it here first, world. You’re welcome.

The ingredients in herbes de Provence are no secret, so if you have the time and inclination, feel free to mix herbs together in proportions you find most pleasing. It’s what Julia Child did. But if you don’t think you need to reinvent the spice wheel in order to make your dinner sing, get yourself a bottle of les herbes and transport yourself to the rolling hills of southeastern France

Terri on Cardamom!

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Ah…  she’s thinking meatballs, I’m thinking sweet buns. Yum any way you try it, but who knew all this? Terri!

In the year 7000 BCE, the city of Jericho had a population of nearly 2,000 people, and they had developed crops of barley and wheat. Beer was still a thousand years away from discovery. The Jiahu people of central China had begun experimenting with a proto-cuneiform, inching the world closer to written language. And in India, cardamom was grown for export, in trade with Babylon.

If you’re counting, that’s 9000 years. Nine. Thousand. Years. 9000! That the words, “Yes, get me some more cardamom, please,” have been coming out of peoples’ mouths. We are more alike than different, even unto our ancients.

Cardamom, a cousin of ginger, is a chameleon. It is at once woodsy, citrusy, smoky, and sweet, and performs with equal vigor in baked sweet goods or in savory meals. I will attest myself that a touch added to my coffee—no more than 1/8 teaspoon—sends said coffee into the metaphorical stratosphere. Yeah… it’s that good.

Curiously, despite being a tropical plant that grows in climates with temperatures that do not descend below 35°F, cardamom has become an integral part of Scandinavian cooking. And by integral, I mean that Sweden consumes more than 18 times as much cardamom as most of the rest of the world, except for India and the Middle East. Norway consumes 30 times as much. Conventional wisdom says the Vikings brought cardamom back to Scandinavia with them after a standard-issue sacking of Constantinople about a thousand years ago, and that’s how the Swedes ended up with their funky citrus-woodsy-sweet meatballs.

With deeper research, academics are now challenging that presumption, stating a lack of evidence that points to Vikings. By 1050CE, according to trade documentation, cardamom had only made it as far north as Germany, and there are no cookbooks or records that show Vikings included cardamom trading as one of their many talents. Thanks to a current, copious application of academic elbow grease, there are more and more food historians that think cardamom did not come to Scandinavia as a happy side effect of a sacking but rather, thanks to the Moors. Established on the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century, Moorish recipes began showing up in Danish cookbooks in the 1200s, two full centuries after the supposed Viking cardamom introduction.

A natural digestive, cardamom has been used historically to alleviate stomach problems. There’s some interesting research that indicates cardamom to be effective in the prevention and treatment of stomach ulcers, primarily by acting as a natural antibiotic to the Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria commonly linked to ulcer formation. Recently, cardamom and cardamom oil have been shown to lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels, which helps improve heart health. It’s been shown to counter the effects of a high-fat diet by preventing the formation of abdominal fat, improve glucose intolerance, and inhibit the inflammation of liver tissue. And! The ancients chewed cardamom seeds for years, both because it’s yummy and because it helps keep gums healthy.

Cardamom delivers organ-friendly overall health benefits, while managing to balance savory-sweet deliciousness. It’s diversity is reflected in its popularity, being much beloved in both India and Scandinavia…and in the rest of the world. While I may not be able to thank my Viking ancestors for furthering cardamom’s global popularity a thousand years ago, I can thank them for their surprising use of it in meatballs.

Terri on Basil… mmmm

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Here’s Terri on an herb we love… it always felt so straightforward before this…

Basil has a curiously contradictory folkloric heritage. To the Romanians, the gift (and acceptance!) of a basil sprig indicated an engagement, while Greeks thought basil represented hatred and poverty. In Egypt and Iran, basil was planted or scattered on the graves of the recently departed as a sign of love, while in Crete, basil was thought to represent the devil…but would be kept on the windows to ward him away. In the 16th century in England, it was particularly dangerous business handling basil. It was thought, by at least one person important enough to have his musings preserved, that basil sprigs put under a rock bred scorpions. Even worse, one physician claimed that if one breathed too deeply the scent of a basil plant, scorpions would infest the sniffer’s brain. Scorpions. In the brain. Meanwhile in Africa, basil protected against scorpions.

Editorial note: Basil does not produce scorpions. (Priestess response: Well, that’s a relief!)

