"Mark Diacono… has such a friendly, self-deprecating and comfortable voice you want to follow him into the kitchen." - Diana Henry’s Autumn 2022 Best Cookbooks, The Telegraph
Spice is a vibrant exploration of flavour, fragrance and heat that majors on the kitchen, with a celebration of over 50 spices that will fill your kitchen with a wealth of heady aromas and tastes.
Packed with ideas for enjoying and using spices, Spice is much more than your average recipe book. Mark Diacono shares the techniques at the heart of sourcing, blending and using spices well, enabling you to make delicious food that is as rewarding in the process as it is in the end result. Focusing on the familiars including cumin, turmeric, vanilla, pepper and cinnamon, Spice will also open the door to some lesser-known spices such as grains of paradise, asafoetida, tonka beans and passion berries.
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. 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.
Beginning with a guide to 50 of Mark’s much-loved spices and blends, the book then offers over 100 innovative recipes that make the most of your new spice knowledge. With additions throughout from chefs and food writers of whom spices are an integral part of their cooking identity, including José Pizarro, Honey and Co, Maunika Gowardhan and Yuki Gomi, Spice is sure to inspire and uplift.
About the Author :
Mark Diacono is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food. He has written a number of award-winning books, including A Year at Otter Farm and A Taste of the Unexpected (which both won Food Book of the Year for André Simon and the Guild of Food Writers, respectively), Sour (which was Food Book of the Year 2019 in The Sunday Times and Daily Mail, and nominated for a James Beard Award in the US), Herb and Spice. Known for growing everything from Szechuan pepper to pecans to Asian pears, Mark's refreshing approach to growing and eating has done much to inspire a new generation to grow some of what they eat. He was involved with River Cottage, appearing in the TV series, running courses and events at River Cottage HQ, and he has written four River Cottage books. Mark has a monthly column in The Sunday Times, and writes regularly for a range of publications including The Telegraph, Delicious and Country Life; his features have appeared in The Observer, Guardian, National Geographic, and others. He also speaks and demos at food festivals around the UK and writes for an engaged and growing audience on his Substack: ‘Mark Diacono’s Imperfect Umbrella’.
Review :
Less of a cookbook than an encyclopedia in the universe of spices, Spice deepens even the most versed cooks and chefs on the intricacies of flavors from all over the world.
As voices in your head go there are few more chatty and compelling than Mark Diacono’s [...] with a spice-grower's enthusiasm for liberally stirring aromatic, zingy or warming bark, berries and seeds through both everyday dishes and some very special indulgences, he eggs us on to uplift our cooking.
A book to cook from as the nights draw in, to fill your kitchen with the warm scent of spice.
