Gernot Katzer is a 38-year-old Austrian chemist who took a break from research in theoretical thermochemistry to wander through Asia with camera and pen in hand, indulging a consuming passion for spices and exotic cuisines. His quirky, amazingly encyclopedic website often lures us away from our own quotidian tasks. After all where else can you learn about zedoary and mahaleb cherry with one click?
Spice Pages covers 118 spices and herbs, from the rare to the familiar. You can look up asafetida (a pungent herb with a mildly rotten smell used in Indian cookery) as easily as you can nutmeg or thyme. And when you do, you get an exhaustive rundown of topics from etymology and chemical constituents to recipes, history, and culinary uses.
Take saffron, for instance. Color photographs of saffron crocus in bloom show bright red threads or stigmata dangling from the veined purple blossoms. It is these threads which are harvested, and Katzer tells us that it takes 150,000 of the lovely flowers to make one kilo of dried saffron. You may never need to know how to say saffron in Finnish (sahrami) or Hungarian (fuszersafrany), but Katzer thoughtfully provides a list of "synonyms" in 65 languages. Then there are passages on sensory quality (“reminiscent to idioform but much more pleasant”) and chemical constituents (the brilliant yellow-orange hue is caused by caretenoid pigments).
Had enough? If not, follow intriguing links to recipes for paella and chicken biryani, as well as to La Musee du Safran in Boynes, France and to Ancient Cultic Associations of Saffron Crocus, a curious website which details myths about the spice. A section on the use of saffron in Middle Eastern and Indian cookery includes paeans to saffron ice cream and saffron lassi. But if you’ve just bought some Kashmiri saffron, reputedly the world’s finest, chances are it’s from another place, maybe Iran, since so little is still grown in that troubled valley.
To see Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages, go to
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/index.html.