Feasting on Padma Lakshmi's new cookbook

It's deliciously coincidental that I'm writing about Padma Lakshmi's The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs days after she sent an Instagram's Scoville score soaring with a chilli-hot picture of herself in her bathroom dressed only in black lingerie.

Padma Lakshmi, 46, has been variously famous for being internationally acclaimed glamour photographer Helmut Newton's favourite model; for living in with, marrying and finally divorcing Salman Rushdie, all in just six paparazzi-hounded years; for giving birth to and nurturing the daughter she had with venture capitalist (and Michael Dell's brother) Adam Dell; and for becoming the international face of the chronic illness endometriosis.

Her abiding passion, though, has been food - she was the one who educated me about Nordic food at a time when no one outside Copenhagen knew who Rene Redzepi was - and the first expression of it was the eminently readable cookbook, Easy Exotic (1999), which got the Best First Book Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Versailles, France.

With the book came opportunities to host two food shows - Padma's Passport on Food Network (USA) and two one-hour specials on South India and Spain on Planet Food - but it was in 2006 that she got her big break as host and judge of the American cable television reality cookery show, Top Chef - a job that, as she said to Time.com after the Emmys last month, sees her gaining weight over six weeks of shooting and then taking "12-15 weeks" to shed the excess baggage.

In the past ten years, Padma Lakshmi has won an Emmy and so has her show; rolled out her Easy Exotic line of rice, spices and kitchen accessories; and written another cookbook, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet (2007), besides, earlier this year, "a vivid memoir of food and family", Love, Loss and What We Ate, which has been described as "a tantalising blend of Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron's Heartburn."

The Encyclopedia of Spices & Herbs (published by Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint), I believe, will be, till her next big book, her most important contribution to demystifying our food universe.

It was in the Czech Republic, at its beer capital Èeské Budìjovice, this summer that I realised how spice-friendly the world had become.

We had gone to a restaurant that was famous for its Czech speciality, roasted duck with sauerkraut and steamed dumplings, and just as I was remarking sotto voce about how tasteless the dish was in the absence of any spice, the owner plonked a bottle each of Tabasco and Hungarian paprika paste on my table.

"That... very hot," he said, gesturing at the bottle of paprika paste. It was in Budapest a couple of days later that I got a taste of what he was saying.

Padma takes us around the world on a brilliantly illustrated spice trail, starting from Lexington Avenue, New York City, home to North America's first spice shop, Kalustyan, which opened in 1944 and is named after its Armenian founder, K Kalustyan, and has been owned by two Bangladesh cousins, Alam and Aziz Osmani, since 1988.

The book covers every spice known to the world (my only grouse is that the famous lazzat-e-tahm, the 25-spice mix that lends Awadhi dishes their unique flavours, is missing from the book) and almost each page is studded with a revelation.

I didn't know, for instance, that the bhoot jolokia had been dethroned from its pole position on the Scoville scale in 2013 by the Trinidad Scorpion, which, in turn, was ousted recently by the Carolina Reaper.

Or that wasabi and horseradish are not the same, though they are used interchangeably, the former being the rhizome of a perennial herb growing in cold mountain streams.

Or that Vietnam today is world's biggest producer of pepper. Or that vadouvan, the French-influenced, dried onion-based spice mix used for cooking in Pondicherry, has become trendy among chefs in the US.

My favourite, though, was the entry on ras al-hanout, the ubiquitous Moroccan spice blend, which I learnt comes laced, on demand, with aphrodisiacs (notably the Spanish fly) and even hashish.

And then there's the story of poppy seeds, every Bengali's favourite posto - the plants are also the source of opium, morphine and codeine, which comes from the latex, or sap, of the seedpods.

The British Raj, as is well known, promoted the cultivation of poppy plants in India to dump opium into China. Bengal's peasants growing these poppy plants then discovered the seeds and created the state's favourite vegetarian dish - aloo-posto.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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