Toda,

se, that's a lovely e inside that you just quoted from poland as well. Like that. There's a famous douglas adams qot i think about, imagine a puddle of water. And one day the puddle of water wakes up. And this is, of course, also an anthropocentric view of a puddle of water, because puddles of water can't think. But the puddle of water decides. Red hay, you know, this universe must be made for me, because everything is such a perfect fit, and it keeps sinking that till gradually one day it is no longer there, you know. So now, tell me a bit about spices. We've basically, and this is obviously fortuitous, i don't think it is that e, you know, that there was any sense, when these defence mechanisms were evolving, that they will actually help r, you know, spread the stuff about. But before the hva ais fo, i found it, thought of, you know, walking trees in an atmosphere with less oxygen, so utterly delightful. Ye, i know.

A no y have. So you have a lot of rings, you have the ends. So that's

the except the ends are there along with hobits and humans. And that obviously not possible as one or the other exactly. And i think i prefer the warking trees. So tell me a bit about spices. Now, you've elaborated on spices in great detail, and to be honest, i am going to re read this and sort of take my time to process it. And, you know, like, i cook a little bit, but my cooking is all the kind of cooking that you would really frown upon. It is basically, i'll have a recipe which i've mucked up, and something has worked for me in the past and is very functional. And i don't a kind of think about it, but, you know, after i red ou book ive figured that, listen, this is like, so fascinating, and i've got to kind of play around a bit. Now, you point out at, you know, you divide spices into four broad buckets, amming. Obviously there are. There's a much subtler gradation, which you also describe. But tell me a bit about these four buckets, and tell me how we should think about spices in general, like, especially all the people who are in india right now, and we cook here, and we have kitchens, and we have access to all these spices, yes. How should we think about them?

So so far as i think you no a, let me start by saying that, first of ous, there's no such thing as the wrong way to cook, or wrong way too tch cooking. I think that's rule number zero, right? Is that you cook, it feeds you. You like it. You know? That's basically great. That's it, right? So i think the first and foremost thing is to get this whole sense of superiority about yes, it's actualy. It's perfectly fine to learn from recipes and cook. Everyone has their own mental bottle, if you so, getting two spices, right? So spices are actually quite fascinating becaue. They're rather central to indian cooking, right? And there's also this oherisis a gentleman called ganish baggler, who's ethic inda triplity, and i read the stock as he's written a paper on how a lot of traditional signs about how flavors combine in the west, right? Is predicated on what we call sharing flavored molecules, right? So the things that share flavored molecules likey. If something has three flavor molecules, and tis one has four flavor molecules, and two of them are common, then the general theory is that if you combine both of them together, it will taste better, because they'll kind of u harmoniously go together. So ther so they've worked out a lot of these e combinations, which is why you kind of have this sir. There's a a steak and butter sauce sort of thing, because there's some molecules that are similar. You can have cranberry sauce and ligorberry sauce and beat balls corsombir. So you have these standard combinations in the est, which are all based on this idea now, what genish backler actually says is that southeast asian and southasian cooking actually takes a fundamentall opposite approach. A lot of our cooking actually works by taking things that you would not believe should work together by that original sort of western idea, and they work together fantastically, right? And that thinking is now going back into the west. So there is now e's actualy. There'sa bisa book called art of flavor ati. It as actully written by a perfumer, which, again, goes back to the fact that a lot of taste, a lot of flavor, is actually a robarits, a guy who makes perfumes, and a chef, and they've kind of got together and tried to concoct these completely new, contrasting combinations. I'll give you one odd example before we get to spices.