Lifestyle
Where Do Your Spices Come From?
In 2012, Ethan Frisch was working for a development organization in Afghanistan when he saw a vendor selling wild cumin at a local market.
“I thought I knew my way around spices,” said Mr. Frisch, 38, recalling his experience at the market in Badakhshan Province. “But I had never tasted anything like this.”
Mr. Frisch had worked as a cook in London, where he attended graduate school for international development, and in New York, including time at Tabla, the fine-dining Indian restaurant by the chef Floyd Cardoz and the restaurateur Danny Meyer. He started bringing bags of cumin home to New York to share with friends in the restaurant industry, garnering rave reviews with each taste. He realized that there was a market for spices sourced directly from farmers.
In 2016, he started Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company, with his friend Ori Zohar. The two had collaborated years earlier on Guerrilla Ice Cream, a roving ice cream cart that served flavors inspired by political and activist movements. Mr. Zohar came from a business background, working in marketing and advertising, and helped found a tech start-up that shut down in 2017.
Mr. Frisch put his life savings — about $20,000 — into starting the business. He ran it out of his one-bedroom apartment in Queens, cold-calling restaurants and showing up to kitchens with a backpack full of spices to give chefs a taste. He built up a base of spice suppliers, using skills and connections he developed while working with the Aga Khan Foundation on rural infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, and doing logistics for Doctors Without Borders in Jordan.
For years, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar flew overseas to stock up on inventory, returning with duffel bags full of cardamom, cumin, nutmeg and more. They would bring back enough spices to “fund the cost of the trip,” Mr. Frisch said. (“I had some funny conversations with the customs officers,” he added.)
In 2019, Burlap & Barrel embarked on its first chef collaboration: a line of masala spice blends with Mr. Cardoz.
After Mr. Cardoz died from Covid-19 in March 2020, his wife, Barkha Cardoz, continued to work with Burlap & Barrel, releasing the blends in October 2020, in honor of what would have been Mr. Cardoz’s 60th birthday. The company received more than a thousand orders that day — its biggest day of sales at that time.
The founders realized that there was “a way to connect a home-cook audience to a chef, through a spice blend,” Mr. Frisch said, and collaborations became a core part of their business. Amid the early months of the pandemic, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar saw an increase in orders as more people made their meals at home.
In April 2023, another breakthrough moment came when they appeared on the reality TV show “Shark Tank.”
“It almost doesn’t even taste like conventional cinnamon — I mean, it’s, like, incomparable,” Gwyneth Paltrow, a guest “Shark,” said after trying the brand’s Royal Cinnamon variety from Vietnam.
Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar didn’t end up with a deal, but they gained publicity and a surge of new customers. In 2024, the company did about $9 million in sales, according to Mr. Frisch.
Over the years, they have collaborated with chefs including Marc Murphy; Ashleigh Shanti; Sohla and Ham El-Waylly, who are New York Times contributors; and the fashion designer and cookbook author Peter Som. Recently, they teamed up with Martha Stewart on a poultry seasoning, and with Jane Goodall on jars of honey from the Miombo woodlands of Tanzania.
Now, more than eight years later, what began as a scrappy passion project is a growing brand and social enterprise with big-name collaborations, home-cook devotees, celebrity fans and cameos in the background of the FX show “The Bear.”
The chefs Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, founders of Honeysuckle Provisions, an Afrocentric grocery and cafe in West Philadelphia that was named one of Eater’s best new restaurants of 2023, collaborated with Burlap & Barrel. They wanted to work with them, Mr. Tate said, both because of the sheer flavor of the spices, and because of their ethical and intentional approach to working with farmers.
“They make sure that the communities that they are sourcing from are respected — not just through the ingredients that are being extracted and that they’re exporting to make these profits, but they’re also redistributing that wealth to the community,” Mr. Tate said.
At Hani’s Bakery and Cafe in Lower Manhattan — a new spot from Miro Uskokovic, the former Gramercy Tavern pastry chef, and his wife, Shilpa Uskokovic, an editor at Bon Appétit — Burlap & Barrel’s Royal Cinnamon is used in their popular malted cinnamon buns.
The cinnamon “is the only one we’ve found that offers the right combination of strength and florality to stand up to all that cream cheese and butter,” Mr. Uskokovic wrote in an email.
“As a chef, the one thing that we have always lacked is any kind of traceability or any kind of transparency in spices, in herbs,” said Rick Bayless, the celebrated Chicago chef and restaurateur who specializes in Mexican cuisine. “When I found Burlap & Barrel, I wanted to get to know these guys and see what they were doing, because they were telling stories about who grew this cumin and who grew these peppercorns.”
Transparency and storytelling is at the heart of the business. As what’s known as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that focuses on contributing to a social good — Burlap & Barrel seeks “to connect smallholder farmers to high-value markets,” said Mr. Zohar, 39.
“Our business works because we’re paying the farmers more, which then allows the farmers to not just grow the spices, but they clean the spices, they dry the spices, they grind the spices, they prepare them for export,” he said.
