The recipes build on bringing your spices alive – whether that's creating blends to easily enhance your food when short of time on a weekday evening, or in infusing and blooming spices to bring out the very best of these treasured ingredients. Mark Diacono… has such a friendly, self-deprecating and comfortable voice you want to follow him into the kitchen.

Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your Mastering Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your

I love Mark’s note in his Introduction that “ the brilliance of spices [is that] they are – like music, painting and poetry – almost entirely unnecessary and yet utterly essential. I’ve come across references and recipes featuring achiote (aka annato), anise seeds (not the same thing as star anise), cinnamon berries, grains of paradise, kokum, tonka beans, and wattleseed before but never cooked with them. Not all recipes have photos, but many do and these are all taken by Mark; some show the finished dish in its cooking pot or pickle jar, the rest show food or drink served in homely crockery on pleasingly plain surfaces.In Spice: A Cook’s Companion he provides advice on how to source and blend spices well, and how to make the best of them in your kitchen. The reader will become familiar with the differences in flavour intensity and provenance and discover how, through the use of spice, we can applaud and appreciate cuisines from around the globe. Mark Diacono is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones

Last comes the Drinks chapter with recipes such as Melon and pineapple tepache (a Mexican fermented drink), Loomi tea (made with dried limes(, Ginger, mace and verbenna berry switchel (a sweet sour drink from the USA), Nutmeg syrup, Sol khadi (a spicy and sour Indian drink), Ginger beer, Spiced rum, Krupnik (a Polish spiced-honey vodka), White dalmation (a pepper-spiced cocktail), Ponche crema (a Venezuelan eggnog), Mulled cider, and Tascalate (a Mexican cold chocolate drink). Focusing on the familiars including cumin, turmeric, vanilla, pepper and cinnamon, Spice will also open the door to some lesser-known spices. For each spice Mark gives an introduction, a guide to using it, which spice blends it features in, and a list of ingredients that the spice has an affinity with. Caraway seeds are used in both the pastry and the tart filling, alongside mustard and fresh parsley, but it’s in the pastry that the spice really shines.With a few (such as harissa) there are specific instructions on how to make the recipe; for the rest Mark provides basic instructions and advice in the chapter introduction.