Follow the Spice: Turmeric, the Spice That Has Always Known Where It Was Going

Follow the Spice is a monthly column about one ingredient and the many kitchens it has passed through.

A Spice That Has Always Traveled

Turmeric has been traveling longer than any of us.

Five thousand years ago it was growing in South Asia, already woven into cooking, medicine, ceremony. It moved along trade routes into the Middle East, into Africa, into Southeast Asia. Portuguese traders carried it to West Africa. The spice trade brought it into the Caribbean. And at some point, quietly, it arrived in Mexico, where it now lives in wellness markets in Puerto Vallarta alongside moringa and jamaica, growing in small organic gardens in the Sierra, showing up in chef kitchens that are just beginning to discover what South Asian and African cooks have known for centuries.

Turmeric has always found its way in.

First Haldi

I’ve been following this particular spice my whole life without knowing that’s what I was doing.

I grew up calling it haldi, the Urdu word. My mother used it the way a painter uses a primer coat: before anything else, first haldi. It went into the chicken, into the dal, into the marinade. It wasn’t the flavor. It was what made the flavor possible. Earthy, slightly bitter, warming. The thing running under everything else.

Same Spice, Different Ocean

When I started cooking Korean food, I found it in the broth. When I cooked through West African recipes, it appeared in peanut stew and jollof. When I spent time in the Caribbean, I found it braided into curried goat, into roti, into the cooking of Indian and African descendants who had brought it to the islands from opposite directions centuries apart. Same spice, different ocean, different century, different hand.

I stopped being surprised by it. I started being curious about it.

What Turmeric Does in Each Kitchen

What turmeric does in each kitchen tells you something about that kitchen.

In Pakistani and North Indian cooking, it’s a base note: added early, cooked long, never the thing you taste individually but everything would be wrong without it. In West African cooking it tends to run deeper, earthier, sometimes paired with scotch bonnet and ginger in ways that create a completely different character than the same spice on a different continent. In Southeast Asian cooking it shows up bright and fresh, the whole root grated into curries and rubs and soups, tasting entirely different from the dried powder. In Oaxacan mole it appears rarely but meaningfully, an undercurrent that reads as warmth rather than spice.

In Puerto Vallarta’s wellness community it has arrived as something almost medicinal: golden milk, turmeric shots, anti-inflammatory tonics. Which is accurate, it has been used medicinally for thousands of years, but also only one part of a very long story.

Why I Named My Table After It

I named my supper club after it for exactly this reason.

Planet Haldi is Puerto Vallarta’s first supper club, and haldi is the name that felt true. Not because it’s exotic or because it makes a good brand, but because it is the one ingredient that has traveled every kitchen I have ever cooked in. It crosses the Pakistani and African American traditions I grew up in. It runs through the Korean food I’ve absorbed, the Mexican cooking I’ve built a life around, the Caribbean flavors that keep finding their way onto my menu. It doesn’t belong to any one of those traditions. It belongs to all of them.

That is exactly what this table is trying to be.

Next month: chile. The ingredient that connects Mexican and Pakistani and Korean and Caribbean cooking without anyone having planned it that way. One pepper, many rooms.

Meena Ali is the founder of Planet Haldi Supper Club, Puerto Vallarta’s first intimate supper club experience. Find her table at PlanetHaldiSupperClub.com and on Instagram @PlanetHaldi.SupperClub.