“Spices of the World” is the latest in the IWFS series of monographs. It gives a specialist’s insight into this tasty topic for those who love to cook. Being pocket-sized, 74 pages, the monograph can be easily stored, close to hand, in the kitchen ready to refer to when looking for that missing ingredient to give added depth of flavour to a dish.

Spices expert, and author, Jill Norman provides the reader with an A-Z of some 42 spices — both the popular and those less well known. She recommends uses for them such as sprinkling AKUDJURA on salads or steamed vegetables, or using GRAINS OF PARADISE, as an alternative to pepper, to add complexity to dishes.

In addition there are useful notes on when to add the spice to a dish, depending on whether flavour or aroma is more important. The next chapter provides a summary of popular spice mixtures and their key ingredients, so the reader can be creative and blend their own mixture of CHINESE FIVE-SPICE POWDER, RAS AL HANOUT, ZA’ATAR and more.

It also touches briefly on the history of spices, their use in medicine, embalming, cosmetics, and some more unusual uses such as paying the rent! Today it is mainly for their flavour and aromatic qualities that they are sought after.

The book finishes with useful suggestions about wines which work well with spicy dishes. A list of online spice merchants (for stocking up from home), will help readers with a copy of Spices of the World to cook up some delicious dishes.

Jill Norman

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