A Dish of Spices was Huysmans' first, self-published collection of writings. These twenty "bagatelles" include prose-poems inspired by Baudelaire; evocations of the forgotten byways of Paris; sketches of a night-time city peopled by the "nymphs of the gutter"; faux-antique ballads; and illuminated, symbolist reveries.

What unites this miscellany is the allure of decay, the charm of distaste and disappointment, and, above all, Huysmans' unparalleled style--studded as it is with the baroque and barbarous, the arcane and archaic.