The spice chronicles takes a slight deviation from Rosengarten's book and talks about some interesting news items pertaining to spices/food. Let me start with the one closest to the Spice trading routes and the book.

The Buddhist statues in Afghanistan

We all know about the Buddhist statues that were blown up a few years ago, but did you know that area has a whole cave system full of oil paintings from the 3rd/4th century AD. Some expert's claim that these are probably the world's first (oil paintings). There are similar Buddhist paintings in Western India at the "Ajanta & Ellora" caves. Buddhism was the prevailing religion of the region then, co-existing with other (religions).The relevance of the paintings in Afghanistan was that they were located in a confluence of the Spice trade routes, on the west was the Roman Empire, and on the Northeast were China and the Southeast lay India. So probably affluence from trading translated to exploration in the arts and culture.

Here is a BBC News link video that shows more --> Bhuddist statues in Afghanistan


Unfair labeling of American tourists

We all hear about how bad the American tourist is, but is it really true. This recent news item about a survey of 21 countries finds that Americans rank at 11/21 (sharing this rank with the Thai tourists). Japanese rank at 1/21, from Europe we find that the French rank at 19/21, and the Chinese rank dead last at 21/21.

Read it all here in Abnoxious Tourists

Well what has all this got to do with India and spices, it so happens that the Indians rank at 20/21, only better than the Chinese, and I have my theory for this. As you know cooking Indian food is complicated, plus if you have culinary restrictions, it makes it cumbersome when you travel.


Drum roll please for the hottest curry sauce

Did you know that there is a Simpson's index that measures the heat of chili peppers, and it is NOT Habenaro (score 8000) that gets the gold, but it is the Naga chili (score 855,000).

Read more here -->

Hottest Curry

How about an Indian cooking day on who is the local Koyabashi of chili ingestion :)? (Koyabashi - speed eating legend from Japan)