Spices

I like to celebrate the fact that we are in a privileged place and time where we can cook virtually any world cuisine we want and fix a wonderful variety of dishes at home. I'm realizing belatedly that one drawback to all this diversity is that some of the staples used in cooking -- particularly herbs and spices -- are not as fresh as they would be if we stuck to one or another cuisine.

In Mexico or Morocco or India, the home cook would constantly use the same spices and these would be used up and replaced often so that they generally would be fresh. That's not the case for me, cooking different types of food just a couple of times a week for two people. With all the food habits I've changed in pursuit of good eating, there is one bad old habit I haven't shaken: I somehow think that I should be able to buy a spice or dried herb and keep it on my shelf for months, and often years, and that it remains a legitimate ingredient.

But it's not! Why should I think that I can be spared the expense of regularly replenishing oregano, for instance, that costs $6.95 in the little supermarket bottle or much less in bulk, when I routinely spend much more for fresh ingredients, including fresh herbs, for just one dish?

I went to make a tagine recipe calling for ras-el-hanout this week and ended up concocting an approximation of it from spices I had on hand. But I'm fairly certain none of them was fresher than 6 months and most of them were much older than that. So the dish lacked the zing you might expect from exotic spices -- big surprise!

I was proud of myself last year when I reorganized my spice shelf with generic bottles so I could buy spices in bulk. Two local stores at least, Broad Branch Market and the Silver Spring Co-op, sell spices in bulk and you can fill one of these little bottles with a $1.50 worth of spices. I vaguely thought of labeling the spices with a date and throwing them out after 6 months or a year, but I never followed through on that.

But I think I will make more of an effort. It would mean throwing out virtually all the ground spices and dried herbs I have. One approach would then be to buy ingredients only as needed, label them with the date, and replace them the next time I used them if they were no longer sufficiently fresh. I've ordered Herbs & Spices: The Cook's Reference by Jill Norman and will see what kind of suggestions she has about how fresh individual spices should be.