Pantry · Spices
Mastic
Chios tears — a pine-sweet resin for ice cream, bread, and a glass of water that turns cloudy.
The journey
Mastic is a spice with a route. Chios, Greece. Cooks carried the name because a pot without it tasted like a different country.
The corpus names it in 1 recipes across Turkish cooking. This page keeps the jar next to the hearths that still reach for it.
In the kitchen
In Turkish cooking, Mastic is not decoration. Add it where the recipe puts it: early if it needs fat and time, late if it is perfume.
Taste Mastic before you empty the spoon. Fresh jars smell like themselves; tired ones smell like dust. Buy the smallest amount you will finish.
Healers and the table
Home kitchens treated Mastic as food that changed a meal — appetite, warmth, or a settled stomach — the way families talk about a jar, not a clinic.
Mastic on a table is supper. Traditional talk around it is not medical advice.
Traditional uses are part of the story of this spice. They are not medical advice.