Spicy Life of Spices

Spices are the aromatic parts of tropical plants. Spices come from the bark or roots of certain plants but the majority are berries, seeds or dried fruits. There are different types of spices. For example the spices like pepper, cardamom, ginger, cloves, turmeric, chilies, aniseed, caraway, celery, coriander, cumin, dill seed, fennel, fenugreek, garlic, onion, saffron, vanilla etc. Spices were also flavor disguisers, masking the taste of the otherwise tasteless food that was nutritious, but if unspiced, had to be thrown away. Some spices were also used for preserving food like meat for a year or more without refrigeration. Spices are well known as appetizers and digestives and are considered essential in the culinary art all over the world. Some of them have anti-oxidant properties, while others have preservative properties and are used in some foods like pickles and chutneys, etc. Some spices also possess strong anti-microbial and antibiotic activities. In the sixteenth century, cloves were used to preserve food without refrigeration. Cloves contain a chemical called eugenol that inhibits the growth of bacteria. It is still used to preserve some modern foods like Virginia ham. Later, mustard and ground mustard were also found to have preservative qualities. When spices were not available people went hungry because they could not preserve their foods to carry them over to the winters.