Combining travelogue and recipes, this book tells the story of how Chris and Carolyn Caldicott followed the trails of the early spice merchants on their search for authentic spice recipes. As they travel through the Eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Africa and the Americas, they explain how indigenous spices were traded and how foreign spices arrived, and they explore the effect the spices have had on the local cuisines, supplying the recipes for the dishes they discovered along the way. Among their adventures are an encounter with an unscrupulous saffron-dealer in the souk in Aswan, an elephant hike through the jungles of south west Nepal, enrolment at the Thai Cooking School at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and a trek across the Andes to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas.