Salt, Pepper, Season, Spice: All the Flavors of the World

With that introduction, readers of Salt, Pepper, Season, Spice: All the Flavors of the World embark on a culinary, cultural, and historical exploration of some of the most common kitchen pantry ingredients. Salt, pepper, chili pepper, mustard, ginger, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, are well known flavouring agents while chocolate, coffee, and tea, are common beverages. The book begins with salt, a common and inexpensive staple, although once a rare and expensive item. The word “salary” comes from salarium, the necessary salt ration paid to Roman soldiers, a tribute to its cost and its necessity. Salt takes many forms, from the familiar white crystals found in shakers and paper packets to pink and black salts with unique smells and flavours. Harvesting salt is work, whether mined underground in rock-like form or through extraction from salt water. Although the book doesn’t mention the fact, the expression “going back to the salt mines” is a reminder that, in the past, it was arduous work, often undertaken by prisoners or slaves. While most people associate salt with cooking and food preservation, it’s also a necessary ingredient in a variety of household cleaners and pharmaceutical products. And those of us who live in cold climates know that salt keeps roads and sidewalks free of ice.

Black pepper is white salt’s frequent table partner. It “first showed up in Europe in the 15th century” (p. 8) although it had been a common spice in Asia for thousands for years. If salt was precious, pepper was even more so and was also a form of monetary currency. Getting the spice from Asia to Europe created the spice trade. The 20th century witnessed the “space race”, but the “spice race” of the 16th and 17th centuries led European adventurers to go where none had travelled before, including North and South America. Although black pepper is the form most people know best, pepper, like salt, comes in other colours, including green, red, and white, depending on the pepper berry’s degree of ripeness. Ever wonder why pepper makes you sneeze? “Blame it on piperine, a compound in the pepper plant that cases a tingly nose in anyone who gets too close. For the pepper plant, it’s a defense mechanism that helps keep harmful fungi away.” (p. 13)

If piperine makes you sneeze, capsaicin can burn your mouth and make your eyes water. If you handle a chili pepper without gloves, your fingers will feel it. Unlike black pepper, which is the product of a vining plant, chili peppers belong to the same botanical family as tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, and bell peppers Capsaicin is found in the seeds of chili pepper pods, and “the more capsaicin there is in the seeds, the hotter the pepper.” (p. 15) As a self-confessed “chili head”, I love the heat and flavour of chili peppers, whether the mild ones such as paprika and ancho peppers, medium hots like the cayenne (the pepper used in Tabasco™ sauce) and measured amounts of the hot peppers like the bird pepper (peri peri), all of which are mentioned in the author’s list of pepper varieties. Those who really crave fire on the palate go for super-hots like the habanero or the Naga, billed as one of hottest peppers on the planet. (p. 15) Surprisingly, in the information on the relative heat of peppers, the authors did not mention the Scoville scale which rates the degree of pungency and capsaicin (and thus, the heat) of peppers. A bell pepper has a rating of “0” Scoville units while the Naga apparently rates 1 million Scoville units.

Still craving heat? There’s mustard, a cousin of the cabbage, turnip and radish plants. Although mustard greens have been eaten for a long time and are still a popular side dish in the southern United States, its use as a condiment “first appeared when some curious person decided to mix ground mustard seed with unfermented grape juice” (p. 16) The English accompany meats with their hot mustard (think of Keen’s™), and the French town of Dijon is famous for its mustard, also a hot one. When mustard seeds are ground and mixed with water, a chemical reaction takes place, the result being allyl isothiocyanate. When its hits the taste buds, it’s pungent to the nose and throat. But, not all mustards are hot, and some have interesting flavour add-ins, including honey, seaweed and, in Italian mustard, candied fruit. As for the innocuous yellow spread for hot dogs and burgers, sugar or caramel makes it sweet instead of hot.

While pepper and mustard are typically used in savoury dishes, ginger – which can be either sweet or hot – has a variety of culinary uses. Its source – Jamaica, Africa, Australia, India - determines its pungency, its heat/spice level, and, as a result, the foods in which it is used. Ground or candied, ginger is essential to cookies like gingerbread or baked goods such as scones; marinated in rice vinegar, it is “a key ingredient in Japanese cuisine” (p. 21), and powdered ground ginger adds a nice kick and interesting flavour to many dishes, especially in Asian cuisine.

This isn’t mentioned in the book, but, if your mouth is on fire from too much pepper, mustard, or ginger, a spoonful of sugar helps to quench the burn. But sugar is used for much more than as an oral fire extinguisher. Many people have a sweet tooth and love the stuff. Although there are sweeteners made in a lab, sugar is a natural product found in fruit, the syrup of maple trees, the juice of agave plants, and in the date palm. However, the crystalline product used for baking, cooking and sweetening beverages comes from one of two plants: the sugar beet (which grows in temperate climates) and the sugarcane (growing only in hot, humid climates). (p. 22) Granulated sugar can be white (from sugar beets) or brown (from sugar cane). Both white and brown sugars can be further processed, and syrups from corn, agave and maple are popular products, and the byproduct of refined sugar, molasses, is necessary for both the colour and taste of some baked goods (think gingerbread cookies). “Sugaring off” is a springtime Canadian tradition in places where sugar maples grow. The sap of the maple tree is harvested, boiled down, and turned into a variety of products, including the iconic topping for pancakes, waffles and other breakfast foods.

One of the oldest known spices, cinnamon has an irresistible smell that is the quintessential ingredient to such sweet breads, cakes and cookies. Cinnamon is the bark of one of two types of cinnamon trees which have slightly different flavour palates. Cinnamon can be ground, or its essential flavour extracted, and, while most people think of it as a culinary spice, it is also used to flavour products such as toothpaste and as a scent note in perfume.

