The Shocker’s Spice Rack
Boy, it’s some hot ones.
By Chris Alarie, Micah Wimmer, Emily Lever, Louis Keene, Willie Fitzgerald, Adithya Pugazhendi, Corbin Smith, Damon Agnos, Kristen Arnett
We know this much is true: Food is an essential part of human survival, and it’s barely even worth eating if it’s not properly seasoned. So by the transitive property, spices are paramount to human life. (Yes, without spices we would still have herbs and aromatics, but these can only go so far.) And yet, after literally thousands of years of spice trading and the colonization of most of humanity to secure European access to commodities which included spices, what was that all for—do you even know what each spice is for? Maybe you think you know, but do you really know?
Here is, according to the Shocker staff, what each spice is for.
Paprika — Paprika is the new salt and pepper. It is the M in K, F, M. (F is Smoked Paprika. K is Turmeric.)
Smoked Paprika — Distinct from the above, Smoked Paprika is basically what you think Cajun food tastes like. (I mean, that and thyme). Rich, smoky (no shit), earthy and sweet, it can complicate a dish in fun ways or make it taste like a campfire. Less is more.
Coriander — I put this in lentil soup, it’s good as shit. I got the recipe from Good Eats, it’s the King of Soups. Look up Good Eats + Lentil Soup for the best goddamn lentil soup WE HAVE on this godforsaken planet.
Sumac — Not your average spice. This purple powder, obtained by grinding up sumac berries, is not spicy or pungent or earthy but sour. Sumac, from the Assyrian word summaqa (“red” or “to shift towards redness, to turn red”), is a common and game-changing ingredient throughout the Middle East and South Asia, particularly on salads, meat or rice. It has a complex acidity, not like those basic (in both senses of the word) spices. It can also be used to dye cloth or even marble — marble! — a deep purple color. Its wood can fluoresce under ultraviolet radiation. Seriously! The queen of spices. We have decided to stan.
Caraway — Maligned by me and everyone with a functioning palate for its role in rye bread, Italian sausage, and other foods which are objectively better without it, caraway is more versatile than you might think. This pointy seed has redeeming qualities: in Tunisian cuisine, it lends its cool, herbal, anise-like flavor to vegetable dishes and chili pepper pastes.
Cayenne — Look, I get that some people may want a little extra heat in their food, but cayenne — anything more than a shake of the pepper jar — is just too much. What are you trying to prove? That you’re tougher or manlier or cooler than me? We already knew that. Don’t make me suffer by eating too spicy food in the process. Also, yes, I am white. Why do you ask?
Turmeric — I sprinkle it on my pizza, bake it into my cookies, toss it into whatever I’m sautéing. Hell, sometimes I just eat spoonfuls of it. Do I know what it is? No. Do I like how it tastes? Probably not. Do I have any sense of what I’m doing to my food by adding turmeric to everything? Hell no. So why do I do it? Plain and simple: I am a gourmand.
Saffron — The world’s most expensive food by weight. Anyone who uses this is a class enemy and ought to be gutted in communist revolution.
Salt — During the Roman Empire, soldiers were paid not in currency but in salt, which is the origin of the word “salary” and of the phrase “being worth one’s salt.” This is probably apocryphal but honestly who cares. In any case it speaks to the importance of salt, which before it became ubiquitous and forgettable was a commodity worth expending military force over. Flavored salts (Lawry’s, chili salt) are good too. Sometimes I get nervous that I’m oversalting my food and hastening my descent into hypertension which is what killed my grandfather but on the other hand he lived a full life and was active into his 80s and besides I don’t think, in this economy, I have a chance at living long enough that the health problems associated with old age will have a chance at killing me.
Cinnamon — According to Pliny the Elder, the Greeks believed that cinnamon came from birds’ nests, particularly the phoenix. In Pliny’s own time, the spice was an important good traded between East Africa and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, valuable enough that the right to sell it had to be purchased from the king of the Gebbanitae. In contemporary times, it is primarily used during the autumn to make everything taste like Starbucks.