The company now consists of 20 people, most of whom are contractors, and works with farmers in about 30 countries including Vietnam, Turkey and Guatemala, often helping with the logistics of the export process. The founders visit farms to meet the farmers and see firsthand the practices and products of each potential partner.
Shadel Nyack Compton, the owner and managing director of Belmont Estate, a family farm and tourist destination in Grenada, works with Burlap & Barrel to sell nutmeg and bay leaves. The farm — whose main crop is cocoa — has been in her family for 80 years.
In 2021, Ms. Nyack Compton found Burlap & Barrel online. She was looking for new business and wanted to work with a company that was interested in developing a relationship with farmers. “We want our story to be told,” she said.
“Spices represent a lot to a lot of different people,” Mr. Frisch said. “A spice jar becomes a way to tell a story, to evoke a memory, to teach about a culture or a cuisine, to give someone the opportunity to do their own cooking in a different way.”
Burlap & Barrel is unique, Ms. Nyack Compton said, because the company works to “establish this kind of equitable, transparent supply chain,” an approach she said is more often seen in the cocoa and chocolate space. With spices, she said, “it’s very novel.”
Jane Austen ready to party for her 250th birthday at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore.
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In her six completed novels, Jane Austen excelled at love stories: Elinor and Edward, Lizzie and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, Anne and Wentworth, heck even Catherine and Tilney. As her fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, they’d like you to know it’s a mistake to simply dismiss her work as light, frothy romances. It’s full of intricate plots, class satire and biting wit, along with all the timeless drama of human foibles, frailties and resolve.
Tessa Harings (left) learns English country dance at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
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“The basic reason why Austen is still popular today is because all of her characters are people we know in the world,” says Tessa Harings. She’s a high school teacher from Phoenix and one of the more than 900 attendees at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, held in Baltimore this year. “We all know of someone who’s shy and aloof and needs to be brought into the crowd. We all know someone who’s quite witty, naturally. We all know someone who is a bit silly and always looking for attention.”
Colin Firth, properly memed from the 1995 BBC miniseries. His Darcy is a big favorite with the JASNA crowd.
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Shy and aloof? That could be Darcy. Naturally witty? Lizzie Bennet. Silly and looking for attention? Take your pick: baby sister Lydia or maybe the haughty Caroline Bingley or the unctuous Mr. Collins, all creations from what might be Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Her characters have permeated modern pop culture, even among people who’ve never opened her books. Harings says that’s one reason her students want to read these Regency-era novels. They want to understand the jokes in all those short videos and memes, like Mr. Collins making awkward dinner conversation.
He wants a wife, he compliments the potatoes. In Mr. Collin’s head, it makes sense.
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Her students enjoy the tension between Darcy and Lizzie: he’s very rich, so besotted by her against his will that he can hardly dance, glower and talk at the same time. Lizzie initially cannot stand him and refuses his first proposal, as shown in this soggy scene from the 2005 movie adaptation.
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Harings says Lizzie is her favorite Austen character. “She has such sharp, sarcastic wit and she’s so self-confident, despite the fact that she’s constantly being put down by the people around her for her supposedly lower position in life as the slightly less pretty of the mother’s two oldest daughters.”
Milliner Dannielle Perry (right) and her assistant Mia Berg of Timely Tresses in their Regency-era togs.
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“When I was a teenager, I loved Lizzie and I wanted to be Lizzie,” says milliner Dannielle Perry of Oxford, N.C. She’s read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books and she loves how they change for her as she’s gotten older. She’s now more sympathetic toward Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie’s mom: a woman desperate to get her five daughters married, least they be penniless since they can’t inherit their father’s estate. “I feel sorry for her in a way I never did before,” Perry says. “She is sort of silly, but she’s lived with a man for 20 years who largely dismisses her and thinks she’s frivolous.”
Doctoral student Katie Yu, of Dallas, has this analysis of Mrs. Bennett and her husband, who seems mentally checked-out at best: “He’s not a great father. He’s always putting his wife down in front of his daughters, he’s putting his daughters down in front of his daughters.” Yu says Mr. Bennet married Mrs. Bennet because she was pretty, treats her as an inferior, and often ignores her. This is why Mrs. Bennet goes on about her nerves and “has the vapors” whenever she’s stressed: she’s trying to get his attention.
“But,” says Tessa Harings, “she still has a level of street smarts that she has to get her daughters married. And yes, she’s sincerely concerned about their future … she actually, of the two of them, is the more concerned and involved parent.”
Tom Tumbusch explains 19th century dance moves to JASNA members.
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Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch, of Cincinnati, says men can learn a lot from Austen. “Modern men struggle to find good role models,” he says. “Reading Austen’s works can help them see the places where men can go wrong.” Mr. Bennet, for example. Or the libertine George Wickham who lies and runs off with the flighty Bennet sister, Lydia. Or maybe Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility, who leads Marianne Dashwood on, ghosts her and is later revealed to have abandoned an unmarried woman who gave birth to his child.
