Customer Reviews

All Along the Rhine: Recipes, Wines and Lore from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and Holland

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This book is a combination of a cookbook and a kind of travelguide which gives recipes and historical, geografical and cultural information.

The recipes seem to be ok, but the information the book gives on the countries is not reliable. For example the sentence: 'Stacks of the [apple-]fritters, sprinkled with confectioners' sugar, are prepared anually in Dutch homes to serve children at the traditional Saint Nicolas Day celebration on December 6.', contains the following errors:
-Saint Nicolas Day celebration ('Sinterklaasfeest') is on December 5.
-the apple fritters ('appelflappen') are a traditional food for New Year's Eve (Oudjaar), and not for Saint Nicolas Day.
+ the recipe in this book uses beer as a ingedient for the apple fritters, and then suggests that this is given to children. This is ofcourse not done! Children do not get food that contains beer.
+ the apple fritters that Dutch people bake at home do not contain beer, but use water instead.
These are just a few examples of mistakes, there are many more. And the spelling of Dutch, German and French words is very often incorrect.

If you're just interested in the recipes and can get this book for free, then this book is ok, there are about 130 recipes in this book, and most of them are not too difficult. The recipes are from Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, the Alsace region of France, and the Netherlands. If you have to pay for it, or if you're interested in some background information of the countries along the River Rhine, you may want to buy a travel guide, or try to find information on the web (Wikipedia?).