Spice

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.

Author Biography

Mark Diacono is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food. His A Year at Otter Farm and A Taste of the Unexpected both won Food Book of the Year, for André Simon and the Guild of Food Writers, respectively. His book Sour was Food Book of the Year 2019 in The Sunday Times and Daily Mail, and nominated for a James Beard Award in the US. 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 also writes regularly for a range of publications including The Telegraph and Country Life, and his features have appeared in The Observer, Guardian, National Geographic, and others.