Ginger — As a spice, it’s fine. A nice little addition to an otherwise bland dish. And who doesn’t love a nice crisp glass of ginger ale? Ale-8–1, Vernor’s, Reed’s — now that’s the good stuff. I mostly just mainline crystallized ginger though, like tons of it, over a pound a week. Why, you ask? Because I’m anxious all the time which just makes me nauseated as hell and ginger purportedly helps. Does it actually help? I don’t really know. I’ve been helplessly addicted to the stuff for literal years now and its benefits may be more psychological than physical at this point. I don’t have health insurance and buying ginger in bulk every week at the local Safeway is all I have to keep the nausea at bay. Sure, I could try to address the issues underlying my anxiety and stress and self-hatred, but really, who has the time for that?
Bay Leaves — Bay leaves can’t melt steel beams. #truth #looseleaves
Annato — The Western hemisphere’s answer to turmeric in that it has an earthy, complex flavor and lends everything an orangey hue (yellow and orange are both shades of red, fight me). Used correctly, it will make your attempts at Mexican food taste less like you doused them with the contents of a jar labeled “chili powder” that you bought at Safeway during the Bush administration and more like what you think of as Mexican food.
Sichuan peppercorn — I first had Sichuan peppercorn in a vat-sized dish of soup titled, appropriately, ‘Sichuanese Boiled Fish.’ Related to citrus (it’s not really a pepper), Sichuan peppercorn numbs your mouth and changes flavors like one of those weird berries that was a thing for insufferable people in 2011. Downside is there’s not a lot of uses for it; upside is it makes everything extra-spicy and water taste like lemons. Good team player, but has to be in the right situation.
Spice (synthetic marijuana) — Basically PCP, this stuff will fuck you up in the worst way and make you punch holes in walls. But at least it won’t make you fail a drug test.
Black pepper — Comes out of a fucking cracker thing. Turn it around, break the stones, release the oils onto your food… or… on another person or object of your deepest, darkest desire…
Nutmeg — C’mon, let’s get high!
Mustard Seed — The canary in a coal mine of spices. Plop it on some oil in a frying pan, and when that thing starts crackling you know it’s time to put the rest of the good stuff in. Mid-tier mouthfeel.
Pink Peppercorns — pure commodity, just a bullshit peppercorn, probably just black peppercorns that have been dyed pink somehow, I can’t believe we’re even discussing this, what are you going to ask me about next — Himalayan pink salt that comes in a grinder? Get out of here.
Himalayan Pink Salt that Comes in a Grinder — Oh shit, wait, nevermind, stop hitting me.
Spice 1 — Coolin’ on the corner with the cellular phone, you can tell that the East Bay was his home. More mail than the rest of the pushers, ’cause he’s got a tech nine in the bushes. And that’s how the shit was handled, first name Jack, last name Daniels.
“The Spice,” from Dune, the 1984 David Lynch film — Look, I’m a pretty big David Lynch fan, maybe a David Lynch stan, but Dune, his 1984 adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel is not great. In fact, it’s not even good. Spice, the pivotal object of the movie that sets everything in motion and inspires pretty much every action any character takes, is never really explained in any way and its function is always left pretty unclear. And not in like a cool MacGuffin, it doesn’t really matter that much if you just roll with the punches kind of way, but in more of a this movie doesn’t make any sense at all and seems to have no real plot despite being over two hours long sort of way. So this spice might be cool, it might be good, it may be awful, but here’s the thing — I don’t really know if it’s any or all or none of these things, and the movie isn’t good enough for me to care, either.
Variety — It’s the spice of life!
Spice Girls — I am not gonna cook and I don’t know the difference between a bay leaf and the Bay City Rollers, but I think there is room for the Spice Girls on this list. Probably the thing I like best about the Spice Girls is that they are a group of lady singers and I am a gay lady. That’s spicy enough for me. I will not rank the Spice Girls they are all equal. If you rank the Spice Girls you are a cop.
Zaatar — D’you remember the middle school assignment where you have to read the whole thing before following any of the directions, and then the last direction turns out to be “ignore everything on the list except the last line”? No? Hmm. Okay well here we are anyway, at the end of a list of irrelevant spices. Zaatar is the only spice that matters. Please ignore all the rest.
