Spices in Persian cooking

Turmeric gives chicken the golden colour that a great many South and Southeast Asian dishes depend on visually, alongside an earthy base note. It is used in small quantities — enough for colour, not enough for bitterness.

Add alongside: Cumin, Coriander seed, Ginger

• More than about a teaspoon in a family-sized dish turns the flavour bitter without adding useful colour.

A long-established pairing across Persian, Spanish and Moroccan cooking. Chicken is mild enough that saffron's honeyed, hay-like aroma is not overwhelmed, and the colour is part of the point.

How: Bloomed in warm water and brushed over roasting chicken; In a paella base

Add alongside: Onion, Green cardamom, Yoghurt

• Heavy competing spicing wastes it. Saffron and a full masala together is money spent for nothing.

Characteristic of Mughlai and Persian chicken dishes, where cardamom's floral coolness lifts a rich yoghurt- or cream-based sauce.

How: Bruised whole pods in a korma or biryani

Add alongside: Saffron, Cinnamon (Ceylon), Yoghurt

• Powerful. Three or four pods season a family dish; a teaspoon of ground cardamom will dominate it.

The masala omelette base. Turmeric bloomed in the pan before the egg goes in adds an earthy depth and deepens the yellow; stirred into raw egg it stays bitter and chalky, which is the commonest way this goes wrong.

Add alongside: Cumin, Chilli powder, Coriander leaf

• Bloom it first. Raw turmeric in a two-minute egg dish tastes raw.

Vanilla is broad and rounded and can read as flat on its own; cardamom is sharp and aromatic and gives it an edge to sit against. A Scandinavian and Middle Eastern combination more than a British one, and one of the few things that genuinely improves vanilla rather than competing with it.

Add alongside: Cassia, Saffron, Honey

A marinade base across South Asia: yoghurt tenderises and carries, turmeric colours and adds an earthy depth, and the acidity keeps the turmeric from tasting raw the way it would in a dry rub.

Add alongside: Ginger, Garlic, Chilli powder

Cardamom cuts through chocolate in a way warm spices do not — it is aromatic and slightly camphorous rather than sweet, so it lifts the bitterness instead of layering onto it. A Scandinavian and Middle Eastern pairing more than a Latin American one.

Add alongside: Cassia, Vanilla, Coffee

Chai, Scandinavian baking and Middle Eastern coffee all reach for this pair. Ginger is sharp and immediate, cardamom is floral and slow, and the two occupy different parts of the same warm register without overlapping — which is why both survive being boiled with milk.

Add alongside: Cassia, Cloves, Black pepper

Paella, Persian chelow, biryani and risotto alla Milanese are all built on it. Rice is neutral and absorbent, so it takes both the colour and the aroma completely, and the visual result is a large part of the point.

How: Bloomed in warm water and stirred through part of the rice for a two-tone finish

Add alongside: Green cardamom, Yoghurt, Cinnamon (Ceylon)

Bruised pods cooked with rice perfume the whole pot and are easily picked out. Standard in biryani, pulao and Persian rice.

Add alongside: Cinnamon (Ceylon), Saffron, Bay leaf

A traditional Persian and Middle Eastern combination in sweets and drinks. Honey's floral complexity meets saffron's honeyed note directly, and the sweetness offsets saffron's bitterness.

Add alongside: Green cardamom, Dried rose petals

A Persian and Mughlai combination running through rice dishes, milk sweets and drinks. Both are floral and expensive, and both are easily lost, so they tend to be used together and without competition.

Add alongside: Dried rose petals, Yoghurt

• Neither survives being buried under a full masala. This is a pairing for restrained dishes.

A standard of Turkish and Levantine grill cooking. Lamb fat is rich and distinctly flavoured, and sumac cuts it with clean acidity at the moment of eating — applied at the table rather than during cooking, which is the part that matters. A wet acid would not survive the grill or would steam the surface.

