Have you taken a look at the spices in your cabinet lately? A really good look? A recent conversation with my husband made me realize that it was time to weed through those carefully alphabetized jars.
J and I were reminiscing about a wonderful couscous dish we made years ago; it was full of Middle Eastern spices and flavors. We got the recipe from a friend but had put off making it for about six months because it called for cardamom; on our student budgets we couldn’t afford it. When I finally did bite the bullet and purchase the cardamom, the resulting dish was worth the investment.
What’s the key phrase in that previous paragraph? It’s “student budgets,” which we last saw in 1993. Yes, that nineteen-year-old Durkee jar has moved with us to several apartments and four houses, from Cambridge to Syracuse to Charlotte to Connecticut and back to the Boston area. That’s a lot of miles on an elderly jar!
It even has the original price sticker ($6.49!) from Star Market in Cambridge — for those of you familiar with the area, we purchased this back when groceries were sent via an underground conveyer to a drive-up hut in the middle of the parking lot. I’m not sure when that Star was converted to a Shaw’s (and the steps re-graded and the hut dismantled), but this little jar is a piece of history.
And history it is.
With the help of the McCormick “How Old Are Your Spices” site, I’ve culled many a jar from the cabinet. When I plugged in the product code from this tin of pepper (in my defense, we use freshly ground pepper for seasoning, and rarely make recipes that call for pepper as an ingredient), I got the following message:
You threw out your boy band CDs. Throw out your old spices.
This spice was made on 11/6/1998
How embarrassing!
I dare you to investigate the spices in your cabinet — what’s the oldest you’ll find?!
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Ha!!!! Love this. I’m sure I have a few odd spices around that quite old — I mean how often do I cook with fenugreek? I use cardamom, so I know mine is kinda fresh. I should probably do a spice rack check myself. I can’t use the bar code thing tho, because I’ve transferred all my spices to different jars.
This is a frightening post Dawn! I know I have old spices… and inheriting this house in 1996 from my mom, I know int he back… I still have some oh her spices so that would make then probably early 90′s…. ugh.
SO many I do not use too so I really should make a clean sweep with the spices and start again.
19 years?! That’s pretty impressive…my spices are all about two years old, because I had my mother mail me fresh ones after I moved to Macedonia. (The only “spice” really used in Macedonia is Vegeta – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegeta_(food) .) I’m already dreading replenishing my spice cabinet when I get back to the states, though I know I should be replacing my spices every year as a standard thing.
Yikes! I definitely need to check out that site.
I’m telling you! You gotta get over to Penzey’s. Your cooking will never be the same!
Heh. I have some spices that I only use once a year, and they have been with us for 7 or 8 years now. I need to go through these and see what’s good and what has gotten stale. I love that there is a website devoted to this, but I am a little scared to visit it!
Every time I wade through my spice jars in my-too-small-city-kitchen-cabinet, I think I should throw some of these out. You have just given me the incentive! (I have spices that traveled from near Syracuse to NYC three years ago- they have to go!)
I know I should sort through them more often. My oldest daughter is the spice police in our family. Once she visited and found several cans of spice with price tags of 25 cents. I told her I was keeping them for nostalgia purposes, but she saw right through that lie.
Over the holidays I cleaned out the spice cupboard. EEEEK! I am soooooooooo embarrassed. That’s all I’m sayin’… LOL!
well, I totally reid my kithen about 5 years ago and I got rid of all my spiced then..so I known none are older than that.
A also try to buy whole spices when I can, and grind them, They stay fresh a long time that way. Still, maybe not a few decades…
I grind my pepper and coriander and cardamon and cloves. I have this cute little grinder I got in Turkey, but I also use a cheap coffee grinder just for spices.
Great post, Dawn. I try to weed out my spice cabinet every few years, usually just before the holidays. Jill’s mention of Penzey’s is the second I’ve seen this week – had never even heard of them before!
I don’t have any that old because I threw out the ones in the rectangular cans when we moved. But I’m sure I have some that should be cleared out.
What fun. I know I will be ashamed at my old spices!
Oh man … I’m sure I have some oldies in there!
Okay, this is so funny because I’m awful about throwing out old spice. My husband will go to grab spices and give me the stink eye at the age of some of them. I’m afraid to plug my codes in, the spice police might come for me.
I would love to plug some of my Mom’s spices into that website. When my parents moved from the house they had lived in for almost thirty years, I caught my Mom packing up a jar of allspice that my Dad claims she moved to that house 30 years earlier! I wrestled that one away from her but I know there are more lurking on her spice carousel.
Great post!
Ohhhhh, I will have to do that before one of my family members decides to check them. I am notorious for having old canned foods and not throwing things out. I’m embarrassed to say that I might have some that old. It really wouldn’t surprise me. I grow my own herbs, but some of the spices… I’m scared to check. LOL I do recall grabbing a can of meat tenderizer and nothing would come out because it had all hardened. I’d like to blame humidity… :thumbsup:
I ran across this website while searching for something else. I just realized it’s “SHE is too fond of books”. So this is a website for females?
uhhhh, in that case, my name is Jameson. …not James. (Could that pass as a girls name?: :giggle: