Old Spice

So a few years back, McCormick, the people who make spices, put a notice in the Sunday paper about how to tell how old your spices were. Apparently I wasn’t the only one still harboring spices she got at her wedding shower 20 years ago.

I don’t know why they didn’t put dates on the bottles, but for a long time they didn’t. So McCormick has a site you can visit to find out the year the spice was produced. You punch in the code on the bottom of your spice and wait a second to find out how ancient that stuff in the bottle is. The weird thing is that it never occurred to me how old these dried spices in my rack were getting until I saw that notice. The fact that my basil was a shade of gray versus green didn’t click. The fact that many of the spices didn’t have even a hint of smell or flavor anymore never gave me pause.

After checking many of the codes to find mortifying years pop up, I tossed about 75% of the spices and bought new. Geesh, I’m lucky I wasn’t poisoning people! But today, years later, the same thing happened. I pulled out some ground mustard in a contemporary looking McCormick bottle. But I knew in my heart I hadn’t bought dried mustard in quite a while.  Why would I, after all?  How often do you use ground mustard? So I punched in the little code on the bottle and waited for the bad news–a dried mustard Russian roulette of sorts. This spice was produced in August of 2000! What the what?  That bottle has been in there for nine years! How could that be? I’m Heloise’s worst nightmare. I rationalized by telling myself that it probably sat in the supermarket for a while before I bought it.  But still. Next, I checked a bottle of cayenne pepper. The verdict? 1997!

Although you can vow to buy fresh spices wherever possible (they taste better), you still need to have some dried ones around since the fresh ones don’t stay fresh long. I guess it makes sense to date dried spices immediately after purchase, but I don’t see me doing that. Best not to cook at all.  Problem solved.