The Spice Cabinet Is Not a Cabinet. It Is a Situation.
I had no courage for the spice cabinet at all.
This is not an admission of laziness. This is strategy. Anyone who has ever organised a kitchen knows there are levels to this game. You start with the easy wins, the cutlery drawer, the Tupperware you think you’ll finally match with its lids, the optimistic shelf of “miscellaneous.” The spice cabinet, however, is the final boss.
It is also, quietly, the place where I store everything I have carried with me from one home to another. The spice cabinet is not a cabinet. It began innocently enough, as these things do, a neat drawer with labelled jars and good intentions. Then it expanded. From drawer to cabinet. From cabinet to cupboard. And now, frankly, the spice situation has started colonising the rest of the kitchen. I’m one reorganising spree away from admitting that my kitchen is no longer a kitchen, it is a storage facility for masalas with occasional cooking.
This becomes particularly apparent every time we move houses, and I have moved enough times to know that the spices travel before anything else truly settles. The movers and packers are always confident at first. They arrive with clipboards and optimism. They pack books. They pack clothes. They pack crockery. And then they reach the kitchen. Specifically, the spices. There is always a pause. One of them opens a cupboard, closes it slowly, and looks at me with concern usually reserved for people who hoard newspapers from 1987. Another asks, gently, “Madam… all this is masala?” as if hoping I might say no, this is an installation art piece.
Box after box is filled. Small boxes. Then medium ones. Then one suspiciously heavy box that requires two people and a short prayer. The expressions range from disbelief to awe to mild fear. I can see them recalculating the inventory in their heads. They did not budget for this much turmeric. I don’t blame them. From the outside, it looks like excess. From the inside, it is the only way a kitchen begins to feel like mine again. But what they don’t understand, what outsiders never do, is that Indian kitchens don’t have “spices.” They have systems. Systems that are learnt, inherited, corrected, and occasionally argued over across generations.
There are whole spices and ground spices. Daily spices and festive spices. Spices for tempering, spices for marination, spices that only come out when a particular aunt is visiting. There is amchur and anardana, two kinds of chilli powder depending on mood, cumin in seed form and cumin that has already lived a full life and become powder. There are blends whose exact proportions are family secrets and jars that are only refilled by hand, never bought ready-made.
And then crucially there is a separate section. The continental spices.
Because in the name of God, they cannot be mixed.
Italian herbs have no business rubbing shoulders with garam masala. Smoked paprika does not get to loiter near mustard seeds. Thyme is welcome, but it must know its place. This is not snobbery; this is survival. Cross-contamination here would be disastrous.
Yes, I know people eat butter chicken with fried rice. I have seen it happen. I acknowledge that this is a thing in the world. But that does not mean my kitchen has to endorse it. My spice cabinet maintains strict borders.
At some point, I documented this chaos on Instagram, making a harmless little reel about my spice cabinet. I thought it was funny. My viewers were… horrified.
The comments had a tone usually reserved for true crime documentaries.
“Why do you need so many?”
“Is this normal?”
“Are you okay?”
They stared at the shelves like anthropologists encountering an undiscovered civilisation. I could practically hear them whispering, She has three kinds of cumin. What they were really asking was: how much of where you come from do you plan to keep?
But here’s the essence underlying it all: spices are not excess. They are memory held in colour, texture, taste and smell. They are inheritance, quietly passed down from my grandmother to my mother and from my mother to me, irrespective of where we have chosen for our kitchens to blossom. They are reminders that wherever we bloom, the roots will always remain. Each jar holds a story- a recipe from my mother, a tip from my grandmother, a packet carried across continents because this brand is not the same abroad.
When I think about the kitchen in our Bombay home, I don’t first remember the food or even the smell of it cooking. I remember the marble worktop stained yellow with turmeric. No amount of scrubbing ever fully removed it. The colour had seeped into the stone itself, a quiet record of meals cooked daily, of people fed, of life unfolding repeatedly around that counter.
This is not clutter. This is what stays.
And yes, sometimes I open the cabinet and something falls out. Sometimes I retreat strategically and tell myself, Today is not the day. Even action heroes don’t fight every battle at once. One day, I will face it properly. I will line things up. I will reduce and conquer.
But today? Today I close the cupboard gently, salute its contents, and back away slowly because the spice cabinet is watching.
Written by Snehal Amembal
