B-Side

Grab your Passport

I ordered twelve matte black tins from Temu. Uniform. Airtight lids. The kind you write on with chalk markers so you can erase and update without buying new labels. I’d seen the look I wanted — a spice cabinet that looks considered instead of accumulated — and I was ready to make it happen. Then I counted my spices. Twelve tins wasn’t going to cover it. Not even close. I had jars of things I’d bought for one recipe, mystery powders in unmarked containers, three different versions of the same spice on three different shelves. The tins were a good idea. The math wasn’t working.

So I did what I always do when a constraint won’t move. I changed the question. Instead of asking how do I fit everything into twelve tins, I asked: what actually deserves a tin?

That question took me somewhere I didn’t expect. I started thinking about Everything But The Bagel seasoning. Sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried garlic, dried onion, salt — five things that became one thing, and that one thing goes on everything. The blend already existed. Someone had already done the combining. And then I thought — every culture has done this. Every cuisine in the world has a signature blend. The masala dabba in an Indian kitchen. Chinese five spice. Za’atar in the Middle East. Herbes de Provence in France. Garam masala. Berbere. Ras el hanout. These aren’t random combinations. They’re centuries of cooking distilled into proportions that work. The flavor backbone of an entire culture’s cuisine, pre-combined, ready to go. One tin. Dozens of dishes.

That realization changed how I was thinking about the cabinet entirely. Once I started mapping the regional blends, something else jumped out. The same spices kept showing up across continents that had never talked to each other. Cumin. Indian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, North African — it’s in all of them. Coriander. Same story. Cinnamon shows up in savory cooking across the Middle East, India, and Mexico in ways most Western cooks don’t expect. Ginger spans Asian and Middle Eastern cooking in parallel traditions. Garlic, in some form, is in almost everything. These aren’t coincidences. They’re the spices that do the most work. The ones that survived in every kitchen because they earn their place every time.

So I had two layers now. The regional blends — each one a tin that unlocks an entire cuisine. And the foundational spices that run underneath all of them, the ones worth having in their pure form because they show up everywhere and sometimes you need them alone.

I stopped trying to transfer every spice I owned and started building from the question: if I could only keep twelve, which ones would give me the most range? A few regional blends — za’atar, garam masala, Chinese five spice, a good chili blend. These are tins that unlock whole cuisines without requiring ten individual jars behind them. Then the foundational spices that no blend fully covers on its own. Cumin. Coriander. Cinnamon. Ginger. Smoked paprika. Turmeric. The ones that cross continents and show up in everything from a weeknight curry to a Sunday braise.

Twelve tins. Maximum range. Nothing that only does one job. The constraint I’d been frustrated by turned out to be the editing tool I needed. I wasn’t trying to fit everything in. I was trying to figure out what was actually worth keeping. Those are very different problems — and the second one has a much better answer.

The chalk markers work exactly as advertised. The lids are labeled. Everything has a place and a purpose. When I open the cabinet I don’t see chaos — I see a decision that got made once and holds every time I cook.

The twelve tins didn’t just organize my spices. They taught me that every great cuisine already solved the flavor combination problem centuries ago. I just had to stop collecting and start curating. Everything But The Bagel showed me it was possible. The rest of the world showed me it had already been done.

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