A Whisper of Cardamom

Eighty recipes and stories exploring the cultural history, symbolism and flavours of spice and how they can be used in sweet cooking and baking, by the award-winning author of Fire Islands and The Nutmeg Trail.

This is a love story between sugar and spice.
 
Spice is often the party girl, the loud, bold, exuberant element in the mix. There is also another art, more subtle yet equally seductive. Married with sugar, spice can provide a delicate fragrance, hard to put your finger on but one that gives backbone to a dish. It can balance tartness and bring sweetness so you can tone down the sugar. Flavours can be enhanced by a thoughtful addition from the spice cupboard, making chocolate more chocolatey and fruit taste more of itself. Added not in shouts, but in whispers, an intrigue of spice deepens allure. In this book, we explore how to unlock flavours, and how to marry them to make much more than the sum of their parts.
 
Floral and fruity spices pair well with rich fats. Warming spices like ginger and clove play off treacly brown sugar. Anise sweetens, lemony coriander seed brightens and herbaceous notes pick out complexity in chocolate. A suspicion of nutmeg cuts the sweet creaminess of custard for a more rounded tart, and a whisper of cardamom makes inky poached plums jaunty and interesting.
 
Chapters are divided by taste to guide you towards a dessert or bake that is bright and zippy, floral and fragrant, or dark and spicy. Recipes include spice switches so you can be creative and playful with your combinations. For those with an eye to expanding their repertoire, there are helpful spice-matching features and flavour wheels to inspire. A whole world of inviting new flavours awaits.

About the Author

Eleanor Ford is a food writer and a cook who uses food as a means to explore culture and understand the world. A 'culinary detective', as Yotam Ottolenghi describes her. She is the winner of numerous awards, including an Edward Stanford Travel Writing award and three Guild of Food Writers awards, the most recent of which she won for her third book, The Nutmeg Trail. Alongside writing about food, Eleanor gives talks about it across the globe including regular lectures on spice for The Smithsonian. She lives in London. @eleanorfordfood

'Eleanor Ford's passion shines through her beautiful and picturesque writing.' Guild of Food Writers Awards