This glorious herb has been cultivated for somewhere between 4,000-5,000 years, give or take whose history you decide to follow. It originated on the hills of India, growing wild in the lush heat, and made its way everywhere warm (or could go to seed and have the seeds protected during the winter), relatively quickly, especially for a plant that can’t travel on its own. America as a continent is a late-comer to the basil game, since basil did not reach these shores until the 1600s, when it was brought over with the pilgrims who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Even with 400 years of basil at our fingertips, we still primarily associate this herb with Mediterranean and/or Thai food.

Sweet basil delivers a flavor package that is at once soft, round, pungent, bitter, and delicate. It is also unforgiving in how it should be used; basil ought to be used fresh, and either raw (pesto, salads) or added at the end of the cooking time (pasta, Thai stir fries, everything else it’s cooked with) lest the heat destroy the volatile aromatics that give basil its distinctive flavor. Drying it…honestly, I’ve yet to see the point of dried basil, because to me it tastes like slightly licorice-y paper. And it doesn’t store well. If you wrap plucked leaves in damp (but not wet!) paper towels and put them somewhere cool (but not cold!), you may be able to hang on to the leaves for two days before they reduce themselves to slime. Maybe. Your best bet is to grow a pot on your windowsill. This way fresh basil is always at hand, and you can ward off Satan in the process.

Nutritionally, sweet basil offers a lot to the consumer. Basil is packed with Vitamin K, which is instrumental in protein modification and blood clotting. (Side note: if you are on blood thinners, maybe keep an eye on basil consumption.) Its essential oils have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties, which help alleviate symptoms of arthritis and a sour gut. Even John Gerard, an herbalist writing in the 16th century, recognized basil’s ability to calm digestive upset. And it’s a great source of manganese and Vitamin A, which help promote cardiovascular health. As long as you don’t overheat the basil and destroy the essential oils that provide these benefits. See how it all goes together?

Perhaps the complex flavor profile and myriad health benefits contributed to the complicated social history that surrounds this herb. All I know is, when I smell it I get hungry. I’m usually happier having eaten something that’s basilicious, and I’ve never encountered even one scorpion while doing so.

Terri on Saffron

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Picture if you will, a field full of crocus…es. Crocii? Crocus flowers.

Now, imagine each one of those flowers has three red stamens, and they are fragrant and pungent and delicious.

Imagine if you don’t harvest those stamens the day the crocus blooms, they will wither and die. And because they stamens are so delicate, they have to be harvested by hand or they could be destroyed.

Imagine it takes 225,000 stamens—or 75,000 flowers—to create one pound of product.

You have just imagined what it takes to harvest saffron, and perhaps have come to a right understanding as to why it costs about $10,000 a pound. The bad news is…seriously, it costs $10,000 a pound. The good news is, a little goes a long way.

Saffron was first cultivated in Iran, or Crete, or possibly, India, or Greece in hummina-hummina BCE; the first depiction of saffron in use in Greece is in Bronze Age work, which dates from 3300-1200 BCE. Saffron was reportedly used by Cleopatra in her bathwater, both for its color (she liked the golden sheen) and for its smell (I love the smell of a $1200 bath in the morning). She would use a quarter cup of it. In the bath. Then again, she was Queen of Egypt.

Most of the time, saffron measurements in recipes are stated in things like “a pinch”, or “three or four threads”, or “1/8 teaspoon”, which still makes anything with saffron slightly more spendy than most other dishes, but decidedly less than $1200. According to aficionados, there’s nothing like it in the world, so the pleasure of saffron is worth the luxe expense. It has been described as many things—musky, herbal, sweet, heady—which culminate in something mysterious and difficult to describe but uniquely glorious. That gloried image is only helped by the way it imparts a golden color to recipes fortunate enough to benefit from the saffron pinch. From dinners to desserts, saffron brings a pungent, heady scent that carries the flavor through your nose, across your palate, and straight to your heart.

That’s not all it does, though. Crocin, one of the primary compounds in saffron, has powerful antioxidant properties which boosts overall cellular health and can help maintain metabolism. Research also indicates that saffron (or saffron extract) taken orally for 6-12 weeks can be an effective antidepressant, perhaps as effective as low-dose prescription drugs. Other compounds have been used to treat PMS and improve memory and learning ability. Not to be outdone by its stamens, a compound in the petal of the actual crocus is being studied for its effectiveness in treating cancer. It’s a plant that keeps on giving.

