Market

We visited the spice market in Istanbul; it is also called the Egyptian market for historical reasons.

Vivian tried very hard to encourage me to buy some local spices and try in some dishes later during my cookery experiments. Of course I waved off the idea - it is not easy to find enough volunteers to risk their lives.

Gourmets and those with some knowledge on the history of cookery would have heard of the original purpose of spices: to cover the unpleasant smell and taste of those slightly outdated ingredients, and possibly to reduce the chance of food poisoning.

The situation is rather similar to writing up for medical journals: If you have good data from a well conducted trial, you don't need much analysis - if you have a fresh catch of delicious fish, the best "cooking" is to slice it and serve it raw as sashimi. Only if the available piece of meat is old and tough (maybe half rotten), you need to wrap it with flour, deep fry, and season it with salt and garlic and pepper and curry and everything ...

... and only if the study design is shaky and data point to no where you need a lot of statistics.

PS. It is therefore somewhat disappointing to find many pseudo-gourmets in medical research keep demanding for more seasoning of research result. Yes, a bit of spice does make the dish taste better, but too much of it makes us too hot for a cool judgement.