There are cookbooks you use, and then there are cookbooks that make you want to clear off the kitchen table, open every jar in the spice cupboard, and start cooking immediately. Spiced: Recipes Celebrating Spices from Around the World by Priya Mani belongs in the second category.
At its heart, Spiced is a celebration of the extraordinary things spices can do. Mani presents fifty economically important spices, arranged by botanical family, but this is much more than a reference book. With more than 330 recipes, essays, cooking techniques, buying advice, and cultural histories, it becomes an invitation to rethink the way we season food.
The book’s most important lesson is its most delicious: spice does not simply mean “hot.” Mani explores aroma, sweetness, bitterness, acidity, savoriness, fragrance, and texture, showing how a carefully chosen spice can completely redirect a dish. Harold McGee’s foreword adds a fascinating scientific perspective, explaining spices as plants’ natural chemical defenses—and the delicious irony that humans have turned those defenses into culinary pleasures.
What makes Spiced particularly appealing to a curious home cook is the attention to technique. Mani explains why blooming whole spices in hot fat releases flavor, why freshly grinding spices matters, how spices can be infused into vinegar or alcohol, and how pastes can be built from fresh and dried aromatics. Even something as simple as grinding becomes an opportunity to understand flavor.
And then there are the recipes. The Venezuelan hallacas, for example, transform annatto into both flavor and brilliant color, wrapping a richly seasoned filling of pork, chicken, olives, raisins, capers, and spices in corn dough and banana leaves. The Trinidadian pelau similarly demonstrates how spice, caramelization, meat, rice, and black-eyed peas can come together in one deeply satisfying dish. These recipes feel like meals with stories attached. Now that Halloween is behind us, you’ll be wondering what to do with all that pumpkin. Try Priya’s Pumpkin Stew in our Recipe section…it’ll quickly become an annual favourite!
I also love that Spiced encourages cooks to venture beyond the familiar supermarket rack. Alongside cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, and cardamom are grains of Selim, mastic, perilla, prickly ash, galangal, grains of paradise, and other less familiar ingredients. Mani offers guidance on what to look for, what different spices are called, and where to find them, making culinary exploration feel achievable rather than intimidating.
There is history here, too—sometimes joyful, sometimes uncomfortable. Mani considers spice trade, colonialism, migration, identity, language, and cultural ownership, reminding us that the ingredients we casually shake into a pot have travelled through centuries of human stories. Purchase the book at Spiced: Recipes Celebrating Spices from Around the World | Standard Edition | 9781837292653 – Phaidon or win a copy in our Giveaway section.
Beautifully ambitious yet wonderfully practical, Spiced is part cookbook, part field guide, part cultural history, and entirely an invitation to taste more attentively. For anyone who believes the best way to travel is sometimes through the kitchen, this is a particularly enticing journey. Just be warned: after reading it, your spice drawer may never be the same again.
Contents and images used with permission from Spiced: Recipes Celebrating Spices from Around the World © 2026 by Priya Mani. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved. Spiced: Recipes Celebrating Spices from Around the World | Standard Edition | 9781837292653 – Phaidon