How: Dusted over grilled lamb after cooking; Shaken over the raw onion served alongside

Add alongside: Onion, Parsley, Black pepper

• Sumac loses colour and brightness under heat, so this is a finishing pairing rather than a marinade one.
• Salted commercial sumac will season the meat as well as sour it, and the salt in the rest of the dish should be reduced accordingly.

Courgette is pale and bland, and turmeric addresses both at once. It appears in Indian and Persian courgette dishes, where the vegetable is a carrier rather than the point.

How: Bloomed in oil at the start of a courgette sabzi; In a mixed vegetable stew

Add alongside: Cumin, Mustard seed, Nigella

• Turmeric is easy to overdo on a mild vegetable, where its bitterness has nothing to hide behind.

The Persian and Iraqi stews built on dried lime are mostly lamb, and the pairing is structural: lamb is fatty and strongly flavoured, and the fruit’s sourness and slight bitterness cut it across a long simmer in a way a fresh acid added at the end cannot.

How: Pierced whole into a khoresh with lamb; In an Iraqi marag with rice

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cinnamon (Ceylon), Black pepper

• Take the limes out if the stew starts to taste bitter rather than sour; the sourness is already in the liquid by then.

Lentils and beans are soft, starchy and flat without an acid, and dried lime is the one Persian and Gulf cooking reaches for. It goes in whole at the start and gives up its sourness gradually over exactly the cooking time pulses need.

How: Whole in a lentil and herb khoresh; In a bean soup with turmeric

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cumin, Parsley

Gulf fish dishes use dried lime for the same reason lemon is used everywhere else, with the difference that it can be cooked into the dish from the start rather than added at the end. The musty note suits robust fish better than delicate ones.

How: Ground into a rub for baked fish; Whole in a fish and rice dish

Add alongside: Turmeric, Coriander seed, Black pepper

The use safflower is actually for. Rice takes up the water-soluble yellow completely and evenly, and because the spice contributes essentially no flavour the dish is coloured without being seasoned — which is the point, and the reason it is worth having.

How: Steeped in warm water and stirred through cooking rice; Added to the cooking liquid at the start

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cinnamon (Ceylon), Cumin

• Steep in water rather than fat: the useful pigments are water-soluble, unlike annatto’s.

Used in stews and braises across the Middle East to give chicken and its sauce a golden colour without altering the flavour. Where saffron would be used for aroma, safflower is used when only the colour is wanted or affordable.

How: Steeped and added to a chicken stew; In the cooking liquid for a braise

Add alongside: Turmeric, Cinnamon (Ceylon), Black pepper

Broths and soups are where a colouring agent with no flavour is most useful, since anything aromatic would have to be accounted for. Safflower gives a clear golden liquid and changes nothing else.

How: Steeped and stirred into a clear broth; In the pot with the vegetables

Add alongside: Turmeric, Black pepper, Parsley

Biryani and pulao are where shahi jeera earns its name. Rice is a blank absorbent base that shows a delicate aromatic clearly, and black cumin was chosen over ordinary cumin in Mughlai cooking precisely because it perfumes without asserting itself the way cumin would.

How: Bloomed in ghee before the rice goes in; Whole in the pot for a biryani

Add alongside: Cassia, Green cardamom, Bay leaf

• A quarter teaspoon does the work of a teaspoon of ordinary cumin, and the slender seed scorches faster.

The standing partnership of braised beef across most of Europe and much of South Asia, and onion is doing two jobs rather than one. It seasons, and it also supplies the sugars that brown alongside the meat and the body that thickens the liquid as it breaks down. A beef stew made without onion is thinner in texture as well as in flavour, which is why the omission is so noticeable.

How: Sliced and browned deeply before the beef goes in; In quantity, cooked to a soft base for a curry or a daube

Add alongside: Thyme, Black pepper, Bay leaf

• Browning onions properly takes far longer than most recipes claim. Rushing it gives sharpness where the dish wanted sweetness.