reid@decwrl.UUCP (11/12/87)
As longtime readers of alt.gourmand or mod.recipes will remember, there are certain regional ingredients that are simply not available in other countries or continents. I have been frustrated for years by my inability to find a North American substitute for the copha sold in Southeast Asia and Australia, or for the Graham crackers that are so universally used in North American baking. Max Hauser of U.C. Berkeley has solved the Graham Cracker problem. He suggested to me that a "Digestive Biscuit" from McVities of Middlesex is a proper substitute for a Graham cracker, and that in general the things that the British Empire countries call "digestive biscuits" are pretty much the same thing. I arranged to get a few packages of various brands of digestive biscuits (thank you, Harrod's Food Halls) to test this delightful claim. Lo and behold, Max Hauser is right, and the Graham cracker dilemma is solved. Persons outside North America can use digestive biscuits whenever a recipe calls for Graham crackers, and vice versa. A nice side effect of having solved the Graham cracker problem is that it also solves the "Israeli tea biscuit" problem. Recipe CHOC-CAKE-1 has always mystified me with its call for 500 grams of tea biscuits. I tried making the recipe with several different things posing as "tea biscuits" and none of them worked. Remembering that Israel was once under British control, I guessed that an Israeli tea biscuit and a Harrods digestive biscuit might be similar, and tried making a version of CHOC-CAKE-1 with Graham crackers. Bingo. Not necessarily what Mike Trachtman, the submitter of that recipe, had in mind, but much better than anything else I've been able to find here. So all of you out there who write "colour" instead of "color" can try out the recipes calling for Graham crackers (BANANA-CAKE, CHEESECAKE-1, CHEESECAKE-4, CHEESECAKE-6, CHERRYCHEESE-1, CHOC-CAKE-4, COCO-CHIPS, MOUSSE-CHOC-1, and PUMPKIN-CAKE). Max pointed out that digestive biscuits have a slightly higher fat content than Graham crackers, so when using them in a recipe that calls for mixing them with butter or other fat, that you should use a bit less fat than the recipe calls for, to compensate for the extra fat in the biscuits. He also claimed, and I now concur, that digestive biscuits taste better than Graham crackers. This is almost certainly because of the extra fat, since we all know that calories are the fundamental medium of flavoring.