Astypalaian Yellow (Saffron) Biscuits

KITRINA KOULOURIA ASTYPALITIKA

Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of Greece.

To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here.

I first saw these biscuits on Holy Thursday in Astypalaia (an island of the Dodecanese). In a bakery there I saw pan after pan full of yellow biscuits about to be baked for the second time. I thought they were the baker's specialty and asked if I could buy some. To my astonishment I learned that they belonged to the women of the village, who had brought them there to be baked. I was offered one to taste, and tried to figure out what was giving them their strange flavor. I had never seen or tasted anything like those biscuits anywhere in Greece.

The week before Easter it is customary throughout Greece to bake Easter biscuits, but the ones I was familiar with were sweet and contained many eggs. These were savory — I could taste pepper in them — but I could not figure out the rest of the flavors. When I asked, I was told their main flavoring was saffron.

In the fall, after the first rains, the women of the island climb the rocky hills of Astypalaia in search of the crocus flowers from which they collect about 1/3 ounce of saffron threads — enough to color and flavor the dough made from 28 pounds of flour that they usually bake. Astypalaian women don't like commercial saffron, believing that the saffron gathered from their own hills is best. And, of course, they are right.

As I learned later, these saffron biscuits are found only on this tiny island. In Athenaeus, bread with saffron is described as one of the foods served during ancient symposia, but in modern Greece — although we now cultivate and export a lot of the precious spice — we use hardly any saffron in our cooking.

I believe that this recipe must be a very old one, and that is the reason it contains no sugar. The women of the island keep the tradition and bake a lot of these yellow biscuits every Easter. They send some to their relatives in Athens and keep the rest in large tin boxes to eat with fresh farmer's cheese or with their coffee for the rest of the year.

Adjusting the recipe given to me by Virginia Manolaki for 8 cups of flour was quite an ordeal. Commercial saffron seems to be weaker than the Astypalaian variety, so I had to use more. Finally, I came up with the version that follows, which is very near the real thing. Serve the biscuits with fresh cheese or with coffee.