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Let's get Cooking!
This isn't just a collection of recipes. It's a growing library of cooking lessons, historical inspiration, and practical techniques designed to help you become a more confident home cook. Learn how to build flavor, understand spices, master the Bloom Method, and discover the stories behind the world's great culinary traditions. Whether you're making dinner in twenty minutes or spending the afternoon exploring a recipe from another century, you'll find ideas that make cooking both easier and more rewarding.
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The Shared Pot: A Little History of Fondue and a Table Worth Lingering Over
A fondue pot invites everyone to stay at the table a little longer. Follow its history from a 1699 Zürich cookbook to the cheese, queso, broth, and chocolate pots we share today.
10 min read
The Table Beneath the Cloth. Jewish Foodways of Iranian Kurdistan, c. 1800–1840
An embroidered ceremonial tray cover survived from early nineteenth-century Iranian Kurdistan. The meal beneath it did not. Follow the Spicekeeper as one remarkable object opens an investigation into Persian Jewish foodways, culinary memory, and the creation of The Persian Table.
17 min read
Hands to Work, Herbs to Market, Flavor to Table - Inside the Shaker Pantry
A random cookbook opened the door to the Shaker pantry. Follow the trail from herb gardens and drying houses to canisters, peddlers and nineteenth-century kitchens, and discover how one dumpling recipe changed the investigation.
25 min read
The Story of Viking Salt
Viking Salt was never meant to recreate a lost Viking recipe. Its story begins with historical recreation, Danish salt, Viking Age foodways, and one imaginative decision to scatter a little edible gold through the bowl.
11 min read
Garlic Without Apology - One Bulb, Thousands of Years, and the Story Behind Wilde Garlek
Garlic has never had just one flavor. Follow the surprising story of Wilde Garlek from a medieval English kitchen to California garlic farms, early dehydration plants and the modern blending table, then put that history to work with an easy roasted potato recipe.
15 min read
The Ingredient Is Not the Flavor. Food, Flavor, and the Lost Kitchen of New Kingdom Egypt, c. 1400 BCE
Thirty-five hundred years ago, the ingredients survived. The recipes did not. From a basket of cumin sealed in the tomb of Kha and Merit to experiments in our own kitchens, we explore a deceptively simple question: if we know the ingredients, do we know the flavor?
15 min read
What Did Renoir's Paris Taste Like?Food, Flavor, and the Tables Behind the Paintings, 1865–1885
What did Renoir’s Paris taste like? Step beyond the paintings and into the French kitchens of 1865–1885, where butter, parsley, aromatics, stock, wine, and time built flavor in layers. Along the way, discover why the lavender we expected never appeared, and how that research inspired La Cuisine 1875 Paris.
22 min read
*The Sweet Side of Pasta: A Renaissance Dessert
Could pasta ever be dessert? Long before modern meals divided sweet from savory, Italian and European cooks paired pasta with honey, butter, warming spices, and nuts to create simple yet elegant dishes. Discover the forgotten sweet side of pasta with a Renaissance-inspired recipe featuring the Bloom Method and Oak City Spice Blends' 14th c. Franconia, while exploring the history behind one of Europe's oldest flavor traditions.
7 min read
*The Cuppa and the Cold Veranda: Addis Ababa, 1972 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Ten
A little girl arrived in Addis Ababa expecting Africa to be one thing and discovered an entirely different world. Through her memories of shiro, berbere, injera, layered fruit juice, and the timeless Ethiopian coffee ceremony, this issue of The Spicekeeper's Almanac explores how food preserves the places that shape us. Part memoir, part culinary history, and part historical journey, it is a story of hospitality, memory, and why some tables stay with us for a lifetime.
17 min read
*The Woman in Blue, Following a Lapis Necklace Home - Badakhshan, c. 1885 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac Issue Nine
The Woman in Blue: Following a Lapis Necklace Home begins with a real lapis lazuli necklace that has hung in my home for nearly forty years. That single object leads us back to the mountains of Badakhshan, where the world's finest lapis has been mined for thousands of years. Through history, archaeology, food, and careful imagination, we follow the blue stone home to an ordinary woman whose name has been lost but whose life reflects countless others history never recorded.
23 min read
*The Spice Seller - Pompeii, c. AD 70 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac - Issue Eight
A simple string of Roman beads inspired the imagined story of Victoria, a spice seller in Pompeii just nine years before Mount Vesuvius changed history forever. Walk beside her through a bustling market, discover the quiet kindness that no ledger ever recorded, and bring the flavors of ancient Rome to your own table with three Bloom Method recipes inspired by everyday Roman cooking. Sometimes the smallest objects preserve the greatest stories.
24 min read
*The Governess at Dalguise, Perthshire, c. 1875 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Seven
In Issue Seven of The Spicekeeper’s Almanac, we travel to Dalguise, Perthshire, in 1875, where a young Beatrix Potter spent Highland summers learning to notice the world closely. Through river fish, oatcakes, berries, broth, and sketchbooks, this issue explores how food, nature, and careful observation shaped one of the world’s most beloved storytellers.
22 min read
*The Unicorn's Table, Paris, c. 1500 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac - Issue Six
Step inside a Parisian home around 1500, where hospitality was an art practiced through every sense. In Issue Six of The Spicekeeper’s Almanac, Michel explores The Lady and the Unicorn, medieval table culture, and the timeless care that turns a meal into a welcome.
25 min read
*Dinner in the Mustard Seed Garden - Nanjing, 1671 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Five
What can a 350-year-old garden teach modern cooks? More than you might expect. In Dinner in the Mustard Seed Garden, we step into Li Yu's Nanjing home, where the finest meals celebrated freshness instead of excess. Through period recipes, culinary history, and one remarkable philosophy of flavor, discover why great seasoning should never hide great ingredients. The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Five.
19 min read
*A Feast at Birka, 960 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Four
Most people imagine Vikings gathered around great feasts. The reality was far more practical. In Birka around 960, survival depended on preserved fish, stored roots, butter, and salt. Explore the foods that carried Norse families through the long northern winter and recreate a Viking meal inspired by one of Scandinavia's most important trading towns.
15 min read
*The Cook's Last Tables: Rome, 1527 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac — Issue Three
On the morning of May 6, 1527, a Roman cook prepared for another day of feeding the men he had served for decades. The bread was set out. The bowls were ready. Then history arrived at the gates of Rome. Through the food, kitchens, and forgotten workers of Renaissance Italy, The Cook's Last Tables: Rome, 1527 explores the human story behind one of history's most devastating events.
14 min read
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