the ancient world they were more than mere foods: they were thought to have medicinal and even transcendental properties Sacrificial fires wafted the fumes of aromatics upward to please the gods, and at the same time offered earth-bound humans a whiff of heaven Spices came from the ends of the earth, from Arabia and legendary lands to the east The growing hunger for the aromas of paradise helped drive the European exploration of the globe, the discovery of the Americas, and the biological and cultural exchange that helped shape the modern world Few people today think of herbs and spices as emissaries from paradise or to heaven Yet they’re more popular than ever: because herbs and spices do indeed bring other worlds to our table They mark the foods of different cultures with distinctive flavors, and provide us a taste of Morocco at one meal and Thailand the next They help us recapture the kind of sensory variety that our ancestors enjoyed in foods before agriculture made eating both more reliable and more monotonous And because smell is one of the senses through which we experience our immediate surroundings, herbs and spices delight by lending our foods hints reminiscent of the forest, the meadow, the flower garden, the seacoast They can conjure a familiar part of the natural world in a bite or sip This chapter surveys herbs, spices, and three other important flavorings derived from plants Tea and coffee are such prominent ingredients in their own right that we don’t think of them as herb or spice, but that’s essentially what they are: tea is a dried leaf and coffee a roasted seed, and we use them to flavor water (and infuse it with a useful drug, caffeine) And wood smoke is a flavoring created when intense heat breaks plant tissues down into some of the same aromatics found in true spices  ... delight by lending our foods hints reminiscent of the forest, the meadow, the flower garden, the seacoast They can conjure a familiar part of the natural world in a bite or sip This chapter surveys herbs, spices, and. ..enjoyed in foods before agriculture made eating both more reliable and more monotonous And because smell is one of the senses through which we experience our immediate surroundings, herbs and spices... three other important flavorings derived from plants Tea and coffee are such prominent ingredients in their own right that we don’t think of them as herb or spice, but that’s essentially what they are: tea is a dried leaf