The Happening of How to be Sage?

You know what makes a great parents' day gift? Feast on Your Life!

Dear Tamar:

I have a cupboard full of old herbs and spices or some new that are unopened—like a whole lot of chili powder. Is there anything I can do to bring these to life or is it destined for compost?

-How to be Sage

Dear How to be Sage,

For a long time I had a word document on my desktop called “In Praise of What Remains.” I don’t know where the phrase came from. I don’t know what I meant to do with it—though at some point I probably did. I must have eventually deleted the document, and with it whatever intentions I’d had.

I still love the phrase, though. I can imagine having wanted to write a New York Times column about the smudges of the past seen around a city’s edges. Or the palimpsesty nature of restaurants, where, if you look from a certain vantage, you can imagine their predecessors and their patrons. Or the rare old-timey dishes one still finds, like the Baked Alaska at Delmonico’s, or She-crab soup at Gage and Tollner. Whatever my original intent, it’s probably fair to say that almost anything I’ve written has been a form of praise of what remains. Traditions and herbs stems and memories and chipped kitchenware—all the literal and figurative vestiges and verdigris.

The phrase came to mind when I read your question, not because of my own predilection for remains, but because, I realize, it describes, to some degree, a universal urge. Of course there are those who profess to hate leftovers. There are lovers of fashion who adamantly choose “new” over “old.” There are many people, like my mother, who genuinely consider a scratch or stain a form of ruin, a kind of degradation. (If you have seen my pots and pans—or my person—you already know that I believe the opposite.) Even among all of those groups, though, whose positions on tarnish is so anathema to me, there is an occasional—and strong!—impulse to preserve. In fact, I would say that seeing—and seeking to maintain—the value of a thing whose worth might not be preserved by market evaluation is as universal a human impulse as the impulse to create.

Might there be some life to this yet? strikes me as a question we have all asked—one of us only having the impulse to preserve flowers by cutting their stems and refreshing their water, another wondering only about furs that belonged to her grandmother, another only about silver. I find myself musing that perhaps this impulse itself is a vestige—a thing that remains—an ancient, inarticulable memory inside of each living thing that once, we were all related. Perhaps it is a case of matter recognizing its own.

I see that all in your question about herbs and spices. You suspect that there’s nothing to do with them, that they’ve turned to dust, that they’re only worthy of compost—if that. And yet, you wonder. You might even hope. I find that, in itself, worthy.

To get practical, though, the first step toward an answer is the first step toward resolving any culinary quandary: to smell and taste. You must open up each of the agéd bottles and jars and inhale, and then wet a finger, insert it, and taste the contents.

The exception to this step is any herbs or spices that remain unopened. They keep longer that way, and there’s no point in speeding up aging. For unopened bottles and jars, I recommend waiting until you plan to cook something that might require the unopened spice in question. With a good deal of time before dinner, open and taste whichever it is optimistically, and if it tastes like nothing, set yours aside, borrow the amount you need from your neighbor, and continue cooking.

For anything in the cupboard that’s been opened, the rule is: 1) Smell. If a) the contents smell like nothing, set them to the side. If b) the contents smell like something, then 2) taste them. The worst outcome of this is small licks of edible dust. The best is finding an ingredient you can use to cook with. Take anything in this category, wipe down its container, wipe the cupboard it lives in, and resolve to make something with it soon.

Now, turn to those containers from 1)a) above. These can be divided into substances that can be used and substances that can’t. I’m sure I’m missing something, but the only use I’ve come up with for odorless, tasteless herbs is clothing dye. The good news is that both rosemary and sage seem to make quite lovely colors. This involves buying some yarn—which can be used for present wrapping if you’re not a knitter—and boiling some water containing your otherwise useless herbs. In some cases, dyeing might benefit from pre-treatment with alum and cream of tartar. Whether you have the time or interest to dye at all, never mind pre-treat, I don’t know. But I do know the feeling of smug satisfaction of turning what might have been discarded into what will, surely be celebrated.

Dear cook, it may be that all the opened herbs and spices are tasteless and that you don’t have time or wherewithal to repurpose them as dye. In that case, perhaps the thing worth saving—the thing whose remains we can praise—is simply the devoted human interest in saving what we can, regardless of evidence pointing to the effort’s futility.