Few people today think of herbs and spices as emissaries from paradise or to heaven. Yet they're more popular than ever: because herbs and spices do indeed bring other worlds to our table. They mark the foods of different cultures with distinctive flavors, and provide us a taste of Morocco at one meal and Thailand the next. They help us recapture the kind of sensory variety that our ancestors enjoyed in foods before agriculture made eating both more reliable and more monotonous. And because smell is one of the senses through which we experience our immediate surroundings, herbs and spices delight by lending our foods hints reminiscent of the forest, the meadow, the flower garden, the seacoast. They can conjure a familiar part of the natural world in a bite or sip