I am more of an herb guy than a spice guy. It comes back to a certain conservatism I have regarding food. The French are not big on spices; they use more herbs. I know the spices used in European cooking and use them in moderation. I am not going to serve a dish that is wildly nutmegged!" David Waltuck, Chanterelle NYC

Sufia began to grind turmeric with a giant stone shaped like a rolling pin. She passed the stone back and forth over the turmeric bulb, smashing it into a rough paste, and then went over it again and again until it turned smooth, darkening to the colour of crushed marigolds.

The red gravy was the starting point- sauce 'tomate' to her mom, the mother sauce. She grabbed a big yellow onion, two ribs of celery, a fat carrot, and a handful of parsley, the 'quattro evangelistas,' the "four saints," of Italian cooking.
She diced the onion, celery, and carrot first, then cut a sweet red pepper and parsley even finer, like grains of wet sand, running the knife through them again and again. She picked off five cloves of garlic, smashed, peeled, and gave them a rough dice, so that they'd flavor the sauce but not overwhelm it.
Three big glugs of olive oil went into the heated pot, followed by the 'evangelistas,' salt and pepper, and only then by the garlic, so it wouldn't burn. She folded in a dollop of tomato paste. While they simmered, she stripped a handful of dried herbs from the collection she kept hanging- rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano- then rubbed her hands together over the pot and watched the flecks drift down like tiny green snowflakes.

Spices are like colors: if you mix them all together you get a taste that is akin to the colors black, dark brown, or grey. But if you mix spices judiciously and sparingly—as you would mix yellow and blue to make green—you get a wholly unexpected and beautiful flavor.

As he talked, Pepino roughly diced a concasse into a stainless steel bowl, deftly peeling and deseeding three small, vine-ripened tomatoes in a blink of an eye, leaving them to marinate in extra-virgin olive oil with some brunoised carrot, parsley, and garlic. He heated butter and oil in a pan and let it come up to a foam while he quickly rinsed a dozen shrimp. He dropped the vegetables into the pan and let them cook down with a beaker of white wine while he delicately deveined the backs and bellies of the shrimp, leaving the heads undisturbed. He set a second pan on low heat, poured a light coating of olive oil and rubbed the pan with a large clove of garlic; he browned four large, bias-cut slices from a baguette and left them to gently brown in the oil. He added a whisper of salt to his sauce, a generous grind of black pepper, saffron, a pinch of cayenne, and a dash of brown sugar. He laid the shrimp into the sauce, turned them and let them finish, then quickly pulled them out to a side plate at the precisely pink moment of doneness. He mounted his improvised beurre blanc with a knob of butter, plated the fried bread, laid on the shrimp and fragrant sauce, which he left unsieved and rustic, and sprinkled chopped scallions and parsley over everything.
Angelina poured two glasses from the remainder of the wine he'd used in the sauce, an acidic, wonderfully dry 'Gavi di Gavi' from Piedmont, and they touched glasses before diving in. The shrimp were fresh and perfectly cooked. They ate them shells and all, sucked the sweet meat of the heads with relish, then wiped every last drop of the sauce from their plates with the crostini, which were beautifully crisp on the outside and moist and lacy on the inside.

Ounce for ounce, herbs and spices have more antioxidants than any other food group.