Spice Up Your Life!

Cooking is a Love Language. Spices are, well, spicy IYKYK

I never thought I’d become the kind of person who slips pieces of dark chocolate into a bolognese sauce or considers tossing a bit of habanero onto her sunny-side-ups — and yet, here we are. My road to spice-infused cooking has been long and bumpy, and I’ve hated some of the experiments with all my burning gut, but I strongly suspect they’ve made me exactly the person I was meant to become.

I should probably start with a disclaimer: even though I’m a white woman, I come from a cultural background where spices and herbs were always part of the everyday table. We’ve grown and still grow our own chilli peppers, and my father was famously known for eating up to seven of them whole at any meal, as if they were mere pickles. But it wasn’t until I was twelve, when all the adults in the house were bedridden with a virus, that I first started cooking. The very first thing I ever made from start to finish was what I proudly called “sauce bolognese.” Of course, it was simply a tomato sauce with minced meat and vegetables, and I apologise to all Italians for that. Please, don’t come after me. I was a child — and I’ve since learned how to make the real thing (I lived in Italy for a while). But the magic of turning raw, sometimes unappealing ingredients into something rich, aromatic, and shareable was nothing short of a spiritual experience.

These days, my spice cabinet holds more than fifty ingredients — most of which see daily use. There are the ones I add to my coffee (I’m forever a pumpkin spice latte girl, and I could easily write a dissertation on why it’s more than just a seasonal cliché), the ones reserved for oats, and the blends that only appear alongside certain fish or vegetables. There’s the ancho paste I made from peppers I carried back from Mexico, and the dried rosemary I picked in a garden by the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. For me, local ingredients — especially herbs and spices light enough to fit into a carry-on — are the best kind of souvenirs. Have they ever sparked curious conversations with TSA agents about the suspicious powders in my bag? Absolutely. But I still practice what I preach. As someone with no real talent for painting or drawing, I think of cooking as my own creative palette — a way to mix, experiment, and express. Inventing new edible experiences has become one of my truest love languages.

There’s a small but mighty stall in the now-famous, perpetually crowded Borough Market in London that I love above all others. It’s called Spice Mountain, and it’s packed to the brim with boxes, jars, sachets, and bottles of flavours from every corner of the world. It’s safe to say it’s one of my happy places. And it feels only fitting that I’m writing this as I stand here, searching for Aleppo pepper, Malaysian rendang curry, and harissa. I can already feel the magic in the air — or maybe that’s just the nutmeg.