I made paprika from scratch once, my greengrocer, a short Italian man who was always on the hustle was in the habit of having at least one irresistible bargain to sell to his loyal customers. Today it was a box of bell peppers at too tantalising a price to leave alone.
Paprika I thought.
I picked out a recipe book and, as instructed, I started cutting them into thin slices ready for drying. At the time I didn’t have a dehydrator, so I improvised covering greaseproof paper lined baking trays with thinly sliced segments of the yellow fruits. I placed a wooden spoon in the door to let the evaporated essence of a season’s carefully grown bell peppers out of the door.
I didn’t know how long it would take, I’d never dehydrated anything before, and so I baby sat my drying peppers. Turning them every half an hour, after much of the day they were crisp, moistureless.
The sun had set and bathed in the electric light of the evening, I took to turning them into powder. Again, I didn’t have the right tools for the job and blew the dust off a charity shop bought pestle and mortar. For the best part of an hour I pounded each dry ring into dust. Descovering, in the most experiential manner possible that peppers are mostly water.
What I thought would be enough paprika to pass out for Christmas presents that year turned out to half-fill a tiny jar. Yet, the paprika was exquisite, the most sweet and flavourful I’ve ever tasted – a pinch could transform a soup, stew or cassoulet. A precious powder indeed.
I can remember putting that tiny jar back up onto my shelf full of herbs and spices some picked and processed from the wild. Others bought from a myriad of shops but harvested from around the world. As I put the spices back I found a new respect, a reverence for each and every spice that existed on my rack. I thought of each proton of sunlight that shines down all of the plants that made these spices, the soil, or moreover, the bacteria and mycelium and how much work - perhaps I mean life - went into the growth of these goods.
Goods that would have seemed a luxury to all but the latest crop of humanity.
I then thought of the humans and how each spice was tended to, harvested, processed, packed, shipped, ordered then stacked on the shelf before being priced up and sold to me or Emma (my partner).
The cookbook I used was still sitting on the kitchen table. I reached up and put it back on the top shelf along with my small selection of specialist cookbooks, pushing it with an ample amount of force so that it squeezed between the other books and proudly showed its spine level with the others.
I felt the same reverence I did when pushing the paprika onto the shelf, that the words inside those pages contained just as many worlds as my spices - perhaps more. How many books did the author read before setting down to write those recipes? How many people did they talk to or cook with? Did one school teacher or learned individual inspire them or did many, did the kind words of a friend ring around their head and give them the confidence they needed to go for it?
Then more practical thoughts entered my head, how many people helped to print the pages right from the growing of the trees to make the paper, the making of the ink, the binding, the glue that holds the pages together, the typesetters, editors, agents – all of it.
I feel the weight of experiences when I hold a book, or a spice, in my hands. The toil and dreams of thousands, maybe millions of people fill and enrich my life. My rooms are full of books and my kitchen is full of spice.
and I write this to frame a piece of audio that acts as a small thank you to Adharanand Finn, Susanna Wadeson, Kate Johnson, Lois Pryce and Bruno Vincent. A small handful of people who really helped me get over a slump of self doubt that almost cost me my career. These are a few of the invisible people that are contained in my little paprika jar of a book New Wild Order. It’s my most ambitious and audacious project of any kind and it will be published in February 2025.
If you have time, there is a little podcast episode to listen to. It’s an odd recording timewise as much of it was recorded before I wrote New Wild Order. My attitude has changed considerably as a result of writing New Wild Order and making this episode.
I hope that it helps you if you are feeling any kind of doubts or fears regarding anything that you are doing – it doesn’t even have to be creative, it could be that you’ve simply made a difficult decision. It’s my wish that hang on, try and see the bigger picture and above all else, find some inner belief and cherish it like that beautiful jar of paprika it is.
Enjoy x
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