The Ultimate Guide to Kaycee Corporation

We have watched a great many visitors buy the wrong bark.

It is always the bark.

Mattancherry has been trading spice for six hundred years and it is still sold here the old way: by grade, by origin, and by a name you will not find on the label at home. Most of what goes wrong for a visitor is not being cheated. It is buying the right-sounding thing and going home with a different one.

The cinnamon problem

If you learn one thing before you spend anything, learn this. Most of the world's cinnamon is cassia — a different bark, from a different tree, and the thing inside almost every supermarket jar.

Ceylon cinnamon, the real one, is pale tan and brittle, and rolls into many thin papery layers like a cigar. You can crumble it between your fingers. It tastes sweet and light.

Cassia is one thick slab that curls in from both edges, darker and redder, and hard. It tastes hot, with a bite at the end.

Neither is a fake. Cassia is a real spice and the better one in some dishes. But they are not the same thing and they do not cost the same, so know which is in your hand.

Kaycee stocks Sri Lankan Ceylon alongside Vietnamese rolled cassia, Vietnamese split cassia and Indian broken cassia. Ask to see all four together. Once you have looked at them side by side you will never mix them up again, anywhere.

Cashews are graded by number

W180, W240, W320. The W means white whole kernels; the number is roughly how many nuts make up a pound. So W180 is the biggest and the dearest, W320 the smallest of the three.

Below the wholes come splits, bits, and cashews with the skin still on. Same nut, lower price. For anything you will grind, cook into a gravy, or eat by the handful on a train, bits do the same work for less money. Buy wholes only when the nut is going to be seen.

Cardamom is graded by the millimetre

8mm bold, 7mm bold, 6mm bold. That is pod length, and longer pods are graded up and cost more. What you actually cook with is the seed inside, and broken pods and loose seeds carry the same seed for less. Buy bold when the whole pod goes into a biryani and will be seen; buy broken or seeds when it is going to be ground.

Green cardamom and black cardamom are not substitutes for each other. Green is the sweet, floral one, for tea and payasam and biryani. Black is large, wrinkled, dark brown and smoky, and belongs in slow gravies. A recipe that says cardamom with nothing after it means green.

Pepper: bold only means big

Black pepper is sold as bold or regular. Bold is the larger, denser berry, and dense is what you want — density is a rough proxy for oil.

White pepper is the same berry with its skin removed: milder, earthier, and the one for pale sauces where black flecks would show. Green is the same berry picked unripe.

Two things on that shelf labelled pepper are not pepper at all — pink pepper and Sichuan pepper come from unrelated plants entirely. Long pepper, pippali, is a genuine relative, but it is a small catkin rather than a berry, and it is hotter and sweeter than black.

The names you will actually hear

Ask by the Malayalam name and the conversation gets a great deal shorter.

• Jeeragam — cumin
• Karinjeeragam, kalonji — nigella seed
• Kaatujeeragam — black caraway, sold as shahi jeera further north
• Uluva — fenugreek seed
• Kasoori methi — dried fenugreek leaf
• Kaayam — asafoetida, hing
• Thakkolam — star anise
• Pippali, thippali — long pepper
• Indhuppu — rock salt
• Kalpasi — black stone flower, the lichen in a Chettinad masala

Cloves and nutmeg

Cloves are sold by origin — Kerala, Madagascar — and as a grade called lalpari. Whichever you are shown, the test is the same: a good clove is oily. Press one with a thumbnail. It should mark, and it should smell before you have finished pressing. Pale, dry, shrivelled cloves have lost their oil and it does not come back.

Nutmeg comes with the shell, without the shell, and as mace — the red lacy webbing that grows around the nut, sold separately and worth a small bag on its own. The shell keeps the nut fresher for longer; without it is convenience. Either way buy whole and grate as you go, because ground nutmeg goes flat within months.

What survives the flight home

Whole beats ground, every time. Ground spice starts losing its oils the day it is milled. Whole cardamom, pepper, cloves and nutmeg keep a year or more in a closed jar out of the sun.

Buy less than you want to. Spice is light and cheap by the kilo, and it is very easy to fly home with a kilo of something you use a teaspoon of.

Check what your own country lets in before you shop, not after. The rules differ and they change, and seeds, unroasted nuts and whole plant material are where they bite. It is a five-minute look at your own government's site.

Where to go

Kaycee Corporation is in Mattancherry and sells its retail spice line as Heirloom Spices. Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5.30pm. Shut on Sundays.

They do not publish prices, so ask — and ask what the grade is, and ask to see two grades next to each other. That last one is the whole reason to buy spice where it is traded instead of where it is packaged.

The warehouses along Bazaar Road are what all of this grew out of; they had private jetties at the back for pepper and grain. Walk it before or after. It makes more sense of the shop.

We will be on the sacks by the door, and we will not be moving for you.