[Sca-cooks] Cariadoc quandry

[david friedman]

Waryn de Ashley wrote:

>     I am working on a few of the recipes from Cariadoc's Miscellany and I
>have come across a couple small snags, namely saunders and galingale.
>Having visited most of the health and/or odd food stores in Columbus, I
>found one who believes "galingale" may be synonymous with gallangal, which
>he does not stock, but can order.  Has anyone else run into this?  Is this
>the same substance and do I really want a pound of it?  Secondly, "saunders"
>has drawn a blank everywhere.  Can anyone advise even what sort of
>ingredient this is?

For galingale, you want an Asian grocery that has Thai customers; it
is a yellow-tan powder, looking rather like ground ginger, called
galangal or galangas or laos powder. Around here (West Kingdom) we
can get it fresh; it looks like a reddish overgrown ginger root. My
lord tells me that dried whole galangle root breaks spice grinders.
Saunders is ground red sandalwood, used as food coloring.

We have a section on ingredients in the beginning of the recipes part
of the Miscellany which contains most of this information, about page
5 or so. Here is the url of the recipes section of the current
edition:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/miscellany_pdf/Misc9recipes.pdf

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook (the Miscellany's other author)