I just reordered whole nutmeg for the spice shelf. It occurred to me that some of the spices residing in the rack may be too old and need to be replaced. I noticed the task had been somewhat addressed as I found some new and old containers of the same spice. I asked the know-it-all computer program(Google) for the typical life expectancy of spices. 1 to 4 years covered most items in the spice rack. During my investigations one picture and sentence caught my eye. It had to do with the popular brand McCormick. The picture of a bottle with circled text of the origin saying “ If you had a bottle of McCormick spices with Baltimore MD as the origin, then your spices were at least 25 years old. The correct location today is Hunt Valley, MD. What is living in your spice rack? Jerry
Just about everything you can think of. My husband does a lot of cooking and uses herbs and spices in almost all of his dishes.
We have some v-e-r-y old spices at our vacation cottage in upstate NY. I bet there are some McCormick Baltimore spices lurking there!
Wow - I might have the odd McCormick container kicking around too. If I do it would be super old. I do tend to go through my spices fairly often but some are old i.e. Cinnamon. Am thinking that could easily be pushing 10 yrs ....... Will have to have a look.
Most of my spices live in clear bottles I bought at the dollar store or bulk barn. All of the spices are used regularly and are fairly fresh. I did just find an old McCormick bottle of Cumin but it says McCormick Canada. I don't use a lot of cumin, so there's a very good possibility that one could be over 10 years old!
I'm big on cumin and turmeric so I've got them in pint size jars. Same with parsley & chives - they in jumbo containers. Most of the other stuff though is just regular size spice jars. I find that dried spices don't have much flavour so I end up having to use lots of it.