So yes, it’s expensive. But it is also an unparalleled gift from the earth with benefits that go far beyond the flavor it brings to the table. Try it, and see how you like it. All it takes is a pinch!

Terri on Ancho Chiles! Hot! Hot! Hot!

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Hey, buddy, I ancho chili powder. I ain’t nobody’s chili powder.

Because I cayenne-‘t help myself I had to start with a pun and for that, I apologize. I have a problem. I need jalapeño.

Ancho chili powder is the love child of poblano peppers and time. That’s it. Most of us are familiar with poblano peppers, which are named to honor their origination in the Mexican state of Puebla. In their unripened state poblanos are spade-shaped, about the size of a palm, and a deep forest green. They have a little bit of heat (but not a whole lot; on average, a jalapeño is about five times hotter), and are relleno great for stuffing. When poblanos ripen they turn dark red, almost black, and that is when poblanos are harvested for drying. By means of metamorphosis, poblanos turn into ancho peppers.

Anchos—the name simply means “wide”—undergo a change in character and flavor profile as they wizen. The drying process helps intensify the heat of the pepper, hence the dried product, both in whole dried form and pulverized into powder, is spicier than the pepper itself. Drying also teases out richer flavors in the pepper, contributing to anchos being described as sweetly smoky (but they are not smoked, and that’s important to note in pepper prep), with a hint of raisin. The ancho’s complex flavor provides a great base for things like sauces—I’m looking at you, mole—and enchiladas. And, happily, it’s a phenomenal pairing with chocolate, so if you’re looking for a little sweet heat it’s your go-to choice.

Because ancho powder is just ground-up pepper, it carries the same nutritional payload as a pepper. Capsaicin, the compound that gives a pepper its heat, has been shown to inhibit internal inflammation, aiding in the relief of things like arthritis. Spicy peppers can also help control cholesterol and act as an antioxidant, lowering risk of things like strokes and heart attacks. And the vitamin A and beta carotene in peppers shores up the ol’ immune system, the iron in the pepper helps keep red blood cells healthy, and there’s always a little boost of fiber (a little? One measly tablespoon of ancho powder has 4 grams of fiber, or 15% of the recommended daily allowance) to keep…other things…moving along.

Don’t confuse ancho chili powder with a standard chili powder, which can be a combination of available chili powders on hand (much like canned pumpkin can be any kind of bright orange squash, but I digress). If you want to bring a little spicy-sweet raisiny-ish powdered love to your dinner table, make sure it says “ancho”. Rub it on steaks. Roast some carrots in it. Turkey chili? Yes, please! But most of all, enjoy it!

Terri on (YUM!) Vanilla

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I like Vanilla. I like Terri’s writing. Together? It’s all good!

Vanilla. According to the International Ice Cream Organization (a dream company to work for, if ever I heard of one), the number one ice cream is vanilla, which garnered 29% of the fave-vote. Surprisingly, chocolate could not touch vanilla’s popularity, with only 8.9% of those questioned claiming it as favorite. Honorable mention goes to butter pecan and strawberry, tied at 5.3% favoritality.

Vanilla is an orchid. And like most orchids, it’s persnickety about its bloom.

Native to Mesoamerica, the vanilla plant blooms but one day a year and on that day, bees—specifically, the Melipona bee—and maybe some hummingbirds pollinate the plant and cause the big green beans to start growing off the flower, almost immediately. If the flowers are not pollinated on that one day they wither and die, with nothing but their graceful fragrance left behind. Once European conquistadors were done…conquistadoring, they brought the vanilla plant back to Europe. From the late 1500s on it grew in popularity throughout the cultured gardens of Europe. Only the conquistadors forgot to bring the appropriate bees and hummingbirds. The plants flowered but did not pollinate until 1841, when 12-year-old Edmond Albius, a plantation slave on Réunion Island, discovered how to hand-pollinate vanilla by doing the work himself and physically mating the plant’s male and female parts.

To this day, most vanilla is painstakingly, carefully pollinated by hand. Vanilla beans are most hearty when left to mature on the vine, and can take up to nine months to reach full maturity. Then they are boiled and sweated and dried and cured; it takes close to a year for a bean crop to be ready to use. And that’s not even taking Cyclone Enawo into account.

