When we moved to Prague, the first thing I unpacked was the spice box.
Not because we needed it immediately, but because a kitchen without it didn't feel like ours. Twelve small tins of the everyday staples — cumin, coriander, turmeric, mustard seed, cardamom, cloves — arranged in a circle the way my mother arranged hers, the way her mother did before that. The box was the first thing that made this flat feel like home.
The second thing was figuring out where to replace them.
What you can find without looking hard
Prague has surprised us here. The big supermarkets — Albert, Billa, Kaufland — stock the basics: cumin seeds, ground coriander, paprika (in about fifteen varieties), chilli powder. Turmeric has become fashionable enough that most shops carry it in the health food aisle alongside matcha and spirulina. Not ideal company for a spice that has been a kitchen staple for four thousand years, but we take it.
Fresh ginger and garlic are everywhere and cheap. Thai basil occasionally appears at the Vietnamese markets scattered through the city — Sapa in Zličín is the one we return to most, a covered market that feels genuinely like another world. If you need galangal, kaffir lime leaves, or banana blossoms, that is where you go.
Rohlik and Košík, the two big grocery delivery services, cover the everyday shopping well. Basmati rice in quantity, coconut milk, whole spices. We have the shopping list on each recipe here linked directly to both — it saves twenty minutes per cook.
Where it gets harder
Hing (asafoetida) took two months to find. The small, powerful tin of fermented resin that gives dal and certain South Indian dishes their particular depth. Eventually we located it at an Indian grocery near Náměstí Míru — a small shop that also stocks fresh curry leaves, dried Kashmiri chillies, and urad dal, among other things I had started to assume I would need to bring back from trips to London.
Fresh curry leaves remain a challenge. Dried ones lose too much in translation; the real thing has a fragrance that cannot be preserved. We grow a pot on the kitchen windowsill now. It survives Prague winters indoors, just barely.
Mustard oil is another one. The bright, pungent oil used in Bengali cooking has a heat that vegetable oil cannot replicate. It is not in any Czech supermarket we have found. We order it online and keep a bottle in reserve.
Substitutions that actually work
Some substitutions are happy accidents. Czech smetana — the thick, slightly soured cream — is not the same as Indian fresh cream but it behaves beautifully in butter chicken and korma. The fat content is right, and the slight acidity balances the richness in a way that standard whipping cream does not.
Czech butter is excellent. We use a lot of it.
For dried red chillies, the smoked Spanish paprika that Czech shops carry works well in slow-cooked dishes where the chilli is contributing depth more than immediate heat. Dried Kashmiri chillies from the Indian shop produce a better result when you can get them, but smoked paprika is a respectable weeknight substitute.
What the kitchen looks like now
Eighteen months in, the pantry has settled into its own logic. A shelf of Czech staples — good bread flour, smetana, butter, the excellent local honey — alongside the Indian spice box, three varieties of dal, a sack of basmati. The pressure cooker lives on the counter because we use it twice a week. The tava for making roti sits beside the Czech cast-iron pan we picked up for nothing at a market in Vinohrady.
Two kitchens worth of logic, living in the same small space. It works better than it has any right to.