Spiced - by Priya Mani (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A modern guide to cooking with spices, featuring more than 300 globally inspired recipes designed for home cooks

Elevate your everyday cooking with this comprehensive, visually stunning celebration of spices from around the world. Spiced focuses on 50 key spices, offering a deep dive into each. Home cooks will find annatto from Central and South America, cardamom from India, grains of paradise from West Africa, nutmeg from the Banda Islands, and more, all accompanied by texts that cover the spice's history, origin, and impact on world cuisine.

Each entry includes a suite of recipes in which the spice plays a starring role, presenting a mix of traditional and modern dishes - from Risotto alla Milanese (saffron), Jollof rice (calabash nutmeg), Massaman curry (white cardamom), Chicken paprikash (chile), Touba coffee (Grains of Selim), Golden milk (turmeric) and Eggnog (nutmeg). The book also includes 20 recipes for spice blends, including garam masala, Chinese five-spice, baharat, and ras el hanout, which evoke the distinctive flavors of regions across the globe.

Part recipe collection, part culinary history, Spiced gives fascinating cultural context for its subject. Author and food historian Priya Mani provides deeply researched insights into the complex history and origins of spices, inviting home cooks to consider the evolution of flavors that have shaped today's culinary landscape, and to expand their palates by adding new spices to their pantry.

Together with a foreword on the science of spices by Harold McGee, there are historical essays sprinkled through the book written by Andrew Dalby, Dr. Anna Spudich and Ken Albala, as well as personal essays from a roster of chefs and food writers, including Petty Elliot, Susan Jung, Virgilio Martínez, Kamal Mouzawak, Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir and Ozoz Sokoh.

Beautifully photographed and thoughtfully designed, Spiced is a kitchen shelf essential for contemporary home cooks.

Review Quotes

'Awesome, thrilling, inspiring!' - Claudia Roden, food writer'Priya Mani's Spiced is as rich and tantalising as the subject she tackles. Packed with factual information, topical essays from experts, recipes from around the world and beautiful photographs, this book deserves to become a kitchen staple and a first point of reference for the spice-curious.' - Dr Polly Russell, food historian and curator

'Priya Mani's practical hands-on knowledge from childhood, her visual and sensory understanding of how spices look, feel and cook through the beautiful images that accompany the recipes and explanatory text, make this the only spice book you'll ever need. Sophisticated, illuminating - makes absolute sense of why chilli is now synonymous with spice, and why the other forty-nine seeds, roots, rhizomes, bark, leaves and petals have supplied the flavours and fragrances that have brought us joy ever since someone discovered a pestle and mortar. Prickly ash, anyone? You'd be surprised. Gorgeous, delicious, unmissable.' - Elisabeth Luard, food writer and broadcaster

About the Author

Priya Mani is a food-historian, award-winning writer, and designer leading research-driven projects on ingredients, flavor, and material culture. She founded Appetite Studio, based in Copenhagen, and is the author of, and contributor to, several food books articles for the BBC, and journals, including Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). In 2022 she won the prestigious Guild of Food Writers Award (2022) and the International Association for Culinary Professionals (IACP) award. She is a trustee of the Oxford Food Symposium, and a director at the British Guild of Food Writer s, leading the committee on Diversity.