Enawo tore through Madagascar’s vanilla crops in 2017, causing vanilla prices to soar to nearly six times their normal prices and sparked a crime wave in Madagascar as cases of cured vanilla beans were hijacked. Real vanilla is second only to saffron in cost (yes, even after Enawo), which will be discussed in a later post. So if it is so expensive, how has it come to be used in roughly 18,000 commercial products, with a bottle in almost every home pantry?

Most—99%, some sources say—of the products we use that have vanilla in them are actually made using synthetic vanilla. The main flavor compound of vanilla, vanillin, or 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde, is quite easy to replicate in a lab and when heated, the taste differences between real and synthetic vanilla are nearly indistinguishable. Ice cream makers? That’s a different story since there’s a marked difference in taste if the synthetic stays cold. They’ve borne the brunt of Enawo too, with some creameries halting production on their vanillas until the prices return to normal.

For those with real vanilla—with beans in their hands—remember, those babies are packed with all sorts of goodies. Vanillin has been shown to help lower cholesterol, and the bean contains potassium; together, they boost heart health. There is an array of B-vitamins tucked into this bean, helping keep skin healthy and metabolism chugging along. Aromatherapy fans often use vanilla oil in a diffuser to help combat depression. But! Vanilla oil can cause rashes, so take care not to rub too much essential oil on your skin. And drop spent bean casings into sugar so the remaining vanilla essence can infuse the sugar with its goodness, to make a rich vanilla sugar you could eat on…anything. It would make a shoe taste better, but I digress.

Vanilla. Who knew? It’s a winking code word for something bland and basic, but vanilla’s not so vanilla, when you get the bigger picture.

Terri on Fennel Seed

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Here’s the Bartender’s reflections on fennel. We’re a bit behind because her computer decided to go on strike for several days… She’ll catch up. But in the meantime, mmmm, fennel seed!

Originating in the sunny Mediterranean, fennel seeds are now grown around the globe and find their way into everything from savory sausage to breath fresheners to fusion treats.

This herb—a member of the carrot family—grows from seed to bulb, and the plant can be used nearly in its entirety. Toast and grind the seeds for general cooking, saute or roast the bulb, and gather the pollen to make a delicately licorice-y topper on your favorite pasta, that you toss with the fennel fronds for added flavor.

Because of its licorice taste, fennel is often confused with anise, but they are not the same thing at all. Fennel, as stated, grows into a bulb. Anise seed grows into a bush that looks sort of like Queen Anne’s Lace. The only part of anise that is edible are the seeds, while fennel gives of its whole self. Anise is somewhat sweeter, so it lends itself more readily to sweets and cookies, while fennel fares better in heartier, more dinner-y food…though fennel has been known to find its way into the occasional cookie. And at last! Here’s the similarity you’ve all been waiting for: Fennel and anise do belong to the same family of plants, the Apiaceae, so they’re sort of…cousins. Identical cousins, I think you’ll find.

For those of you who don’t get that joke, make friends with Nick at Nite. Get back to me. I’ll wait.

While we enjoy fennel seed for its flavor, when we eat it we get the bonus of several health benefits. Fennel is naturally high in fiber—a tablespoon of fennel has about 2.3 grams of fiber in it, which is between 6-9% of daily recommended fiber, depending on your caloric needs—and can help keep your digestion on track. You can steep seeds in hot water to make tea which can, again, help with digestion and other digestive issues (bloating, etc). Fennel is loaded with a wide range of minerals, so it adds to our overall health and wellness, assisting in immune system health, maintaining eyesight, and helps promote good bone and cardiovascular health. And so on. Plus! Barring an allergy, there are no ill effects associated with fennel consumption, and if you eat some, your breath with smell freshy-fresh.

It may not be the most common herb in our pantries. But things can change, and there are about a hundred different reasons why more fennel = a better way of life. What are you waiting for?

 

Terri on Spices: Black Pepper

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There are two spices that dominate the American tablescape; crisp white salt is, of course, the first thing we think of in shakers across the country. The second spice, the yang to salt’s yin, is the brisk, bracing flavor-punch of black pepper.

Black pepper has been woven into the fabric of our culture for roughly 4000 years. Mummies were buried with pepper in their nasal cavities to help keep the body preserved. Greeks used it as currency. It was used as an offering to the gods, and as a bartering tool to placate the barbarians at the gates of Rome. And we all pretty much agree that it tastes great. But what is it?