Spices can be costly, and, of late, vanilla has become a very precious product as climate changes in heat and weather patterns have affected the areas in which vanilla plants grow. Vanilla is a vine, and the pod of the vine produces a vanilla bean. Central America, the source of much vanilla, lacks the insects which pollinate vanilla flowers, and, as a result, pollination takes place through the work of human “bees” that “fertilize the flowers of the vanilla plant by pollinating the flower’s pistil by hand.” (p. 28) It’s the beginning of a costly and labour-intensive process which includes blanching the harvested pods in hot water, sweating the pods to blacken them, drying them in the sun, and then curing them during which time they ferment and develop their flavour. Various types of vanilla exist – Mexican, Madagascar, and Tahitian – as well as various forms: bean, powder, sugar, and extract. All have become very expensive in the last few years, but, if you want true vanilla flavour, as opposed to the chemically produced artificial product, you pay the price. When you have tasted ice cream made with quality vanilla, there’s nothing “vanilla” about the flavour.

Another Central American product is chocolate made from the pods of the cacao tree. Although most people think of cocoa as an edible product, in addition to using cocoa beans for a beverage, the Maya and the Aztecs “used cocoa butter as a balm to treat burns and chapped skin” (p. 30), and cocoa butter is still used in moisturizing products. Like vanilla production, chocolate making is a multi-step process resulting in dark, milk, or white chocolate. White chocolate, unlike dark and even milk chocolate, does not contain caffeine, and, unlike either white or milk chocolate, dark chocolate contains no milk. Whether as a powder (for beverages), molded into bars or fanciful shapes and flavoured with all kinds of add-ins, like nuts, dried fruit, coffee beans, or used in a dessert, few can resist the taste and texture of good chocolate.

The final two items explored in this book are both beverages: coffee and tea. Where does coffee come from? NOT from Starbucks™ or Tim’s™. Coffee comes from the coffee plan, which produces a fruit called a coffee cherry, and the seeds of the cherry contains two coffee beans. Coffee is produced in tropical climates, including Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Honduras, with some very top-notch coffees grown in Réunion Island (off Madagascar) and Blue Mountain in Jamaica. Many of us jump-start our day with the caffeine in our cup, and “it’s estimated that more than two billion cups of coffee are consumed every day.” (p. 34) Although the beverage is thought to have had its start in Yemen, Europeans started drinking it in the 17th century. The first coffee powder was invented by a New Zealander, and, in 1938, the Nestlé company refined it and started selling the instant coffee known as Nescafé. Like vanilla and chocolate, getting coffee from bean to cup takes many steps, starting with the hand-harvesting of the beans. While some of the remaining steps are mechanized, it takes time for beans to be dried, washed, sorted and roasted so that the green beans become brown or black. Coffee can be brewed by many methods, and four common ones are depicted along with a bit of information about the decaffeination process. Some consumers now wish to purchase “fair trade coffee”, and, for coffee to be labelled as such, several standards must be met.

Tea has been grown in both China and India for millennia and made its way to Europe about a century before coffee’s arrival. The tea bush is native to the East, growing in China, Southeast Asia or India. Tea bushes are kept rather small to make it easier to hand-pick the leaves. Tea quality depends on proper harvesting, which means selecting only buds and the first two or three leaves. Tea leaves start out green, but processing determines whether the product is black, green, oolong or white tea. Many people also enjoy herbal teas infused with spices, florals, or essential flavouring oils. Tea drinking is also steeped in tradition; the British enjoy afternoon tea, and, in Chinese and Japanese culture, the serving and consumption of tea “is an art form. In Japan, the tea ceremony is a sacred ritual that unfolds in a series of very precise steps, using special objects.” (p. 41)

As a serious “foodie” who has always been interested in the science of food, the history of cooking and the cultural significance of foodstuffs, I found this book to be truly engaging reading. There’s a history to the items which season and spice our meals, and, for many of us, the seasoning and/or spice necessary for the preparation of special foods are integral to our ethnic identity. Welcoming a visitor with salt and bread, participating in the Japanese tea ceremony and sugaring off the maple syrup are all examples of the cultural dimension of food. Salt, Pepper, Season, Spice also reminds its young readers that before any food gets to the grocery store shelf, it is grown somewhere and usually undergoes some processing for it to be used in the kitchen or in other contexts. Seasonings and spices enhance our meals because of their chemical composition and the chemical reactions which take place when they interact with other food ingredients or with our senses of taste, smell, and, sometimes, touch. Many seasonings and/or spices can be produced only in certain climates, and I would have liked to have seen a bit more information about the environmental challenges faced by growers of such products as vanilla, coffee, and chocolate.

Nevertheless, Salt, Pepper, Season, Spice is a book which provides good curricular connections with science and nutrition. The information is presented in easily accessible text with unfamiliar words presented in boldface and referenced in the book’s Glossary. Claire Anghinolfi’s illustrations are clearly rendered, colourful and incorporate clever details. For example, the pages depicting “a mustard for every taste” (p. 19) presents mustard bottles in shapes familiar to users of the product. English mustard is in Keen’s™ straight sided bottle, Dijon mustard is in the bottle familiar to users of Grey Poupon™, and yellow mustard is in the yellow plastic squeeze bottle used by a variety of condiment brands. Salt Pepper Season Spice: All the Flavors of the World samples all the flavors of the world and is a most worthwhile acquisition for middle school libraries, as well as a supplementary item for teachers of science and nutrition.