Seasoned Memories
This season, move beyond the usual and embrace the warmth of eastern spices — cumin, coriander, ginger, and turmeric — for a fresh take on holiday flavors.
Scientists call it the Proust effect — that sudden flood of memory triggered by scent. One whiff and you’re somewhere else entirely: a childhood home, a holiday morning, a feeling you can’t quite name. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), the narrator dips a madeleine into lime-flower tea, and the taste unexpectedly returns him to the Sundays of his youth at his aunt’s house. This spontaneous rush of recollection, unprompted by conscious effort, revealed what Proust called involuntary memory — the way certain sensory experiences can unlock entire worlds long dormant in the mind.
Decades later, neuroscience confirmed what Proust intuited. Smell and taste have access to memory in ways vision and hearing do not. Unlike other senses, scent bypasses the brain’s thalamic relay and connects directly to the amygdala and hippocampus — the regions that govern emotion and long-term memory. It’s why the aroma of nutmeg or clove can transport you faster than any photograph ever could.
This holiday season, consider bypassing the predictable and looking east — to the warmth of cumin, coriander, ginger and turmeric — for scents and flavors that create new memories.
(Photo courtesy Iris Miller.)
“Memory lives in the scent of spices. It’s always been the thread connecting the past and home.”
Spices are made from the seeds, bark, roots, or fruit of plants, and their drying amplifies both scent and flavor. For simple ways to bring more spice — and serenity — into everyday life, Iris Miller, a devoted Ashtanga yoga practitioner and talented cook who spends part of each year in Mysore, India, suggests beginning with something small. “A simple cup of chai
can be a daily ritual to enhance mood and stimulate circulation,” she says. Sitting on the patio of her Diamond Head home, skin luminous from a morning yoga workout, Miller emphasizes the importance of buying spices in small quantities and storing them in airtight containers to preserve fragrance and flavor.
“Memory lives in the scent of spices. It’s always been the thread connecting the past and home,” says Honolulu textile and clothing designer Amerjit Ghag, who remembers the sound and scent of ghee warming on the stove, cumin seeds coming to bloom. “The fragrance takes me back to my mother’s kitchen on winter afternoons when someone had the sniffles,” she recalls. “She would begin her quiet ritual: tempering cumin in ghee with onions until fragrant, then adding moong dal, rice and water until it all simmered into a golden, comforting khichdi (stew).” The aroma filled their home — soothing and sustaining — a reminder that spice could be as healing as it is flavorful.
Ghag, the owner of Island Bungalow, a boutique known for its artisan-crafted home furnishings and clothing, is as passionate about food as she is about design. Her papaya-print pajamas and banana-leaf linens sit comfortably alongside small-batch spice blends during the holidays. One holiday favorite at Island Bungalow: a turmeric, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and jaggery mix from Spicewalla, you can use this to make golden milk — a fragrant ritual for those seeking comfort with intention.
You don’t need an entire pantry of jars to start adding more spice to your repertoire. A few well-chosen, spices — cumin, cardamom, black pepper, coriander, and ginger — can transform the way you cook and the way your home smells. Oaktown Spice Shop, Penzeys and Diaspora Spice Co. are good online resources and all offer simple recipes to help you get started.
“The sound of cumin meeting hot ghee still feels like an invitation to pause, to connect across kitchens and cultures,” says Ghag — a small reminder that a little more spice might be exactly what we need.