What I Learned From Pumpkin Spice About Finding Your Flavor
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Beyond the latte lies a richer history. How a 3,500-year-old spice journey from Indonesia can teach us to create work that’s more complex and alive. Welcome to What I Learned From… “Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 What I Learned From …It’s Pumpkin Spice season, friends! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! The air turns crisp, the leaves begin their fiery transformation, and a familiar scent wafts from every coffee shop and bakery. And as a white gal who owns multiple pairs of athleisure leggings and can recite the entire Taylor Swift discography, my soul is programmed to respond to the call of the basic. Plus, I really like wearing longer sleeves and being all cozy in fuzzy socks (especially with my recently broken toe.) I was making a spicy autumn granola for my afternoon Greek yogurt snacks, but I do things a little differently. See, I don’t normally cook with pumpkin spice blend in the fall. I’ve used it in a pinch, especially with pastries and quick breads, and I’ve gifted it to soooo many friends (particularly the Trader Joe’s version.) When I’m cooking, my hand blasts past the PSB and instead reaches for: Garam Masala. If you aren’t familiar, Garam Masala is a spice blend from northern India, likely popularized by the Mughal influence (Turco-Mongol lineage) living there in the 1300s. It includes many of the pumpkin spice...spices...like cinnamon and nutmeg, and adds deeper notes like cassia leaves, black pepper, cardamom, and cumin. It’s similar to Chinese five-spice, though that often includes anise, a delicious flavor to many but one that makes me throw up in my mouth a little, which defeats the purpose of cooking food I want to eat. Thinking about these blends that felt so similar made me wonder about the origin of “pumpkin spice.” Since it contains nutmeg, I knew it had to come from Indonesia. Specifically, I learned, it comes from the Banda Islands of Indonesia, where the nutmeg tree is a native plant that can be traced back 3,500-years to residue on pottery shards that were found on the island of Pulau Ai. In the West, we’re taught that these are more commonly known as the “Spice Islands”, as it is where the Dutch East India Company Guess who we often credit with popularizing such baking spice that people were using for millennia? Yep, the Dutch. There’s a reason Dutch Apple Pie and winter blends like koekkruiden/speculaas are a things. They're all similar blends. But after living in Bali, with friends from areas close to the Maluku Islands (like Sulawesi) and up through Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, I knew there were so many recipes that use similar combinations. Because I had tasted those recipes. In my mouth. Dishes like beef rendang and seafood gulai, or pretty much any semur (stew), often include nutmeg as a key ingredient. The Indonesian spice paste “bumbu” features it, alongside turmeric and ginger, to add “pleasant flavor and aroma” to both savory and sweet dishes. Trade moved up and down the Malay world long before Europeans mapped and named the ‘spice routes’, so Indian cuisine would have also found these blends and pastes, adding their own flavors like black peppercorns. Meanwhile, in the West we settled on a couple of spices palatable to northern European tastes, and eventually that became an entire personality for a season. Of course there are times when a simpler pumpkin spice blend is what a recipe needs. If you want to bring out the flavor of, say, a relatively neutral squash like a pumpkin, then you don’t want the spices to overpower the taste. But if you want to experiment, and find new ways to boost your dishes and recipes, why not learn more about where pumpkin spice came from? Explore the ingredients inside it. Look for other combinations and pastes that use similar building blocks, and notice how proportion changes everything. Learn about the cultures that originated these culinary traditions, and why they made the choices they did. Masala is a common word in Hindustani that means “spices”; we see it frequently in tikka masala and tandoori masala, and even chai masala (literally "spice tea.") Garam Masala can be translated as “hot spices.” It isn’t what we would consider “hot” in our cooking, though. Instead, it’s more of a warm feeling...a blend that makes your insides feel that comfy, snuggly goodness. Almost like a perfect sweater, on an autumn day, wrapping you up in its toasty embrace. If only we took some extra time to try this adventurous flavoring in our writing craft. So often we reach for our standard blends. We use the familiar trope, the common structure, the reliable archetype. They're fine. They work. But what if we learned where those tools came from? What if we explored the deeper, richer, more complex narrative "spices" from other traditions? What if we understood the history of storytelling itself, the 3,500-year-old human impulse to make sense of life through tale-telling? About the same age as those shards in a cave on an island in the South Pacific. We wouldn't just be tossing in exotic ingredients to be fancy, We'd be learning the origin points of flavor itself. We could learn to create work that feels truly nourishing, complex, and alive. I still make the granola. Some seasons it wears the familiar sweater, other seasons it leans more vanilla and citrus to brighten with higher temps. Either way, it warms you from the inside out, and it lingers long after the bowl is licked clean. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Writing is like cooking a meal; you need a balance of raw ingredients and spices to make it delicious. The proper cooking temperature and time is the editing process. Julienning the vegetables is the crafting of sentences. The recipe is your outline. It all comes together to create a perfect medley of taste in your mouth. I’m getting away from myself here with this analogy. The point is that you can use figurative language, words or phrases that have meaning while not being literally true, to elevate your writing.” — Maribel Leddy, f(r)iction Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Write three micro paragraphs (just 4–6 sentences each!) on the same idea. In version A, write sweet and nostalgic. In version B, write earthy and grounded. In version C, write bright and aromatic. Compare what the different blends do to meaning. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Incalescence [in-kuh-LESS-uhns] (n.) — The state or process of growing warm; the first stir of heat or ardor. From Latin incalēscere “to grow warm” (in + calēre “be warm”), it names the specific phenomenon of gathering heat. Incalescence is not the scorching blaze, but the vital, comforting transition into warmth. Useful for describing prose that begins to hum. Sorta synonyms: kindling, quickening, awakening Use it for: the “warmth-not-heat” of garam masala, the initial spark of a story, a reader’s interest beginning to glow. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Focus Friend: This popular new productivity app features a little bean (you get to name them!) who just wants to knit cute things. But every time you are on your phone, the bean gets distracted and they can’t knit. How could you do that to Little Bean‽ The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Me, listening close to get the tea and "study the interactions because I'm a writer." ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - As I was revising this essay, I saw how much my writing style in WILF has changed. Which do you like more? The bubbly conversational personal? The erudite academic deep dives? Some magical mix of the two? |