Hi, I’m Naomi, and I have a problem with spices.

Not an allergy. More of an obsession. One that started in the kitchen and ended up somewhere much older.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother’s spice drawer.

Not the cooking, but the drawer itself. The way it smelled when you pulled it open. The little jars with handwritten labels, half of them in a language I couldn’t read yet. The ones that had clearly travelled a long way to get there and hadn’t come with an explanation.

I grew up eating food that tasted like somewhere else.

I’d been cooking for years, sharing recipes here, building a collection that was part family archive, part personal obsession. Then I started noticing something. The more I cooked with a spice, the more I wanted to know about it. Not just what it did to a dish, but where it came from. Who found it first. Why it cost so much once, and why it costs so little now.

One rabbit hole led to another. Turns out the black pepper in your grinder once triggered actual wars. The spice trade didn’t just connect the ancient world. It funded the Renaissance, justified colonialism, and explained why certain people got very rich and others got very hurt.

The history was always there. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Spice to Sauce started as a recipe blog and it still is one. There are hundreds of recipes here and I add to them all the time. But somewhere along the way it became something else too. A place for the stories behind the ingredients. The origin myths and the trade routes and the accidents that became staples. The cultural fingerprints in a spice blend. The politics in a pinch of salt.

I’m a home cook who got completely sidetracked by history. I read about food the way other people read thrillers, always wanting to know what happened next, always a little stunned by how much was at stake.

Pull up a chair. The food is good. The stories are better.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​