The Complete Cook's Encyclopedia to Spices: An illustrated guide to spices, spice blends and aromatic ingredients, with 100 taste-tingling recipes and 1200 step-by-step photographs Book

This book is very helpful in breaking down ingredients one is likely to encounter in a standard South Asian cookbook. It is not a cookbook, but contains a few pages of recipes anyway. The book does a good job breaking down a masala and other mixes into their components. Particularly helpful are brand name suggestions and serving suggestions. I would like to have seen genus/species information on the plants, more alternative names of ingredients, and a much-expanded glossary. The tiny illustrations are essentially unhelpful. Last complaint: the print is too small for these sextuagenarian eyes. Its chief strength outweighs its drawbacks; when planning a dish requiring a trip to the store, this book really helps compile a proper shopping list.