Books open doors to home cooking in other lands
Associated Press
It's easy nowadays to sample the world's great cuisines in cosmopolitan restaurants anywhere. Yet there still are family dishes that cooks make at home, off the usual tourist beat, that don't always get featured on public menus.
Cookbooks can open doors into those more personal kitchens — telling of local dishes served in out-of-the-way places, supplying recipes for specialties visitors might not otherwise come across.
Here are a few cookbooks to go exploring with. The first two deal with home cooking in Spain, both based on travel through and knowledge of regional Spain.
"Spanish Home Cooking" (Cocina Casera, $34.95) by Miriam Kelen, who lives in Minneapolis. Kelen toured extensively, collected local cooks' recipes and quotes, and passes them on with plenty of color photographs she made herself, showing the places, people and food she clearly enjoyed.
"My Kitchen in Spain" (HarperCollins, 2002, $34.95) by Janet Mendel, an American-born journalist who has lived in Andalusia for more than 30 years. She's found her way into kitchens all over Spain, she says in her introduction, as she researched the "225 authentic regional recipes" collected in the book.
"Mediterranean Street Food" (HarperCollins, 2002, $29.95) by Anissa Helou, who was born in Lebanon and now lives in London. Her book is replete with enthusiastic tastings from tea carts, sandwich stands and candy stalls around the Mediterranean, from kebabs in Athens to Istanbul's stuffed mussels and Cairo's sticky semolina cake. Plenty of local color in the prose, black and white photos, and recipe.
"The Art of Romanian Cooking" (Pelican, 2002, $21) is written by Galia Sperber, whose family is from Romania, but who grew up in the United States and Belgium, and now lives in London. She learned from her mother and grandmother to cook favorite family recipes of Romanian food, which is flavored with historical influences from French, German, Greek and Turkish cuisines.
"French Caribbean Cuisine" (Hippocrene Books, 2002, $24.95) by Stephanie Ovide, who was born and raised on Guadeloupe and now lives in Paris. She's collected recipes from Guadeloupe and Martinique and other islands to give readers an appreciation of what French Creole home cooking is all about.
"A Taste of Haiti" (Hippocrene Books, 2002, $24.95) by Mirta Yurnet-Thomas and the Thomas family. Yurnet Thomas is married to a Haitian, lives in New York and was prompted to write this book because she could not find a Haitian cookbook in the United States. The recipes are for traditional dishes, collected from family and friends, with titles given in English, Creole and French.
"The Glorious Foods of Greece" (William Morrow, 2001, $40) by Diane Kochilas is subtitled "Traditional Recipes from the Islands, Cities, and Villages." This is an extensive recent account of the captivating variety of original, unexpected dishes the writer found in her travels around Greece. She collected more than 400 recipes, typically based on common ingredients, simply cooked, for this substantial survey.
"A Year of Russian Feasts" (Jellyroll Press, 2002, $16.95 paperback), by Catherine Cheremeteff Jones, comes from three years the author spent living in Russia. Russian friends "invited me into their homes and took me into their confidence," Jones writes. Her culinary journeys led to her discovery that "The deepest roots of contemporary Russian cuisine lie in the foodways of village life, which have always followed the rhythm of the seasons." Each of the 40 recipes has a story behind it, which Jones tells lovingly.
