SC - Re: help please

[Christi Redeker]

Stephanie Rudin wrote:

> unfortunately the recipe calls for quite a bit of saffron, 1/2
> teaspoon of threads.  I do have some at home and 1/2 teaspoon is about half of
> the quantity in my little tube.  I'm not really looking for a substitute for the
> flavor of saffron but more for a substitute of an appropriate spice that would
> have been used in a dish like this.   I'll start my list with cinnamon.  I am
> making a practice run on the recipe this weekend and I think that I can just
> split the sauce into small portions and add a different alternate spice to each
> portion and see what kind of flavor I get.

Certainly that would work. Standard spices for this type of dish are
ginger, cinnamon, mace (for the Italian versions) and also coriander
seed, or perhaps cilantro leaf (for the Islamic forms). I did not
respond earlier because I needed a chance to look these up, but here
they are for what it's worth.

My suspicion is that you are buying tiny amounts of saffron for too much
money. The "little tube" you speak of is probably 1/4 gram, which may
have run you as much as $6 in the supermarket. If you go to a Middle
Eastern or Indian market, or buy by mail order, you are more likely to
pay something like 4 or 5 dollars per gram (roughly eight of your
recipe's doses of saffron). You can pay even less for an ounce, in a
little tin box the size of your closed fist. That can run somewhere,
roughly, between thirty and fifty dollars, but that's an awful lot of
saffron, perhaps enough to make your chicken recipe roughly 240 times
over.

Admittedly, the chances are that the author of your cookbook is no more
qualified to redact a Renaissance recipe than many of us here, and
saffron isn't essential. I just didn't want you to be made, by random
circumstance, to feel that saffron was somehow an unimaginable luxury.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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