Spices in Cajun cooking

The blend is designed for high-heat cooking and chicken takes it directly. The paprika forms a crust and the cayenne provides heat that chicken's mildness does not fight.

Prawns' natural sweetness balances capsaicin heat directly, which is why hot prawn dishes recur from Louisiana to Goa to Sichuan.

Add alongside: Paprika, Garlic

The standard way to separate colour from heat. Paprika supplies red colour and sweet body without pungency; cayenne supplies pungency without much flavour. Using both lets each be adjusted independently, which a single hot paprika does not allow.

Add alongside: Garlic, Oregano

The backbone of Mexican and Tex-Mex seasoning, and of American chilli powder, where oregano supplies a resinous top note over cumin’s earthy musk. This is one of the pairings where the species distinction bites hardest: Mexican oregano’s citric resin is what the combination was built on, and Mediterranean oregano makes it read as Italian.

How: In a chilli powder or taco seasoning; In an adobo for pork

Add alongside: Cayenne pepper, Garlic, Paprika

• Use Mexican oregano if you can get it. Nothing else in the mixture supplies what it does.

Chemical relatives — thymol and carvacrol are isomers, and each herb carries some of both — used together so routinely that most commercial Italian, Cajun and Creole blends contain the pair. Thyme supplies a woody base that lasts through long cooking and oregano supplies the top note, and neither has to give ground.

How: Together in a dry rub; In a long-simmered stew

Add alongside: Garlic, Bay leaf, Black pepper

• Adding both where a recipe named one produces a generic herbal register rather than a specific dish.

A pairing chosen for what it does not do. White pepper delivers piperine pungency without the black husk’s fruity aroma and without visible specks, and paprika delivers colour and sweetness; together they season a pale sauce or a Creole roux with heat and depth while leaving the colour alone. That is why both appear in Creole seasoning and in central European paprika cooking rather than their more aromatic alternatives.

How: Together in a Creole seasoning or a roux; In a paprika cream sauce

Add alongside: Garlic, Onion, Cayenne pepper

• White pepper carries a fermented note from its processing that some people find intrusive in a delicate sauce.

The bulk of almost every barbecue rub, and it is there for colour and sweetness as much as for flavour. Smoked paprika does a second job again, supplying a smoke note to ribs cooked in an oven that never saw any. Its sugars are also why a paprika rub belongs at low temperature.

How: The base of a dry rub with sugar, salt and pepper; Smoked paprika in an oven-cooked rack

Add alongside: Cumin, Black pepper, Garlic

• Paprika burns and turns bitter over direct heat. This is a low-and-slow spice.

Cumin is the earthy weight in a barbecue rub and the reason a good one tastes savoury rather than merely sweet and hot. It is also heat-stable enough to survive several hours at low temperature, which a leaf herb would not be.

How: In a dry rub with paprika, pepper and garlic; Toasted and ground fresh for a rack

Add alongside: Paprika, Black pepper, Oregano

Coarsely cracked pepper is half of a Texas rub and most of what makes the bark on a beef rib. Piperine is heat-stable, the coarse grind survives hours of cooking without dissolving, and the texture of the crust is part of the result rather than incidental to it.

How: Coarse-cracked with salt as a Texas-style rub; In a broader rub with paprika and garlic

Add alongside: Salt, Paprika, Cayenne pepper

The heat in a Maryland or Cajun crab boil, and the reason the strategy works is the shell: the seasoning is in the water and only a fraction of it reaches the meat. Cayenne applied directly to picked crabmeat at boil concentrations would bury it entirely.

How: In a boil with celery seed, mustard and bay; A small amount in a dressed crab or a crab cake

Add alongside: Celery seed, Mustard seed, Bay leaf

• What works in a boil does not work on the picked meat. The shell is doing the moderating.

The spice that makes a crab boil taste like a crab boil, and the one people cannot name. Celery seed is bitter, green and intensely aromatic, and it supplies the savoury vegetal background that stops a boil being merely hot and salty.

How: In a crab boil with mustard, bay and cayenne; In a seasoning for crab cakes

Add alongside: Mustard seed, Bay leaf, Cayenne pepper

A Louisiana pairing more than a general one. White pepper is fermented as well as dried, which gives it a faintly barnyard note black pepper does not have, and Creole and Cajun cooking use that against thyme in the roux-based dishes where a visible black speck would be unwelcome. The choice of white over black here is aesthetic in origin and audible in flavour.

How: In a Creole seasoning; In gumbo and étouffée

Add alongside: Paprika, Celery seed

• White pepper is not simply black pepper without the skin; the fermentation changes it

A savoury pairing that turns up wherever a long-cooked base is being built: the thyme is resinous and slow-releasing and the celery seed adds a vegetal depth that would otherwise require actual celery. It is much of the reason a stock made with a bouquet garni tastes of more than its bones.

How: In a bouquet garni; In a Creole or Cajun seasoning

Add alongside: Bay leaf, White pepper

A pinch, and no more. A little heat sharpens the perception of sweetness, which is why cayenne and paprika turn up in scallop dishes across France and the American South. The constraint is the pan: at searing heat, ground chilli scorches in seconds, so it goes into the butter or the sauce.

How: In the finishing butter

• Do not put ground chilli on the scallop before searing; it burns

Heat with okra is near-universal wherever it is eaten, from West African soups through Louisiana gumbo to South Indian dry fries. Okra itself is very mild, so the chilli is supplying the interest rather than balancing anything.

How: In gumbo; In a West African okra soup

Worth recording as the pairing that is really a choice. Both okra and filé thicken a gumbo, by different mechanisms, and Louisiana practice is to use one or the other rather than both — okra in an okra gumbo, filé in a filé gumbo. Using both produces a texture most cooks consider wrong.

How: In gumbo, traditionally as alternatives

• Conventionally not used together

Filé goes into a seafood gumbo off the heat at the very end, and prawns are the classic protein for the filé version rather than the okra one. The powder thickens on contact and turns stringy if boiled, which is why it is stirred in at the table or in the last seconds.

How: Stirred into a finished seafood gumbo off the heat

• Never boiled; filé added to a simmering pot turns ropy

Recorded with a caveat rather than an endorsement. Filé appears in tomato-based Creole gumbos and its sassafras note sits oddly against tomato acidity — the combination works where the tomato is a minor component of a dark roux-based pot and fails where the dish is tomato-led.

How: In a dark roux gumbo containing tomato

• Not a general tomato pairing; the sassafras and the acidity compete