Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean by Ana Sortun is a love letter to your taste buds. And where the addition of a single plant’s dried fruit, seeds or twigs awakens your keener sense of taste, you won’t be satiated until you know spices like your household salt and pepper (salt by the way, Sortun says, is quite an important seasoning and its misuse leads to bland dishes!). They’re that compelling, and yet mysterious. So, if spice is your mentor, let the author be your guide into a fascinating world of taste!
No doubt the two most curious taste-enriching additions to raw materials for the cook, or even raw foodist, are sauces and spices. As kinds of flavorings they seem bewilderingly complex, and you wonder whether any book short of an encyclopedia would offer enough information to make their study worthwhile. You need an introduction, perhaps a taste test. That’s where Sortun’s advice is golden because for years she has worked with Mediterranean and Indian spices as the complex notes in her unique recipes. Each chapter begins with a short primer on three spices and the foods they flavor best. Once you become familiar with the spices, three at a time, the world of spices will be in your hands.
Just for this reason I’ve made notes to myself. They say: take three of your favorite spices and get intimate with the foods they favor. Find out all you can—what they look like, where they grow and what they flavor best, what they do that’s good for your body. I’m enticed by the scented air in South Asian groceries near the spice aisle, so my favorites are cardamom, cinnamon and coriander. And I wonder, do these go together in recipes, do they flavor drinks, desserts, root vegetables (just a hunch)—what about leafy ones, grains? And which other spices are their best complements? These questions and more were the healthy result of following my muse and reading Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean by Ana Sortun. Her book is for the home cook whose experience with spice may be ordinary to date but may suddenly evolve after dreaming in this recipe book of exotic spiced dried fruits, coffees, squash terrines, and citrus studded with cardamom or cinnamon! Just imagine how to flatter a favorite dish with the most divine seasonings, with a few ground spices. What you need to do is acquire a taste for the pairings of food and select spice.
Cardamom is best with oranges, lemons or limes, custards, with nuts, puddings, rice, mango! and gets its fame in gingerbread, chocolate cake, and anything vanilla. Indian vegetarian cooking features this spice in many milk-based sweets and drinks. Veganized, these recipes will marry well with cardamom, and with rose water and saffron really make royal treats. (See Ani Phyo’s Raw Food Asia, reviewed recently.)
Cinnamon blends well into fruits like apples and bananas, citrus, and vegetables, like artichokes and squash. Author Sortun describes cinnamon in Mexican, North African and Greek dishes that also feature favorites like chocolate, saffron, and garlic. Her gourmet recipes feature cinnamon with tomato, a distinctive Middle Eastern touch and in her Black Walnut Baklava with nutmeg and sugar, soaked in a syrup of honey modified by cinnamon, cloves and lemon juice.
Because of the mild and spreading taste of coriander, it’s a leveler, it can correct the seasoning of a heavy hand. Its flavor complements lentils, beans, baked sweets, mushrooms, potatoes, apples and blends well with cumin and cardamom; it enhances coconut, tomato and ginger. Ana Sortun suggests coriander when fennel seed, saffron, or cinnamon are given in recipes. Yamuna Devi, author of “Lord Krishna’s Table: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking”, includes coriander in her eight recipes for garam masala, a spice blend applied at the end of cooking, rather than during the process.
Now with Sortun’s knowledge of these three spices, cardamom, cinnamon and coriander, I’m confident about preparing creamy desserts, drinks, fruits, tomato dishes, and grains. No stopping here will be sufficient, though, there’s lots more to experiment with. Sortun’s got more chapters on chilies, seeds, powdered spices like turmeric, and the dried leaves usually known as herbs: mints, parlsey, basil, thyme, rosemary and sage, and the flowers we eat! More next time!
As an end note, to boost your appreciation for these plant foods as medicinal, Aggarwal (his recently reviewed Healing Spices) has plenty to offer on the spices cardamom, cinnamon and coriander.
Aggarwal calls cardamom “the stomache sentinel”, the spice that keeps everything gut-wise in working order and suggests that it can be used to benefit the breath when very garlicy foods have been ingested. It also benefits the lungs: he says that cardamom is good for the respiratory system, providing an opening energy there.
Aggarwal’s assessment of cinnamon is no less complimentary when he underscores the benefits of cinnamon for blood sugar, and the spice as having anitbiotic properties.
Coriander is an other herb whose main benefits are for the digestive system; Aggarwal agrees with this and its generally known as well. Sortun offers that it’s good for bad breath.
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[…] that makes her books so appealing. See my review of Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, here. Or visit Sofra Bakery and Café in Cambridge to experience what’s now a very hot spot for […]