The spice cupboard

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

I opened my grandmother's spice cupboard to look for cinnamon and discovered a small, disorderly archive. Jars crowded together in several generations of packaging. Some labels had faded to pale rectangles; others carried her handwriting, slanting uphill as though impatient to reach the lid. A tin at the back released a sharp, warm smell that seemed to arrive before I had properly opened it.

She knew where everything belonged. My attempt to organise the shelf by size was received with the patient alarm usually reserved for a child approaching a vase. The cumin was not lost behind the flour; it was where her hand expected it. She moved three jars without looking and produced the cinnamon. Then she asked me to smell it before adding any. I had been treating the ingredients as words in a recipe. For her, they were separate voices, each capable of speaking too loudly.

We cooked without measuring every spoonful. She tasted, paused and added a little more. I began to notice the difference between the dry powder in the jar and the scent rising from the pan. When I wrote down the recipe later, I left spaces beside the quantities. They were not gaps in her knowledge. They were reminders of something my notebook could name but could not yet judge.

Refer to the whole of Source A. Analyse how the writer uses language to convey the grandmother’s familiarity with her ingredients. Explain the effects of specific words, phrases and language choices, using evidence from the passage.