Oh, Marianne, he’s so not worth it!
On the other hand, Tumbusch says Jane Austen’s heroes can show men “how to be masculine in a constructive way,” like owning mistakes, taking responsibility and treating women with respect. It’s not just Darcy, who works behind the scenes getting Wickham to marry Lydia, it’s also Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Tombusch says Wentworth does what men of his station should: he uses his own resources to help someone less fortunate, the poor, partially disabled widow Mrs. Smith. And in Sense and Sensibility, there’s the steadfast Col. Brandon. Hoping to make Willoughby’s rejection of Marianne less devastating to her, he exposes the libertine’s behavior. He rides hours to retrieve her mother when Marianne is near death. He patiently, oh-so-patiently, waits for her young, broken heart to mend.
All this while wearing a flannel waistcoat because he’s on the “wrong side of five and thirty” and needs to keep those ancient bones warm.
Before he rocked worlds as Snape, Alan Rickman made the earth move for viewers of the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
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JASNA president Mary Mintz, of McLean, Va., says though Jane Austen is largely known for her marriage plots, it’s really the human need for connection that grounds her stories. “She writes about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings or among siblings, she writes about relationships with friends. And she is really insightful. When you combine that with her knowledge of human psychology, it’s a great formula for success.”
Mintz is fascinated by Emma’s pivotal character, Miss Bates. She’s a spinster and member of the gentry class who lives with her elderly mother on an extremely limited income. She’s also a nervous chatterbox, “someone who can’t stop talking,” says Mintz. “I’ve known a lot of Misses Bates in my lifetime… people who seem insecure and feel as though they have to fill up silence, but are really good-hearted people.”
When Emma is rude to Miss Bates, she’s firmly chastised by her neighbor, Mr. Knightley. It becomes a turn-around moment in the story. Humbled, Emma apologizes. She also sees how she’s been wrong to meddle in the love life of Harriet Smith, a pretty teenager whose parents are unknown.
Mintz says there’s an interesting link between Bates and Harriet, if you put two and two together.
“In Jane Austen’s actual life, mothers and daughters often share the same name,” she explains. That pattern can be seen in many of her novels. “We don’t know who Harriet Smith’s natural mother is, but at one point Miss Bates is referred to as ‘Hetty,’ which could be a diminutive for ‘Harriet.’ “
That’s the first clue. The second clue occurs during that scene where Knightley sets Emma right. He says of Miss Bates, “she has sunk from the comforts she was born to.” He then draws a contrast between the spinster’s current station and her former one: “You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour…”
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Emma’s father is quite wealthy, so why would Miss Bates’ notice have once been so esteemed? Mary Mintz asks, “Is because she had a child out of wedlock?”
And could that child be… Harriet Smith?
The mind: it boggles! A Jane Austen Easter egg! It’s just one example of how multi-dimensional her novels are and why so many people will continue loving, analyzing and discussing her work well into the next 250 years.
Jacob Fenston and Danny Hensel edited and produced this report.
Rob Reiner And Wife Michele
Throats Slit By Family Member
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Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had their throats slit by a family member, possibly after an argument inside their Los Angeles home, leading to their tragic deaths … TMZ has learned
It’s unclear what exactly triggered the violence, which went down Sunday afternoon in Brentwood … but we’re told one of Rob’s daughters found her parents dead and told police a family member had killed them. PEOPLE reports the couple’s son, Nick, is being questioned in connection with the murders.
Our sources also say the daughter told police the family member “should be a suspect” because they’re “dangerous.”
TMZ broke the story … Rob and Michele suffered lacerations consistent with knife wounds and LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division is investigating the case.
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Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM … though it doesn’t provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence conceals the name of a major U.S. city in consecutive letters. As a hint, the answer’s state also appears in the sentence. Every answer has at least six letters. (Ex. The Kentucky bodybuilders will be flexing tonight. –> LEXINGTON)
1. Space enthusiasts in Oregon support landing on Mars.
2. Contact your insurance branch or agent in Alaska.
3. The Ohio company has a sale from today to next Sunday.
4. The Colorado trial ended in a sudden verdict.
5. Fans voted the Virginia tennis matches a peak experience.
6. I bought a shamrock for decorating my house in Illinois.
7. All the Connecticut things they knew have now changed.
8. Can you help a software developer in Texas?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Mike Reiss, who’s a showrunner, writer, and producer for “The Simpsons.” Think of a famous living singer. The last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last name spell a bird. Change the first letter of the singer’s first name. Then the first three letters of that first name and the last five letters of his last name together spell another bird. What singer is this?
Challenge answer
Placido Domingo
Winner
Brock Hammill of Corvallis, Montana.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Robert Flood, of Allen, Texas. Name a famous female singer of the past (five letters in the first name, seven letters in the last name). Remove the last letter of her first name and you can rearrange all the remaining letters to name the capital of a country (six letters) and a food product that its nation is famous for (five letters).
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
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