A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark, or vegetative substance primarily used for flavouring, colouring or preserving food. Sometimes a spice is used to hide other flavours.
Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are parts of leafy green plants also used for flavouring or as garnish.
Many spices have antimicrobial properties. This may explain why spices are more commonly used in warmer climates, which have more infectious disease, and why use of spices is especially prominent in meat, which is particularly susceptible to spoiling.
A spice may have an extra use, usually medicinal, religious ritual, cosmetics or perfume production, or as a vegetable. For example, turmeric roots are consumed as a vegetable and garlic as an antibiotic.
Read more about Spice: Handling Spices, Nutrition, Production, Standardization, Research
Famous quotes containing the word spice:
“A widow is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practised coquetry, and the halo of one man’s approval.”
—Helen Rowland (1875–1950)
“Lovers may be—and indeed generally are—enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Variety’s the very spice of life
That gives it all its flavour.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)