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A new market just opened in Copenhagen this week, and since I had some business nearby I decided to go and have a look.

There were a lot of stalls with sweet things, and snacks, there were butchers, fishmongers and delicatessen and then there was a spice shop.

I usually buy most of my spice in bulk, but I am always on the lookout for something new. This spice stall had cinnamon leaves, something I have never seen before. When I asked the shop owner, he told me the leaves were new to him too, they were related to bay leaves. The leaves were offered to him when he bought some other spice, and he decided to try them out. He had used them in rice dishes and a tagine.

He ended up giving me some leaves and he was eager to hear about how I liked them, and what dishes I had cooked.

Home I went and hoping EYB could give me the answer. No cinnamon leaves in any of my books or the library.

A little research on the internet and I found this page:

http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Cinn_tam.html

The leaves have a wonderful smell of cinnamon- clove -cardamom

Julie Sahni actually describes the leaves in her Classic Indian vegetarian cooking, apparently the bay leaves used in Indian cooking are Indian bay leaves, and can be substituted for bay leaves (laurel) if they are not available. Yamuna Devi also describes the leaves, she call them cassia leaves.

I have not been able to locate any use of the leaves in any other cuisines.

Do any of you use Indian bay leaves?

I would love to hear about your experience.

I use Indian bay leaves. I use them in cooking Indian cuisines. Once I realized that most US/UK cookbooks dealing with Indian cuisines were using "bay leaves" as a substitute for tej patta/Indian bay leaves/cinnamon leaves, I have quit using Mediterranean laurel leaves in those recipes and only use the Indian bay leaves. They do provide a nice, subtle cinnamon-clove flavor.

I've also used them in Middle Eastern dishes that called for cinnamon sticks or ground cinnamon--it works particularly well in rice and couscous dishes.

I also love Gernot Katzer's site that you linked to. I have often used it when trying to figure out unfamiliar ingredients when reading recipes and their variant names when shopping.

Since I don't have a lovely spice shop offering them locally, I had to resort to internet shopping to get hold of them. I was very careful to buy a product that had a picture associated with it that showed the distinctive parallel veins.

Charmaine Solomon (in the glossary to "The Complete Asian Cookbook") says that  while Bay (ie Laurus nobilis) is used almost universally in European cooking, a similar leaf known as "tej pattar" is used in Indian cooking.

Under "Cinnamon" she says that cassia, grown in India, Indonesia and Burma, is similar to Cinnamon but stronger in flavour and lacks the delicacy of cinnamon.

Charmaine doesn't have an entry for Cassia to give it's botanical name, but I gather from definitions on the web that tej pattar and cassia are the same plant.

Fascinating! I wonder if i can get some cassia leaves.

Thanks for your reply

From the information I have gathered I would agree with scambers:  Indian recipes were meant  to be cooked with Indian bay leaves.

To Eurydice: If you buy leaves online do make sure there is a picture, many ordinary bay leaves are labeled as tej patta at least in several of the stores I have seen online.

I have found a couple of recipes that I will try out in the next week. I will let you know how they turned out.