Priya Mani: ‘A spice box is absolutely a portable homeland’

You grew up in India and now live and work in Copenhagen. How has that distance — seeing Indian food from the outside — changed the way you understand it?

Distance stirs a deep longing, yet it also opens up space to see things with fresh eyes. When I'm back in India, I'm surrounded by the sheer intensity of food — traditional cooking in our family homes, the extraordinary range of restaurant fare. The funny thing is, no one actually wants me to cook; everyone insists on feeding me. Each household has its own fiercely held traditions about what's right, so I gladly become the observer and taster.

My approach is unhurried. After a memorable meal, I love returning home to unravel what made a dish sing — why a certain technique or blend worked so well. Copenhagen gives me the quiet to experiment and reflect. Living away has made me acutely aware of the vast diversity within Indian cooking, and how easily we overlook it when it's all around us. That blend of perspective and intimacy is invaluable in my work.

The book's through-line is that there is "so much of the world in India, and India in the world." When did that idea first take hold?

It became apparent while I was working on The Visual Encyclopedia of Indian Foods. I kept encountering ingredients that challenged the idea of a bounded national cuisine. Where does one culinary tradition end and another begin? Food is culture, certainly — but whose culture is it anyway?

Take cumin, that absolute workhorse of the Indian kitchen. Its geographical reach is astonishing, stretching from Latin America through West and South Asia to Mongolia. But what interests me just as much is the diversity of ways people use those tiny fruits — whole, barely cracked, or ground; raw, gently warmed, or roasted until dark, as in Trinidadian cooking. The botanical may be the same, but generations of cooks have built an extraordinary repertoire around it. The world shows up in how we cook in India, shaped by the many cultures that have called it home. And Indian ingredients have taken on equally fascinating lives elsewhere, just as our people have migrated and made homes in other parts of the world.

Could you walk us through one of those journeys — and what it tells us about how cuisines actually form?

Cloves interest me because they feel so at home in Indian cooking — a clove or two in rice, a spice mix, a slow-cooked dish. I've also seen cooks place a few whole cloves in containers of rice or flour to keep weevils away; there's a wonderfully practical understanding of the spice beyond its culinary use. Yet the clove tree is native to Indonesia's Maluku Islands, thousands of kilometres away.

Cloves travelled long before the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean — archaeologists recovered one dating to roughly AD 900–1100 at the ancient port of Mantai in Sri Lanka. And there's a curious side to them: sometimes a spice becomes so valuable as a commodity that the people who grow it rarely use it themselves. In Indonesia, cloves aren't a staple in savoury food, but I found them in confectionery like kue nastar, tiny pineapple cookies each plugged with a clove bud — and in kretek, the country's clove cigarettes. So the taste is there, just in another form. Today we rarely think of the clove in an Indian dish as Indonesian. That, to me, is how cuisines grow: new ingredients arrive, curious hands experiment, tastes shift, and before long what was once foreign becomes essential.

Spices are, in a sense, the original globalisation — traded, fought over, colonised. How much of that harder history did you want the book to carry?

Quite a lot. I don't think you can write seriously about spices without confronting these histories. Each of the 50 spices has its own essay, approached through different kinds of evidence — an old culinary or apothecary manuscript, archaeobotanical discoveries, accounts of cultivation and trade, the movement of plants and people through warfare, colonisation and the slave trade.

I became fascinated by language, too. Spice names tell us how ingredients travelled and how people regarded them. Asafoetida, so valued in Indian cooking, was given the rather unfortunate name devil's dung by Europeans; even coriander is often linked to the Greek word for a bedbug. What is a beloved flavour for one community can be an unwelcome aroma for another. I wanted readers to savour the pleasure of cooking while also recognising the weight of history — the vibrant exchanges born of the spice trade deserve celebration, but so do the shadows of inequality and violence that travelled with them.

You trained as a designer at NID before becoming a food historian. What does a designer's eye bring to the way you tell a food story?

I approach food very much as a designer. I see ingredients as materials, like textiles, clay or glass — each has its own character, and creativity begins with understanding what those qualities allow you to make. You take a seed or a root and transform it through soaking, grinding, fermenting, drying or heating into something not just edible but delicious. My design training taught me to spot patterns in vast amounts of information, and to look with care — to notice the subtle differences that vanish when everything is lumped under a single familiar name. The research may lead me into history, botany or anthropology, but I still approach it with a designer's curiosity about materials and processes.

For the Indian diaspora especially — people cooking far from home — what do you hope they find in these pages? Is a spice box a kind of portable homeland?

Oh, a spice box is absolutely a portable homeland! Many of us who live away from where we grew up have an intimate relationship with certain flavours — a familiar spice can make a kitchen feel like home, wherever it is. But I also hope the book nudges people to step beyond the familiar. Spices are surprisingly divisive; someone will declare they detest a particular one, and nothing will change their mind. I find that amusing, because a spice has so many expressions — its flavour shifts depending on whether it's whole or ground, toasted or infused, and what it's cooked with. With several recipes for each spice, I hope even someone who thinks they dislike an ingredient might find a preparation that changes their mind.

If a reader carried away a single idea from Spiced — about India, about food, about belonging — what would you want it to be?

Perhaps that our culinary traditions are far more intertwined than we realise — and that this web of connections only makes them more distinctive. The history of spices is about how botanicals and people have moved, but what interests me most is what people did with those ingredients. A spice can travel thousands of kilometres, but a cook still has to decide whether it belongs in something sweet or savoury, whether to toast it or pound it, how much to use. Those decisions seem ordinary, yet much of what we call culinary heritage was shaped by exactly that kind of judgment, repeated and refined over generations. I hope Spiced leaves readers a little more curious about the ingredients in their own kitchens — and about the people, places and histories that brought them there.

Priya Mani's Spiced: Recipes Celebrating Spices from Around the World is published by Phaidon. Her ongoing A Visual Encyclopedia of Indian Foods won the British Guild of Food Writers and IACP awards in 2022. This interview was conducted over email and edited for length; her answers are her own.