Masaalchi

Arun Kapil is a masaalchi – a spice man. A cook, writer and flavour obsessive whose work sits at the crossroads of food, culture, migration and memory.

Born in Lincolnshire to an Indian dad and a Yorkshire mum and now based in County Cork, Ireland, Arun has spent much of his life navigating the rich and sometimes messy territory between cultures. That journey informs everything he writes, cooks and believes about food: that the best meals tell stories, bridge divides and bring people together around a table, with generosity and nourishment at their heart.

In 2007, armed with little more than a coffee grinder, brown paper bags and a stubborn belief that spices should taste alive, Arun and his wife Olive founded Green Saffron, the award-winning Irish spice company built on direct relationships with partner farms across India. Spices were never discovered; they were inherited.

Before Green Saffron, Arun spent many frenetic, successful and quite frankly mad years in the 1990s and early 2000s in London finding talent, promoting bands, running club nights and working in independent record labels (notably Funky Peace Productions), carrying the same curiosity for flavour, culture and connection into every chapter that followed. The punk sensibility of those years still shapes his approach to food. His cooking and writing are less concerned with rules than with flavour, instinct and the joyful chaos of feeding people well.

A graduate of Ballymaloe Cookery School, Arun is a member of the UK Guild of Food Writers, food editor of the arts journal Ars Notoria and the author of Fresh Spice (published in the US as Wild Spice). His second book, Masaalchi: A Punk Spice Manifesto, celebrates spice not as an ingredient, but as a living thread connecting history, family, place and the everyday act of cooking dinner.

Photographer credit: Clare Keogh