Ingredients · Spice

Turmeric

Curcuma longa · Zingiberaceae (ginger family)

Turmeric
A ginger-family rhizome, boiled, dried and ground to a powder so yellow it stains everything it touches. In sixteen products here it is doing two jobs: colour, which is most of why it is in a curry powder or a mustard, and a gently bitter, peppery, root-smelling warmth underneath. Curcumin, the pigment, averages about 3% of commercial turmeric powder by weight. Medieval Europe called it Indian saffron, which tells you both what it was used for and what it cost.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partRhizome
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndia
TasteEarthy, warm, gently bitter and peppery, with a musky root smell; it colours everything gold

How to use it

Bloom it in fat at the start of a dish — raw turmeric stirred in at the end tastes dusty. In every curry powder, and in mustard, pickles and rice. Haldi doodh, turmeric stirred into hot milk with black pepper and a little ghee, now sold in cafés as golden milk. Turmeric rice and dal. Use a light hand: too much is bitter, and it will stain a wooden spoon permanently.

With food

Rice and lentils. Cauliflower and potato. Coconut milk. Chicken and fish. Yogurt. Ginger and lemon. Milk and honey.

With spices

Cumin, coriander, fenugreek and chile — the curry-powder frame. Black pepper. Ginger and cinnamon. Mustard seed and curry leaf for a tempering.

With tea

Ginger and lemon in a caffeine-free cup. Masala chai. Rooibos.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. India grows nearly all of the world's turmeric and eats 80% of it; Erode in Tamil Nadu is called the world's largest producer and most important trading centre. Shop notes name no lot origin. One sourcing fact worth knowing: lead chromate, a bright yellow compound, has been found used as an adulterant of turmeric in Bangladesh.

What happened

Turmeric starch grains were found in pottery and in cattle dental calculus at Farmana, a Harappan site, dated 2600 to 2200 BCE. Sanskrit has at least fifty-three names for it, among them haridra, dear to Hari, and jayanti. It spread with Hinduism and Buddhism because the yellow dye colours the robes of monks and priests, and it travelled the Pacific as one of the canoe plants Austronesian voyagers carried island to island. It reached China by about 700 AD, East Africa by 800, West Africa by 1200 and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, which is why Jamaican curry is so yellow. In 1280 Marco Polo described, in the kingdom of Fuju, a fruit resembling saffron that serves the purpose of saffron just as well — often quoted as the first European account of turmeric, though his own nineteenth-century editors doubted it and suggested a gardenia fruit or safflower instead. A story worth telling with a wink.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

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