Take a good, long whiff of freshly-cracked black pepper. Sneezing aside, what did you notice? It’s kind of…what, spicy? Pungent? Did you ever happen to notice that it also smells slightly floral, or at least vegetal? That’s because our beloved spice is actually a fruit.

Peppercorns are the berries that grow on the flowering vine Piper negrum, which can grow to 30+ feet tall and produce a whole lot of berries. While it’s been determined that this plant is native to India, Piper negrum has grown well when introduced into non-indigenous, tropical regions from Viet Nam to Brazil. Black pepper comes about when the berries are harvested, cooked, and dried to fragrant, grind-ready, wrinkly perfection.

Inside these little wizened flavor nuggets lives a compound called piperine, which has shown promise in helping treat a host of ailments, from stomach upset to depression to the Big C. Phytonutrients in pepper’s outermost layer help boost metabolism, which in turn helps keep the body moving and grooving in summary order. And the oil from black pepper, with its condensed nutrient/piperine payload, also helps with arthritis pain, lowers cholesterol and helps regulate blood pressure.

So do yourselves a favor. Get thee to a pepper mill and a bottle of whole corns (the good juju dissipates more readily out of pre-ground pepper, of course) and give yourself a dose of tastes-good-and-good-for-you. You don’t have to stick it in your nose to reap the benefits of black pepper that even the ancients recognized, four millennia ago. Just enjoy the extra bite in your salad, and move on.

Terri Peterson

Terri on Cinnamon — Spices of Peace!

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I won’t be the only one who writes on Spices of Peace. I asked my friend Terri Peterson (hey, you remember the bartender from the Bartender and the Priestess don’t you, and the photographer from pics of days gone by) to write about each of the spices. She does cook. And she does research. and here she is!

Cinnamon:

Cinnamon. It can be a dose of powdered comfort delivered on a pillow of sugary-melty buttered toast. It can be the aromatic nosegay in savory dishes like banh mi or a lamb tagine. Or it can be the brain-melting heat in self-inflicted torture candies like Red-Hots or Atomic Fireballs. They’re all delicious (if perhaps a little bit sweat-inducing), but what is this fantastical spice that can go from sweet to heat without batting a proverbial eye?

It’s tree bark. When you break most foods down to their taxonomies they can sound kind of weird (for example, corn, at its most basic level, is part of the Poaceae family and Poaceae are, of course, grasses; enjoy your next plate of grass on the cob and you’re welcome) but you don’t even have to go that far down the “how did this evolve” hole for cinnamon. You just have to find the right tree and peel the outer layer off. Et voila!

Most cinnamon in the United States comes from the Cinnamomum cassia tree, which is found in Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand. Cinnamomum. Say it with me. Cinnamomum. Adorable. Was this tree named by a four-year-old? I digress. Purists will argue that true cinnamon comes from the Cinnamomum verum in Sri Lanka, once known as Ceylon. But, there are something like a dozen different trees that produce the spice, so it’s time to put the ordinal ranking of cinnamon aside and enjoy it for what it is—a savory-sweet dried quill, possibly pulverized into powder, that was scraped off a tree’s inner bark.

Cinnamon’s heat is not a man-made effect, either, spawned in some hellish test kitchen with a dream to make candy lovers cry. It’s all tree. Cinnamomum trees naturally produce an oily compound called cinnamaldehyde (even that sounds adorable!). Cinnemaldehyde can be measured on par with the milder hot peppers on the Scoville chart, which measures the fiery compound capsaicin, the culprit in peppery heat. In the interests of comparison remember, a jalapeno is a milder hot pepper on the Scoville chart. When the oil is extracted and concentrated, the heat rises. When the bark is dried and ground to powder, and then further tempered by other ingredients, the spicy heat is less noticeable. But it’s there.

So what do we do with this magnificent reddish-brown sneaky heat flavored tree dust? Why, bake it into cookies or saute it into Greek meatballs with a spicy tomato sauce, or sprinkle it on your cappuccino, of course. Wars were fought over cinnamon, lands captured, ransoms demanded. At one point in history cinnamon was valued at fifteen times its weight in silver. With a spice this valued, versatile, and delicious, we owe it to our forebears to enjoy cinnamon with the gusto of a spice pirate on holiday.