[Sca-cooks] Turmeric

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Caointiarn wrote:
>     Adding from Andrew Dalby's _Dangerous Spices_:

Ya beat me to it...

(snippety-doo-da)
>...To the west, in countries where saffron
>was traditionally available, turmeric had few attractions in ancient &
>medieval times, because the cost of transportation made it as expensive
>as its rival.  So early western writers know little of turmeric.

And, of course, turmeric lacks the ineffable flavor of saffron. So it 
would have been as expensive as saffron, but added little flavor and 
only color, therefore not worth the cost.

OOP (but then, again, maybe not), but definitely not OT:
When i lived in Indonesia, turmeric was added to most forms of jamu - 
"herbal medicine". Used in large quantities, turmeric, in both fresh 
and dried from, is bitter, as are many medicinals (in Indonesia few 
are actually herbs and most are roots, rhizomes, barks, seeds, etc.). 
jamu is often drunk sweetened.

Jamu ladies used to come down our gang (not pronounced with a broad 
"a", but more like "ah") - a gang is a very narrow "street" that's 
barely wide enough for a betchak (pedi-cab). They had something like 
the old wire carriers for glass milk bottles. They'd have jamu 
already mixed up in glass bottles. The customer would bring out a cup 
from her kitchen. I gathered most was for general health, beauty, or 
fertility. My neighbor often used to drink buy a cup. One day one of 
her daughters, a rather young one, convinced her mom to get some for 
her - she'd apparently never had any before - and she reacted 
strongly to the bitter character of the jamu. It was good for a (not 
cruel) laugh from her mom and the jamu lady. I never bought any from 
a jamu lady, but i did buy packets of powdered jamu from shops... I 
still have some, although i'm sure that after 22 years it's no longer 
efficacious.

I use herbal medicine on myself. Once i gave some to a Balinese 
friend of mine living in the US. It had goldenseal in it - a very 
yellow, very bitter root indigenous to the US. He approved of it, 
since it tasted like Indonesian jamu.

Anahita