Delhi: So you think you know about spices because you're familiar with cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric, cumin and star anise? Think again. Walk around the wholesale spice market in Old Delhi, the Muslim quarter of the Indian capital, and trust me, you will feel pig-ignorant.
This is Asia's biggest wholesale spice market and is concentrated in a small area called Khari Baoli. Even top chefs come here to deepen their understanding of their flavours.
It dates back to the 17th century when traders from Central Asia and all over the world came here looking for spices. In those days, a canal ran through the central thoroughfare as wide as the Champs-Elysees, coffee shops lined the street, and trade was conducted with some elegance.
It still looks pretty 17th century, only worse. Dirty, chaotic, ludicrously over-crowded and noisy as hell, the market is an assault on the senses.
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Some of the shops go back to the 18th century and it is the current generation of the same family, sitting under garlanded portraits of their ancestors, that run them.
The shops spill out onto the pavement where jute sacks filled with spices, dried fruits and tea sit. In the better shops, the spices are stacked neatly on the shelves.
Messy, undoubtedly, but what an array of spices and dried fruits and what colours.
There is the regular stuff (regular as in what you can find in the average Indian kitchen) such as fennel, sesame seeds, star anise, saffron, pomegranate seeds, mace, nigella seeds, mustard, fenugreek, curry leaves and asafoetida, which comes from the word fetid and does indeed stink – it's often called 'the devil's dung' – until, that is, you cook with it. But there are also dried mulberries from Afghanistan and puffed lotus seeds.
Despite the shabbiness, there is method here.
Business worth billions of rupees is transacted in these tiny alleys and bylines every day. These spices are sent all over the world. They are not all to be used in cooking. The strangest looking items, the twisted, desiccated twigs and leaves, are used in ayurveda, the ancient Hindu system of medicine.
"That's for loss of vigour," says a shopkeeper cryptically about a pile of gnarled twigs.
What about these big dried berries? "Reetha, used for shiny hair," he says. And this sack of chestnut coloured papery scraps? "They're boiled and used to treat diabetes," says another shopkeeper.
"I'm learning to run the business as my father is unwell these days. It's not common for women to work here but I can't abandon my family's heritage," said Naheed Hussain, a tiny 24-year-old woman who can barely be seen behind the counter.
The only thing that breaks the frenetic activity is the tea-drinking. The tea sellers boil milky, cardamom-flavoured tea in saucepans before pouring them into small, tapered glasses.
A chotu, as young boys are affectionately known, picks up a wire rack holding these glasses and goes off to distribute them to thirsty merchants.
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